blondbraintrust

This is a cool and enlightened guy.
He asks the ultimate question. What is the end objective of progress and development? I think the world would be a lot better off if all politicians, from the city councilman to the POTUS,CEOs, scientists and think tanks kept that question in mind when making decisions.
Good article by Stephan Herrera over at technologyreview.com

By the end of this year, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, whose family has ruled
over Bhutan for almost a hundred years, will officially hand over power to the
people. Nobody wants to see him go, but the king himself has decided that he
must take a less active role in government. By his own account, he does not want
to see the throne stand in the way of the remarkable modernization under way in
Bhutan.

Rejecting the models of urbanization and unregulated market development usually promoted by the U.S. government, the king has crafted the framework for a political economy based on a theoretically harmonious mix of representative government, south-Asian-style capitalism, traditional religious values, environmentalism, hydropower, tourism, mandated preventative medicine, and universal health care.

If Bhutan's experiment succeeds or fails, many will credit or blame the
country's very Buddhist (or very eccentric, depending on whom you ask) notion of
"gross national happiness." In the late 1980s, Bhutan's University of
Oxford-educated king famously asserted that gross national happiness (GNH) was
more important than gross national product (GNP). Among the core principles of
GNH, he said, are good governance and sustainable economic development, cultural
and religious preservation, eradication of poverty, and environmental
protection. More recently, health care and education have been added to the
concept.
Bhutan only began modernizing in the 1950s. Previously, there were no paved
roads, most homes were built from mud and grass, literacy was low, and the death
rate was high. That Bhutan has progressed so far is thus remarkable. The current
king, who came to the throne in 1974, invested the country's meager finances in
an airport, an east-west road, bridges, national education, health care, and
select energy-producing technologies like hydropower, which provides almost all
the country's electricity. And it has worked, after a fashion.
According to the Asian Development Bank, Bhutan's GNP in 1985 barely topped $45 million. By 2002, it was more than $590 million. From 1999 to 2003, Bhutan's average GDP grew by 6.72 percent every year. Save for China, none of Bhutan's regional neighbors--including India--saw more GDP growth during the same period.
If Bhutan is still not a very healthy place to live, it's certainly better than
it was. The number of health facilities in the country rose from 65 in 1985 to
more than 200 today. Infant mortality rates in 2000 were half of what they were
in 1985, while average life expectancy rose from 48 years to 63 during the same
period.

The country has seen a remarkable growth in general education. The literacy rate
is almost 50 percent, whereas in the early 1990s it ranked the lowest among the
least-developed countries. More than 90 percent of Bhutanese children now reach
at least the fifth grade. The country's first university opened its doors in
2003.

But even as it modernizes, Bhutan has also strengthened or enacted laws designed to control pollution, mining, and logging. Almost 70 percent of the country's forests are protected. New laws ban smoking, gambling, and prostitution; anticorruption and construction codes have also been enacted.

Now comes the real test: can Bhutan and the king's enlightened framework
withstand the messy business of democracy and development, and the problems that
tend to follow? "With China, India, and Nepal sitting on its borders," says
Stephen Cohen, a senior fellow at the Washington, DC, policy think tank the
Brookings Institution who specializes in south-Asia security matters, "and donor
nations in the West constantly pushing new models upon the developing nations
they fund, anything can happen."
But if Bhutan can prove that democracy,
social equality, sustainable development, environmental protection, and limited
technology are compatible with Buddhism and 21st-century modernization, it will
be an interesting example for other poor nations who want modern technology and
economies--but who want them on their own terms.