Enforcing government defined happiness

It can be a tricky business. Consider the current news from Gross National Happiness pioneer, Bhutan:

Bhutan has warned its citizens over cutting down thousands of young trees every year to make prayer flags, a threat to the tiny kingdom's lush scenery and the government's duty to bring "Gross National Happiness."

Himalayan Buddhists put up prayer flags for good luck or to help the dead find the right path to their next life. The more flag poles put up for the departed the better, and Buddhist monks say fresh poles must be used each time.

Having failed to convince its citizens to switch from wood to steel for prayer flags, the government of the Himalayas' last Buddhist kingdom is growing bamboo, which it hopes will be an attractive alternative.

"The pressure on forest is from all sides -- from flagposts to hydropower. We are discussing this every day," Agriculture Secretary Sherub Gyaltshen, said.

Bhutan's constitution, which emphasises the importance of Gross National Happiness over Gross Domestic Product, stipulates the country must have at least 60 percent forest cover.

Himalayan Buddhists believe winds will carry positive vibrations of tantric symbols written on the prayer flags in yellow, green, red, white and blue to represent the five elements, and 108 prayer flags are put up when someone dies.

So I guess my question is, what actions produce national happiness? What the people obviously want to do, or what the government wants them to do? Why wouldn't a program to plant renewable prayer flag seedlings be the way to address this issue?

Or maybe is this actually a weird reverse prisoner's dilemma problem, where everyone individually would like to stop with the prayer flags already but can't risk the stigma from being the only one who quits? And the government really is doing their people a favor?

Happiness: yer doin' it wrong!

At least if you're running Bhutan you are. The impoverished Himalayan nation's king has been promoting the importance of Gross National Happiness as a goal of the nation. So far the only concrete policy steps taken to raise it are (1) a smoking ban, (2) a dress code, and (3) setting limits of how much of the country can be developed.

But now the king wants to take it to the next level. How? Well he's appointed a "happiness commissioner" and the country is being surveyed about their level of happiness with an instrument "comprised of nearly 300 questions" that "take(s) several hours to complete."

Aaargh!! I'm from the government and I'm here to help you!! Run!!!

Here's some excerpts from the WSJ article linked above:

Developed in the 1980s by Bhutan's fourth king, Gross National Happiness, or GNH, is a Bhutanese twist on Gross Domestic Product. Up till now, it has not represented an actual dollar figure, but rather, a fuzzy set of principles on the environment and culture. It has produced unique policies, such as a smoking ban, strict limits on deforestation and a dress code....
its leaders want to prove that they can achieve economic growth while maintaining good governance, protecting the environment and preserving an ancient culture. To do that, they've decided to start calculating GNH. It means coming up with an actual happiness index that can be tracked over time.

"We are in the midst of great changes," Mr. Tshiteem says in an interview. The Happiness commissioner wears a red checkered Bhutanese robe, called a gho, and munches on betel nut as he looks ahead to his country's collision with the modern world. "If we are going to manage this change, we have to be able to measure it," he says.

Being right next to India, Mr. Tshiteem has developed negative views toward industries that could help soak up Bhutan's young, unskilled workers and fuel growth. On outsourcing, he says: "Stay up all night, sleep all day, I wouldn't want to see my kids in a job like that."

And on fast food and McDonald's, he wonders whether possible health problems and the impact on Bhutan's culture would outweigh the benefits of job creation and potentially higher prices for farmers. "Maybe," ventures the Happiness commissioner, "Bhutan can be a small island, free from the golden arches."

OUCH! Dude, that hurt.

France joins Bhutan

In the quest to measure "gross national happiness". In this case though, President Nic has commissioned a couple of heavy hitters to create an alternative index to GDP. Here is an article on what they've come up with:

"Sarkozy asked U.S. economist Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel economics prize and a critic of free-market economists, and Armatya Sen of India, who won the 1998 Nobel prize for work on developing countries, to lead the analysis of growth tracking.

Sen helped create the U.N. Human Development Index, a yearly welfare indicator designed to gear international policy decisions to take account of health and living standards.

Their report, delivered to Sarkozy on Monday, recommends shifting the emphasis from gross domestic product, which measures economic production, to well-being and sustainability.

The report recommends looking at household income, consumption and wealth rather than production in the economy as a whole for a better reflection of material living standards. Non-market activities such as house cleaning should also be tracked, it says.

More prominence should be given to the distribution of income and wealth, as well as to access to education and health.

Attention should also be given to whether countries are over-consuming their economic wealth and damaging the environment, the report says."

OK, got all that? Our index measures house cleaning, income distribution, access to particular goods and services, plus measures of over-consumption and environmental damage.

I will have to see if I can find the actual report and see if Stiglitz and Sen were so foolhardy as to list a concrete quantitive formula containing all this that could be computed.

Let me conclude by saying that on a 0 - 100 scale, my happiness today is around 97.34!

Please Join my World Bank Re-Location Campaign!!

The managing operations director of the World Bank just flew in from Bhutan. He sez we all could learn a lot from and should even emulate Bhutan. Why is Bhutan so sexy? Well they don't want to talk about GNP but rather GNH (gross national happiness). AAARGH. Bhutan ranks very near the bottom of the HDI (human development index) which is an attempt at a not completely GDP based development metric (it uses GDP, Life expectancy and Literacy). Bhutan came in 135th in 2004.

So, the World Bank, failed promoter of development and progress, is now offering up Bhutan "one of the most isolated and least developed nations in the world" as a model.

Awesome.

Poverty: if you can't beat it, endorse it!

People let's all get together and take up a collection and move them Bankocrats! From DC to Thimpu. I know that would increase our GNH!!