Happathon's PHI: GDP for happiness
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Opinion

Happathon's PHI: GDP for happiness

Poor millionaires!

Unless you are worth $5 million, don’t fool yourself you are rich. So say US investors surveyed by UBS. UBS Investor Watch asked more than 4,000 investors whether they considered themselves to be wealthy. Some 60% of those worth more than $5 million said they did – which raises the question: why did 40% say no? Only 28% of those worth a mere $1 million to $5 million considered themselves to be wealthy. It depends on how you define wealthy. Half of the respondents said that being wealthy means having "no financial constraints on activities". Only 16% said it means "surpassing a certain asset threshold" and 10% said it means "not having to work again".

But does wealth equal happiness? The Happathon Project, which will be hosting a workshop at Sibos in Dubai in September, is attempting to create the equivalent of a GDP for happiness. It is crowdsourcing ideas in the form of a hackathon to come up with a means to create a Personal Happiness Indicator Score (PHI). "At scale, we feel this is the way we create a future based on transparency and metrics that focus on worth over wealth," says founder John Havens.

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