What’s the Deal with New Zealand’s Wellbeing Budget?

“Hi folks, it’s Paul from The Happiness Experts Company. I’m kind of excited to share with you the news that’s running today. New Zealand just introduced its budget for the upcoming year, and it’s really quite exciting and ordinarily, a foreign government’s budgetary process wouldn’t interest me a lot. But, they have set as their priority the well-being of their populace, which is quite different than the typical measures that most Western governments use for budgetary purposes.”

“It’s always usually about economic growth, the growth of GDP, economic competitiveness, that kind of thing, and the standard measure has been GDP per capita. So, the gross domestic product, the amount of money your country has per human being, is the measure somehow of success of its overall well-being. And of course, this perhaps arguably, is not a very good measure. As long ago as the early 1970s, a little tiny Buddhist kingdom in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains said that their highest indicator of wellbeing for their country would be the happiness of their people, which I’ve always found quite exciting. Now, New Zealand has kind of made it official as the first Western country to measure the success of their government based on the well-being of their people.”

“The UK took some interesting strides down this road where they said it would be a factor as they considered public policy decisions, whether people would be happier from the public policy or not. So that was good, but New Zealand’s come out and said de-facto that this is the most important thing that they’re trying to achieve is the well-being of their people. It’s a departure from economic growth being the most important thing.”

“And of course, economic growth has demonstrably not made people happier. Take the United States for example, where decade after decade, since basically we were first able to measure in the 1850s, the country has in fact become less happy. On average, people are less happy decade after decade. And that’s in spite of phenomenal economic growth that’s occurred in that same period where GDP per capita has gone up and up and up.”

“So, what’s going on here? Well, all we know for sure is that there’s been tremendous amounts of economic inequality that’s become more and more apparent through those years. So some people are very poor while others are extraordinarily rich, and that clearly is an impact in the well-being of the country. Similarly, in the United States, access for everyone to reliable, high-quality healthcare is an issue. And then finally, there is an emerging science where we’re seeing that social isolation is a growing problem and leads to the lack of well-being for country citizens.”

“And so by shifting his focus from economic growth, which if the United States is the richest country in the world, ought to be the happiest country in the world if that were a fair measure. Instead, we’re looking at actual measurements of well-being, which is exactly where we need to go. And it’s very, very encouraging. That’s exciting news, and I’m going to put in the link below the article that came out my Huffington Post today about the New Zealand budget. This is where, frankly, we as economies need to go.”

“And then always, we should be able to scale that down to a reflection in our own individual lives and say, what’s most important? And people who cheat chase, chase, chase economic well-being, that is, they want to get wealthier, tend to get very little returns. Yes, it’s true that up to a certain level of income, around $75,000 per household in the United States American dollars, that seems to indicate the people are about their happiest level at that point. Which is really just a measure of people meeting the needs of their physiological necessities. And after that, money makes very little difference.”

“So, we know that materialistic values, that people who pursue individual personal wealth, tend not to be happier. They need, instead, to be happiest to pursue values that are about well-being, personal growth, quality of social relationships, health and exercise, whatever. And in contributing in society, in whatever way is meaningful for you.”

“And so, to take that same learning that New Zealand’s using for its whole countrywide measurement, and apply to our personal selves in terms of our personal well-being, and our cooking with fire, and this is exciting for me as a deep about happiness. So, I hope you like this little bit, and I hope you’re having a great day. Bye for now.”