Gross National Happiness

Even as the U.S. nears the venerable age of 200, there lingers the colonist's sense of style lost, of some fragile wine of culture that did not travel well to Plymouth Rock and Jamestown. 'Europeans know how to live', goes the American cliche. Many Europeans might quarrel with that assertion, but there are nonetheless the beginnings of an instructive debate on preserving and enhancing life-styles in the Old World. It turns on the concept of what some call the bonheur national brut, or gross national happiness, an index of the quality of life.

The new President of the Common Market Commission, Dutch Socialist, Sicco Mansholt, prefers the phrase gross national utility to G.N.H., but he is getting at the same thing. Mansholt wants Europeans "to examine in what way we would be able to contribute to the establishment of an economic system that would not be founded on maximum per capita growth." His aims include greater opportunity for every European's intellectual and cultural growth, the end to polluting, and the conservation of the Continent's shrinking resources. That is a program many in the U.S. also embrace. Americans--and most Europeans, for that matter--are hardly ready to accept Mansholt's harsh conclusion that such goals are only possible if the West's present material standard of living is in fact reduced. But it surely would be a worthy transatlantic enterprise to search for a valid definition of gross national happiness.

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