The majority of Bhutanese - there are only a few hundred thousand of them - are happy. Really happy. The type of happy you can measure. Bhutan, according to the United Nations, is the happiest country in Asia.
What do the inhabitants of this tiny landlocked Himalayan country know that the rest of us don't? Plenty, it turns out, and they are keen to share it.
"The GDP-led development model that compels boundless growth on a planet with limited resources no longer makes economic sense," Bhutan's prime minister Jigmi Y Thinley told a UN conference this week. "The purpose of development must be to create enabling conditions through public policy for the pursuit of the ultimate goal of happiness by all citizens."
For four decades, Bhutan has eschewed Gross National Product, the usual method of ranking countries based on economic growth, in favour of a Gross National Happiness (GNH) index. This index is designed to measure different aspects that make up "happiness" - and it is remarkably detailed. There are 33 indicators: elements like literacy and household income, as well as more intangible (but measurable) aspects like "responsibility towards the environment", "cultural participation" and "spirituality". In total, there are 124 variables.
This information is designed to inform policy making, and now the United Nations is taking notice. This week saw the launch of the first UN World Happiness Report. It ranks countries according to how happy their citizens say they feel. The report is part of a trend to find other measures of the progress of nations than simply economic growth: it notes that the United States, despite tripling its GNP per capita since 1960, has not increased at all the happiness its citizens report. Bhutan, which remains relatively poor, is held up as proof that happiness requires other things than money.
But wait. The happiness rankings throw up some puzzles. Firstly, there is the astonishing correlation between wealth and happiness. Not only are the top three - Denmark, Finland and Norway - among the world's richest countries, but every single one of the top 10 are part of the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, basically a club of rich countries. At the same time, the bottom countries are overwhelmingly poor. The bottom three - Togo, Benin and the Central African Republic - are part of a clear trend. In the bottom 25, there are only three countries that are not in sub-Saharan Africa, the world's poorest region. More money does seem to equal more happiness.
This trend is also marked among the Arab countries. The happiest three Arab countries, the UAE (ranked 17th), Saudi Arabia (26th) and Kuwait (29th) are, coincidentally, also three of the richest. While the bottom three Arab countries (Yemen, Sudan and the Palestinian territories) are among the poorest.
And then we come to the problem of definition. What exactly is happiness? Happiness seems different to contentedness and different again to fulfilment. How to measure the differences? The survey information the UN uses is a mixture of several polls, giving data across 150 countries. But the questions are broadly the same, in that respondents were asked to self-report their levels of happiness, both in the moment (day to day) and generally. A typical question was: "How happy are you with your life these days?"
If the definition of the question is tricky, giving the right answer is equally so. Most of us don't know what makes us happy in the long-term (which is why we eat and smoke excessively, even when we know these things will harm us), but equally we don't know what makes us happy in the moment. Having children has been shown to have a positive effect on life happiness - but which parent can say they are truly happy when awoken at 3am by a crying baby?
Ditto with higher education - there is some evidence that university graduates are happier over the long-term, but how many students feel that bliss in the stress before exams? Self-reported happiness is easily skewed by current states of mind. (One might even argue that, given that happiness itself is a state of mind, it is immeasurable.)
That leads to the biggest problem with measuring happiness - what might governments do once they have measured it? Once happiness moves out of the realm of psychology and self-improvement and into the realm of policy, it becomes more than a question of what makes individuals happy, but of what policy might make the largest number happy.
That's why this UN report is so interesting, because it is an attempt to set in motion a new way of categorising countries, and even to set political goals. For once the idea of happiness as a worthy goal is chosen, it then follows that we need to work politically towards maximising or attaining such happiness. And that will involve difficult political choices.
Take, for example, the policy implications of happiness for working life. "Mass unemployment is a major blow to society," notes the report. "It reduces the happiness of those unemployed by as much as bereavement or divorce." The report goes on to note a possible solution: "A bad job is often better than no job. Job sharing may play a role to spread jobs within an enterprise facing a downturn." This is an interventionist policy in the workplace, suggesting that work is seen as such an important provider of happiness that governments may intervene to make sure the greatest number of citizens are employed. Rather than set the conditions for high employment, governments might think it their role to make companies give low-performing employees job shares.
Those problems notwithstanding, there is something inherently positive about looking at other markers of prosperity than mere economic growth. There are sound reasons for thinking that the way the rich world currently lives is utterly unsustainable. To imagine that the way the West lives today can be extended to the billions in Asia and Africa without devastating the planet is ridiculous.
So there are good reasons to find other ways to define success. But just as happiness is subjective, so is there a specificity to the happiness of countries. Bhutan's king has admitted this, saying Gross National Happiness is "inherently Bhutanese". Moreover, the countries at the top of the happiness rankings have particular societies that cannot easily be replicated.
Take the top three, Denmark, Finland and Norway. All are small, secure and relatively homogenous ethnically and religiously. They have generous social systems. None have large cities that rely on a regular influx of foreigners. All of these elements make a difference. To imagine that one could take the Danish experience and apply it to a big country like India is pure fantasy.
We need to tread carefully. Human societies are a lot like human beings; they are all complex but complex in different ways. Individual happiness relies on particular circumstances, just as societal happiness is rooted in particular societies. Governments like policy solutions, which are inherently faceless. There have been many social experiments across the 20th century that ended in tragedy once the state got involved. Many of them nominally involved maximising happiness and started with pleasingly happy reasoning, only to end any way but cheerily.
Faisal Al Yafai is a columnist at The National
