Has the David Cameron dog sled recently swung by the little Himalayan city of Thimphu, do you suppose? His latest policy — to make us all, in a rather nebulous way, happier — seems to have been taken word for word from the philosophy of King Jigme Singye Wangchuk, the supreme ruler of Bhutan.
Bhutan is the only country in the world which has an annually measurable index of Gross National Happiness (GNH), which takes precedence over such arid and abstruse criteria as GDP. The country was the subject of a rather wide-eyed and credulous BBC documentary recently, so perhaps David caught the tail end of that before The Bill came on and liked what he saw. In the film, beatifically smiling, monkish lackeys to King Jigme expressed the overwhelming importance of individual happiness and wellbeing and suggested that Bhutan was a world pioneer in taking such concepts extremely seriously. The camera then panned away to picturesque mountains, cheerful yaks and contented peasants.
In Bhutan, the government is directly accountable for happiness and wellbeing. Any one of the country’s two million or so individuals may, if they are feeling a touch dolorous, or even thoroughly fed up, make direct representations to King Jigme, who will, it is assured, swiftly put things right. They had a symposium on happiness there quite recently and one troublesome Western delegate, the writer Stefan Priesner, quietly wondered if the whole happiness business was simply a rhetorical concept.
Well, indeed. The Gross National Income (GNI) of Bhutan is about £480 per year per capita (2001 figures), which to my mind is a bit on the lowish side. It thus makes more sense, if you are ol’ Jigme, to emphasise the importance of more intrinsic and subjective values than ones which you can actually measure scientifically — such as the fact that almost 70 per cent of the country’s women and a third of the men are illiterate (2000 figures).
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