The kingdom of happiness

It can be tough for a politician from a little country to capture the world’s imagination when heavy hitters like Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad show up at the U.N. General Assembly bearing flashy initiatives and monopolizing the attention of the world media. But Bhutan’s Prime Minister, Jigmi Y. Thinly, took a stab at it on Monday with a proposal to save the world’s downtrodden with a dose of happiness.

Speaking at the U.N. summit for the promotion of the Millennium Development Goals — a set of eight targets for eliminating hunger, illness, and extreme poverty around the world — Thinly urged his foreign counterparts to adopt happiness as the ninth official goal. "I hear some laughter," he said after making his announcement. "I see a lot of smiles."

Happiness, it seems, has a long history in the Kingdom of Bhutan. Forty years ago, the Bhutanese King Jigme Singye Wangchuck decided that "conventional" approaches to raising the standard of living of his poor subjects simply wouldn’t do. "Having pondered the meaning and purpose of development and being dissatisfied with the aimlessness of prevailing models, our king’s understanding of his innermost yearning of his people inspired him into conceiving the development philosophy of Gross National Happiness," Thinly said.

Wangchuck’s idea of tracking GNH instead of GDP has attracted enthusiastic followers, and not just in Bhutan. A group of economists and social scientists has tried to develop metrics for measuring national happiness, and even conducted global surveys to rank the world’s countries. President Sarkozy of France also took up the cause recently, suggesting that happiness was a more important indicator of success than nominal economic growth.

The Bhutanese Kingdom defines happiness as "a state of being that is realized through a judicious equilibrium between gains in material comfort and growth of the mind and spirit in a just and sustainable environment. It is not about asceticism and denial." Thinly said that Bhutan is eager to work together with other countries to develop a "set of elaborate and precise metrics" for happiness that can be applied to the world’s poor.

It’s not likely to be a standard that will please everyone. The Bhutanese leader lashed out against corporations and the media writ large — who "thrive on reckless consumerism." But in an effort not to make the world’s big powers too unhappy he stripped out a line from his original written speech that criticized the "voracious" consumption practices of the U.S., China and India.

"It does not demand much imagination and intelligence, indeed, to understand that endless pursuit of material growth in the world with limited natural resources within a delicately balanced ecology is not sustainable," he said. "The so called wealth we have created are in fact illusory, and that being unreal, they disappear often, without a trace, like the jobs, homes, saving, investment, and more. The only things real are the psychological, emotional, and environmental costs."

Boy, that doesn’t make me feel very happy.

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