Ha! Ha! What if the world were to dedicate itself to be happy?

Ha! Ha! Ha! What is more important: the growth of the Gross National Product or an upswing of Gross National Happiness? Is it better to spend the day laughing your head off and telling jokes or frowning, pouting and blowing your top?  Proposing hilarity as a way of life sounds something like an off color joke at a time when the world is aflame with war, infighting, hypocrisy, injustice, impoverishment, ecological disaster, financial crisis, economic meltdown and depressing International Monetary Fund recipes, yet that is precisely what Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Commission is attempting to do.

According to Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate professor at the University of Melbourne, the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan imposes high visa fees, which reduce the influx of tourists, in order to promote "gross national happiness" as a priority to economic growth. What’s the idea?  More tourists might boost the economy, but they would damage Bhutan’s environment and end up reducing the country’s long-term happiness.

On September 22 in Aljazeera, Singer wrote concerning Bhutan’s policy: “I wondered if it really meant anything in practice, or was just another political slogan. Last month, when I was in the capital, Thimphu, to speak at a conference on "Economic Development and Happiness", organised by Prime Minister Jigme Y Thinley and co-hosted by Jeffrey Sachs, Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University and Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, I learned that it is much more than a slogan.”

Dealing with happiness as a policy demands a definition: is happiness a surplus of pleasure over pain, or does it have to do with the amount of satisfaction we have with our lives? The first approach would appear to be a question of adding and subtracting positive versus negative moments. Singer suggests that the essential question might be: “How satisfied are you with the way your life has gone so far?” But then: which of these two approaches should be promoted?

Surveys using the first approach indicate that countries such as Nigeria, Mexico, Brazil, and Puerto Rico do well, a bit surprising if you consider the degree of violence and social problems in those countries; thus happiness would apparently have more to do with culture than with objective indicators such as health, education, and standard of living.

Surveys with the second approach, tend to show greatest satisfaction in the richer countries such as Denmark and Switzerland. Yet do people’s answers to survey questions in different languages and in different cultures really mean the same thing? At this point it is salient to ask what the real goal of a government should be? Is it crazy to talk about happiness as a goal when the world is dominated by markets exclusively interested in profits and “efficiency?” Should the heads of the IMF, NATO, the UN and multinational corporations dedicate themselves to laughing? (Some might suggest that they laugh, but at people’s expense).

The Center for Bhutan Studies, set up by the Bhutanese government 12 years ago, is currently processing the results of interviews with more than 8,000 Bhutanese, Singer says. The interviews recorded both subjective factors, such as how satisfied respondents are with their lives, and objective factors, such as standard of living, health, and education, and participation in culture, community vitality, ecological health, and the balance between work and other activities.

Bhutan’s prime minister chairs the “Gross National Happiness Commission.” Its task is to screen all new policy proposals put forward by government ministries. If a policy is found to be contrary to the goal of promoting gross national happiness, it is sent back to the ministry for reconsideration; the proposals die if they fail to get the Commission’s approval.

One controversial law that did go ahead recently is a ban on the sale of tobacco. Bhutanese may bring into the country small quantities of cigarettes or tobacco from India for their own consumption, but not for resale - and they must carry the import-tax receipt with them any time they smoke in public.

Last July, the UN General Assembly passed, without dissent, a Bhutanese-initiated resolution recognizing the pursuit of happiness as a fundamental human goal and noting that this goal is not reflected in GDP. The resolution invited member states to develop additional measures that better capture the goal of happiness. The General Assembly also welcomed an offer from Bhutan to convene a panel discussion on the theme of happiness and well-being during its 66th session, which opens this month.

As long as the UN General Assembly continues to whitewash or wash its hands of issues such as the western invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, or the use of the veto by Washington to deny a voice to Palestinians, as long as the world’s economic system is based on oil and the destruction of the world’s ecological system—just to mention a few stumbling blocks—happiness would not appear to be on the agenda of the world’s vested interests. Nevertheless, it would indeed be a challenge if people all over the world were to dedicate themselves to solving their problems with good humor, meditation, stimulate el thymus and the flow of endorphins.