Gross National Happiness – Bhutan, Part 1

The Gross National Happiness Index has been discussed and marvelled at but I don’t see many countries seriously adopting it, I wonder why? GNH is an indicator that measures happiness. Therefore the whole goal of government is to ensure the people are happy. I actually wondered about if Governments spent a lot of the time working out how they could serve the people and got excited on ideas that brought down taxation, or increased leisuretime or health care advances. I really love the energy around the goal of happiness. Being a clown I can appreciate its importance. Perhaps in the future to be a clown is not a put down but more of a joke in a fun way. Life is meant to be joyful not a hardship.

Here is some background and information about happiness

Coinciding with the coronation of the 5th King of Bhutan, His Majesty Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, in November 2008, the Royal Government of Bhutan has adopted the GNH index. The index was inaugurated and launched by Lyonchhen Jigmi Y. Thinley, Prime Minister of Bhutan, on 24.11.2008. The purpose of the GNH index is to reflect GNH values, set benchmarks, and track policies and performances of the country. The GNH index was developed by the Centre for Bhutan Studies, a non-aligned and non-profit research institution based in Thimphu, Bhutan .

Need for GNH index

Across the world, indicators focus largely on market transactions, covering trade, monetary exchange rates, stockmarket, growth, etc. These dominant, conventional indicators, generally related to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) reflect quantity of physical output of a society. GDP, along with a host of supporting indicators, is the most widely used indicator. Yet GDP is heavily biased towards increased production and consumption, regardless of the necessity or desirability of such outputs, at the expense of other more holistic criterion. It is biased against conservation since it does not register conservation or stocks.

Indicators determine policies. The almost universal use of GDP-based indicators to measure progress has helped justify policies around the world that are based on rapid material progress at the expense of environmental preservation, cultures, and community cohesion.

Indicators embody values. In general, policy makers tend to implement policies or programmes based on current international development trends, without taking into consideration the values that lie behind such trends. One way to overcome this tendency is by recognizing the fact that between values and policy implementation stand indicators. Values, policies and programmes are mediated by indicators.

Indicators capture the imagination and help convince lay people about the direction of the countrys goals and development objectives, but it is not always easy for the people to discern that indicators are not value neutral, and that values and principles underlie and determine programmes and policies.

Indicators actually drive society in certain directions and even determine the policy agendas of governments. Not only decision makers, but ordinary citizens, tend to take social or economic programmes at face-value, and accept proposed policy implementation without examining the ultimate values underlying those programmes. But indicators can help bridge that gap.

As many contemporary indicators of progress and development do not reflect GNH adequately, the Royal Government of Bhutan directed the Centre for Bhutan Studies (CBS) to develop GNH index, which will provide appropriate indicators for Bhutanese development.

The Centre for Bhutan Studies constructed a single number index for Gross National Happiness that can be broken down into individual component indicators that are useful for different sectors for planning and technical purposes at the ministerial and departmental levels.

Although GNH is a complex concept and ideal, for practical application, GNH philosophy had to be translated into a metric system. The government expressed the need for GNH indicators because without some kind of measurement system, GNH cannot guide practical policies and programmes. Left at the level of inspirational discourse, imprecision will allow many conventional indicators to play unwitting roles in a GNH society.

GNH indicators are also needed to foster vision and a sense of common purpose. Left at the plane of vision, GNH cannot specify the practical programmes and resources needed to attain those visions in quantitative terms. In this respect, screening tools for projects and policies developed by the Centre for Bhutan are expected to used for selection of policies and programmes, which are aligned with GNH. People clarify their vision by specifying targets and indicators that serve to point to areas of weakness and strength. Indicators serve as convenient instruments and yardsticks of evaluation over time.

GNH indicators can become tools of accountability. The sense of common purpose embodied in a coherent set of indicators enables ordinary men and women to more readily judge, hold accountable their leaders, by checking whether these the targets are being fulfilled. Without a common vision concretized through indicators, each individual merely looks to his or her own ends, even though welfare is a shared pursuit. Not only do GNH indicators assist in building vision, they are instrumental to that vision being held in common by all citizens, building a notion of greater interdependence across time and over space.

Once people are familiar with GNH indicators, they can have a practical effect on consumer and citizens behaviour. The behaviour changing function can emerge in significant ways when there are appropriate indicators that direct attention towards both the causes of problems and the manner in which behaviour and decisions can prevent and solve those problems. This potential behaviour changing function of GNH indicators can be valuable. For example, certain indicators for GNH gauge the prevalence rates of negative and positive emotions, from compassion to anger. The level of trust, volunteerism and safety can also be tracked. Information on their prevalence rates will influence peoples behaviour as they begin to gauge their own traits against the national trends.

To qualify as a valid indicator of GNH, an indicator with respect to any variable has to have either a positive or a negative influence on well-being and happiness. The direction of causality on happiness and well-being must be clear. For examples, less crime, illness, and air pollution have a more positive influence on happiness than more crime, illness, and pollution.

GNH indicators include both objective and subjective dimensions of life. The construction of an index should give equal weight to both the functional aspects of human society as well as the emotive side of human experience. To give just one example, peoples perceptions of their own safety and security are as important in determining happiness as objective crime statistics. That balance allows good representation of information between the objective and the subjective.

When measuring objective conditions such as educational and medical facilities, or room ratios etc., measure of the psychological or subjective experience that accompanies this condition is important. For example, a student attends a school that scores highly in the conventional educational statistics, but he/she subjectively views the educational experience as entirely deficientthe teachers might be oppressive, or the classroom tense. In other words, the process of obtaining the education, including the classroom experience, does not promote a sense of well-being in the student, despite the schools apparent high objective performance. Self reporting of experiences along with objective statistics therefore provides a more accurate picture of well-being than the objective statistics alone.

As indicators reflect values, and shape programmes, they become a vital link in providing feed-back on the effectiveness of existing policies and programmes and feed-forward into programme implementation, thereby allowing the values they embody to be infused into policies and programmes in a broad based manner. Thus, in the case of using GNH indicators as evaluative tools, they can be used not only to check whether programmes are consistent with GNH indicators but also to create conditions for a coherent, organic relationship between professed values on the one hand and actual policies, programmes and projects on the other. The ramification of pursuing such an organic relationship should be recognized for the polity of Bhutan as a whole: if it is done successfully, it means that the countrys economic, political, social, environmental, cultural and technological environments will be penetrated by GNH values, and that there will be a natural coherence to the countrys policies that reflect its cherished values.

At the same time, from a Bhutanese cultural perspective, it must be understood that the subjective versus objective distinction is merely a heuristic device that does not in any fundamental sense represent what is basic to the nature of reality. The interdependence of all things, and the non-abiding self of everything, is a key concept. The conventional subjective versus objective division is an abstraction from what is actually inter-relational. For GNH indicators, this cultural concept means that seeing everything as relational is more useful than seeing them as separate categories. In fact, happiness itself dwells in the experience of quality of relationship. Thus, the various domains are not simply separate conditions of happiness in and of themselves. Rather, it is the intimate inter-relationship among these domains that is significant.
The GNH index construction aimed at a deeper representation of well-being than conventional indicators. The distinction between subjective and objective is but an abstraction from reality, given that from a Buddhist view, they do not exist. What exists in a fundamental way is relationality (as opposed to subject and object) at all levels, which can only be assessed by a broad range of social, economic, cultural, and environmental indicators. Seen in this way, happiness and well-being is ultimately a way of being that is affected by and affects relational quality, which changes in meaning over time with deepening sensitivities to the world around us and with our understanding of what is important or valuable for us and for all sentient beings.