French president Nicolas Sarkozy says we should change the way we measure national wellbeing. You’ve got to laugh, says Neil Tweedie
The French, let’s face it, are hardly a barrel of laughs. Take their cinema: morose man stares at morose woman; morose woman stares back at morose man. Gauloise smoke coils lazily between them as they survey their mutual desolation. Fin.
As for their waiters – well, need one expand?
Yes, the French are good at looking miserable, and, at the moment, they have something to be miserable about. Last week, François Fillon, the prime minister of France, warned that chronically slow growth threatened not only his country’s cherished “social model” but the very survival of the economy itself. France, like Britain, is bumping along the bottom of the downturn: growth in GDP is expected to be one per cent next year, half that of the United States and a quarter of that in Asia. Unemployment, meanwhile, is nearing 10 per cent. The country is sliding steadily down the league table of economic performance. When purchasing power parity is used, her economy is now eighth in the world, behind Russia and just in front of Brazil. Not a pretty picture – which is why Nicolas Sarkozy has decided to get out his paint set and brighten things up.
Gross domestic product, inflation, unemployment, these are old-fashioned, Anglo-Saxon indicators of national wellbeing, says the president of France. From now on, the country’s economic progress will be measured in terms of happiness – bonheur. And how does one measure bonheur? Well, through things like work-life balance, rates of recycling and traffic congestion. And DIY.
The president is taking his lead from a report he commissioned last year from two Nobel Prize-winning economists, the American Joseph Stiglitz and India’s Amartya Sen, who concluded that new indexes are needed to measure wellbeing and environmental sustainability. Endorsing the report, President Sarkozy said: “The [banking] crisis doesn’t only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so.” France would put pressure on international organisations to revise their statistical methods to reflect this new reality. So is this merely a form of Gallic mickey-taking, like the Common Agricultural Policy, or is there something to the concept of “gross national happiness”?
Rating countries by the contentment of their populations is a new and questionable pursuit. Two years ago, the British academic Adrian White published a league table of happiness which put Denmark in pole position, ahead of the United States (23) and Britain (41). White combined figures compiled by Unesco, the World Health Organisation and the CIA with responses from 80,000 people in 178 countries. He found that when it came to happiness, factors such as health care and education were significant – hardly a revelation.
A “Happiness Index” produced earlier this year by the British think-tank New Economic Foundation used criteria such as life expectancy and the “ecological footprint” of the population. Costa Rica came top, while in sixth place was Colombia – quite an achievement for a country previously noted for the efficiency of its death squads. Lord Layard, the academic, government “happiness tsar” and author of a book on the subject, is convinced that such exercises are worthwhile.
“The French report was conceived before the downturn, so it is not a diversionary tactic at all,” he says. “We can measure happiness. A good way is simply by asking people – and you find those answers are very well correlated with electrical activity in the relevant parts of the brain. There is a completely coherent story about how to measure whether people are feeling good or bad, and what causes them to feel good or bad.”
The French report points to the importance of relationships in overall happiness – do you have enough time to meet your friend/wife/mistress etc.
“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.”
The French have already bucked the Anglo-Saxon preference for long working days and “face time” in the office, introducing a statutory 35-hour hour working week, observed by 86 per cent of the salaried population. “In many ways, French society is a better organised one than ours,” says Lord Layard. “Their productivity is about 20 per cent higher than ours, and has been for a very long time. Their working week has always been shorter, and they have always enjoyed longer holidays.”
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.”
Once a society reaches a per capita income of just over £10,000, people stop getting happier simply by earning greater and greater amounts of money. One’s position in the food chain then begins to take over. Research carried out by the University of Bonn has shown that the pain of earning less than one’s colleague is felt more keenly than the pleasure of earning more.
Bruno Frey, a researcher at Zurich University, calls this dulling process in regard to greater wealth “hedonic adaptation”. “People rapidly adjust to increases in income,” he says. “After about one year, two-thirds or more of the benefits of an increase in income wear off as people increase their income aspirations. This process has become known as the aspirational treadmill.”
According to Frey, using happiness as an indicator of national progress is dangerous. Governments will be tempted to distort responses to create a rosier picture, while respondents may be tempted to give less than honest answers.
“When individuals become aware that the happiness level they report influences the behaviour of political actors, they have an incentive to misrepresent it. They can play the system.”
The French report may also be looking at the wrong indicators. The ability of mothers to spend more time with their children may not be a key factor for some.
No doubt Sarkozy’s statisticians will come up with the figures he needs. Gender equality in terms of pay is one proposed indicator, and France does not do too badly there. There is a headline 20 per discrepancy in male-female remuneration, but when people of the same seniority and experience are compared, the differential falls to six per cent.
Gerard Mermet, author of Francoscopie, a survey of French national life published every two years, backs Sarkozy. “It is not possible to understand the world without qualitative indicators,” he says. “GDP is simply not sufficient.”
But what worries your average mec? “Unemployment – and growing inequality in wages. The French are also suspicious of the morality of big bosses, their big salaries. Suspicion of inequality is probably written in human nature but maybe a little more in French nature.”
His countrymen, he says, may adopt a morose attitude to the world at large but are sensible enough to recognise their own good fortune. “If you ask the French, they always say France is not doing very well, but when you ask them about themselves individually, they are happy. The world is bad, France is bad but my own life is not bad.”
Sarkozy may get the answer he is looking for – but maybe not. John Stuart Mill warned: “Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so.”
Universe of Jared Setyaone 
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