As a society we care about what we measure, we use what we measure, and what we measure drives policies
and society in a particular direction. We therefore need to measure progress correctly. If societies blindly
accept GDP as their measure of progress, they might be trying to maximize the wrong indicator for society. In
this paper I present Bhutan as a living example of a society that has opened a national dialogue about what
progress means, and they have created the Gross National Happiness (GNH) index to reflect their
understanding of progress. Furthermore, the political and economic architecture of Bhutan is structured
around maximizing GNH rather than GDP. Institutions in Bhutan use the GNH index and a series of
instruments of policy to construct policies that promote GNH. We can draw a number of lessons from the
Bhutanese experiment, namely that each individual society should strive to answer the following three
questions