Considering the rapid demise of all of our 401ks, maybe economists could come up with a better way of measuring how well weâre doing outside of the Gross Domestic Productâthat only measures economic activityâwhich, of late, has not been especially good. In fact, one country has already come up with such an alternate metric. In 1972, the small kingdom of Bhutan, a landlocked nation just South of the Himalaya Mountains , devised a so called Gross National Happiness index.