It’s wonderful to watch a nation try to create an ideal government. Bhutan is in the process of creating one in which the government is held accountable based on the happiness of its people.

To make this work the Bhutanese came up with a way to mathematically quantify happiness both on the individual and national level, and to have an objective measure of to what degree specific government policies increase or decrease the happiness of the people.

Part of this involves a 300 question questionnaire, which most people were quite happy to fill out. Questions about the degree to which people feel safe from spirit and ghost attacks struck me as silly at first, but the fact is that people do feel less happy when they are worried about being attacked by a ghost.

Amazing and inspiring stuff.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 3rd, 2010 at 4:26 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.