Gross National Happiness in Bhutan

Over at Popehat, blogger Ezra has a suggestion for future awards of the Nobel Peace Prize:

I submit that the prize be awarded each year in perpituity to the nation of Bhutan. In 1972 their king uttered the simple phrase “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product.” Since then, Bhutan has systematically and doggedly worked towards increasing the happiness of it’s people. This is not some hippy-dippy rainbows & unicorns idea. It is deeply Bhuddist and something the entire government works towards.

Think about that, a government that is actually concerned about the happiness of it’s people, and is serious enough about it to put the resources of the government into better facilitating that happiness (heh, sorry libertarians..) It’s fascinating to me to see a country take the same principles and statistical management we put into capitalism and focus it on something “touchy-feely.” For that effort alone Bhutan deserves the award.

It’s interesting to look at some of the items measured by the Center for Bhutan Studies in calculating their GNH index:

Emotional balance indicators
Spirituality indicators
Family vitality indicator
Socialization indicator
Kinship density indicator
Dialect use indicator
Traditional sports indicator
Community festival indicator
Artisan skill indicator
Value transmission indicator
Basic precept indicator
Folk and historical literacy indicator
Ecological degradation indicator
Ecological knowledge indicator
Afforestation indicator

I should note that I’ve cherry-picked some of the sillier ones. The GNH also includes a number of reasonable indicators for factors such as health and time use. Still, the sillier ones make it easier to game the numbers.

I think we can forgive Ezra for being charmed by the idea of a government that tries to make its people happy, especially after 8 years of a government that treated us like we might suddenly attack them with exploding footwear. It wouldn’t be as good a story if the facts in Bhutan turned out to be a little ugly.

As it turns out, the facts in Bhutan are a little ugly. The folks at Freedom House have this to say:

Reversing its long-standing tolerance of cultural diversity, the government in the 1980s began imposing restrictions on Nepali speakers, also known as Southern Bhutanese, ostensibly to protect the culture of the ruling Ngalong Drukpa ethnic group. In 1988, the government began stripping thousands of Nepali speakers of their citizenship. The newly formed Bhutanese People’s Party (BPP) responded in 1990 with sometimes violent demonstrations, prompting a government crackdown. Tens of thousands of Southern Bhutanese fled or were expelled to Nepal in the early 1990s, with credible accounts suggesting that soldiers raped and beat many villagers and detained thousands as “antinationals.”

That was all under King Wangchuck the 4th, the same guy who made the pronouncement Ezra quotes approvingly above. I’m guessing that Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness measurement probably didn’t include ethnic minorities.

As you’d expect, Bhutan doesn’t have a terribly free press either, nor freedom of assembly. Protesters and the journalists who report their activities are at considerable risk of arrest.

As Wangchuck 4 gave way to Wangchuck 5, freedom in Bhutan has improved somewhat. Amnesty International is reporting some progress, and with the new constitution and national elections last year, Bhutan is now a constitutional monarchy, which has prompted the folks at Freedom House to upgrade its rating from Not Free to Partly Free.

Bhutan’s ecomony is weak, with a per-capita GDP of only $5200 in 2008. That’s just slightly more than one third of the per-capita GDP of Mexico. Nevertheless, this is a huge improvement over Bhutan’s 2006 figure of only $4100, making Bhutan technically the fastest growing economy in the world.

With figures like that, it’s not hard to see why King Wangchuck was hoping to get people to ignore the GDP.