Month: October 2005

As Alice remarked, she had seen a cat without a smile before but never a smile without a cat. Gross National Happiness, the wonderful new and improved measure of national well-being about which I wrote the last time, is according to James Elliot, like the cat’s meow but with no cat in the background to back up the meow. James posted a comment which I thought was significant enough for all to ponder. Thanks for carrying the discussion forward.

{Disclaimer: The following views belong to James and I while I concur with them largely, there are points that I may differ on in detail.}

I find GNH creepy too.

We’ve been having a discussion about this on a Buddhist site. Apparently some think GNH is the cat’s meow. Maybe so, but where’s the damn cat?
Continue reading “Gross National Happiness: The Cat’s Meow”

A New York Times article (hat tip: Suhit) of Oct 4th, starts off with

What is happiness? In the United States and in many other industrialized countries, it is often equated with money.

Economists measure consumer confidence on the assumption that the resulting figure says something about progress and public welfare. The gross domestic product, or G.D.P., is routinely used as shorthand for the well-being of a nation.

But the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has been trying out a different idea.

In 1972, concerned about the problems afflicting other developing countries that focused only on economic growth, Bhutan’s newly crowned leader, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, decided to make his nation’s priority not its G.D.P. but its G.N.H., or gross national happiness.

When thinking about GDP and GNH, one has to be very careful about what one is aggregating. GDP is an accurate measure of what it measures: aggregate annual production of final goods and services in an economy denominated in monetary terms.

GDP does not aggregate cows, or beauty or whatever one may mistakenly think it does. Thus saying that the GDP does not accurately tell me anything about how many cows are in the economy, or complaining that GDP does not tell me anything about “the total amount of beauty is in an economy,” is as silly as saying that GDP does not tell me whether the people in the country are happy or not. Continue reading “Gross National Happiness is Grossly Silly”

A terrible specter is haunting the world and it goes by the name H5N1, more commonly called the avian flu virus which cases influenza in birds. This avian flu high pathogenic virus mainly kills birds but has also killed a few dozen people since 2003. That is not the bad news. The bad news is that this virus could mutate after crossing with human flu strains and become highly contagious. If that happens—and some scientists believe that it is an almost certainty—then anywhere between 50 million to half a billion people would die from the pandemic.

Flu pandemics kill periodically. Spanish flu in the 1918-19 killed an estimated 50 million worldwide, for instance. (For a very readable account of flu pandemics, see the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention site.) Continue reading “Bird Flu Pandemic”

Ignorance, stupidity, in great affairs of state is not something that is commonly cited. A certain political and historical correctlness requires us to assign some measure of purpose, of rationality, even where, all to obviously, it does not exist. Nonetheless one cannot look with detachment on the Great War (and also its aftermath) without thought as to the mental insularity and defectiveness of those involved and responsible.

Thus wrote John Kenneth Galbraith in his 1994 book A Journey Through Economic Time.

Today he celebrates his 97th birthday. Born in Ontario, Canada, in 1908, he has been one of the keenest observers of the 20th century. A profile the Guardian did in April 2002 called him the last of the old-style liberals. Continue reading “Happy Birthday, JK”

Here are the facts, very briefly. A magazine called JAM, did a story on a management institute called IIPM. The story said that IIPM makes tall claims. Many Indian newspapers carry full page IIPM ads. A blogger, Gaurav Sabnis, blogged about that and basically called IIPM claims fraudulent. IIPM served a legal notice threatening to sue Gaurav for a huge sum of money. They also contacted IBM, from whom they buy laptops for their students, to convey to them that they may stop that business relationship. Why? Gaurav works for IBM. So Gaurav resigned from IBM. The word got around and everyone and his brother is now blogging about the story–a rich corporation threatened a blogger and somehow managed to coerce him into quitting his job. Continue reading “The Blogger and IIPM: If the cap fits …”

First there was the Andaman-Sumatra earthquake which resulted in the Boxing Day tsunami in the Indian Ocean. South Asia suffered massively last December and now another earthquake in the Himalayas has led to the loss of tens of thousands of lives. As if the man-made disasters were not enough, natural distasters have added to the woes.

Lives in over-crowded poor parts of the world are really cheap. The death of thirty thousand lives lost will probably be associated with a total damage of one billion US dollars at most. Hurrican Katrina and the ensuing flooding of New Orleans cost about a thousand lives but the cost is a whopping $200 billion. (On Oct 2nd, I spoke with Prof James Reese where we compared the Katrina with the Tsunami — the podcast is available here.)

My word to god would be enough already. Disaster fatigue is setting in.