[Pen-l] "G.N.P. is a broken promise"

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

New York TIMES / May 7, 2009

Thimphu Journal: Recalculating Happiness in a Himalayan Kingdom
By SETH MYDANS

THIMPHU, Bhutan — If the rest of the world cannot get it right in
these unhappy times, this tiny Buddhist kingdom high in the Himalayan
mountains says it is working on an answer.

“Greed, insatiable human greed,” said Prime Minister Jigme Thinley of
Bhutan, describing what he sees as the cause of today’s economic
catastrophe in the world beyond the snow-topped mountains. “What we
need is change,” he said in the whitewashed fortress where he works.
“We need to think gross national happiness.”

The notion of gross national happiness was the inspiration of the
former king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, in the 1970s as an alternative to
the gross national product. Now, the Bhutanese are refining the
country’s guiding philosophy into what they see as a new political
science, and it has ripened into government policy just when the world
may need it, said Kinley Dorji, secretary of information and
communications.

“You see what a complete dedication to economic development ends up
in,” he said, referring to the global economic crisis. “Industrialized
societies have decided now that G.N.P. is a broken promise.”

Under a new Constitution adopted last year, government programs — from
agriculture to transportation to foreign trade — must be judged not by
the economic benefits they may offer but by the happiness they
produce.

The goal is not happiness itself, the prime minister explained, a
concept that each person must define for himself. Rather, the
government aims to create the conditions for what he called, in an
updated version of the American Declaration of Independence, “the
pursuit of gross national happiness.”

The Bhutanese have started with an experiment within an experiment,
accepting the resignation of the popular king as an absolute monarch
and holding the country’s first democratic election a year ago.

The change is part of attaining gross national happiness, Mr. Dorji
said. “They resonate well, democracy and G.N.H. Both place
responsibility on the individual. Happiness is an individual pursuit
and democracy is the empowerment of the individual.”

It was a rare case of a monarch’s unilaterally stepping back from
power, and an even rarer case of his doing so against the wishes of
his subjects. He gave the throne to his son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel
Wangchuck, who was crowned in November in the new role of
constitutional monarch without executive power.

Bhutan is, perhaps, an easy place to nimbly rewrite economic rules — a
country with one airport and two commercial planes, where the east can
only be reached from the west after four days’ travel on mountain
roads.

No more than 700,000 people live in the kingdom, squeezed between the
world’s two most populous nations, India and China, and its task now
is to control and manage the inevitable changes to its way of life. It
is a country where cigarettes are banned and television was introduced
just 10 years ago, where traditional clothing and architecture are
enforced by law and where the capital city has no stoplight and just
one traffic officer on duty.

If the world is to take gross national happiness seriously, the
Bhutanese concede, they must work out a scheme of definitions and
standards that can be quantified and measured by the big players of
the world’s economy.

“Once Bhutan said, ‘O.K., here we are with G.N.H.,’ the developed
world and the World Bank and the I.M.F. and so on asked, ‘How do you
measure it?’ ” Mr. Dorji said, characterizing the reactions of the
world’s big economic players. So the Bhutanese produced an intricate
model of well-being that features the four pillars, the nine domains
and the 72 indicators of happiness.

Specifically, the government has determined that the four pillars of a
happy society involve the economy, culture, the environment and good
governance. It breaks these into nine domains: psychological
well-being, ecology, health, education, culture, living standards,
time use, community vitality and good governance, each with its own
weighted and unweighted G.N.H. index.

All of this is to be analyzed using the 72 indicators. Under the
domain of psychological well-being, for example, indicators include
the frequencies of prayer and meditation and of feelings of
selfishness, jealousy, calm, compassion, generosity and frustration as
well as suicidal thoughts.

“We are even breaking down the time of day: how much time a person
spends with family, at work and so on,” Mr. Dorji said.

Mathematical formulas have even been devised to reduce happiness to
its tiniest component parts. The G.N.H. index for psychological
well-being, for example, includes the following: “One sum of squared
distances from cutoffs for four psychological well-being indicators.
Here, instead of average the sum of squared distances from cutoffs is
calculated because the weights add up to 1 in each dimension.”

... [Mathematical nonsense]

Every two years, these indicators are to be reassessed through a
nationwide questionnaire, said Karma Tshiteem, secretary of the Gross
National Happiness Commission, as he sat in his office at the end of a
hard day of work that he said made him happy.

Gross national happiness has a broader application for Bhutan as it
races to preserve its identity and culture from the encroachments of
the outside world.

“How does a small country like Bhutan handle globalization?” Mr. Dorji
asked. “We will survive by being distinct, by being different.”

Bhutan is pitting its four pillars, nine domains and 72 indicators
against the 48 channels of Hollywood and Bollywood that have invaded
since television was permitted a decade ago.

“Before June 1999 if you asked any young person who is your hero, the
inevitable response was, ‘The king,’ ” Mr. Dorji said. “Immediately
after that it was David Beckham, and now it’s 50 Cent, the rap artist.
Parents are helpless.”

So if G.N.H. may hold the secret of happiness for people suffering
from the collapse of financial institutions abroad, it offers
something more urgent here in this pristine culture.

“Bhutan’s story today is, in one word, survival,” Mr. Dorji said.
“Gross national happiness is survival; how to counter a threat to
survival.”

Copyright 2009 / The New York Times Company

[Bhutan faces a big conflict between their use of GNH and the "more
developed" capitalist world, which clings to GDP and imposes its
standards on everyone.]

-- 
Jim Devine / "If heart-aches were commercials, we'd all be on TV." -- John Prine
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