Bhutan, after prioritizing happiness, now faces an existential crisis

Bhutan's economy is growing, but it still has a nominal GDP per capita of only $3,700. Their youth unemployment rate is 16%, but 24% in urban areas. For all the talk of gross national happiness, it's hard to imagine a young person feeling happy in a poor country with very limited opportunities for upward mobility.

I'm also not sure that mass emigration should be seen as an existential threat. Many developing economies have very successfully leveraged emigration and remittances as an engine of economic growth. If Bhutan can modernise into a more open economy, those young people could start returning home with the skills, experience and capital to do great things.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

https://www.nsb.gov.bt/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2023/1...

https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2024/03/11/a-stron...

>Bhutan's economy is growing, but it still has a nominal GDP per capita of only $3,700. Their youth unemployment rate is 16%, but 24% in urban areas. For all the talk of gross national happiness, it's hard to imagine a young person feeling happy in a poor country with very limited opportunities for upward mobility.

Is it really that hard to imagine? For someone not flooded by continuous stream of advertisements about how far better would be their live if they could buy the next crap the wonderful market planned with obsolescence included, it’s not that hard to imagine the lake of "upward mobility" as a barrier to live happily.

From TFA:

> "Gross National Happiness acknowledges that economic growth is important, but that growth must be sustainable. It must… be balanced by the preservation of our unique culture," Tobgay said. "People matter. Our happiness, our well-being matters. Everything should serve that."

> Every five years, surveyors fan out across Bhutan measuring the nation's happiness. The results are analyzed and factored into public policy.

> "Gross National Happiness does not directly equate to happiness in the moment. One happiness is fleeting, it is emotion, it is joy," Tobgay said.

Perhaps when you or I have a hard time imagining them being happy, its more our imagination's fault than anything! I know there is no escaping cold hard capitalism, and a "happiness index" is a little cringey, but I don't think any situation would preclude their intentions here. Other than that, its up to you I guess to believe or not the data instruments (and the people) that are saying they are happy!

> nominal GDP per capita of only $3,700.

GDP is not a good measure of whether people have their needs met or not, doesn't factor in COL

> in a poor country with very limited opportunities for upward mobility

on the other hand, with its economy growing and an open-minded leadership, opportunities for enterprising young people would generally be greater

> youth unemployment rate is 16%

to put that in perspective, that's about the same as the EU

I imagine the low wages there are a big reason why young people leave. I was there in 2011 doing the tourist thing and you could live nicely on not much money as they didn't have much the way of a land shortage or silly building restrictions so you could build quite a nice house for not much - the style there is log cabin like. But it must be tempting to go off and earn 10x for a while and then come back.

Advertisement comes in many forms. Seeing the rich nobles and their kids walk around with something you don't have is a form of advertisement. Poor people are not stupid, they notice when the rich have something interesting and they tend to want that too.

> For all the talk of gross national happiness, it's hard to imagine a young person feeling happy in a poor country with very limited opportunities for upward mobility.

The early North American colonists had the same outlook about life among the Native Americans. However, is never a _single_ instance of a Native American running away from their tribe to join the colonists, but colonist defections to the tribes were a common occurrence, more among women than men.

Why? For all that talk of "upward social mobility and a better life", people figured out the Native Americans were _happy_ living in harmony with nature, and the women who escaped realized they had more personal freedoms with the "savages" versus the high-and-mighty Europeans who sold them on the good life at the colonies.

Upward mobility and money still aren't everything, despite the pressure those forces put on the world to appear so.

Advertisement aims to convince people that they need to buy something.

The nobles that walk around with their kids might be animated with pervert narcissism and enjoying poor people looking at them with envy, but they are certainly not their to suggest plebeians should strive at obtaining the same kind of wealth they want everyone to think they enjoy.

Also nobles more often than not have their own existential threats and fears. It’s not like going up the social ladder is a certain path to more serenity and happiness.

And it is a big problem for the EU as well.

The PPP adjusted for COL puts Bhutan roughly on a par with Sri Lanka or Indonesia, which suffice to say are countries where a lot of people don't get their needs met. There's plenty of intra-EU migration driven by youth unemployment, and I suspect that the Bhutanese unemployment benefits - if they exist at all - aren't as generous. And I think the Llotshampa might have something to say about how open minded the Bhutanese leadership really is...

There are, however, instances of entire Native tribes adopting settled agrarian economies, developing written languages, and largely adopting European civilization: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee

The Native Americans weren't ignorant of the advantages the European settlers possessed, and many did attempt to reform their societies along European grounds. They just tended to do this as a society-wide endeavor, rather than individual people running away to live with colonists.

> However, (there) is never a _single_ instance of a Native American running away from their tribe to join the colonists

I have heard and quoted this for years, but I'm actually questioning whether it is true now. It just seems unbelievable when you think about it, and sort of feeds the "noble savage" trope. Out of hundreds of thousands or millions of Native Americans, there MUST have been some youth, at least one, seduced by the promised of western culture and voluntarily left their tribe and moved to a city or something. It just makes for a better story the other way around. Whether this was documented is another matter I guess.

> However, is never a _single_ instance of a Native American running away from their tribe to join the colonists, but colonist defections to the tribes were a common occurrence, more among women than men.

There are many such instances, most famously Pocahontas. As far back as the 1600s there are records of Native Americans studying at Harvard. We just don't typically frame integration into the culture and institutions of a colonial power as "running away".

> Advertisement aims to convince people that they need to buy something.

That is wrong because of the word buy. Political ads are not convincing you to buy anything. The nobles don't want the result, but the plebeians still see their wealth and want it.

> Also nobles more often than not have their own existential threats and fears. It’s not like going up the social ladder is a certain path to more serenity and happiness.

I 100% agree with this. However from the point of view of the poor it looks much better (I tend to agree with them even though I'm closer to the rich end - like most people reading HN)

This description leaves out the why. Why did the tribes start adopting these ways of life?

The wiki link itself talks about how they continuously had their land stolen, the deer population they hunted for food was almost made extinct by the colonists, and a general attempt to claim ownership and sovereignty over their land in a way that was in line with how the European powers viewed ownership.

> attempt to reform their societies along European grounds

well, yeah, they had their land forcibly taken away from them so had to change their way of life

it's also unclear how much some of the social structural changes by the Cherokee was by choice or pressure from invaders to become "civilized" (i.e., pyramidical government structures, individual land ownership, etc.)

there's no indication that, generally speaking, Native Americans saw European societies as a "better life" -- in fact, quite the contrary. More powerful technologically and militarily, yes, but that's a separate matter altogether.

It's worth reading "1491 (Second Edition): New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles C Mann if you have the time.

https://www.amazon.com/1491-Second-Revelations-Americas-Colu...

What happened is that European disease created massive pandemics that killed most of the American Indians. No one was seduced by western culture, because, in general, American Indians had a better standard of living than the European colonists.

Where I live, (in Massachusetts,) the remaining American Indians integrated into European settlements because so few of them were left. I know its different elsewhere in the American continents; you can find out more if you read 1491 and its sequel 1493.

There are indeed such instances.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Occom The first indigenous Presbyterian minister

Here's another: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Colbert A native American fought for Andrew Jackson and eventurally retired and set up a cotton plantation.

In the 1600s, English settlers and native Americans probably had similar standards of living (i.e. a bit above subsistence). Maybe a 2x difference which I'm not sure would have been in favor of the Europeans, given that the natives had had so much time to learn how to farm, fish, hunt, and forage in the area.

Bhutan vs the West is a huge difference in comparison.

I believe Don C. Talayesva went to the colonist world, then came back to his village.

He wrote Sun Chief, an autobiography which is a fascinating, candid and surprisingly easy read. Higly recommend!

https://archive.org/details/sunchiefautobiog0000tala/page/n6...

There are multiple primary sources cited in Tribe (http://www.sebastianjunger.com/tribe-by-sebastian-junger).

Among the first things western men did native peoples was rape the women and spread disease. Word spreads fast when it comes to those things.

Also, Captain Cook documented problems with his men raping and spreading disease on _all_ his travels. He lamented he did not have the power to control his men, and weighed disciplining them against facing a mutiny half a world away from a court that could do anything about it.

> Political ads are not convincing you to buy anything.

My own (non-native) sense of the meaning attache to advertisement is matching the first one given in Wiktionary:

> A commercial solicitation designed to sell some commodity, service or similar.

And from there, I can perfectly see how it might lead to a metaphorical use, but just aptly as in "politicians want plebeians to buy their bullshits".

> I'm closer to the rich end - like most people reading HN

Do you have statistics about that? By the very essence of capitalism, most people are despoiled at the bottom of the pyramid. I get that those winning the Silicon Valley lottery can end up with millions in their bank account, but how do we evaluate the percentage of readers of HN that are in the higher end of the incomes percentiles ?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distri... If you make 150k or more you are in the top 25%. You may not be rich but you are doing well. And that is just us income, throw the world at it and everyone looks good.

I made 50k/year over the last two years, and that's the best I ever earned and I'm 40 old, living in France.

I don't mean that I feel like the poorest person in the world, to be clear, especially if we can agree that money income is a poor proxy to measure how lucky we are in life.