Bhutan, the king said, needed to ensure that prosperity was shared across society and that it was balanced against preserving cultural traditions, protecting the environment and maintaining a responsive government.Now that's what *I* call a benevolent dictator. More importantly, other nations are studying his example and the more general principles that it represents -- valuing a whole range of the human experience rather than just wealth-production.
Around the world, a growing number of economists, social scientists, corporate leaders and bureaucrats are trying to develop measurements that take into account not just the flow of money but also access to health care, free time with family, conservation of natural resources and other noneconomic factors.Somebody pinch me!
The goal, according to many involved in this effort, is in part to return to a richer definition of the word happiness, more like what the signers of the Declaration of Independence had in mind when they included "the pursuit of happiness" as an inalienable right equal to liberty and life itself.
(via Follow Me Here)
3 comments:
Cool article.
"Small Is Beautiful" was an important book, but seems to have been forgotten here.
Funny that they quote all the Princeton guys but not Kahneman, also at Princeton, nobel prize winner in Economics and recently (past 20 years) focused on hedonics and measures of well-being.
-Fortuitous
Well, other than at the bottom of the first (e)page, where it reads
Indeed, America's brief flirtation with a similar concept, encapsulated in E. F. Schumacher's 1973 bestseller "Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered," ended abruptly with the huge and continuing burst of consumer-driven economic growth that exploded first in industrialized countries and has been spreading in fast-growing developing countries like China.
:))
Yeah -- I got that. I just meant it seems to have been forgotten in American policy and debate. I don't think I would have come up with the reference if not for seeing it in the article.
Yes, my "here" was not very specific.
-Fortuitous
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