Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers. I'm your host Andrew Hee.

I really want to go to Bhutan. Small Buddhist kingdom in the Himalayas. You know it, Bhutan, not to gain enlightenment or

Instagram selfies or even tax evasion. I want to go for the wononkiest, nerdiest reason anyone in the world could ever want to go to Bhutan.

I want to talk to a Bhutanese official about their country's Gross Happiness Index.

Have you heard of this? I find it fascinating.

Here in the United States, the big numbers that we tend to look at in terms of policy are gross domestic

product, GDP, or maybe the high or low of the Dow Jones Index, unemployment numbers.

Bhutan has a gross happiness index, a G.H.I.

Fascinating.

Now, as I understand it, the Prime Minister and a Commission controlled by the Prime Minister

are in charge of disseminating a survey and analyzing it, which immediately makes me suspicious of the application of such a concept.

If you're the head of government and you're in charge of an attitudinal study, my guess is that

you're going to find a way to slice it up to show that your administration is amazing. And there's some criticism of

Bhutan's Gross Happiness Index as a sort of flimsy ephemeral report at

best or a distraction from ethnic cleaning at worst.

But the concept, the concept of a gross national happiness index is interesting, is it not? Imagine we had some very basic happiness metrics built

into the census. From a policy perspective, it would be very interesting to me if we could

say, well, good news, African Americans are

aggregately 8% happier than the last census, but, bad news, teenage girls are down 20%. Or better because the census only comes out so often and

also it would be more of a hassle to sit down and figure out your mood when you wrote it.

Imagine pew research or Quinnipiac, where some outfit, did a big-ass cross-sectional

daily survey of how people are feeling. They find statistical representatives of demographic and geographic groups and enlist them to thrice a day,

...