The "happiness" project

When the United Nations General As sembly passed a resolution titled “Happiness: towards a holistic approach to development” in July 2011 urging member nations to measure the happiness and well-being of their citizens and calling happiness a “fundamental human goal”, it also acknowledged that the inspiration for pioneering such an initiative was the small country of Bhutan and the “happiness project” the Buddhist Himalayan kingdom had been pursuing since the early 1970s. The focus was on five specific social development themes: longevity, health care, education, an active lifestyle and happiness, which was stressed in conference documents as something that “should permeate the entire social sphere”. Svetlana Petrova, Deputy Minister of Labour and Social Protection of the Russian Federation, said that there was a special federal project called “The Older Generation” that replicates some segments of the Moscow Longevity Project in other parts of Russia. Dmitry Glushko, Deputy General Director of the Union of the Agency for the Development of Professional Communities and Workers Young Professionals, said that in 2019, more than 2,500 people in 11 regions of the Russian Federation would be retrained as part of the “Young Professionals” project.