Warren Buffett, glided in and out of dining halls and conversations — real and imagined for three whole days. Anyone looking for the smartest investing tip or hoping he would give corporate India’s philanthropic bones a good shake missed the imprint of his visit. His abiding message is something meatier than that. It is about being, quite simply, a happier person. The rest, it seems according to Buffett philosophy, will follow.
Buffett’s oft-repeated anecdote in response to how he defines happiness and the feel-good factor is the story of a Polish Jew forced into a concentration camp with her family. While she survived, the rest were less lucky. Asked how she measures friends, she said, “I am slow to make friends because when I look at people, I have one question in mind — would they hide me?” Buffett says if you have a lot of people that would hide you, then you can feel pretty good about how you’ve lived your life. And he’s quick to add that he knows scores of A-listers who would not be hid even by their own children.
While we get caught up in the galloping economic growth numbers, the comparison with China’s blistering growth rates, the aggressive ambition of our business houses and rising national income, we may risk losing out on another very important parameter, the measure of a nation’s health — the happiness and well-being quotient. In fact, the Easterlin economic theory says that once basic needs are met, which is certainly lagging in India, happiness at a national level does not increase with wealth.
Many countries are taking the quest for happiness quite seriously. Several societies large and small are starting to come to terms with the fact that gross domestic product is an inadequate measure of development and prosperity, and that society should also deeply care about the well-being of citizens.
Bhutan, landlocked, tiny and lacking in military or economic prowess, talks up the well-being of its folk as an important measure — it has a gross national happiness index. Those who dismiss Bhutan’s quest for happiness as an indulgent pass-time, should look westward at France. The European nation set up a committee to look at broader measures of national progress. The group, headed by the famous economist Joseph Stiglitz, recommended that GDP should be replaced by a wider measure based on something called Net National Product, which takes into account annual growth and the value and depreciation of all human and physical capital. It suggests there should be an index of national achievement that would grade the environment, equality of incomes, quality of public services and even opinion polls on the contentment of ordinary citizens. The world’s biggest economy, the US, which endorses capitalism and free enterprise too, in its declaration of independence, lays down “happiness” as a right.
India is a long way from thinking on those lines, as its citizens scramble to meet basic needs and the income disparity among the rich and the poor reaches threatening, disruptive proportions. We need to ask ourselves, as Easterlin suggested, whether that extra money is making the super wealthy happy? Then comes the question — what makes them unhappy? Is it a poorly trained workforce, poor governance, rampant corruption, poor infrastructure? If so, how can they use the money they can’t spend to get rid of what makes them unhappy?
Viewed thus, the desire for equality in society might become a quest for happiness. Once it slips into that territory, it ends up being a far more pleasurable chase.
Anjana Menon is Executive Editor, NDTV Profit. The views expressed here are personal
