Insight - How digital cash can lift gross national happiness

Price of joy: People at the Gankar Punsun glacier in Bhutan. The country is perhaps right to press ahead with its own digital currency. —Reuters

THE tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, landlocked between the teeming multitudes of China and India, shot to global fame in the 1970s with gross national happiness: a broad measure of overall welfare it prefers over the more traditional metric of gross domestic product, which only includes production of goods and services, even those that ultimately leave us miserable.

More recently, the hydroelectric-powered nation decided to become not just carbon neutral –but carbon negative, its pristine forests acting as a sink-hole to absorb the greenhouse gases released by its coal-burning neighbours. And now Bhutan wants a digital currency.