Happy Planet?

I came across The Happy Planet Index which "reveals the ecological efficiency with which human well-being is delivered" on a country by country basis a while ago and thought it was great, but have just been reminded of it by Franny's mailout message, which points out the following:

"nine of the top 10 nations are in Latin America. Big cheer. Saudi Arabia is 13th, China is 20th, India 35th. Not a single European country made it into the top 50, for shame... Germany is highest at 51, Sweden 53, Italy 69. Blair must be relieved that the UK (74) just managed to beat that well-resourced and happy country known as Iraq (79). Australia (102) beat New Zealand (103) and the USA (114) is no doubt breaking out the champagne for managing to triumph over Nigeria (115) by one whole place. Not surprisingly, Zimbabwe is languishing at the bottom (143)."

(sign up to our mailing list for more...)

Once again it reminded me of how counter intuitive it actually is to measure national success by GDP - what on earth has an average wealth calculation got to do with the success of humanity?

You can also calculate your own HPI (Happy Planet Index)

I got 80.6:

Thank you for calculating your score on the Happy Planet Index

What's your score? (seriously, I'm interested)

I'd also be interested to find my score from last time and compare to now... various 'happiness plus environmentally friendly indicators' in my life have definitely gone up... I cycle for an hour and a half 5 days a week (to work), am vegetarian, feel pretty happy with my working environment and life in general...
but I let myself down when it comes to time spent engaging with my community... and I probably lied about how stressed I was because I couldn't decide.

Other than that, I'm very happy to know that my life expectancy is 95.9. wow, I need to stop panicking about lack of time.

1.3 planets needed to sustain me seems like quite a lot (well especially when I word it wrongly like that) but is apparently pretty amazing for someone in the western world.

Wouldn't it be great if we could actually measure success on terms like this...