What's subjective to you is pretty objective to me - the health impact of unhappiness, for example, will reflect in healthcare costs. Which btw makes up 15% of US GDP. Now is that even real GDP or just a manufactured problem - with doctors and lawers and insurance guys all making money off of health problems of consumers.
For the same baseline level of internal well-being, people will respond to the question "how happy are you?" differently depending on their culture. Do you understand how this presents a problem when measuring happiness across cultures? That is why I refer to it as subjective. Cultures change over time, so a change in the HPI might simply be a reflection of that.
That being said, I do not believe that just because a measure is subjective, it is useless. Of course it's useful. It's just important to understand what exactly you're measuring.
What's subjective to you is pretty objective to me - the health impact of unhappiness, for example, will reflect in healthcare costs. Which btw makes up 15% of US GDP. Now is that even real GDP or just a manufactured problem - with doctors and lawers and insurance guys all making money off of health problems of consumers.
See this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:International_Comparison_-...