Summary: After the Great Depression the government's of advanced democracies started to systematically collect data on the state of the economy. Since the end of World War Two the economic performance of the government of the day has become a yard stick for success. President Bill Clinton immortalised the general sense that growth was a pre-condition for electoral victory in his now famous campaign slogan "it's the economy stupid" but there is a growing body of work suggesting that we are measuring our government's performance by the wrong standards. Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen were appointed by President Nicolas Sarkozy to a commission tasked with recommending a new set of measures for policy evaluation in France. Bhutan measures its nation according to national happiness accounts, not economic ones. This week saw the launch of LSE's mappiness project - a hi-tech attempt to measure the happiness of the UK in real time. The new science of happiness measurement is getting closer to shaping government policy - is this just the sensible replacement of bad measure, gross domestic product, for a better one, gross national happiness? Or is it getting too close to brave new world for comfort? To debate that happiness should not be a matter for government policy are economists Paul Ormerod and Juliet Michealson. Paul Ormerod, arguing that happiness does not play a policy role is best-selling author of many books and papers, including, Why Most Things Fail. He is a founder and director of Volterra Consulting, he has co-authored a pamphlet for the Institute of Economic Affairs called, Happiness, Economics and Public Policy. Juliet Michaelson arguing that happiness does have a role in formulating and prioritising policy, is a research at the Centre for Well-being of the New Economics Foundation (NEF). She has worked on NEF's National Accounts of Well-being and a Happy Planet Index.
