Bhutan's happiness index goes
global By Raja Murthy
MUMBAI - The United Nations on April 2
hosted a conference with a more unusual topic than
most: the global spread of Bhutan's gross national
happiness (GNH) index. The GNH is a long overdue,
upgraded version of the gross domestic product
(GDP) level conventionally used to measure a
nation's growth.
More than 600
governmental and social leaders attended the
meeting in New York, including British Prime
Minister David Cameron and Laura Chinchilla,
president of Costa Rica and environmental
activist. Their attendance is seen as part of
growing global realization that growth means more
than merely fatter paychecks.
The GNH
conference started the process of implementing a
UN General Assembly resolution on applying the GNH
as a model for
national growth, which
was adopted unanimously in July 2011 [1] It also
asked member states to give more importance to
happiness and well-being, while striving towards a
more holistic social and economic framework for
development.
That one cannot buy happiness
is a cliche, but it apparently took a small South
Asian country to remind the world that prosperity
alone does not define progress.
"While
material prosperity is important, it is far from
being the only determinant of well-being," United
Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon acknowledged
during the New York conference [2]. "Such thinking
dates back to the earliest times. It can be found,
for example, in the teachings of the Buddha and
Aristotle."
The Brundtland Report of 1987
(more commonly called "Our Common Future"), the
Human Development Index of the UN, and the
Commission on the Measurement of Economic
Performance and Social Progress that French
President French President Nicolas Sarkozy started
in 2008, are more recent calls to widen the scope
of what we call progress.
Preceding this
by over a decade was Bhutan, the tiny Himalayan
kingdom wedged between China and India. In 1972,
Bhutan started its gross national happiness, based
on four cornerstone parameters: 1) promoting
sustainable development; 2) preserving and
promoting cultural values; 3) environmental
conservation; and 4) fair distribution and
efficient use of resources.
Since then,
this new social development paradigm found more
takers worldwide, including the US and Japan, two
of the world's richest countries.
"As one
key example, the world's economic superpower, the
United States, has achieved striking economic and
technological progress over the past half century
without gains in the self-reported happiness of
the citizenry," said Jeffrey Sachs, director of
The Earth Institute, Columbia University, in the
first World Happiness Report [3], which was
commissioned for the UN conference and released on
April 2. "Instead, uncertainties and anxieties are
high, social and economic inequalities have
widened considerably."
The GNH concept is
already up and running in the US. American
delegates visited Bhutan in 2008, and then started
the Gross National Happiness American Project in
2009. Seattle and Nevada City have Happiness
Initiative projects. Former Nevada city mayor
Reinette Senum has a new job title as "Happiness
Liaison", and a happiness survey for Nevada
residents ended recently, on April 6 [4].
Across the Atlantic, British Premier
Cameron on November 15, 2010 declared his
government would include happiness in any survey
of economic measures. Thailand, Brazil, Canada and
Netherlands have already hosted gross national
happiness conferences.
Bhutan conducted
the world's first national happiness surveys in
2007, to give bench marks and direction for policy
makers. The latest survey in 2010 was the first of
its kind in the world that included inhabitants in
remote villages [5].
Since 2006, China has
run an index called "green GDP" to include
environmental factors in measuring national
economic output. The green GDP index was found to
be three percent lower than the conventional GDP
measurement.
Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
has for decades been the yardstick economists and
governmental leaders have used to measure national
growth. The idea of GDP was born in 1934, as an
invention of Simon Kuznets (1901 - 1985), the
Russian-born economist at the US National Bureau
of Economic Research. The GDP uses the total
market value of goods and services that a country
produces to measure its progress.
But
within two decades, skeptics worldwide,
particularly from France, questioned the
narrow-mindedness of measuring progress merely
within a commercial framework.
Kuznets
himself was the first to emphasize that GDP cannot
be used as an indicator of progress. He wrote that
"the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred
from a measure of national income."
In
1971, Kuznets received the Nobel Memorial Prize in
Economic Sciences. The next year, the then king of
Bhutan Jigme Singye Wangchuc declared his aim of
not just increasing the gross domestic product of
his country, but also the "gross national
happiness". That year, 1972, had the same numbers
as the year 1729 when Bhutan was given its
original governance code that declared: "if the
government cannot create happiness for its people,
there is no purpose for the government to exist."
King Wangchuck's inspiration came from the
Buddha, the world's most successful practical
researcher into what brings true happiness. The
Buddha named over 40 types of happiness, besides
comparing which type of happiness is superior to
the other. The Buddha explained the four basic
types of happiness for a householder living in the
mundane world [6]:
1. Anaya sukha: The happiness of being
free from the misery of being in debt.
2. Atthi sukha: The happiness of
possessing debt-free wealth and property.
3. Bhoga sukha: This wealth enables one
to enjoy the happiness of various comforts in life
- one sees pleasing sights, hears melodious music,
smells sweet fragrances, tastes delicious foods,
enjoy pleasant physical contact. All these
comforts give happiness.
4. Anavajjasukha: But all this wealth
and comforts is of no use, without the happiness
experienced by living a wholesome lifestyle -
without harming oneself or another being: to
abstain from killing, stealing, adultery,
abstaining from deception, backbiting and using
harsh words that hurt others. One abstains from
using intoxicants. One earns a livelihood that
does not involve dealing with weapons, poisons,
animals for slaughter, meat and intoxicants such
as alcohol. This former crown prince, who had
renounced wealth, power and possessions in the
pursuit of true happiness, rediscovered and shared
the practical way to happiness, by coping with the
fundamental truth of life: impermanence, and the
constant change inherent in all things.
The annual Economic Summit in Davos,
Switzerland, in the first year of this millennium,
included an introduction to Vipassana meditation,
the Buddha's practical path to purifying the mind,
developing the wisdom to cope with changing
fortunes in life, and thereby experiencing a
happiness that no worldly pleasure can give.
"How each of us copes with the periods of
things going 'dead wrong' is a major component of
the meaning of happiness regardless of our money,
power and prestige," Vipassana teacher and former
industrialist Sayagyi U S N Goenka told a large
gathering of governmental, corporate and social
leaders worldwide in Davos, in January 2000 [7].
Bhutan's GNH is a simple reminder that if
money, power and prestige alone are all what is
needed for the highest standard of living, then
school children might be now learning not about
the Buddha, but about Emperor Siddhartha Gotama,
Jesus Christ might have owned a chain of furniture
stores in the Middle East, and millions across
millennia would be paying deep reverence to Saint
Donald Trump and undertaking sacred pilgrimages to
Wall Street.
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