Case study, Economics, Bhutan's Gross National Happiness:An Economic Reality or Wishful Thinking ?

 

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Downside of GNH Measure cont...

The merit of Bhutanese concept of GNH is undoubted in exposing the inherently flawed nature of GDP. GNH as the guideline has fetched good results for the people of Bhutan. Still, as admitted by the then Bhutanese Prime Minister Kinzang Dorji in the third GNH Conference, “considerable space exists between the inspirational ideal of GNH and the every day decisions of policy makers”.³⁰ Putting GNH into practice has drawn sharp reactions as evidenced in Bhutan's deportation of over 100,000 inhabitants of Nepalese ethnicity on the grounds of non-adoption of traditional Bhutanese language, dress and religious practices. Balaram Poudyal, president of Bhutan People's Party formed by the deportees bewails, “It's not gross national happiness; it's gross national sorrow.”³¹ The sympathisers of the exiles read into it a conspiratorial ethnic cleansing under the cloak of GNH mumbo-jumbo. Critics comment that GNH is, at best, an empty slogan including everything and meaning nothing; while, at worst, it is an ideological cover for repressive and racist policies.³²

It is also questionable whether Bhutan's pillars of GNH will survive the arrival of television and Internet; and the consequent onslaught of globalisation.A media impact study, conducted by Sok Sian Pek for Bhutan's Communication Ministry, detected huge changes in family life of Bhutanese. People adjust mealtimes for their favourite TV programmes. People are becoming restless and materialistic. Youngsters have started watching pop music and playing video games in dirty pubs. There is a controversy surrounding the causal aspect of happiness as well: Whether happiness is derived by having what one desires or desiring what one has? Jeff Larsen of Texas Tech University and Amie McKibban of Wichita State University studied both the aspects. Their test showed both to be instrumental in generating happiness though the correlation between the two was found to be far from perfect.33 In Defence of Traditional Yardstick From the other end of the crossfire, the Wharton academics Prof. B. Stevenson and Prof. Justin Wolfers have rebutted Easterlin's Paradox and mended the

dented image of GDP as a positive correlate of happiness. By re-analysing all the relevant postwar data including those from the Gallup World Poll, these two economists posited that there is no Easterlin's Paradox, which was miss-premised on negligibly "available data that do not lend themselves to strong conclusions between GDP and happiness";.³⁴ Stevenson and Wolfers have established that GDP and happiness do move together ; and Easterlin's Paradox was simply a case of equating "absence of evidence" with "evidence of absence".

Prof. Daniel Kahnneman, Princeton psychologist and recipient of 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, had earlier maintained that there was little correlation between income and experienced happiness because of adaptability of people to higher income. As individuals get used to higher incomes, their aspiration levels march up and they begin to derive less happiness from the same income – or alternatively speaking, the same happiness from a higher income–compared to beforehand. This is called ‘aspiration treadmill'. Later on, Kahneman gave his notion up when a sample of over 130,000 people from 126 countries exhibited a correlation between GDP and reported happiness at 0.40, “an exceptionally high value in social science”. He then inferred that the “humans everywhere, from Norway to Sierra Leone” do benchmark their life “by a common standard of prosperity”, asserting in effect the cross-country operation of relative income hypothesis.³⁵

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30] Dorji Kinley, “The World Needs Gross National Happiness”, http://www.gnh-movement.org/press_detail.php?id=88
31] “As Tiny Nation Tallies Up Votes, Bhutan Also Counts Its Blessings”, op.cit.
32] “The Pursuit of Happiness”, http://www.economist.com/ PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3445119, December 4th 2005, page 2
33] “Is Happiness Having What You Want, Wanting What You Have, Or Both?”, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/ 080428104537.htm, April 28th 2008
34] Wolfers Justin, “The Economics of Happiness, Part 5: Will Raising the Incomes of All Raise the Happiness ofAll?”, http:// freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/the-economics-of-happiness-part-5-will-raising-the-incomes-of-all-raise-thehappiness- of-all/, April 23rd 2008
35] Kahneman Daniel, “The Sad Tale of the Aspiration Treadmill”, http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_17.html

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