Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

- Woody Allen

I've been rich, I've been poor. Rich is better.

- Sophie Tucker

French president Nicolas Sarkozy wants to scrap GDP and replace it with happiness as a new measure of economic output. As the Financial Times reports, Sarkozy wants other countries to adopt new measures of economic output set out by an international panel of economists led by Joseph Stiglitz, the US Nobel Prize winner. The commission argued that GDP was perverse because it did not take into account public services and home based activities and included spending on prisons and security systems, as if these were for the greater good of society.

GDP is of course the holy grail of economists and statisticians so including accounting for people's wellbeing and for the sustainability of a country's economy and natural resources would turn that system on its head completely, not to mention do things to the heads of economists and statisticians.

As the Financial Times points out, it would also improve France's economic performance by taking into account its high-quality health service, expensive welfare system and long holidays.

So what exactly are these indicators? The Telegraph presents the list: work-life balance; traffic congestion; mood; chores; recycling; gratification; a sense of security; gender (as in are men and women treated fairly in the workplace; tax (as in does everyone get their money's worth) and relationships.

British academic Richard Layard argues that happiness is the only one true yardstick to measure society's progress.

It's not a bad argument. But my problem is that measuring happiness is, at best, open-ended. At worst, it's utter rubbish because there are no objective global standards or metrics to gauge a subjective emotional state. No one has come up with the perfect blissometer for hedonometrics.

Bhutan is the only country in the world to have a Gross National Happiness (GNH) Index. But Bhutan has also been had people fleeing as refugees to third countries, including the United States. Presumably, the GNH does not take their views into account.

When you think about it capitalism can make you rich, and it can even make you free. It's hard to see how anyone can expect it to make us happy as well.