GNP vs GNH -GS

The countries of the world are trying to measure happiness to make the quality of life in their country better. The main method for this is called GNP (gross national product). It tries to calculate happiness under the assumption that if more money is spent the people are happier. But in recent years a new method has challenged the GNP this method is the GNH (gross national happiness).

A country that is trying to initiate the GNH is Bhutan. Bhutan is a small country in between India and China. It was a small closed off country until it opened its borders to tourists in 1974. Bhutan is the main supporter of GNH, thinking that it represents better what the citizens' quality of life is than GNP. GNP is used to calculate the amount of money a country spends and try's to reflect its quality of life with that data. The most common con of this method is that things like traffic jams will boost the GNP (more gas is sold) but not make the people happy (who likes traffic jams?). However, GNH does not have this problem since it tries to measure the total sum of the economic output, environmental impacts, the spiritual and cultural growth of citizens, mental and physical health and the strength of the corporate and political systems. This brings up a better vision of what the quality of life is like in a country.

I personally think that GNH is better because it takes more factors into consideration. It takes into consideration the health of the population, the presence of religion, and more. This makes things like traffic jams have less impact on the total GNH.

This can connect to Civ because happiness is more important than wealth. The main reason for this is that happiness can impact the wealth of your Civ, and that your Civ can be happy with low wealth. So in all ways happiness is more important. An example is that in my game I have a lot of happiness, this leads to me getting the bonus that happiness gives. It also helps me get more wealth with the luxury resources I have in double. I can trade these resources to other Civs to make more money per turn. Yes, it could be argued that more money in Civ is important because you can buy happiness with buildings and that gold is a really important resource, but happiness can impact gold more than gold can impact happiness.

This is how GNP and GNH affect the real world and Civ 5.