An iPad can calculate faster than the human brain, but in the areas of creativity and abstract thought, even massive supercomputers lag far behind the average human three year old. Still, the size of our computer databases and their processing power is increasing so rapidly that data and algorithms for interpreting it are becoming formidable sources of political and economic power. In education, finance, and government, it seems, he who has the most inscrutable machines and impressive statistics sets the agenda.
The trouble with this is that the qualitative data about our lives – the quality of our relationships, the happiness of our children, our level of satisfaction at work – is often left out of the equation (and therefore the agenda) because it’s much more difficult to measure.
Chip Conley, Founder of Joie De Vivre Hospitality and the author of Emotional Equations, argues (against Einstein, as it happens), that everything that counts can and ought to be counted. A hotelier by trade, he says that GDP and the bottom line are blunt instruments for measuring the health of a society or a business. After the dot.com crash of 2001, and a visit to the Buddhist nation of Bhutan, which has a “Gross National Happiness” index, Conley and his team decided to create indices for measuring the well-being of their employees and customers.
See the wonderful video here: MathematicsHappiness
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