How should a libertarian view the pursuit of happiness in Bhutan?

I was pondering this question last week on my first visit to Bhutan. Some readers may wonder why anyone who loves liberty would actually need to ponder this question. It is obvious that such a person could not support a law requiring citizens to wear national dress, particularly when this law means that ethnic minorities with a different cultural heritage are expected to wear the traditional attire of the majority of the population. Nor could anyone who loves liberty support a law specifying that any person found with more than the permissible quantity of tobacco products for personal consumption ‘shall be guilty of the offense for smuggling’.

My pondering has focused on the issue of whether such restrictions of liberty are central to Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) objective. My conclusion is that I don’t think they are. While GNH seems to be mentioned whenever the government does anything in Bhutan, restrictions of liberty seem to me to be more appropriately attributed to the historical legacy of isolation from the rest of the world, the reasons that the Druk majority have had to fear that they might lose their cultural identity and political independence, and the history of paternalistic government that is greatly respected by a high proportion of the people (and which has generally deserved that respect).

It seems to me that attributing restrictions of liberty in Bhutan to GNH would be as silly as attributing the recent riots in Britain to its Westminster system of government, or the existence of a relatively high prison population in the US to the ideals expressed in its Declaration of Independence. Principles deserve to be considered on their merits, even though the claims to moral leadership of the countries that espouse those principles are often impaired to some extent by bad policies and policy outcomes.

The following remarks of the current king of Bhutan, his majesty Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, seem relevant in this context:

‘GNH acts as our National Conscience guiding us towards making wise decisions for a better future. It ensures that no matter what our nation may seek to achieve, the human dimension, the individual’s place in the nation, is never forgotten. It is a constant reminder that we must strive for a caring leadership so that as the world and country changes, as our nation’s goals change, our foremost priority will always remain the happiness and wellbeing of our people – including the generations to come after us’.

The GNH concept originated in the early 1970s in a remark by the former king that ‘Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product’. Systematic efforts have been made over the last decade or so to specify the objective clearly, to measure GNH and to incorporate relevant criteria in government decision-making.

The central idea behind Bhutan’s GNH objective is to integrate environmental conservation, promotion of cultural activities and good governance with economic growth and modernization. This idea has gained considerable international support. The UN General Assembly recently adopted by acclamation a resolution sponsored by Bhutan inviting countries ‘to pursue the elaboration of additional measures that better capture the importance of the pursuit of happiness and well-being in development with a view to guiding their public policies’. Bhutan has been invited to convene a panel discussion on the theme of happiness and well-being during the Assembly’s next session, which begins in September.

While offering its view of the pursuit of happiness to the rest of the world, the government of Bhutan does not claim to have resolved all the problems of economic development and social change. For example, public literature about GNH acknowledges that Bhutan faces problems associated with rural-urban migration, youth alienation and substance abuse.

One possible area of concern about pursuit of GNH is whether attempts to integrate environmental and cultural concerns with economic development will reduce economic freedom and constrain economic opportunities available to Bhutanese people. I’m not sure how restrictive the project approval processes might be, but it seems to involve a weighing up of the good and bad effects of individual projects. This approach seems to me to have potential to enable approval of a larger number of good projects than would the process in Australia of requiring projects to jump a series of environmental and/or social impact hurdles imposed by different levels of government. The inclusion of a good governance criterion should also help to ensure that projects are not held up by corrupt officials or narrowly focused interest groups.

Although the Heritage Foundation’s index suggests that Bhutan has a relatively low level of economic freedom (a ranking of 103 among the 179 countries ranked) it is not clear that its ranking is adversely affected by the pursuit of GNH. Bhutan’s economic freedom ranking is considerably higher than that of neighbouring countries such as India (124), China (135) and Nepal (146) whose governments do not have GNH as an explicit objective. I don’t see why pursuit of GNH in Bhutan would not be consistent with greater economic freedom than at present.

I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to Bhutan. I think it would be hard for anyone to visit the country without ending up with a great deal of respect for the peaceful people who inhabit this country. The people are so kind that the dogs even seem to feel safe sleeping on the roads. I don’t like the paternalistic restrictions on liberty in Bhutan but I think that there is a fair chance that the government will decide, before long, that such policies are actually inimical to individual flourishing and to GNH.

Do all well-being indicators tell similar stories at a regional level?

I have previously noted that there is a tendency for many different well-being indicators to tell similar stories in international comparisons. The most obvious reason for this is that well-being is related to socio-economic circumstances. People who live in countries with relatively high average incomes could be expected to have good housing, better health outcomes, greater life satisfaction etc.


It would seem reasonable to expect a similar pattern at a regional level within countries. Regions that have a high rating on an indicator, such as subjective well-being, might also be expected to have a fairly high rating on a range of factors that are known to be related to well-being.

There is an excellent facility in Victoria (Australia) to test whether this is the case. The site, known as Community Indicators Victoria, enables visitors to look at relationships between a large number of variables across local government areas (LGAs). I used the double data map facility to examine the relationship between subjective well-being (SWB) and a range of variables that I thought might reasonably be expected to be correlated with SWB. The SWB measure used is the Australian Unity Wellbeing Index combines satisfaction with life as a whole and satisfaction with various domains of life (standard of living, health, achievements in life, community connection, personal relationships, safety and future security).

The relationship with some relevant variables was strongly positive, as I had expected. The LGAs with higher average SWB also tend to have higher ratings in terms of: satisfaction with being part of the community, social support (ability to get help from friends), citizen engagement (e.g. attending town meetings, writing to politicians), safety (e.g. feeling safe walking in the local area at night) and volunteering.

However, the relationship with some other relevant variables was negative. These included household income (Census data), food security, satisfaction with work-life balance and acceptance of diverse cultures.

The explanation seems to lie mainly in differences between rural LGAs and those in Melbourne or close to it. The LGAs with highest average SWB tend to be rural. There seems to be an association between high average SWB and the relatively strong community networks in the rural LGAs. The variables for which a negative relationship was observed, such as household income, tend to have higher values in Melbourne and in LGAs close to Melbourne.

When I was growing up in country Victoria the people where I lived used to say that Melbourne might be a nice place to visit, but they wouldn’t want to live there. They were smiling but they weren't joking. People who live in rural area seem to be highly satisfied with their lifestyles. Perhaps an ideal lifestyle can only be obtained by earning a big-city income and living in the country.

A report prepared a few years ago by Bob Cummins et al, looking at SWB by statistical sub-division (SSD) over Australia as a whole, indicates that the SSDs with the highest levels of subjective wellbeing were all rural and those with the lowest subjective wellbeing were all inner-city. The authors noted that subjective wellbeing is generally lower in cities with more than 40,000 inhabitants and that the most important domain driving this is connection to community.

Is the incidence of depression higher where a high proportion of the population are 'suffering'?

Before being willing to guess the answer to that question I expect most readers would want to know how I define suffering. For the purposes of this exercise, I am using the definition of suffering adopted by the Gallup World Poll. Gallup classifies respondents as "thriving," "struggling," or "suffering," according to how they rate their current and future lives on a ladder scale, based on the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale, where the bottom rating is ‘the worst possible life’ and the top rating is ‘the best possible life’. Respondents are classified as suffering if they have poor ratings of their current life situation (4/10 and below) and negative views of the next five years (4/10 and below). They are more likely to report lacking the basics of food and shelter, more likely to have physical pain, a lot of stress, worry, sadness, and anger. They have less access to health insurance and care, and more than double the disease burden, in comparison to "thriving" respondents.


So, do you think the incidence of depression is likely to be higher in countries where a high proportion of people are suffering? By now, you are probably thinking that must be a trick question. Given the way Gallup defines suffering, surely it must be reasonable to expect the incidence of depression to be higher in countries with relatively high levels of suffering.

However, that doesn’t seem to be so when the Gallup data are compared with the results of a recent study of the incidence of depression in 18 countries. The study, by Evelyn Bromet (and 21 co-authors) recently published in BMC Medicine involved face to face interviews of over 89,000 adults using the WHO’s Composite International Diagnostic Interview. I don’t know what that means exactly, but it sounds impressive. This looks like a reliable study.

The authors report that the incidence of major depressive episodes (MDE) was greater on average in the higher income countries than in the low-to- middle income countries included in their study. That is what attracted my attention initially and the reason why I thought it might be interesting to plot the incidence of MDE against Gallup estimates of the percentage of populations who are suffering, as shown below.

The chart doesn’t seem to show any evidence of a positive relationship between prevalence of MDE in the last 12 months and the percentage suffering. Similarly, a graph plotting lifetime prevalence of MDE against the percentage suffering showed no obvious positive relationship.

The data depicted in the chart suggest there is no simple relationship between income levels and prevalence of MDE. For example, the prevalence of MDE seems to be relatively high in the United States and relatively low in Japan, Germany and Italy.

The findings of the study reveal several things about depression that I was not previously aware of. The incidence of MDE among women is, on average, about twice that for men. The average age of onset is the mid-20’s. The strongest demographic correlate in high-income countries was being separated from a partner, whereas in low-to-middle income countries it was being divorced or widowed.

Depression is obviously related to emotional well-being, but the links seem to be complex. For example, I don’t know how to relate data suggesting that only 2 percent of the population in Brazil are suffering with data suggesting that about 10 percent had a major depressive episode in the last 12 months. Over the last few years I have gained some understanding of correlates of well-being, but that doesn't seem to help much in understanding the incidence of depression.

Postscript 1
Cameron Lau of International Business Times talks about the depression study here. However, seems to have his facts twisted when he claims that depression rates in rich countries far outpace those in poor countries.

Postscript 2
I have just remembered a recent study by John Helliwell and Shun Wang that sheds considerable light on the incidence of depression in different countries. These authors have been able to explain 58% of the variance of 117 average suicide rates drawn from different years in 50 countries around the world using only four key variables: social trust, membership in community organizations, strength of religious belief, and the divorce rate. They comment: ‘The first three variables act to reduce suicide, while higher divorce rates are associated with higher suicide rates. The effects of social trust are large and statistically significant. Moving 10% of the population from generally untrusting to generally trusting, a shift of … less than one standard deviation for the sample data, would be predicted to lead to a … drop in the suicide rate, more than 10% of its average value’ (‘Trust and Wellbeing’, IJW, 2011, p. 50).

Data from World Values Surveys for 2005-6 indicate that the percentage of the population who think that most people try to take advantage of them (ratings of 1 to 4 on a ten point scale) is much higher in Brazil and the Ukraine (shown to have a high incidence of depression in the above chart) than in Japan, Germany and Italy (which have a relatively low incidence of depression).

However, lack of trust does not seem to explain the relatively high incidence of depression in the United States, where the percentage of the population who think that most people try to take advantage of them is about the same as in Japan, Italy and Germany.

Do Australian political leaders lack vision?

I ended my last post asking why the major political parties in Australia seem to be finding it more difficult to promote sensible policies. One possible explanation I hear quite frequently is that our political leaders lack vision. The argument seems to be that the policies of the major parties are too easily blown around by powerful interest groups because the leaders are no longer anchored to a set of values that their parties stand for.


The argument is expressed most often about the prime minister. I often hear people ask: Who is the true Julia? What does she really believe in? What does stand for? (A recent example is in the remarks by Paul Gardner here.)

I am not about to become an apologist for the prime minister, but it seems to me that those questions are unfair. Julia Gillard tells an authentic story about her origins, the use she made of the educational opportunities available to her and the values she holds relating to opportunity and responsibility. Why can’t more people accept that she means what she says when she argues that ‘Labor's modern mission’ is ‘to spread opportunity with a matching sense of responsibility’?

One of Gillard’s problems is that her espousal of opportunity and responsibility seems vague and out of kilter with the leftist views she is known to have held in the past. Some people might feel that she is using the language of opportunity and security as a cover for statism and wealth redistribution.

The leader of the opposition, Tony Abbott, has a somewhat different problem stemming from his background. Abbott makes no secret of the fact that in his youth he was strongly influenced by Bob Santamaria, a catholic political ideologue, who was a particularly divisive figure in Australian politics. The problem that poses for Abbott is that some people think the values he has espoused are a cover for paternalistic conservatism.

So, what values has Abbott espoused? In his book, ‘Battlelines’, Abbott poses the question: “How can Australians, individually and collectively come closer to being their ‘best selves’ and what can the Liberal Party do to bring this about?” (p79). That question seems to me to imply a strong set of values relating to individual aspirations. The doubts that some people have about Abbott stem from the possibility that he may be inclined to impose a social conservative’s view of what it means to be ‘one’s best self’ rather than respecting the rights of every individual to live according to their own views of what it means to be ‘one’s best self’.

It seems to me that the claim that our political leaders lack vision is garbage. The values that Gillard and Abbott currently espouse deserve to be recognized and considered on their merits, even if there are be grounds for suspicion that both are still influenced by their respective ideological histories.

There should be more focus on the similarities and differences between the values that Gillard and Abbott espouse . It seems to me that Gillard’s ‘opportunity and responsibility’ is closely allied to allowing and helping people to come closer to being their ‘best selves’. The difference is that Gillard puts more emphasis on spreading opportunity while Abbott would probably put more emphasis on encouraging greater productivity and individual excellence. There is still potential for the major parties to compete for votes on the basis of their emphasis of different values even though the old political divide based on attitudes toward the role of the state have greatly diminished.

So, if lack of vision is not the problem, what is? The prime minister has failed to ensure that ‘opportunity and responsibility’ are reflected in policy development outside of education and social welfare. For example, the national broadband network seems to be as much about reducing opportunity for people in the big cities, by restricting competition, as it is about expanding opportunities for people in regional areas. Health policy seems to be more about attempting to reduce risk factors through greater government regulation, rather than encouraging individuals to take greater responsibility for their own health.

The leader of the opposition has adopted a small target strategy. Rather than promoting new policies to encourage greater productivity, he continues to recite the mantra he took to the last election about ending the waste, repaying debt, stopping the new taxes and stopping the boats.

What are the incentives for politicians to adopt small target strategies? What role does the media play in this? Why don’t journalists do more to hold political leaders to account for lack of consistency between their high ideals and the policies they adopt? Is there anything that ordinary people can do to raise the level of political debate in this country?

Postscript:
Jim Belshaw - an historian, economist, management consultant and blogger - has suggested in a comment below that there is a lack of good policy ideas and that people like me (and himself) have something to answer for in that regard. Jim has also posted a more extensive comment on his blog.