Word: wangchuck
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...party--Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi appealed to the public over the heads of the naysayers and won a landslide election victory. Only trouble is, sometimes, clear leadership engenders not too little trust but too much. In the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, the reformist King Jigme Singye Wangchuck is so popular that he is having trouble persuading his people to replace his feudal monarchy with a parliamentary democracy. That's not the sort of popularity that is likely to give Jacques Chirac problems anytime soon. [This article contains a table. Please see hardcopy of magazine or PDF.] Countries with...
King Jigme Singye Wangchuck of Bhutan is trying to abolish himself. The enlightened monarch of this tiny Himalayan kingdom, who has introduced such innovations as the use of a Gross National Happiness index to measure Bhutan's wealth, is now urging his people to get rid of him. "Monarchy is not the best form of government," he said last month at a stop on his anti-royalty campaign in the northern town of Haa. "It has many flaws...
...King Wangchuck, whose family has ruled since 1907, has been carefully moving Bhutan into the modern age, allowing in a limited number of tourists as well as television and the Internet?although the country's first traffic light, in the capital Thimpu, was deemed a step too far and the monarch had it removed. But for the first time, the King may not get his way: many Bhutanese seem unwilling to unseat him. "I look at all the problems the so-called democracies are facing and reckon I prefer the monarchy," said one young student at the meeting...
When Jigme Singye Wangchuck was crowned king of the Himalayan nation of Bhutan in 1972, he declared he was more concerned with ?Gross National Happiness? than with Gross Domestic Product. This probably didn?t come as a surprise to the forest-laden country?s 810,000 to 2.2 million (estimates vary greatly) residents, most of whom are poor subsistence farmers. Bhutan?s GDP is a mere $2.7 billion, but Wangchuck still maintains that economic growth does not necessarily lead to contentment, and instead focuses on the four pillars of GNH: economic self-reliance, a pristine environment, the preservation and promotion...
...King Wangchuck?s idea that public policy should be more closely tied to wellbeing - how people feel about their lives - is catching on. ?There is a growing interest in some policymaking circles in looking at these measures,? says Richard Easterlin, economics professor at the University of Southern California. ?We have been misguided in dismissing what people say about how happy they are and simply assuming that if they are consuming more apples and buying more cars they are better off.? There are efforts to devise a new economic index that would measure wellbeing gauged by things like satisfaction with personal...