tokatlas
Teacher account

Measuring national happiness

From South Asia·An enduring case

Bhutan reports Gross National Happiness through surveys spanning psychological wellbeing, culture and ecology, making a value system into an official statistic. Choosing the domains and weights decides in advance what a flourishing life looks like. The index measures the nation against its own philosophy.

The concepts this raises

Each of these gives a class a different way into the same case.

ValuesKnowledge and Society
What a knower or a community takes to be worth pursuing, protecting or preferring. Values operate inside knowledge production and not just around it: they select the problems, set the acceptable risk of error, and decide which trade-offs count as costs.
CultureThe Knower's Lens
The shared practices, language and inherited assumptions of a community of knowers. Culture supplies the questions that seem worth asking and the answers that seem obvious, so its influence is hardest to see from inside it.

Where it sits in the knowledge framework

Scope
What this area of knowledge is about, what problems it takes as its own, and where its questions stop being answerable by its methods. Scope is where you examine why a discipline exists at all and what it deliberately leaves to others.
Methods and tools
The practices, conventions, instruments and forms of reasoning through which knowledge here is actually made, together with the assumptions those methods build in and what they are structurally unable to detect.

Areas of knowledge

The same ideas, somewhere else

Cases that raise a concept this one raises, but in a different area of knowledge or a different part of the world. That contrast is the point: it is what shows a student the concept travels.