Happiness Prescribed 
The United Nations wants the world to focus less on gross domestic product and more on gross national happiness.

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY 
April 3, 2012
WSJ
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304023504577319834149513986.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Syrians are being slaughtered by their own government, Iran wants the bomb, and a humanitarian crisis is brewing in the Sudan. But at the United Nations yesterday, the focus was on how to get the world to stop thinking so much about wealth creation, as expressed by gross domestic product (GDP), and to instead focus on gross national happiness, or GNH. 
Yesterday's event was a follow-up to U.N. resolution 65/309, titled Happiness: towards a holistic approach to development and passed in August. It invited Bhutan, apparently the world expert in contentment, to host a discussion of well-being and happiness at the 66th opening of the general assembly this week. 
The Bhutanese are not the happiest in the world. That distinction goes to Denmark by most accounts. But Bhutan is a kind of poster-child of happiness because while the people are poor and the average life span is only 67 years, surveys indicate that the population is among the happiest in the world. Those of us with more stuff than the average Bhutanese are supposed to learn something from that, namely that money doesn't buy happiness.
The U.N. event also coincided with the release of the first World Happiness Report issued by the Earth Institute and co-edited by Jeff Sachs. The report found that Northern European countries are among the happiest in the world and sub-Saharan Africa is the least happy. What makes people happy is not money, though it helps. Instead the report said that things like jobs with high pay and convenient hours and health care make people happy. In a press release the institute says that the report reflects a new worldwide demand for more attention to happiness and absence of misery as criteria for government policy.
The trouble is that the economic literature of happiness is shaky because of the subjective nature of the matter. In a 2008 World Values Survey directed by University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart, Puerto Rico and Colombia knocked Finland and Sweden out of the top ten happiest nations in an earlier survey. Business Week paraphrased Mr. Inglehart's findings this way: Generally, a rising global sense of freedom in the last quarter-century has eclipsed the contribution of pure economic development to happiness. In December 2010 Cato Institute scholar Johan Norberg wrote that Bhutan's index defines happiness partly as a strong, traditional culture, and has used it to oppress minorities.
Nevertheless the crowd at the U.N. yesterday seemed in search of a global happiness policy. In a New York Times oped last week, Timothy W. Ryback, deputy secretary general of the Académie Diplomatique Internationale in Paris, praised the GNH index and cited the Bhutan government's position: The 2nd April High Level Meeting is intended as a landmark step towards adoption of a new global sustainability-based economic paradigm for human happiness and well-being of all life forms to replace the current dysfunctional system that is based on the unsustainable premise of limitless growth on a finite planet. 
Sounds like a replacement for the debunked global-warming scare. Expect to hear more of it.