The assessment of gross national happiness (GNH; Wylie: rgyal-yongs dga'a-skyid dpal-'dzoms) was designed in an attempt to define an indicator that measures quality of life or social progress in more holistic and psychological terms than only the economic indicator of gross domestic product (GDP).
Read more about Gross National Happiness: Origins and Meaning, Qualitative and Quantitative Indicators, Conferences, External Studies, Criticism
Famous quotes containing the words gross, national and/or happiness:
“I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous ... as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The cultivation of one set of faculties tends to the disuse of others. The loss of one faculty sharpens others; the blind are sensitive in touch. Has not the extreme cultivation of the commercial faculty permitted others as essential to national life, to be blighted by disease?”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“There is a plain distinction to be made betwixt pleasure and happiness. For tho’ there can be no happiness without pleasure—yet the converse of the proposition will not hold true.—We are so made, that from the common gratifications of our appetites, and the impressions of a thousand objects, we snatch the one, like a transient gleam, without being suffered to taste the other.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)