Abstract
Following six decades of fastest economic and technological development in history, the current crises have been triggered by collapse of unsustainable financial systems. The extent of these contemporary interconnected crises of economic, societal, environmental, financial and other systems has also shown a need to reevaluate the measurement of sustainable development. Although the existing sustainability indicators are very complex, interdisciplinary and multidimensional, they could neither predict the onset of the crises nor their extent. Therefore relations between indicators of sustainability, technological development and happiness are presented and discussed also in terms of some of the current crises. Some possible solutions are also presented, which could be used for better measurement of life quality and could potentially replace the Gross Domestic Product as the prevailing measure of development.
Highlights
There are many theories on the origin of current crises
We present some subjective measures of life quality and of technological development as well as their relations to the sustainability indicators
Researchers have found that there exists a personal genetic set point of happiness, which accounts for about 50% of happiness, and that environment accounts for about 10% of happiness
Summary
There are many theories on the origin of current crises. There is no coherent and realistic plan for overcoming these crises in a sustainable manner. There have been many attempts to create a widely accepted measure of sustainable development, such as the initiative of Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy to create the Environmental Sustainability Index [1] and the Environmental Performance Index [2]. While these and similar indices have been widely used, they failed to achieve significant influence on global development. All these indices are designed as a composite measure, which strongly depends on the selection of individual indicators and their weights.
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