French to Measure Gross National Happiness

No. Really. Looks like French President Nicholas Sarkozy thinks he can argue away his country’s dismal economic reports by measuring the, um, national happiness.  ‘

What price happiness? French President Nicolas Sarkozy is seeking an answer to the eternal question so that happiness can be included in measurements of French economic growth.

He’s turned to two Nobel economists to help him, hoping that if happiness is added to the count, the persistently sluggish French economy may seem more rosy.

“It reflects a general feeling in Europe that says, ‘OK, the U.S. has been more successful in the last 20, 25 years in raising material welfare, but does this mean they are happier?'” said Paul de Grauwe, economics professor at Leuven University in Belgium.

Now, this is France, and France is not known for its refusal of pleasures. And yet it seems that the data don’t indicate that they’re really any happier. If anything, they’re worse off.  The Economist’s Free Exchange blog explains with this passage from an article by Cato happiness researcher Will Wilkinson:

In his new paper “The Happy Variety of Capitalism,” Stefan Bergheim of Deutsche Bank Research (Deutsche Bank’s internal think tank) discerns a definite pattern in the relationship between average happiness and economic policy in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, leading him to distinguish between the happy, less happy, and unhappy varieties of capitalism. (Everybody, it seems, is some kind of capitalist these days.) While go-go capitalist countries like the United States, Australia, and the UK, and economically dynamic Scandinavian free-traders like Denmark and Sweden rank highest on happiness surveys, the economically sclerotic nations of “Old Europe” — such as Belgium, Austria, Germany, and France — are relegated to second-tier, “less happy” status. Worse still, France lurks at the bottom of the “less happy” nations, doing barely better than the relatively “unhappy” Italians.

Capitalism! Makes people happy…