Is it time to shelve materialistic measures of a country’s progress such as gross domestic product and replace them with quality of life indicators like access to healthcare, ecological footprint and work-life balance?

The president of France says, yes. Armed with a report he commissioned last year from two Nobel Prize-winning economists (Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen), Nicholas Sarkozy declared that the banking “crisis doesn't only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so." And that is not because the financial crisis has made the French economy more of a basket case than ever; no, it’s because national life should be organised around what makes people happy rather than what makes (some of) them rich, and around environmental sustainability, say the economists.

As we’ve observed many times before on this website, happiness research is a growth industry, and not without reason. There is so much mental ill health and social breakdown in countries where GNP continues to climb that it could eventually undermine the economy anyway. The colossal welfare costs of “advanced” countries look unsustainable. And then there is the environmental degradation that everyone (well, nearly everyone) is so concerned about, and that is linked to the over-consumption which contributes so much to GNP.

The question is how to determine what really makes people happy. Different sets of indicators have put countries as predictable as Denmark and as unpredictable as Bhutan and Costa Rica at the top of the wellbeing league tables. Not sure where France is, but it should be pretty high up because it has a 35-hour working week, more public holidays than almost anywhere else in the world, lots of gender equity stuff like subsidised childcare, and generous family benefits.

Britain’s “happiness czar”, Lord Layard, thinks France is onto something -- the importance of relationships in overall happiness and the need to have time for them:

"Relationships are a lot more important than is normally allowed for," says Lord Layard. "If we want to achieve a higher level of happiness – and it has been more or less static for the past 50 years – we have got to pay a lot more attention to relationships and not be so willing to sacrifice them for the sake of greater income or productivity."

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He believes that a concentration on materialism and status at the expense of family and wider relationships has contributed to the failure of collective happiness – or "subjective wellbeing" – to keep pace with economic growth.

"One factor is that satisfaction in marriage has gone down," says Lord Layard. "There has been a long-term increase in family tension. We are still going through a very long process of adaptation in which women have fewer children and seek, absolutely rightly, some other meaning in life through work. There is a huge social pressure to increase income – everyone is running on the spot to keep up with everyone else."

Layard’s comment implies that, if women and men did think less about income and work less, marital happiness would improve. However, that would seem to depend on how much more meaning the spouses could find in their relationship. More children might be part of the answer. In surveys, parents still say that their young children are their greatest source of happiness and fulfilment. Despite what ecological fundamentalists say, the richer countries need more children, and more kids per family tends to lighten the consumption and eco footprint of each.