Today marks the launch of the 7^th edition of the Happy Planet Index (HPI), which has become one of the most prominent alternatives to GDP as a measure of societal success. The results find Costa Rica returning to the top of the index, with Spain in 4^th place, Germany in 16^th and the USA in 105^th (out of 134 countries).

The HPI, which was first created 20 years ago in 2006, starts from the question: what really matters to people? How can we say whether a country is doing well or not? The simple answer to this question is health and happiness. Happiness, of course, is a complex idea, and itself is determined by so many factors. Nevertheless, subjective questions which ask people to assess how well their life is going (what we call self-reported wellbeing) have become increasingly accepted as meaningful. As such, the HPI includes two key outcomes: self-reported wellbeing and life expectancy, as a proxy for health. If a country’s population reports high wellbeing and lives long, we consider it is doing well. Other things are of course important, for example job creation, poverty reduction or social cohesion. But evidence shows that all these factors determine self-reported wellbeing and/or health, and can be seen as means to those ends, or intermediate as opposed to ultimate ends as the father of ecological economics Herman Daly would put it.

But the HPI was not developed just to measure how healthy and happy people are – it is also intended to assess how sustainable this health and happiness is. It does this as an efficiency measure: the extent to which a country achieves high wellbeing given its ecological footprint. In other words, wellbeing per unit of ecological resources. In this way it echoes the logic of carbon efficiency, which is usually measured as GDP per tonne of CO₂. But rather than GDP being the ultimate outcome, it is wellbeing.

It is in this sense, wellbeing per unit of ecological resources, that Costa Rica is the most efficient country in the world – with a life expectancy higher than the USA’s, the third highest levels of self-reported wellbeing in the world and a per capita ecological footprint which is about half of Austria’s (and a third of the USA’s).

The HPI points towards a post-growth society in three ways. Firstly, it makes clear that the goal that we should be striving for is wellbeing, not GDP. There is a correlation between the two, but it is not tight, and there are many countries which achieve high wellbeing without high GDP (such as Costa Rica). Finland, the country which scores best in terms of the combination of life expectancy and self-reported wellbeing, has seen no net economic growth for the last 18 years.

Secondly, it highlights that economic growth is painfully coupled with environmental impact. By using the ecological footprint, which is a consumption-based measure which includes emissions associated with imports, it is able to see through the lie of claimed reductions in CO₂ emissions in Western countries. A large part of these CO₂ reductions is simply a result of offshoring production to other countries. Aside from effective decarbonisation (in many countries), consumption is little changed in wealthy countries.

And thirdly, the HPI shows that good lives don’t have to cost the Earth. Although there are no countries that achieve high wellbeing whilst remaining within environmental limits, there are definitely some, such as Costa Rica or Spain, that come closer to it. Furthermore, in this edition of the HPI, we also calculate the HPI for individuals based on an online survey, which did indeed find individuals with high wellbeing and a sustainable ecological footprint. We don’t need to cling to the myth that wellbeing is dependent on high consumption.

This is perhaps the most important message of the HPI. Indeed, it is this finding, rather than the HPI itself which we believe is more important. Ultimately, when it comes to replacing GDP, we believe that citizens should be involved in the process of defining what makes a successful society. With that in mind we have been organising citizen’s assemblies to ask the question of what is a good life. But the HPI makes clear that the traditional answer to this question – economic growth – is patently wrong.