How Digital Cash Can Lift Gross National Happiness
The tiny kingdom of Bhutan could prove the perfect electronic currency laboratory for giant neighbor India.
Bhutan doesn’t need ATMs to find happiness.
Photographer: Arun Sankar/AFP/Getty
The tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, landlocked between the teeming multitudes of China and India, shot to global fame in the 1970s with gross national happiness: a broad measure of overall welfare it prefers over the more traditional metric of gross domestic product, which only includes production of goods and services, even those that ultimately leave us miserable.
More recently, the hydroelectric-powered nation decided to become not just carbon neutral — but carbon negative, its pristine forests acting as a sink-hole to absorb the greenhouse gases released by its coal-burning neighbors.