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In Bhutan, Happiness Index as Gauge for Social Ills
By KAI SCHULTZ
As a downpour settled into a thick fog outside, Dasho Karma Ura let his eyes flicker at the ceiling of a wood-paneled conference room and began expounding on the nature of happiness.
“People feel happy when they see something ethical,” he said. “When you think you have done something right and brave and courageous, when you can constantly recharge yourself as a meaningful actor.”
“And lastly,” he added, thumbing Buddhist prayer beads, “something which makes you pause and think, ‘Ah, this is beautiful. Beautiful, meaningful, ethical.’ ”
Mr. Ura, 55, is perhaps one of the world’s leading experts on happiness, at least as seen through the lens of development economics. It has been something of a preoccupation for more than two decades as he has developed and fine-tuned Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness indicator, a supplementary, sometimes alternative, yardstick to the conventional measure of development, gross domestic product.
As the president of the Center for Bhutan Studies and GNH Research, Mr. Ura has spent much of his time asking Bhutanese questions about interactions with neighbors, quality of sleep and physical vigor in an attempt to understand and measure subjective well-being. Over the years, he has watched the idea catch on far beyond Bhutan, a remote kingdom in the Himalayas.
When Denmark repeatedly came in first on the World Happiness Report, which looks at the science of measuring quality of life, more people became aware of both the report, and the concept behind it.
As nations struggle with what Mr. Ura called more “guns, bullets and bombs” than at any other time in history, he said it was imperative that many more countries devise indicators that look beyond economics.
“We have to find new ways of organizing our drives and energies toward peace and harmony,” he said. “We have to sincerely find a way out of it, out of this mutual insecurity. Because you have more guns, I have to have a little more guns. The long-term collapse is facing us.”
While Gross National Happiness has become a political tool around election time, Mr. Ura believes the index has drawn greater attention to social problems. And the results appear to be positive, he said.
In 2015, his staff members released a study that showed 91.2 percent of Bhutanese reporting that they were narrowly, extensively or deeply happy, with a 1.8 percent increase in aggregate happiness between 2010 and 2015.
Those who were educated and lived in urban areas reported higher levels of contentment than their rural counterparts. Men reported feeling happier than women.
Bhutan’s Constitution, which went into effect in 2008 with the transition to democracy, directs the kingdom’s leaders to consult the four pillars of Gross National Happiness — good governance, sustainable socioeconomic development, preservation and promotion of culture, and environmental conservation — when considering legislation.
Born into an agricultural community in central Bhutan, Mr. Ura said his childhood was marked by changes that brought him closer to a world beyond farming. In the 1960s and 1970s, Swiss investors, taken with his district’s alpine terrain, helped develop road and water systems. The introduction of a formal education system in Bhutan gradually upended the mind-set of many villagers, who felt schooling took away from responsibilities at home.
After graduating at the top of his class in Thimphu, Bhutan’s capital, Mr. Ura was sent to St. Stephen’s College in India, where he at first pursued history. By the time he reached Oxford in 1983, he had begun a longer foray into philosophy, economics and politics.
