Q 5.1: Can you share practical / real-life applications of GNW Index in public policy?

There are several applications for the GNW Index, each application can be customized to individual national or local policy needs. The following are a few policy plans and implementation  examples:

• North America:

  • 2009 USA's New York City Green Light District Community Wellness Planning: Gross National Wellness (GNW) Guiding Policy and Measurement Dashboard(pages 103 to 118)

  • 2011 Canada's Edmonton City 2030 Vision: Sustainable Development report: Potential Measurement Approaches - The International Institute of Management Indicators that influence happiness. (page 14)

• Africa:

  • 2011 Ethiopia's  Social Protection Management using Gross National Wellbeing (GNW) Index Measurement   

  • 2017 Nigeria's Agriculture and Fishery Industry Policy Impact on GNW Index Measurements

• Asia:

  • 2011 India's Goa State Vision 2035: Making Goa the first state in India to measure and monitor happiness as the most important socioeconomic development indicator (page 111)

  • 2016 Bangladesh Planning Commission: A Development Planning Framework Option (page 45)

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Q 5.2: Can you share your new research or data with the public for free?

No. Our work was plagiarized by other researchers and we decided to stop publishing or sharing our work publically until we reclaim our authorship rights. We are a private research think tank. Although we sometimes publish our work to educate the public and market our services, we do not have public sources of funding. We make our revenue from consulting and training services. Unlike academics who are supported by university salaries and research grants. We need to  sell or license our services in order to survive and grow.

Q 5.3: What does a "Per Capita Index" mean?

A simplistic explanation of terminology for non-economists:

• Econometrics can be defined simplistically as economic-metrics or economic measurements. It is a branch of economics focusing on the analysis and design of measurement solutions to help identify and solve problems in various industries, including public policy. Researchers and consultants attempt to design and create new solutions, models, and tools to help improve the analysis and policy formulation.

•  "Per capita" means per person. Mathematically, it is calculated by taking any measure of a country and divide it by the total number of the population in that country. For example, you can take the total income or GDP, in US dollar amount and divide it by the population number. This allows economists to measure the total income created by a society in relationship to the total number of people in that society. The use of averages and ratios allow economists to compare countries of different sizes. 

• Benchmarking means comparing to another reference value (a benchmark number). For example, when comparing a group of countries, you choose a reference point for comparison, such as the country with highest  or lowest income or the average value of all compared countries. You can also compare a country's annual GDP per capita to a reference point in time, such as last year or a reference year to see progress.

• "Normalization", the term can have multiple meanings, one meaning is (to normalize) or to adjust different measurement scales to one common scale.  For example, how can you compare an income per capita in USD (measured in currency per person) with the standard crime rate (measured as a rate per 100, 000 of population)? Statisticians use a term called "normalization", i.e. adjusting them to a common scale (so you can compare "apple to apple"). They usually convert values on a scale of 0-10 or 0-100. If you visit the Global GNH / GNW Index Survey, you will see  an example of how the scale for each dimension is normalized  or adjusted to one common scale from 0-10 to measure subjective happiness in relationship to other objective dimensions of wellbeing.

• An Index measures the change in the performance (the progress or regress) of virtually anything (such as an income per capita, production, stock market, healthcare cost, crime rate per 100, 000, happiness levels, etc.). For example, an Index can be used to measure the percentage of change in an income of a country over a period of time. Mathematically, an Index formula is a time series function summarizing movements (changes in value) in a group of related variables.
  How can you create a complex Index made up of different indicators that measure different things (happiness, dollars, crimes, disease, etc.) and use different scales? Statisticians use a technique called

• Correlation: Correlation analysis attempts to see if two factors are related to each other, that is if they behave in similar or opposite manner and to what degree. For example, does higher education level results in higher happiness? If yes, then to what degree?

• Causation (cause and effect): Causation analysis goes beyond correlation analysis, it attempts to find what is the cause and what is the effect of two or more factors. For example, in a certain period of time, one research finds violent crime is higher in black communities. Statistically speaking, it can be said there is a positive correlation between the color of the skin and violence. However, such research is highly misleading (even if statistically sound) because it provides an incomplete association analysis. Further research reveals that the cause is not the color of the skin, but rather the historical conditions (including slavery and explicit and implicit discrimination) leading to lower income and education and therefore more violence. So, the cause is not the color of the skin, but the lower income and education.. The same can be true to any superiority or inferiority association. The root cause problem of stereotypes and prejudice against or in favor of a person or a group or a policy (conservative or liberal) is usually the lack of sufficient causation analysis.

Contrary to the perception of non-economists, the Index math functions can be easily applied and trailered using automated tools using Excel or other software and does not require major investments.  Each one of the above statistical methods or mathematical functions (Index, averages, per capita, benchmarking and normalization, correlation, GDP per capita, etc.) are well-known among economists and statisticians. When an economists propose an average, a per capita or an Index function, they do not have to explain in mathematical notation what they mean, the techniques can be easily understood by other economists; The real challenge (and therefore the real value) is how to select from all the available knowledge elements, then combine them in away to create a new knowledge to solve existing complex problems.

The first generation GNW Index created a multi-dimensional single measure to track the progress of happiness and wellbeing of a society in each of the dimensions (variables) of wellbeing as well as the aggregate (total sum) of all dimensions, thereby allowing benchmarking (comparing) progress over time and against other societies on each dimension and all dimensions combined. The Index model is flexible to allow policymakers to place the same or different weights to each dimension and sub-indicator thus allowing them to focus on one or more areas and see the impact on the total happiness and wellbeing score.

Prior to the GNW Index, happiness measurement were simplistic, subjective and unreliable. They were based on surveys that asked general questions such as "how happy are you?" or "how did you feel yesterday compared to today?" or "how satisfied are you in life?" The GNW Index changed that by creating a holistic and unified conceptual framework that integrated the subjective with objective measurements, by asking about happiness and satisfaction in each dimension of wellbeing and then aggregating the total score. This way, economists and the person surveyed can give a more precise and less subjective answer and rating about happiness and wellbeing in each dimension in life and overall. 

The GNW Index unified, holistic, and integrated structure allows the individual, economists, psychologists, sociologists, and policymakers to know the causes of happiness and unhappiness in each dimension and how they impact the aggregate feeling of life satisfaction and objective wellbeing over time. Policy makers can also make more informed decision on how public investment projects impact happiness and wellbeing on each dimension and total score over time.

The other advantage is that it allows policymakers to correlate between pure objective measures and pure subjective measure of life satisfaction in a 360-degree (full view or holistic) multidimensional manner, rather than partial, skewed, or unbalance manner.

The social impact and applications of such solution are far-reaching. For example, policymakers can use the GNW Index to allocate national investments across the dimensions of wellbeing and measure the performance of those investments on each dimension and the total score, the GNW Index also allows them to compare the performance of these investments to other policies in other societies. One less used, but more important application of the GNW Index is political conflict studies, including peace and war studies, where causes of political tensions and conflicts within a society (economic, ethnic, civil conflicts, etc.) and between societies (cross border wars). Prior to the GNW Index, no econometric solution offered a single measurement unit based on an integrated, holistic, unified and flexible multidimensional econometric system existed that allowed such holistic policy-making application, in the same way that the GNW Index did.

Q 6: Why did you create the GNW Index? What is the purpose or value of the GNW Index? What are the main design features of GNW Index solution? (Combined Questions)

A:The GNW Index solution was designed to break through the limitations of known traditional GDP economics and public policy decision-making models. At the time of publishing of the first paper, there was no unified, widely accepted, or mature  policy framework to support the centuries-old inspiring holistic philosophical and political visions.

Although the GNW solution and Index was the product of a creative process and was based on earlier multi-national and multi-cultural personal and professional experience. Later historical and comparative research discovered hundreds of fragmented indicators  and a few partially integrated measurement solutions that existed before. Despite their valuable insights and contribution to the total heritage of socioeconomic policy and wisdom, they were severely deficient in measuring subjective (happiness) and objective wellbeing, let alone measuring subjective happiness in relationship to each and all of the critical objective dimensions of wellbeing. For example, we found studies that measured crime rates, but not pollution; income inequality, but not poverty;  the number of doctors or hospital bed per capita, but not (the more important)  mental and physical health indicators such as depression or chronic diseases; income per capita, but not unemployment rate;  employment but not work-life balance; environmental pollution, but not urban noises or traffic congestion;  religious affiliation, but not political wellness indicators such as domestic and foreign conflicts.

More importantly, despite their pioneering insight and value at the time, the existing life satisfaction studies were  simplistic, incomplete, too generic and unreliable to guide any practical public policy actions, they rated the generic feeling of satisfaction in relationship to income and other few fragmented indicators, they were not fully integrated into a holistic multidimensional subjective and objective measurement system in relation to each and all the dimensions of wellbeing and were not expressed in a unified measurement unit that allow its adoption similar to the GDP indicator. For example, one of the most important indicators of happiness and wellbeing is the quality of the family relationship; no measure of subjective or objective wellbeing is complete without measuring social stress, mainly, family stress using indicators such as divorce rates and single parenthood, especially considering that half of marriages end in divorce. It is a well-known fact that social relationships and more importantly, the quality of family life is the cornerstone of mental, emotional and behavioral wellbeing. Measuring happiness in relationship to income and other indicators without including relevant social and family indicators is incomplete at best and may not result a reliable subjective or objective wellbeing conclusions. If some studies measured divorce rates as an indicator of social wellbeing, they overlooked major other subjective and objective dimensions. Additionally the design of the old partial indices (labor index, social index, human development index), not only they where limited in their measurements, they were  fixed and restricted in their measurement output, they were not flexible enough to allow weighting of dimensions. So they do not allow the experimentation (what if scenrios) and reflection on the relationship between each wellbeing factor and other factor, and the total score.

Upon recognizing that our GNW solution was plagiarized by some researchers, we did a more detailed study of publically accessible research and found that the scholarship in the pursuit of happiness and wellbeing started as early as the Chinese and Greek philosophers (B.C.).  Many of them identified many factors of a happy and good life. We found some academic research papers that surveyed those philosophers and some of them became famous researchers, yet their research, in our opinion, is unoriginal, fuzzy and contributes no real value for public policy or the science of happiness and wellbeing policies. If you ask a group of a few people what makes them happy or unhappy, you are likely going to get a list of potentially overlapping factors or dimensions (yet not necessarily the same); you do not need a rocket scientist to tell you what makes people happy, yet we found many academics who appear to be fascinated by citing early philosophers or famous (yet unoriginal) researchers for apparently paraphrasing old-age insights in academic language, despite the volume of the research literature, some of them even missed some  critical dimensions. In their writings, they were probably trying to show that they have done their homework or that their research knowledge is vast. In their pursuit of knowledge,   they either suffered from too much focus or information overload, we call these ivory tower academics whose writing are based more on books and much less on real-life and consulting experience, they did not spend sufficient time outside academic compounds and closed policy chambers, they form a networking group at  some high-profile publishing journals and some inter-governmental organization. They demonstrate self and group citation bias, at the expense more original authors even in academia. Some we suspect browse the internet for new and innovative solutions from the private sector or government professionals and reframe it as their own contribution to academic publishing by adding citations to relevant academic article, while omitting original source of the innovation. Our forensic analysis and investigation found that this has happened not only to us but to other authors.

On the other hand, and to be fair, we also found few pioneering studies and solutions that were successful in the creation of concrete and useful measurement units, among the more well-known studies, yet incomplete measurement units (partial measurement, un-integrated, non-holistic, or use different methodologies) are;

(1) The happiness or life satisfaction surveys in relationship to individual income by Richard Easterlin (1974); (2) The World Values Survey (1982) by Ronald Inglehart that measured happiness in relationship to cultural values; (3) The Human Development Index (HDI, 1990) developed by Mahbob El-Haq at the UNDP that measured national income, literacy and life expectancy, but did not measure happiness or other factors that effect wellbeing such as pollution, crime and other factors listed in the GNW Index (Note: unfortunately, academic bias existed as early as 1990s, we found many academic papers that attributed the credit of developing HDI after the death of El-Haq to a more prominent researcher who not only did not have the insight, but who initially opposed the HDI creation. Unfortunate political and fame bias contaminates many in academia and at inter-governmental organizations;  (4) The important and innovative ecological economic indicator, the MEW (measure of economic welfare) developed by William Nordhaus and James Tobin in 1972, and the follow up version, ISEW, (the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare) by Daly and Cobb in 1989 and the Genuine Progress Indicator in 1998 that added and/or subtracted measures of personal consumption, capital formation, defense expenditure and natural resources depletion, but they did not measure the happiness and other wellbeing indicators and did not use a unified complex index to represent the changes in all the critical dimensions to produce a single indicator based on an integrated measurement system; and (5) The Gross National Development (GND, 1998) that provided a more complete objective measures, but no subjective measure of wellbeing. We found no measurement unit that took into consideration the integration of mental health and emotional (happiness or subjective) well-being in the same way as the GNW Index and most of them were blind to one or more critical dimensions and indicators of wellbeing. It appeared that the early pioneering economists were either too specialized on poverty indicators, social indicators or environmental and most of them shied from measuring happiness due to its subjectivity and the difficulty in defining it then integrating it in a holistic econometric framework.

Note: Some earlier initiatives updated their design model after 2005 to include additional wellbeing dimensions and indicators to something similar to the GNW Index, but did not rename their model to version 1.0, 2.0 and so on, thus misleading many academic researchers. You will find their papers reference wrong dates and design.

In short, despite the great contribution of these initiatives to the body of knowledge of happiness and wellbeing measurement science, these proposals and the indicators were fragmented, partial and limited in measuring subjective and objective wellbeing.  Incomplete measurement system and fragmented indicators can lead to wrong conclusions and policy actions. We also note that just because we think these solutions are incomplete, it does not mean they are of any less value as a developmental milestones; these solutions and insights broke through the limitations of prior measurements and should be credited for their contribution. We are also confident that future researchers will recognize the limitations of our GNW Index and propose better solutions.

The institute's first GNH and GNW Index was recognized by some scholars and policy makers for one or more of the following ten contributions:

1. Prior to the GNW Index, many policy makers and their advisors recognized the limitations of traditional economics and called for the development of alternative models, but they could not implement their vision due to the lack of a  practical tool with a complete econometric system that integrates subjective and objective measures. Many psychological surveys and research papers on the topic of happiness, existed; however, few economists and government officials, if any, took seriously the concept of happiness as a development policy; in our opinion, this was mainly due to the difficulty of measuring the subjective nature of "feelings". Mainstream economists did not consider happiness as a main policy objective. To the best of our knowledge, the GNW Index was the first published complete policy management system to quantify happiness and integrate it into an econometric tool in relationship to other dimensions of health, political, social, workplace, economic and environmental well-being. 

2. From a political perspective, we believed that one of the main causes of failure of prior political initiatives in implementing happiness and wellbeing policies is the subjective nature of happiness. Most economist would not touch intangible non-quantifiable subjects. We aimed at creating a new survey and measurement system to overcome that thinking and implementation gap. For example, in our opinion, the Bhutan's GNH philosophy was nothing more than a good mission statement with no real advances for decades. Almost all enterprises start with an inspiring mission statement, but fail to progress due to lack of practical execution and management tools. This also explains the widespread poverty and social problems in Bhutan for the past decades. Visions cannot be implemented without a proper measurement system and tools. The adage "you cannot manage what you cannot measure" is true in this context. In 2012, Bhutan published their local GNH Index. Most of their design implementation match the first IIM GNH / GNW Index, with the exception of of the addition of karma, prayer, and cultural preservation indicators. We disagree with such inclusions for democratic and diverse societies.

3. Create a synthetic multidimensional measurement metric that unites the measurement of  progress of happiness and wellbeing in a context of sustainable development, the aim was to create a new measurement indicator similar to what the GDP indicator did to fragmented economic measurements more than eighty years ago. Although there were many advances in happiness psychology as a science, and some pioneering breakthroughs in welfare (poverty) economics, happiness economics was (and remains) in its infancy relative to other social sciences. To the best of our knowledge, at the time of the publishing of the GNW Index first working paper in 2005, happiness policy initiatives were generic, abstract, and subjective mission statements. They lacked concrete integrated econometric and scientific decision-making measurement unit for measurement of progress and effective implementation, let alone provide a viable metric to supplement or replace GDP.  The situation was similar to the creation of GDP; prior to GDP, there were many fragmented measurements.  GDP created a metric that allowed governments and economists to measure economic activities and growth. Our GNW index aimed to create an Index that integrates happiness and wellbeing economics and decision-making frameworks into a unit to measure the progress of wellbeing (subjective and objective) as the main socioeconomic development metric. Since 1998, the author submitted similar metrics and proposals to government agencies, but the one that proved most popular was the GNW Index. We believe this is in part due to the completeness of the framework, the integration of subject and objective components, and redefining the subjective components in relationship to the each and all the critical dimensions of objective wellbeing.

4. Redefine happiness from the traditional subjective psychological context of general  and unreliable rating of feelings (asking questions how do you rate your life satisfaction) to a holistic, specific and concrete wellbeing economics context with the creation of a measurement unit that rates satisfaction for each of the main dimensions of wellbeing and combined together as one complex synthetic measurement unit to provide more accurate assessment of happiness and wellbeing. Please note that this is a major distinction from the famous pioneering but partial correlation attempts that existed prior to the GNW Index and surveyed people on their happiness or general life satisfaction, or correlated happiness with income (Easterlin, 1974), or religion or culture (World Value Survey 2004). In our opinion, the relative and subjective aspects of happiness makes it difficult to quantify in a reliable manner. This might explain the reluctance of economists and scholars to address this area of research before 2005 and the sudden explosion of studies on the subject by famous academics and their followers.

5. Our research found that international development agencies and governments had large collections of statistical indicators that were mostly used in silos to measure the performance of an individual sector or dimension; We believe that the GNW Index provided the first fully integrated 360-degree tool for economists and policy makers to effectively measure and manage the well-being of their citizens. There were earlier attempts to create a similar solution but the dimensions were incomplete, methodologies were different, &/or they did not integrate subjective and objective measures. Some of the noteworthy pioneering attempts are the Human Development Index (HDI) and Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). The GNW Index aimed to change the paradigm of governance from economic growth to happiness and wellbeing development.

6. Use the solution to evaluate (measure) the outcome of public policies and investment portfolio of public projects. One of the important applications of the gross national wellbeing (GNW) solution is for public investments to measure the strategic wellbeing return on investment in public policies and projects. We call those metrics ROW (Return on Wellbeing) or Return on Happiness (ROH) instead of the traditional ROI (Return on Investment).

7. Create a flexible solution that can be used by different policy makers with different political priorities but use a common communication and reporting framework to bridge political views and communication gaps.

8. We hoped that the measurement system  will become a holistic executive-government accountability framework for elected officials and for citizens to evaluate their government performance. The GNW Index is designed to provide accountability and transparency and reporting to all stakeholders including but not limited to the citizens, congress (parliament) and government agencies. Heads of states competing for election can now have a clear system for debating the issues, instead of misleading themselves and the public by using generic mission statements with no real measurements. So, if they say, we want to invest in a project to improve one of the development areas, the question they have to answer is at what expense and what is the cost of lost opportunities  in other dimensions.

9. Help develop and increase happiness and wellbeing within communities and nations.

10. The management system is designed to be flexible and therefore it is not politically restrictive; it allows heads of states with different priorities to use the same flexible solution with varying weight on the investment measurement model. However, one of the more important functions of such solutions, is the removal of blind spots in decision-making and allowing the leaders to see the individual and social wellbeing impact of any major investment shift. 

Some believe, that the GNW Index opened the door for several international initiatives. The new science of happiness economics is filled with new and exciting developments that promise to advance well-being policy-making all over the world.

Note: Just because we are attempting to distinguish the value of our contribution and reclaim the authorship credit of our work, it does not mean that we do not value earlier contributions by other pioneering researchers who opened the door for future innovators, including ourselves.

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Q 7: What is a policy white paper? What is the difference between academic papers and white papers?

A: A white paper is a brief consulting paper used to introduce  innovative solutions, out of the box thinking, opinions and views on major problems, risks, and opportunities to clients. White papers serve as business development and education tools used by think tanks and consulting firms to create market awareness, educate and serve the public and clients. Most executives are more interested in practical solutions than academic theory. Academic papers, however, are research papers that are usually written by a person with an academic title such as a scholar or a professor. They are required to conduct a thorough survey of existing literature, the papers tend to be longer with more annotations and references. Sometimes the two types of papers overlap in purpose, function and application. After we published the GNW Index as a white paper, the design of the Index found its way to academia and gained many supporters, some academics contacted us to make corrections to some citations and we did that without any hesitation. We believe that correcting an error in any article demonstrates professional integrity, while covering up a mistake is an act of intentional dishonesty driven in part by pride or hubris, which is almost always worse than admitting to making a mistake. Although the GNW Index was the baby of a creative process, we learned a lot in the past decade about the emerging academic research in the field, the "hunger" and the competition among academics to create better systems of measurement and decision-making for policy makers. You will post future public updates on this page.

Q 8: As an academic researcher, can I use the GNW Index in my articles for analysis and improvement?

A: Yes. We encourage scholars to do so for the public benefit. We consider this type of work as fair-use. We do not charge money for spreading happiness and we do not want to restrict fair-use and progress. However, if your work uses our solution, but you fails to credit us for the original authorship, or if you charge money for consulting or commercial purposes, then you may have violated the fair-use rule and may be required to pay damages arising from any resulting plagiarism, intellectual property rights infringement, false advertising of origin, and/or unfair competition. Academic standards require thorough research and the citation of the original author of the main ideas in your paper. If you unintentionally overlooked the citation of the original source of the main idea behind your work, you are expected to quickly correct your paper in order to prevent misleading the editors and the readers and causing further damage to the original author.

Additionally, selective referencing in favor of politically or academic affiliated authors at the expense of an original author is also considered professional and academic misconduct and requires correction or risk academic and other sanctions.

Q 9: If we reference your Institute, can we print and distribute copies of your articles?

A: You can print it royalty-free for education purposes while adhering to fair-use rules. If you plan to use our work, or any part thereof, in any way for which you charge money or for commercial purposes, including consulting, then you will require a written permission from us and may be required to pay a licensing fee. If you are in doubt as to whether your planned use of any of our work falls within the fair-use doctrine, please contact us we may be able to make an exception for some clients in developing countries on case-by-case basis. We can also make an exception for journalists.

Q 10: Why don't you publish your papers in academic journals?

A: Although some of our members are academic researchers, we are not an academic institution. We are an independent private think tank. We are not funded by donors or governments. As an independent entity, we have to make money to survive. We are for profit-with-a-purpose organization. Unlike most universities or professors, we do not receive public funding to support our research. We are concerned that if we publish in academic journals, we might lose some of our intellectual property rights.

Even when we decided to publish the GNW paper on our website for awareness and marketing, we were surprised by the level plagiarism and intellectual property rights violations by others. We contacted some of the authors who failed to cite our breakthrough work, some of them were blinded by the resulting fame and financial gain, they attempted to deprive us of our authorship credit, even though our solution clearly pre-dates theirs and is very similar, and they had access to our work before they published their report. Therefore, we took a decision to minimize the public sharing of our work, until we resolve the copyrights issue.

Q 11: Can you recommend additional reading material to help our research?

A: Yes. Please re-visit this page for the planned full report in 2019-2021.

Q 12: Is your think tank politically conservative or liberal institution?

A: We are an independent think-tank. We would like to think of ourselves as more of a solution-oriented and less ideology-oriented think tank. We do not promote conservative or liberal socioeconomic agendas. Our solutions sometimes agree with conservatives and sometimes with liberals.

Q 13: Are you a lobby working on behalf of the Government of Bhutan, the US or any other government?

A: We are an independent think-tank. We are not a lobbying organization and we do not get paid to promote any governments or political parties. Our authors are independent thinkers. We have a strict code against undeclared political influence or conflict of interest. If in the future we get paid by a government to publish a policy paper, we will disclose such payment in the paper. Please see our <board> and <code>

Q 14: Is the author Buddhist or promoting the Buddhist religion?

A:   The author of this paper is not a Buddhist, but he respects the total heritage of religious wisdom, including the Buddhist faith. We do not promote or work against any religion. Our members have different philosophical and religious backgrounds; some of them are Atheists, Buddhist, Christian, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims.

Q 15: Why did you mention the King of Bhutan political philosophy,   but did not acknowledge the Greek (Aristotle), Chinese (Confucius), and other philosophies or religions in your Happiness work? (Combined questions)

A: White papers are summary papers that are designed to introduce or new creative solutions to difficult problems. They are not academic papers that  require extensive survey of existing literature or tracing historical developments. As such, we have no problem acknowledging the influence of other philosophers and cultures.

It appears that the developments in this branch of science  is becoming an issue of national or religious pride to some. When it comes to happiness, one can find good happiness advice in all cultures and religions. Happiness is not exclusive to any religion, culture, or organization. The King of Bhutan is not the first or the only policy maker to mention happiness in the context of a public policy or state the limitation of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Before him several European policy makers used the word GNH. In the US, Robert Kennedy in the 1960s articulated the same concept of  the limitations of GDP in measuring happiness and joy. Our paper was designed to help the supporters of happiness policies to implement their vision. 

The general idea of what makes people happy is intuitive. One can ask any two people what makes them happy or unhappy and they will come up with a potentially overlapping lists of factors (but not necessarily the same). This is not the breakthrough aspect of the GNW Index. What was missing is i dentifying the right factors of happiness in relationship to wellbeing and selecting a set of dimensions, including subjective and objective measures and combining them to create a unified indicator based on a holistic econometrics model to provide a decision-making system to guide public policy and public investments, thus overcome the limitation of traditional GDP economics. Before 2005 most researchers, including award-winning economists did not understand happiness and wellbeing enough and shied away from measuring them. The earlier attempts were limited to correlation studies to few and incomplete dimensions and lacked integration and a unified measurement solution. Today, there are many happiness and wellbeing indices following the same GNW Index design and solution model with little modifications. We do not say this to take away from the value from earlier thought and research pioneers; we all stand on the shoulders of giants, but, unfortunately the credit for our intellectual contribution was kidnapped by some political and consulting academics and they claim that they do not have to acknowledge our work, because a lot of people contributed to the domain and the knowledge belong to the "distant past".

Q 16: Did you know that Bhutan's GNH was a government propaganda that used well-known academics and intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations to corrupt the history of the government policies? Did you know that the original GNH pillars of good governance and cultural preservation resulted in gross violations of human rights and the execution of one of the largest ethno-religious cleansings against the Hindu Nepalese population in Bhutan? Considering the public evidence are you going to issue a correction?

A:   The author and the Institute apologize to the Bhutanese refugees of the Hindu faith. It was never our intention to promote any person or government at the expense of human rights. As far as we are concerned, we created the GNW/GNH Index in part to help improve the happiness and wellbeing of all nations, including Bhutan. Our GNH Survey and Index are designed for modern democratic societies that protect human rights (please see the democratic indicators in the Index and the  survey). It does not advocate any single religion or cultural tradition. However, in the light of new evidence, our code of ethics necessitate that we share the following updated findings with our readers:

First,   our research on the actual policies and historical events of the Bhutanese government revealed sufficient evidence of propaganda to coverup the historical ethnic cleansing as a result of the GNH pillar of "cultural preservation". According to Human Rights Watch, Over 100, 000 or 1/6 of the population of Bhutan of Nepalese origin and Hindu faith were expelled from the country because (their ethnicity and Hindu faith) were considered "a threat" to Bhutan s Buddhist culture. In reference to the successful propaganda effort, the Refugee Council of Australia, made the following public statement,It is extraordinary and shocking that a nation can get away with expelling one sixth of its people and somehow keep its international reputation largely intact. The government of Bhutan should be known not for Gross National Happiness but forGross National Hypocrisy." We also verified the information about the ethnic cleansing from other sources including the US White House and Amnesty International. (Disclosure: our Chairman serves on the board of director of Amnesty International, USA).

The above listed sources can be independently searched and verified online. We are not a historical research think tank, however, professional integrity and ethics obligate us to issue a correction based on the new findings.

Second, in our experience, we have seen how the public is influenced by a well-orchestrated government lobbying and media campaign, especially when endorsed by celebrity academics at  inter-governmental organizations. This usually results in overshadowing the truth. Like us, many well-intentioned western authors, who were involved in the research of well-being, but were not involved in Bhutan s political affairs, mis-interpreted the generic abstract statements about the pillars of Bhutan GNH using their own western lens. We were surprised that so many of the academics continue to promote wrong misconceptions about the original GNH pillars and policies in various conferences and especially at the United Nations Sustainable Development Network (UNSDN). Few academics, if any, issued a correction or an apology. We believe that some academics might not be aware of such historical facts, and others might be closely connected to the government of Bhutan or their promoters, and some do not want to admit such a high-profile academic research failure. We urge the editors of the UNSDN World Happiness Report to do the right thing. Academics are not diplomats, in their writings, diplomacy and personal or political relationships should never be the expense of the truth and human rights. Omitting such material information is a violation of academic integrity and ethics.

Third, the government of Bhutan took several steps towards becoming a more open and democratic country; however, we found no public formal apology or restitution to the victims of the ethnic cleansing. We hope that the values of the King and his new democratic government will evolve and find the courage to acknowledge prior mistakes and take corrective actions.

Fourth, the goal of our paper is to spread happiness and equal human rights for all (without consideration to any political affiliation) not to create happiness for some people at the expense of others,.

Finally, we hope the above statements bring some justice to the refugees and some balance to our paper.