Bhutan's gross national happiness is about to get adjusted

Is that a crane coming out of your head, or are you just happy to see me investing?

WSJ story on little old Bhutan, home of the "gross national happiness" stat, opening itself up to outside investors to jumpstart its embryonic democracy.

Wedged between India and China, just like Nepal, Bhutan was shut out from the world, Shangri-Lala-land-like, until recently.

No tourists allowed until 1970s and no TV even until the late 1990s.  No traffic lights in the capital city of Thimphu (none in my hometown of Boscobel either, when I was a kid there in the 1960s, so I commiserate).  

But you knew something was going to break after the monarch allowed (actually enabled) a peaceful transition to a parliamentary democracy two years ago.

Only 700k people, and the leadership worries that, absent heightened economic connectivity with the outside world, the place won't survive.

So now they want a domestic airline, IT park and billion-dollar education city that draws in Western universities. 

That, my friends, is some ambition.

But you have to worry about the "contact civilization" characteristics.  This is a place where businessmen, we are told, may spend several hours each day in archery competitions with each other.

McKinsey & Co, the US consulting firm, is advising the government, but the opposition leader says he doesn't think the company has a clue about the nation's real worries.  

McKinsey wants the place to go from a few thousand tourists each year to more like a quarter-million.

To be watched . . ..