Stuff You Should Know - Is Bhutan on to something with Gross National Happiness?

Episode Date: October 1, 2009

How do you measure happiness? How do you measure it on a national scale? Tune in as Josh and Chuck discuss Bhutan's Gross National Happiness index in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. From HowStuffWorks.com Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.

With me as always is Charles W. Luscious Bryant. How's it going Chuck? Sounding funny for a second time around. Josh actually had to do two takes there. To hear your name as Luscious twice in a row is very special. What did it do to you? Made me feel luscious I guess. Good.

You are luscious. I'm doing well sir. How are you? I'm pretty good. What happened to Luscious Jackson? Remember them? Yeah. They were good.

They were around the same time as... Good beastie boys. Yeah. Because they were all buddies. Yeah. Were they? Yeah. I think one of them produced their album or something.

She loved in special sauce. That's who I was thinking. Yeah. I was a huge fan of them early on. Were you? Yeah. And then they got picked up and you're like... Nah.

I think I just kind of lost interest after the third CD or something. Gotcha. Anyway. Okay. Chuck equals Luscious Jackson fan. Just in. Also, I'm thick tongued. In case you had noticed.

People always ask if Josh eats things while we podcast. And that is not true. I know. It has a real effect on my happiness. Yes. No. That's not the lead-in. I was just trying to psych you out.

The seemingly uniquely American tradition of killing Census Bureau workers has begun again just ahead of the 2010 Census, Chuck. Are they doing that now? Yeah. It's about that time. I didn't know. No one's ever knocked on my door. There was a guy named Bill Sparkman, a 51-year-old Census Bureau employee.

I think just a worker, like he was just getting work as a census taker. They found his body hanging from a tree in a cemetery in Kentucky, and the word fed was scrawled across it. Wow. Yeah. That's a new kind of hate crime. Yes. Well, no, it's not new.

Census Bureau workers get killed every census. Really? Yeah. I had no idea. Yeah. It's weird. It's a weird thing to do, but... I hope they get paid well.

They're being invaded. Right. Or their land being stepped on. You don't want to knock on my door, brother. Wow. Chuck, jeez. I can tell you a place where there are census takers that probably will not be strung up in trees.

Bhutan. Bhutan. You know, they had their first census just like four years ago. Is that right? Mm-hmm. Bhutan's been undergoing a lot of changes lately. They're Chuckers. Big time.

In 2008, the king abdicated his throne in favor of a parliamentary democracy. Very popular king. That's huge. Yeah, beloved, you could say. Actually, he was the beloved son of a beloved king. Yeah. And he abdicated his throne in favor of a democracy because they determined that democracies make people happier than kingdoms do.

So he wanted to make his small, I think the census, was 690,000 people. Is that it? Yeah. He wanted to make them happy. He did. And he did so much so that they've also, at the same time when they adopted a new constitution and a new form of government, they also adopted a pretty much a guiding principle for the country called gross national happiness.

Awesome. That sounds familiar, doesn't it? Yeah. Remember that listener mail from the girl who was clearly headed to Yale this fall? Yeah, that she did the survey at her own school to find out how happy the fellow students were. Yeah. Cool.

The Bhutanese are into the same thing. You're going to try and pronounce his name? Yes. The king, Jigme Singe Wangchuk. I got the Wangchuk part, definitely. They said you could call him Dragon King. Okay. They, meaning they called me up, the Bhutanese did.

They said you could just call him Dragon King. They heard that we were doing this podcast. Indeed. Okay. Well, the Dragon King, thank you for that, by the way. Sure thing. Back in 1972, he came up with the idea of gross national happiness. This probably sounds a lot like gross domestic product or gross national product, right?

Right. Which we've talked about before. I'm glad you pointed out in the article, too, that this wasn't just a fluffy little happy thing they decided to do. They were really serious about it. Nor is it tongue-in-cheek like the five-day weekend, which we've also talked about. Right? This is, they've taken, well, we'll break this down.

Yes. Probably what the Bhutanese have done is come to a collective agreement that, number one, happiness is not just a response to external stimuli like a new car or something like that. Sure. They've taken the decidedly more Buddhist approach to happiness that it comes from within, right? Which is a lovely sentiment, I think.

That's step one. It's easy for Bhutan to do it because they're a Buddhist country, right? Right. They're peaceful. So, step one was to say, all right, happiness comes from within. Step two was to say, okay, how do you achieve this happiness? Key. They actually did this survey over three months.

I think it was 108 questions, and that was the second version. The first one was determined to be just way too long. Yes. Awesome. Those questions, too. It was pretty cool. Like what, buddy? Well, I mean, I went to that, what was the website, grossnationalhappiness.com, I think,

actually. Org. How did you... Oh, is it? I can't remember. Is it an org? It may be. I can't remember what the questions were.

I didn't know you're going to put me on the spot like this, but there were things like, how do you feel about, or how much rest do you get when you perform certain tasks? And how does this make you feel about your family? Just things like that. So what they came up with, Chuck, was a... basically nine guiding principles toward happiness, right? Yes. I actually have them here.

I do, too. Oh, really? Yeah, so that means touch and friend. in French. What are they Chuck? Because I can't find mine. Jerry loves that joke. Time use, living standards, good governance, psychological well-being, community vitality, culture, health, and education ecology. Okay. Or those are two, I think, education and ecology.

So basically they figured out that these are the nine things combined that make a happy life, right? I could dig that. And some of them sound a little obtuse, like psychological well-being. What is that, right? Basically what they've come up with is, you can't just say, hey, how happy are you? Scale of one to ten. Or would you say, seven? Sure, that's not bad. Would you say that you're more happy, less happy, or just as happy as you were last year?

Like the Bhutanese pretty much immediately threw this out the window. Right. Just, it's too imprecise, and we have to turn this into a metric system, a system of matrices. Right. Is that right? Metrices? Sure. Okay.

They wanted to quantify it. Very much so, because like you said, they're very, very serious about this. So let's take psychological well-being. They took these guiding principles, and then they broke them down by indicators, right? So you have an indicator like the prevalence of negative emotions like jealousy or frustration or selfishness, the prevalence of positive emotions like generosity, compassion, calmness, right? And those right there are indicators that when you compile them all together in a survey, you have an impression of the psychological well-being of the household that's being taken

in the census, right? Could you imagine our country ever doing anything remotely close to this? No, and the reason why is because we, just like the Bhutanese recently said, we're going to collectively agree that we want to focus our national focus on happiness. Sure. The U.S. a long time ago, actually around World War II when the GMP was first introduced, we made a collective agreement that we want to focus on materialism, money, stuff. That's how we measure our well-being in this country, and that's not to say that it's any

worse or better than Bhutan's idea, it's just radically different. And one of the reasons it is radically different is because in this country, we don't tend to think of happiness as coming from within, it is like behavioral psychologists believe, or a lot of them do. It's a physiological response to an external stimuli, right? Like money. So we've said, yeah, we're going to go for the materialism route, and this is what's going to dictate our policies. How much money do you have? If you've got a bunch of money, you can go get your car and all that stuff, so let's figure out how to make a bunch of

money for everybody in this country, right? And even if you on an individual level don't agree with the concept of materialism, if you're in the U.S., you tacitly agree with it just by going to work every day. The whole point of most of your waking life is accumulation of money. Right, or you're looked at as a freak of nature if you are one of those people who decide to drop out and go live off the grid and sow their own seed in the mountains. Or a weirdo in this country if you do that. Or if you die after three months, they make a movie about you and a book.

Yeah. They're the bear guy? Who? I thought you were talking about Timothy Treadwell, the grizzly bear. No, I was talking about Christopher McCandless from Into the Wild fame. Right, similar thing. The bear, I thought that was actually about a bear. No, Timothy Treadwell was a bear enthusiast who went to live among the bears.

Oh, and was killed by a bear, right? And was killed and eaten by a bear. What a way to go. So Chuck, let's get back to how Bhutan has made this quantified, right? Yes. So you've got, we were talking about psychological well-being and then all these different indicators. One of the other things that they've decided to do is to take objective data as well as subjective data to evaluate just how much worth something has, right?

Right. So you're reading pretty much a breakdown of the gross national happiness system that Bhutan has by the Center for Bhutan Studies. It's pretty impressive. It is. And what they've said is, so you've got like crime, right? In the U.S., we have crime statistics and then the FBI issues the Uniform Crime Report every year, right?

And it gets kind of granular, like crime perpetrated by race, by gender, by age, what kind of crime. Yeah. It gets real granular. It does. But really, if you think about it, it's just a statistic. Like I shoot you, you die. That's one homicide.

Right. Right? So what the Bhutanese do is they still have these crime statistics. They use crime data, but they take it a step further through these surveys and say, how safe do you feel? Right. Okay? I guess that's one of the perks of having a country of 690,000 people.

Sure. I guess the census goes a lot faster. Sure. Yeah. But so that one, right? So the crime statistics taken with how safe the population self-reports feeling, right? That would be part of community vitality, right? Yeah.

It makes sense. It does, doesn't it? Yeah. It's weird that it makes sense because really, it's the opposite of the premise behind gross domestic product or gross national product. Which is all material. It uses a lot of the same model, but rather than money, it's going for happiness. Right.

You know, I think that was the key. It's mind-boggling, actually. I think it's the only way they could have pulled this off is if they did use a GDP model instead of just kind of willy-nilly throwing some questions out there about happiness. Right. They actually said that in this breakdown of gross national happiness, that it's a great idea, but we had to quantify it or else it was just going to be useless, so they really went to town on it, right?

So what they've done is take these nine guiding principles, right? Or dimensions. Is that what they're also called? Dimensions. That's right. Yeah. And they've broken them down into all these different indicators, right, that can be subjectively reported on.

Right. And they've established a threshold just like we use for poverty lines, right? So in the U.S., what is it? If you're an individual and you make some ridiculously low amount, like $13,000 a year, you're below the poverty line, but if you make $13,001, you're above the poverty line. Exactly. They created thresholds for achievement, is how they put it, to where, let's say, we'll go back to a scale just to make it easier, on a scale of 1 to 10, 4 is the threshold

for general psychological well-being, right? So if you say yes to X number of questions on these indicators, and then they add them all up, and your score is 5, you've surpassed the threshold, but you're not put down as a 5. Right. You're put down as a 4. Do you understand what I'm saying? What they're doing in that is that they have chosen to focus on building up any deficits

that turn up in gross national happiness, as opposed to touting how happy the happiest people actually are. Yeah, their goal is to be a happier country. Right. They have a lot of poor people there, too. Like they're really being hard on themselves here, like their gross national happiness, the most it could ever possibly be if every single person in the country is happy at the same time is 1.

Everything else is negative, so then they go focus on why it's negative, and they break it down much the same way like the FBI breaks down crime, like by gender, by region, by age, and then they can say, all right, what can we do to make these people happier? What's lacking? You see what I'm saying? I do. I hesitate to use the word crazy because I don't want anyone to get the impression that I'm casting any doubt or dispersion on it.

This is crazy. It is. Yeah. Well, especially considering where they are, I mentioned the poverty line, or you did, 31% of their country lives below the poverty line. Right. But in a Buddhist country, that doesn't necessarily mean these people are unhappy. Well, no, because they only have an unemployment rate of 2.5.

So the material is not that important. They're working. Right. And I saw their big exports, their industrial exports are cement. That's like their biggest industrial export. And then wood products and then agriculture is their big deal with rice and corn and stuff like that. Okay.

So what we've just talked about is that they have a 30 something percent? 31% below the poverty line. Live below the poverty line. But it's a Buddhist country, so they're big into the rejection of materialism. So that doesn't really matter. Or does it? One of the other things that the gross national happiness model that they've come up with serves as is a framework for accountability for the government.

Right? So the government's like, well, we just all reject materialism. So it doesn't matter if you're below the poverty line. If enough people start self-reporting that they're actually unhappy and all these people happen to be falling below the poverty line, that's published for Buddha and everybody to see. And then all of a sudden you can point to the government like, you guys are wrong. You're making some incorrect assumptions and we need to fix this over here.

By making more money? If that's what the indicator was. Possibly, yes. Yeah. Because if you're dedicated to the happiness collectively and individually of your population, then yes, it's going to turn up on this gross national happiness economic indicator or indicator. And it's going to need to be fixed or else you've just been blowing smoke up everybody's right bottom.

Keester. Do you know what their real GDP was actually? I checked that out. Per capita? What? What would you guess? If America is 46,000 in change, what would you think it would be there in Bhutan? $3.

Per year? Yeah. No. 5,200 per capita GDP. I can see that. So they still, I guess that's a world fact that you have to have. They still have the GDP. Right.

That's an excellent point Chuck. The reason that they instituted gross national happiness is because I think the leaders kind of saw the writing on the wall like, you can only remain shut off for so long and this is very much a shut off kingdom. It's high up in the mountains between China and India and they have, yes very much so they've isolated themselves. But the internet came in 2001, TV showed up in 1999 and it brought with it these Western influences.

So what the leaders said rather than you can't have TV, you can't have internet, they said okay, we'll enter the world stage but we're going to do it on our own terms and this is how we're going to do it. I applaud it. Right. So let's get to the point there, Chuckers, as to whether or not Bhutan's actually onto something. This is an age old question.

Is money more important than happiness? Can money buy happiness? Let's talk about some studies, not necessarily one's conducted in Bhutan, but just in general, like does money provide happiness? I think if you were just to talk about Bhutan though, you'd find out pretty quick that $5,200 a year that they, is their GDP, they're probably pretty happy. And if you talk to your average American, they might not be as happy. That's just a guess.

Agreed. But the GENH will turn that up eventually, right? They'll turn the frown upside down. Actually, Chuck, the Bhutanese census takers aren't the only people who go around asking people if they're happy. I know you're talking about. Who am I talking about? The World Values Survey.

That's right. They ask people how happy they are and they've been doing it for a long time. Since 1981, actually. And they usually ask about 350,000 people in 97 countries. And they ask two questions. In each country? They ask that many? No.

The World Values Survey population is 350,000. They ask two questions. You ready? Taking all things together, would you say you are very happy, rather happy, not very happy, not at all happy? That's one question. And then secondly, all things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?

And that's it. Two questions survey. Right. And then they rank countries. In 2008, the happiest country on the planet was Denmark. I could believe that. The U.S. ranked 16th, right? But if you look, according to the CIA, if you look at per capita GDP, the U.S. was,

I think, number eight, number five or another, number eight in 2008. With that 46 grand. And then Denmark was number 30. So they're the happiest country, but they don't make nearly as much money as the U.S. So no correlation there? But not necessarily. There's a lot of criticism of the World Values Survey. I'm sure.

It's a two-question survey. Somebody pointed out, number one, that you, how do you translate happiness from, you and I can't even describe what real happiness is necessarily. We could possibly anecdotally, but it's so subjective that number one, how can you and I, who have so much in common, not establish what happiness is, that you can also spread it out over 97 countries and all these different societies and groups within it. So that's number one. Number two, I read an article that pointed out that, yeah, Denmark is the happiest country

in the world. It also leads the world in per capita alcoholism and suicide. Really? Yeah. Hmm. I understand the alcohol part. Yeah. Yeah.

Suicide, yeah, that doesn't add up. No, it doesn't. So, Chuck, it's becoming evident just what a responsibility, what a task Bhutan is taking on its own shoulders, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, happiness is really tough to quantify and they've done a great job trying to figure that out, but... Yeah.

I know they do the studies and you pointed to one in your article, your fine, fine article about... I really didn't, I thought it was okay. About, they always study lottery winners. Yes. I love this. And they always compare them to amputees, which I just, I find odd. No, it was just a very famous one that started it.

Is that what it is? Yeah. Okay. It's like, is happiness relative? So, you find out that after the initial joy of the lottery wore off that people kind of generally end the same with the amputee, they generally go back to where they were before? Yeah. If you look at it as like a line, a horizontal line and the event happens at the same time

somebody loses their leg and another person loses their, or wins the lottery, the lottery winner goes up, the amputee goes down, but after three years they both go back to that same line. Sure. Which is kind of startling if you think about it. Yeah. The point about money, which I thought was a really good point is dichotomous. So, money can bring many things.

Money can bring happiness and cool stuff and security and it can also be the evil in your life. It can be. I mean, that security, you've got financial security, but maybe you're a little more worried that your house is going to be invaded during a robbery or something. Yeah. The point with pursuing happiness that I think the boot and knees are hip on is that happiness only brings happiness.

Good point. That's awesome. There was another study by a couple of guys from Princeton at all and they basically used something called a day reconstruction method, which is self-reporting, which you know self-reporting. It flies in the soft social sciences, but that's about it, but basically they asked people to write down their experiences from the previous day and then do that over a set period of time. Right?

I'd love to see mine from yesterday. That'd be great. Oh, yeah. Were you in a bad mood yesterday? No. Were you drunk? No. They're charting your mood or what you did and how it corresponded to your mood.

I think both. Yeah. I'd love to. We should do that. You want to do it? No, I don't either. What these guys found was that when you ask people to report on their mood as it happens or a day after it's happened and then you evaluate it by income, they found that actually

money did indeed bring happiness to a certain extent, right? Right. So the point is I think people who made under $20,000 a year are actually less happy than people who make $100,000 or more. Okay. That's kind of a no-brainer to think about it. Imagine the strife and struggle you have in your daily life if you're making $20,000 or less.

That's what it is. Right? Yeah. They're beaten down by finances, generally happy people. Sure, yeah. What they did find was that when you get to $50,000 to $89,000 that segment was virtually identical to people who made over $100,000, which is kind of significant because there's a substantial difference between $50,000 and $100,000.

So what they've concluded is that money does bring happiness to a certain extent, possibly by satisfying our needs, but after that it loses a lot of its value or a lot of the happiness it can bring once it reaches a certain point, once those needs are satisfied. Yeah. You know, when I worked in LA, I worked with a lot of rich people, obviously, in the film industry. And it never really hit home to me until I left that I was always jealous of the amount of money like these commercial directors would make insane amounts of money, dude, like $20,000

a day for their stupid TV commercials. I'm unimpressed because you already told me that. Yeah, it's just amazing how much money they make, but you grow your lifestyle to fit your salary to a large degree, not always. My friend, you were talking about the hedonic treadmill. So basically, they're, wait, come on, have you heard those two words put together before? Yeah, all the time. Oh, okay.

Don't you see my t-shirt? Oh, yeah, it's right there. Wow. Well, hedonics is on the front. What a silly drawing. I thought so, too. You grow to fit your, your lifestyle grows to fit your salary. So if you make $20,000 a day, your expenses, or let's say $30,000 a month, your expenses

are going to be, you know, they're going to match that. I'm not saying this well. No, I know what you mean. Let's say an example I've read in an article from the San Diego Union Tribune, which is a sterling article, actually, on happiness. It's called Pursuing Happiness. This guy makes the example of winning the lottery and moving to Rancho Santa Fe, which I take as one of the nicer suburbs in San Diego.

I guess so. Okay. He says that when you do that, you go from the, how did I get this lucky type of happiness to living among similar wealth so it becomes your normal everyday life that wears off. Another argument against money bringing happiness is that a lot of times it leads to poor choices apparently about 40% of our happiness, if you look at it in a pie graph, 10% is life circumstances, 50% is genes, genetic, they believe, and then 40% is our choices that happiness or unhappiness or choices bring us.

And one of the points is like, okay, let's say commuting is almost across the board like one of our least favorite things to do as human beings. But you make a bunch more money, so you move out to the suburbs into a bigger house, but you've also just doubled or tripled your commute time. But then you buy the BMW 7 Series, so your drive is a lot sweeter, but then it costs $3,500 for the tune-up. Sure. It all comes out in the wash.

The point I think that you and I are inevitably going toward, stumbling toward, faltering, is that you just shouldn't take money quite so seriously. That's good. I find it interesting, and we've set up a thing in this country where you can never go backward. It's all about going forward. We talked about that with the Peter Principle. Yeah, well, with money though too, like in a divorce case, you always hear whether it's

a husband or the wife that's rich or the one that's asking for the spousal support. The point is always made, well, I've got this lifestyle now. Oh, yeah. You're going to need to get the $40,000 a month from you to stay at this lifestyle. The thought of going back is just unthinkable in this country. It is. Money-wise. If you think about it, stockbrokers don't tend to throw themselves out of windows when

they make a bunch of money. It's only when they lose it. Right. But I mean, that's drastic. But why can't you just, all right, I'm going to take a job that pays less, and I'm going to have a little less. Some people make this choice. You know what, I think some people do, and I would like to hear from them, anybody who's

made that decision, write us and tell us, are you happy? And what you did. But the courts support it with that divorce thing. They think, well, no, you've got this lifestyle, and you must stay at that level. You cannot drop your lifestyle whatsoever. Right. And that definitely does underscore that social agreement that materialism is what we're into.

Yeah. So, let's see, since I said materialism is what we're into, that means that I should tell you to go to howstuffworks.com. You can type in gross national happiness in our handy search bar, and you might also want to read another article on the site, can money buy happiness? Right. Which means what, Chuck? Actually, I got just one more quick thing.

You know, there was an earthquake. You just totally threw me off. There was an earthquake in Bhutan on Monday. Did you know that? No, I didn't. Everybody okay? 6.3. 12 people at least are dead, and wrecked a bunch of, you know, ancient monasteries.

Yeah, which are like built on the mountainside. Yeah. So, I imagine they came tumbling down. Jesus. It's very sad. Yeah, that is sad. So, I just wanted to say hello. If we have any fans in Bhutan, we might have one fan in Bhutan.

Yeah, the internet is there. It is. All right. Well, with that sad news, I guess it's time for Listener Mail. It is Listener Mail, Josh. And this is just a couple of quick shoutouts. This came from Amelia, and Jerry thought it was a good idea to plug it, so we will. It's a website called freerice.com.

Oh, yeah. And apparently what you do there is you go online at this website, and you answer vocabulary questions, and it's like a game. You play these games where you answer trivia questions and participate, and when you get these questions right, they donate rice to the needy around the world. So it's like a little interactive way, I guess, of getting people involved. And 10 grains of rice per correct answer, and the website today said over 68 billion grains of rice have been donated today.

Can't you imagine the poor slob whose job it is to count out every single one of those grains of rice? It may be symbolic. Well, maybe not. You think? No, you're staring blankly. So thanks, Amelia, for that, and that is a worthy cause indeed. And then I wanted to give a special shout out to Ben, our listener from University

of Wisconsin at Madison. Ben and I have been writing. He, at the age of 20, was diagnosed with a form of leukemia that I cannot pronounce. He said it's evidently the good kind, even though after hearing what he's been going through it doesn't sound like it. They were going to have a bone marrow transplant for Ben, but they could not find a match in 11 million person database. And so he has been approved.

This chemotherapy, I'm sorry, radiation worked, and he is going to have an umbilical cord blood transplant. Wow. And he's been traveling. I think he said something like 80 miles each way every day for like a two minute radiation. And he's been listening to our podcast, which is why he wrote in. And that's been helping him out. And Ben's a really cool guy, dude.

His attitude is like leaps and bounds ahead of ours, his outlook on life. Is it? Yeah. He's got active shots where Ben is just, and he's like, oh man, don't feel bad for me because I told him I felt really awful about it. Yeah. He said, you know, I didn't picture this as my life, but it's what I've been dealt and I'm dealing with it and everything's, everything's going to be okay.

And uh, so he was approved for the, uh, he was admitted last Wednesday for the transplant. And it's a six week hospital stay and then a two year recovery period. And he said that, uh, the one thing that he's loved is our podcast and hydromorphone. He's become fond of, which is, uh, with the painkiller they've been giving him. Oh, okay. And he said that he found out later heroin addicts use it as a substitute because that's similar effects heroin addicts will use anything as a substitute. Sure.

And, uh, so Ben, we hope you're well. Yeah. We hope you're listening. Our thoughts are with you. Obviously. And please keep us posted. Yeah, he will. Cool.

Well, you keep me posted, will you? I will. I'm going to have a lockdown on the information that comes in. I do. I control the information. Uh, remember, we want to hear from you if you've decided to take a giant step backward out of the rat race and, um, how your life's going. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com.

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