10% of the country are part of the monastic system, that’s a lot of monks.

If I recall, though, ck, in Theravadin countries, most men go through a basic monastic training. I think it’s sort of a rite of passage event into adulthood. Sort of like how most Catholic boys go through a time of being an altar boy. Though I can’t even begin to think of how I can back this up, I could have sworn that I once read an article to that effect.

I wonder if there is an advantage of who eats what level of comfort that brings.

Good questions, cknuck. Here’s the Wikipedia article on Bhutan.

Bhutan used to be one of the most isolated countries in the world. Developments including direct international flights, the Internet, mobile phone networks, and cable television have increasingly modernized the urban areas of the country. Bhutan balanced modernization with its ancient culture and traditions under the guiding philosophy of Gross National Happiness (GNH). Fervent protection of the environment has been a top priority. The government takes great measures to preserve the nation’s traditional culture, identity and the environment. In 2006, Business Week magazine rated Bhutan the happiest country in Asia and the eighth-happiest in the world, citing a global survey conducted by the University of Leicester in 2006 called the “World Map of Happiness”

I like that idea of measuring Gross National Happiness and trying to keep it high.

Another paragraph from the Wikipedia article:

In a response to accusations in 1987 by a journalist from UK’s Financial Times that the pace of development in Bhutan was slow, the King said that “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product.”[29] This statement appears to have presaged recent findings by western economic psychologists, including 2002 Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, that question the link between levels of income and happiness. The statement signaled his commitment to building an economy that is appropriate for Bhutan’s culture and people, based on Buddhist spiritual values, and has served as a unifying vision for the economy. In a survey in 2005, 45 percent of Bhutanese reported being very happy, 52 percent reported being happy and only three percent reported not being happy. Based on this data, the Happy Planet Index estimates that the average level of life satisfaction in Bhutan is within the top 10 percent of nations worldwide, and certainly higher than other nations with similar levels of GDP per capita.

That is the kind of thinking we all could profit from and which may turn out to be necessary to keep earth habitable.