ABSTRACT
During the past few decades, the Beyond GDP movement has been advocating the idea that GDP and economic growth are no longer an accurate method for measuring national progress and development. Instead, the movement supporters argue that citizens’ happiness and well-being – rather than economic development – offers a more innovative and promising conceptualisation of these factors. The surprising global proliferation of “happiness measures” is understood in this chapter as Happiness Imperialism. At the centre of this metaphoric imperialistic thrust are imaginaries of a better future centred around advances in science, specifically advances in the measurement of subjective well-being in Western economics and psychology. Though the current wave of criticism of what I describe as the happiness-as-progress imaginary, might view these processes as a derivative of Western therapeutic culture, this chapter shows that the development of the concept is a transnational process involving both the Global North and the Global South and does not necessarily represent commonly accepted “imperialistic” power structures. To illustrate this claim, two happiness initiatives are presented, that of Bhutan and the United Arab Emirates, both significant actors in the history of happiness-as-progress.
