Happiness in the Himalayas: as the world struggles with the recession, the tiny kingdom of Bhutan is focusing more on 'gross national happiness' than gross domestic product.

• Author: Mydans, Seth
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

If the rest of the world can't get it right in these unhappy times, a tiny Buddhist kingdom high in the Himalayan mountains says it's working on an answer.

"Greed, insatiable human greed," says Prime Minister Jigme Thinley of Bhutan, describing what he sees as the cause of the economic crisis in the world beyond his country's snow-topped mountains. "What we need is change," he says. "We need to think gross national happiness." The idea of gross national happiness, or G.N.H., was the inspiration of Bhutan's former king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck. In the 1970s, concerned about the problems affecting developing countries that focused only on economic growth, he conceived of gross national happiness as an alternative to G.D.P., or gross domestic product the value of all goods and services produced by a country in one year which is often used as shorthand for a nation's well-being. (See Economic Map of the World, p. 16.)

The Bhutanese are now refining the king's philosophy, which is based on Buddhist principals, into what they see as a new political science. Under a new constitution adopted last year, government programs--from agriculture and transportation to foreign trade--must be judged not by the economic benefits they may offer but by the happiness they produce.

Researchers have found that economic growth doesn't necessarily guarantee happiness. In the early stages of a country's climb out of poverty, incomes and contentment often grow simultaneously. But studies have shown that as annual per capita income passes roughly $20,000, happiness doesn't always keep up.

"You see what a complete dedication to economic development ends up in," says Thinley, referring to the global economic crisis. He adds that many industrialized societies now see G.D.P. as "a broken promise."

While some economists may question the validity of gross national happiness, Bhutan's example has sparked broader discussion of what constitutes national well-being. In recent years, economists, social scientists, corporate leaders, and government officials around the world have been trying to develop measurements that factor in not just wealth but also things like access to health care, family time, and conservation of natural resources.

The goal in Bhutan, Thinley says, is not happiness itself, which each person must define for himself. Rather, the government aims to create the conditions for what he calls, in a twist on the Declaration of Independence, "the pursuit of gross...