Bhutan girls - click the image to read an extraordinarily fine article in a very fine blog
Quietly, one small step at a time, the tiny Himalayan kingdom of
Bhutan, and the vision and common sense of its Prime Minister
Jigme Yoser Thinley in particular, is influencing the way that governments across the world try to bring about "progress".
In Bhutan, after many years of developing the ideas, the materialistic measure of
GDP is being extended to a measure called
GNH, or
Gross National Happiness.
The problem with the word "happiness" is that it suggests that GNH is about some Utopian, flower-power dream. As conceived by Jigme Thinley, nothing could be further from the case. Time Magazine reports that after many years of work, researchers in Bhutan refined the original GNH concept into nine equally-weighted components:
Psychological well-being,
Health,
Time use,
Education,
Cultural diversity and resilience,
Good governance,
Community vitality,
Ecological diversity and resilience, and
Living standards. A very detailed survey established a GNH baseline in Bhutan, a number whose absolute value doesn't matter (it was about 74% of a theoretical maximum), but whose changes can be monitored and tracked.
The important thing in Bhutan is that
every government policy decision will be run through a GNH filter - and that is the key idea which is spreading, in a variety of forms to suit individual countries.
If you are interested in how this is happening, check out (for example) the
Canadian Index of Wellbeing, the
London-based Economic Foundation's Centre for Wellbeing, and many more examples
here.
Although nothing is likely to happen in Washington D.C. until more people in the USA's political system become less interested in partisan dogma, some individual U.S. states are going ahead strongly (e.g.
Vermont's Genuine Progress Indicator, or GPI).
Since presumably even Ebenezer Scrooge was happy in his own way, not everyone's idea of happiness is the same. There is a fascinating web site called
The OECD Better Life Index which lets you see how different countries rate against each other on a number of measures of well-being. Initially these measures are equally weighted, but you can change the weighting according to your own ideas of what's important.
If you don't follow any other link, may I strongly recommend
this article, and the fine blog from which it comes. And thanks to the paper edition of
Time Magazine for many of the links included here.
As a footnote... however you measure it, the UK became an obviously happier place this summer, with a community spirit and a sense of achievement that has not been felt for a long time. The reason for this was the events leading up to, around and through the
London Olympics (my posts on which are
here), followed by the equally wonderful
London Paralympics (my posts on which are
here).
If you like this...
[More links on how Bhutan is affecting the world
[World Happiness Report]
