We recently had the honor of contributing to Google’s Think Quarterly publication. The infographic design is based on data from the Happy Planet Index 2.0, first published in 2009. The Index was developed by statistician Nic Marks, and started as a way to create a better alternate indicator for GDP. Marks explains that, “thinking that GDP isn’t a very good measure for societal progress, the idea of the Happy Planet Index was to create a vision of how success for a nation should be judged — through sustainable happiness — then to create an indicator that showed progress towards that.”
The innovation of the Index is to examine the correlation between happiness and sustainability. Life expectancy measures objective years, the concept of happy life years reflects the fact that it’s no use creating good lives now at the expense of future generations. “We need to think about the cost of creating those good lives,” says Marks, “and that’s where the ecological footprint comes in.”
The Index gathered data on life expectancy, ‘happy life years’ and ecological footprint, then crunched it together to rank countries by how efficiently they created wellbeing among their people. See the entire layout from the publication below.
Wonderful idea and wonderful presentation. It is a great way to view and understand human ‘progress’. Where is it possible to view the complete work?
Thank you for your time.
First class! We live in the attention economy and there is a scarcity of attention. Your work earns attention. It brings into focus what matters and makes it memorable. Thanks for sharing.
@jj – Think Quarterly is sent to select Google UK advertisers. We were lucky enough to receive a copy as a contributor in this issue, so pop on by our office in Newport Beach CA sometime and you can check it out!
@Jeff Payne – Thanks so much for the kind words, we appreciate it!