But, as my colleague Nick Marks, who heads New Economics Foundation’s Centre for Well-being (which developed the Happy Planet Index) says: “Governments the world over have been concentrating on the wrong targets for too long.”

That is the result of the limitations on the way that economics is taught and used. It would matter less if the narrowness of measuring output by quantity were acknowledged, and the modesty of its usefulness accepted. Sadly, mainstream economists advise policy-makers as though what they measure will produce human satisfaction.