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...

> 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.

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.