In praise of inequality?‘Happy Planet’ performance and its determinants

Abstract

The public health profession has studied the drivers and bottlenecks of increased life expectancy and decreased infant mortality for a number of years. The essence of this dominant paradigm of high inequality leads to low life quality seems to suggest that inequality negatively determines a number of public health variables such as physical health, mental health, drug abuse and teenage births. Recent international research, connected with the ‘Happy Planet Index (HPI)’ seem to question the validity of this assertion. The main Happy Planet Organisation indicators are ‘Ecological Footprint’, ‘Happy Life Years’, and the derived HPI, which measures ecological efficiency, with which human wellbeing is delivered around the world. ‘Ecological footprint’ (global hectares/person [gha/cap]) is the one-catch, all-indicator of ecological strain caused by human activity. ‘Happy Life Years’ is an indicator that combines Gallup and World Values Survey data on individual feeling of overall happiness with average life expectancy. The Happy Planet Index calculates the ‘environmental price’ of human happiness. The best global HPI score is that of Costa Rica (76.1 out of 100). Of the 10 leading countries of the world, nine are in Latin America, a continent traditionally characterised by strong inequality. At first sight, the new ‘Happy Planet Index’ puts the R.G. Wilkinson school of thought (inequality as the scourge of humanity) on its head. It rather suggests a tough neo-conservative vision of society, corresponding to economics Nobel laureate Friedrich August von Hayek, who maintained that markets, inequality and a free society interact with one another and that there should be no politically motivated blocks against inequalities in the name of ‘social justice’. Like it or not, our empirics seem to suggest that there is a tendency of rising inequality, going hand in hand with a rising Happy Planet Index performance. Happy Planet performance improves until a society reaches a staggering difference of about 1:30 between the richest 20% and the poorest 20%, and only some very high inequality Letters to the Editors