If you wish to follow the journey of my cousin in Buthan click here.
As a former head of education services at the international red cross committee in Geneva, he has been hired by the King of Buthan and his Prime minister to coordinate a mission at an international level to promote the Buthan’s Gross national Happiness policy.
A Good Dog Can Bring Happiness to Your Life (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
An handful of scholars, idealists, politicians, spiritually minded and visionary people are in the pass of creating the forthcoming scale to measure the way of tomorrow life, i.e. the way of life and the wealth of our children and grand children. Those pioneers have attempted an assembly in New York the 1st and 2nd of April. Here below is the report of thoughts inspired by this meeting to one of its participant, who is also an actor of this coming revolution in the economic metrics:
http://havinhtho.blogspot.fr/2012/04/looking-back-at-new-york-meetings-on.html
My cousin went to New York (a bad place for French CEO the last twelve months) to participate to the world GNH congress at the UN.
His Buddhist philosophy protected him against any bad Karma because he came back safe. Here below is the manuscript of his lecture showing the possibilities of teaching what happiness proceeds from and a few pictures and links presenting the GNH concept.
Manuscript : Ha Vinh Tho
More content about the Bhutan policy available here:
http://www.gnhcentrebhutan.org/
“There is no way to happiness, happiness is the way”. Since my cousin disseminated this sentence via Facebook I immediately made it my maxim for every day life starting from now. Happiness as strange as it could appear is not only the topic of philosophers or spiritually minded people (like my cousin) but also of very pragmatic scientists in the field of a very harsh specialty, namely the economy not to mention political science. Reading the paper here below referenced in the work consulted list I discovered that there are numerous countless means of measuring happiness, of which not the less strange appears to be the duration of authentic or so-called Duchenne smiles. A Duchenne
smile occurs when both the zygomatic major and obicularus orus facial
muscles fire, and human beings identify these as genuine smiles (see Ekman,
Friesen, and O’Sullivan [1988]; Ekman, Davidson, and Friesen [1990]).
Another absolutely non poetic mean is of course the electroencephelogram measures of prefrontal brain activity.
I even learned that it does really exist a World Database of Happiness for over one hundred countries computerizing and data mining the responses answered by a handful of Guinea-pigs to two definitely simple questions entitled very rationally Q1 and Q2:
Q1. Three- step happiness—example from the U.S. General Social Survey (GSS): “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—
would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy or not too happy?”
Q2. Four- step life satisfaction—example from the European Eurobarometer Surveys: “On the whole, are you very satisfied, fairly satisfied, not very satisfied, or not at all satisfied with the life you lead?”
I wonder how the European Quality of Life Survey [EQLS] indicators would perform if the questionnaires were now administered in the streets of Athens or Valencia.
Works consulted:
International Evidence on Well- Being
David G. Blanchflower
http://www.nber.org/chapters/c5059.pdf
Gross National Happiness
http://www.gnhbhutan.org/about/
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