Geography of Bliss
by Eric Weiner · 1 Jan 2008 · 361pp · 111,500 words
requisite idiosyncrasies—a benevolent king, for instance, with four wives, all of them sisters. It had lamas and mystics and an actual government policy of Gross National Happiness. My editors in Washington, D.C., didn’t share my enthusiasm. You want to go where? It will cost how much? No one had much
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of Lord Buddha flourishes, may the sun of peace and happiness shine on the people.” And then there is Bhutan’s policy of Gross National Happiness. In a nutshell, Gross National Happiness seeks to measure a nation’s progress not by its balance sheet but rather by the happiness—or unhappiness—of its people. It’s
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not war” could become the rallying cry for a whole new generation of peaceniks. I wanted to find out more about Bhutan’s policy of Gross National Happiness, which aims to supplement the more traditional measure of progress, gross national product. Is this for real? Everyone with even a passing knowledge of Bhutan
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age sixty?” He has a point. We measure what is easiest to measure, not what really matters to most people’s lives—a disparity that Gross National Happiness seeks to correct. I feel myself slipping into my old, coolly professional style of interviewing and realize it’s time to get personal. “Karma, are
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British philosopher who believed that happiness should be approached sideways, “like a crab.” Is Bhutan a nation of crabs? Or is this whole notion of Gross National Happiness just a clever marketing ploy, like the one Aruba dreamed up a few years ago. “Come to Aruba: the island where happiness lives.” In other
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, the Bhutanese aren’t that sophisticated. They suffer from an excess of sincerity, a trait anathema to good marketing. The Bhutanese take the idea of Gross National Happiness seriously, but by “happiness” they mean something very different from the fizzy, smiley-face version practiced in the United States. For the Bhutanese, happiness is
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richer, they work much less, they have longer holidays, they travel more, they live longer, and they are healthier. But they are no happier.” Enter Gross National Happiness, an idea first floated by Bhutan’s King Wangchuk in 1973. It didn’t really catch on, though, until a smart young journalist named Michael
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Elliott interviewed the king in 1986 for the Financial Times. The headline of the story couldn’t have said it any plainer: “Bhutan King: Gross National Happiness More Important than Gross National Product.” Conventional economists probably thought that the king was suffering from a lack of oxygen up on his Himalayan perch
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say ‘No’ and the first to challenge the idea that money alone is absolutely good,” writes Jeff Johnson in the compendium Gross National Happiness and Development. John Ralston Saul, the Canadian philosopher, describes Gross National Happiness as a brilliant trick. “What it does is go ‘Snap!’ and changes the discourse. Suddenly you’re talking about something
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important and clever about GNH.” Drukpa Kunley, the Divine Madman and trickster extraordinaire, would have loved Gross National Happiness. It is so absurd, so outlandish, that it shakes us out of our stupor. But what exactly is Gross National Happiness? What does it look like? The best explanation I heard came from a potbellied Bhutanese hotel
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consciousness that created it.” Economics is long overdue for the kind of radical shift in thinking that Einstein brought to his field of physics. Does Gross National Happiness represent such a breakthrough? Is it the elusive answer that so many of us have been looking for? Not necessarily, at least not yet, but
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it reframes the question. That matters more than you might think. With Gross National Happiness the official policy of the government of Bhutan, every decision, every ruling, is supposedly viewed through this prism. Will this action we’re about to
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point that a nuclear bomb dropped on a city will probably suppress happiness levels in said city. This is the problem—one of many—with Gross National Happiness. It is a fuzzy concept, easily co-opted by anyone with a cause—a good cause, perhaps, but still a cause. Once that happens
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, Gross National Happiness becomes just another slogan and not a new economic template, not a new way to live our lives. The film is over, and everyone breaks
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of momos in one hand and a glass of apple juice in another when I make my move. “What does Nagasaki have to do with Gross National Happiness?” I ask. Surprise flashes across his face. He is unhinged by my ambush—just for a moment, though, before finding his diplomatic footing. “I truly
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happy people,” he parries. “What we are saying is we are committed to this process of Gross National Happiness. It is a goal.” “But many people in Bhutan, those in the villages, haven’t even heard of Gross National Happiness,” I counter. “No, but they are living it.” Good answer. Maybe only clever, maybe more than
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he’s greeted like a rock star in predictable places like Berkeley. (“It’s amazing, packed halls everywhere.”) He talks about the need to create happiness indexes. (“Governments only respond to data.”) Now, he seems to have plenty of time for me, a little too much time, I think, considering he is
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them. I tell them that I am writing about happiness in Bhutan, and everyone perks up. I tell them about the government’s policy of Gross National Happiness. Marty is skeptical. “How can you measure happiness? It’s what you believe that makes you happy, and you can’t measure beliefs.” The conversation
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. The group published an analytical paper suggesting—just suggesting, mind you—ways in which government might boost national happiness. Among the proposals: a happiness index, akin to Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness; teaching “happiness skills” in schools; encouraging “a more leisured work-life balance”; and imposing higher taxes on the wealthy. It was the last
The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less
by Emrys Westacott · 14 Apr 2016 · 287pp · 80,050 words
alternatives to GDP as measures of a society’s well-being have been proposed. One that has attracted quite a lot of attention is the Gross National Happiness Index pioneered by the government of Bhutan. Others include the Human Development Index, which emphasizes life expectancy, education, and standard of living, and the Social Progress
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Goncharov, Ivan, 146 greed, 156, 158, 161–62, 216. See also acquisitiveness Green, Hetty, 49–50 Grice, Paul, 60 gross domestic product (GDP), 217–21 Gross National Happiness Index, 219 Habermas, Jürgen, 60, 247 Handel, George Frideric, 118 happiness: and acquisitiveness, 156–57; and basic needs, 87–99, 156–57; difficulty of measuring, 211
Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer
by Duncan J. Watts · 28 Mar 2011 · 327pp · 103,336 words
, researchers at Google and Yahoo! have been able to estimate influenza caseloads remarkably close to those reported by the CDC.11 Facebook, meanwhile, publishes a “gross national happiness” index based on users’ status updates,12 while Yahoo! compiles an annual list of most-searched-for items that serves as a rough guide to the
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Duncan J. Watts. 2006. “Empirical Analysis of an Evolving Social Network.” Science 311 (5757):88–90. Kramer, Adam D. I. 2010. “An Unobtrusive Model of ‘Gross National Happiness’ ” Proceedings of CHI. ACM Press. 287–290. Krueger, Joachim, and Russell W. Clement. 1994. “The Truly False Consensus Effect: An Ineradicable and Egocentric Bias in
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. Recently, the CDC has reduced its reporting delay for influenza caseloads (Mearian 2009), somewhat undermining the time advantages of search-based surveillance. 12. The Facebook happiness index is available at http://apps.facebook.com/usa-gnh. See also Kramer (2010) for more details. A similar approach has been used to extract happiness
The Facebook Effect
by David Kirkpatrick · 19 Nov 2010 · 455pp · 133,322 words
be examined by sophisticated software in order to learn new things about aggregate sentiment or ideas. One company project announced in late 2009 is the Gross National Happiness Index. Analytic software measures the occurrence over time of words and phrases on Facebook that suggest happiness or unhappiness. That produces a chart that is intended
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, 24–25, 30 Causes created by, 224–25, 231–32 Greenspan, Aaron, 79, 81–82, 84–85 Greylock Partners, 170, 319, 322 Grimmelmann, James, 212 Gross National Happiness Index, 332 Grove, Andy, 53 Grown Up Digital (Tapscott), 265 Guantanamo Bay, 290 Gustav, Hurricane, 294 Hagel, John, 203, 299 Haiti, 296 Halicioglu, Taner, 53, 64
Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die
by Eric Siegel · 19 Feb 2013 · 502pp · 107,657 words
), March 12, 2010. http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/icwsm10.worry.gilbert.pdf. Governments such as Bhutan’s measure mass mood, e.g., via their gross national happiness index, as a means to track prosperity: Jyoti Thottam/Thimphu, “The Pursuit of Happiness,” TIME, Vol. 180, No. 17, October 22, 2012. www.time.com/time
The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning
by Jeremy Lent · 22 May 2017 · 789pp · 207,744 words
Community, have begun to explore alternative ways to measure society's true performance. The Himalayan state of Bhutan has broken new ground by creating a “Gross National Happiness” index, incorporating values such as spiritual well-being, health, and biodiversity.72 These alternative measures offer a very different story of the human experience over the
The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations
by David Pilling · 30 Jan 2018 · 264pp · 76,643 words
a worthwhile enterprise. In economics the happiness discussion has been unhelpfully hijacked by Bhutan and that small, mountainous country’s promotion of what it calls gross national happiness. Mention measuring happiness to some people and they’ll look at you with a slightly knowing look and say, “What, like Bhutan?” I’ll deal
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how to get along. * * * — Who could be against happiness? If measuring it helps the government design better policies, then surely we should embrace it. A happiness index could even become a standard complement to our standard growth measure, if not an outright replacement. Yet before we hug happiness economics too closely, we
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in. In 1972 the fourth king of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, still a teenage monarch, made his country the first in the world to declare gross national happiness and not gross domestic product the prime orientation of policy. His decree, hailed as enlightened by many development economists, drew on a long national tradition
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from unification in 1729, states, “If the government cannot create happiness (dekid) for its people, there is no purpose for the government to exist.”23 Gross national happiness (GNH) is different from the type of happiness studied by most Western academics. Unlike the sort of work Layard does, GNH is not focused primarily
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prices. 27. All figures from Unesco. 28. Bill Frelick, “Bhutan’s Ethnic Cleansing,” New Statesman, February 1, 2008: www.hrw.org. 29. Bhutan’s 2015 Gross National Happiness Index, Centre for Bhutan Studies and GNH Research, November 2015: www.bhutanstudies.org.bt. CHAPTER 13: GDP 2.0 1. Tobin became most famous for his
Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010
by Charles Murray · 1 Jan 2012 · 397pp · 121,211 words
involvement on youth risk behaviors among adolescents: A comparison of native-born and immigrant families. Social Science Research 35:181–209. Brooks, Arthur C. 2008. Gross National Happiness. New York: Basic Books. Brooks, David. 2000. Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. New York: Simon & Schuster. Brown, Susan
The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality
by Richard Heinberg · 1 Jun 2011 · 372pp · 107,587 words
of profit. Indeed, the organization “Coop America,” which began as a sort of cooperative of US cooperatives, in 2009 changed its name to “Green America.” Gross National Happiness After World War II, the industrial nations of the world set out to rebuild their economies and needed a yardstick by which to measure their
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economists” have found ways to combine subjective surveys with objective data (on lifespan, income, and education) to yield data with consistent patterns, making a national happiness index a practical reality. In The Politics of Happiness, former Harvard University president Derek Bok traces the history of the relationship between economic growth and happiness
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kingdom of Bhutan. In 1972, shortly after ascending to the throne at the age of 16, Bhutan’s King Jigme Singye Wangchuck used the phrase “Gross National Happiness” to signal his commitment to building an economy that would serve his country’s Buddhist-influenced culture. Though this was a somewhat offhand remark, it
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develop a survey instrument to measure the Bhutanese people’s general sense of well-being. Ura collaborated with Canadian health epidemiologist Michael Pennock to develop Gross National Happiness (GNH) measures across nine domains: • Time use • Living standards • Good governance • Psychological well-being • Community vitality • Culture • Health • Education • Ecology Bhutan’s efforts to boost
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launching a Happiness Initiative and intends to conduct a city-wide well-being survey.65 And Thailand, following the military coup of 2006, instituted a happiness index and now releases monthly GNH data.66 Michael Pennock now uses what he calls a “de-Bhutanized” version of GNH in his work in Victoria
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Happiness Initiative,” Sustainable Seattle.org, sustainableseattle.org. 66. “ABAC Poll: Thai People Happiness Index Rose to 8 Out of 10 Points,” eThailand.com, posted December 6, 2010. 67. “Coronation Address of His Majesty King Khesar, the 5th Druk Gyalpo of Bhutan,” Gross National Happiness.com, November 7, 2008. 68. Cliff Kuang, “Infographic of the Day
Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology
by Kentaro Toyama · 25 May 2015 · 494pp · 116,739 words
of Bhutan proposed an alternative measure of progress. He announced that instead of Gross National Product, his country would judge itself by what he called Gross National Happiness. And before we deride a young king of a small, far-off land for his idealism, it’s worth remembering that Thomas Jefferson, representing a
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the pursuit of happiness real for every American.”48 The Ant and the Grasshopper If you had to suppress a giggle at the mention of Gross National Happiness – or perhaps you didn’t even bother to suppress it – you’re not alone. Happiness seems like cotton candy, pink and fluffy. It calls to
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.econlib.org/library/Bentham/bnthPML18.html. Bentley, Daniel. (2012). First annual results of David Cameron’s happiness index published. The Independent, July 24, 2012, www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/first-annual-results-of-david-camerons-happiness-index-published-7972861.html. Best, Michael L. (2004). Can the Internet be a human right? Human
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action Green Foundation, 106–107 Green Revolution, 207, 273(n19) Grit, 135 Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 43, 88, 95, 97, 176, 187, 216, 245(n56) Gross National Happiness, 87–88 “Gross National Wisdom,” 172–191 Group intrinsic growth, 136–139, 174–191 Happiness, 87–91, 137, 166, 244(nn45,51), 244–245(n52
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