Julian Baggini
Back in his all-things-to-all-voters days, before the crash and austerity diverted the young David Cameron from his land of milk and honey, he liked to claim GWB (General Well-Being) trumped GDP. Virtually nothing else survives from the hug-a-hoodie days, but there is a legacy here. Since 2010, the government has been tracking national well-being, by surveying citizens on four questions about how happy, satisfied and anxious they are, and how worthwhile they feel their life is. No one but a misery guts wants to stop people being happy, but the fundamental problem here is that all the measures are quantitative, ranking how you feel on a one-to-10 scale, whereas the most important variations are qualitative.