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What kind of happiness leaves no room for puppies and warm guns?

[Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development website] – For much of the 20th century, economy and science played safe, taking the view that you could not go far wrong if you measured in terms of monetary value, immune to the vagaries of the human heart. So gross domestic product (GDP) measured the value of the goods and services a country produced, from corn to cars, coal to customer services, and measured progress by how far or fast it grew from year to year, and in comparison to other countries.

By the turn of the century, it was becoming clear that GDP was an increasingly inadequate tool even in purely economic terms; in a knowledge-driven Internet age, economic success depended on elements that were not being measured in GDP, such as the education level of the workforce, their health, and whether the whole system was sustainable in terms of the way we were using natural resources…

The OECD’s work culminated in 2011 with the launch of the Better Life Initiative and the Better Life Index – a way to look at what life is actually like for people by measuring 11 key aspects of life – not just income and jobs but their housing, environment, social network, work-life balance, personal security, education, health, whether they feel part of the democratic process and their level of satisfaction with life in general.

Everyone starts out with the same 11 elements, but can rank them according to personal preference to see how their country shapes up in terms of what matters to them. Some of the results have been quite surprising…

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Continued at OECD | Better Life Index tool | More Chronicle & Notices.

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