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To: LLCF who wrote (28448)	2/5/2003 8:01:20 AM
From: smolejv@gmx.net	Respond to of 74559

>>Gross Happiness Product. Now THATS an idea! THATS worth persuing! And we have the perfect mind here on BBR to formulate the whole thing, Mq! << Ho ho hoold your horses! First of all, can you measure it in time units? RegZ dj

To: LLCF who wrote (28448)	2/5/2003 1:49:00 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 74559

Thanks DAK, Gross national Happiness is explored by Orville Schell in this essay: redherring.com I first heard of the Bhutanese concept of Gross National Happiness on CBS's Sixty Minutes. It may be quixotic, but when I look at what passes for measurements of satisfaction in the U.S., I can't see us as being in any way superior, except at creating vastly more world-wide unhappiness than any other nation.

To: LLCF who wrote (28448)	2/5/2003 4:56:32 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

DAK, you are getting there. You have understood that happiness doesn't come from GDP and arcane measurement of material goods by hedonic valuing expressed as consumer price index. The pursuit of material goods and the education inflicted on people against their will in schools and by parents and the constant badgering over GDP related news items becomes, as with so many habits, self-destructive if converted to an addiction. Just as work is a good thing, but workaholism is an expression of something else of a more disturbing nature. A person imprisoned by acceptance in the GDP realm. The problem with the Bhutan GDH is that it's determined by the King! It's the good old Kremlin model. It allows no freedom. No self-determination. No self-enlightenment. No free will. No seeking of Nirvana in the conflicting confusion of the temporal world. The King issues the edicts and pronounces on the GDH. The Q on the other hand is the manifestation of the free will of humanity. There is no conquest, no imprisonment, no penalty to force acceptance of any particular values. If people in their self-determination seek material goods, that's fine and they can value their time in material goods expressed in Q. If they prefer to give monks some money to help in the buyer's enlightenment and further inroads on Nirvana then they can express that in Q. You are now officially enlightened and have reached 4th Dan on the road to paradise. Congratulations. With a little more struggle, you can make it to the top! Mqurice

To: LLCF who wrote (28448)	2/5/2003 9:25:37 PM
From: Mark Adams	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

Chop down a wonderful tree in your back yard [kill it] removing it's beauty, harmony, blahh blah blah [known as blahh going forward for BeautyLightHarmonyHappiness]... by selling the tree for firewood GDP goes UP... That is short term thinking... Sure GDP rises year one by the value of the firewood less the 8% (for a relatively mature tree) the tree would have grown had it not been chopped. Then run your net present value of the 8% per annum future growth discounted by the appropriate rate (are we in a 0% rate world? What does a 0% discount rate do to the net present value calculations? Interesting effect... can the tree be worth more left standing than as firewood, unless one is in dire need of firewood?) I wonder at times about the caucasian vs aborigine model of commerce. The native model would remove 1/2 the bark to make a needed canoe. The tree would likely recover, using the other 1/2 as a conduit for it's nutrient flow. The caucasian would chop down 100 trees, make 200 canoes, and then attempt to convince everyone they needed a canoe, some of whom would subsequently rent canoe storage space from another caucasian for off season storage. But all of this is a mere tangent on the culinary delights available to us for a rather slight effort to step out of the glare of McD's arches and probe the world of possibilities. Some of which hail from the same glacial water reputed as the source for the legendary Hunza longevity. The Balanced Scorecard does suggest that if we measure the wrong data points, we encourage the wrong results. Perhaps making themselves Obese, eating anxiously looking for blahh... looks GREAT on the level of GDP growth and misallocates resources to junk food production is a symptom of such.