On a scale of one to ten, how happy are you feeling today? Is that figure higher than this time last week? How does it compare with your state of mind pre-September 2008? It’s easy to sneer at the Government’s proposed General Wellbeing (GWB)  or ‘happiness’ index, which sets out to gauge the national mood in various parts of the country and adapt policy accordingly. And plenty have.

How on earth do the serried ranks of dutiful statisticians go about measuring such a thing? Isn’t a bit like trying to nail jelly to a wall? And isn’t it a lousy time to be starting something of this nature when many people are feeling mightily hacked off – thanks in no small part to the efforts of the new government?

It is unfortunate that the Coalition is trying to get its happiness project up and running amid the gloom of cuts in public services and general economic unease. But what is a government there for if not to attempt to increase the wellbeing of the population who elected it? (Not to mention those who didn’t elect it, for that matter).

We’re not alone in shunning purely financial indicators when studying the health of the nation. President Sarkozy in France is a big fan of this new tack, and the Canadians are well advanced in their plans to make it a central plank of policy.

The UK plans are putting into action the two most important elements of a report by two Nobel Prize-winning economists, Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, who have called on world leaders to get away from a purely economic concept of gross domestic product. They believe in systematically measuring subjective wellbeing as part of a broader national accounting system, and using these data to decide on policy direction.

None of this is new. Way back in 1968, Bobby Kennedy said that ‘we cannot measure national spirit by the Dow Jones average, nor national achievement by the gross domestic product’. Ask not how much cash sits in the Fed, but how your fellow American is feeling. And a new method may be especially pertinent in a country like ours, where wealth appears to be concentrated among too few and the trickle-down effect has failed slightly in recent times. As Will Hutton reminds us ad nauseam in his recent book “Them and Us”, being relatively wealthy with a large GDP doesn’t mean that the happiness-giving wonga gets properly shared around in the UK.

There are other issues to contend with. Poverty is not synonymous with misery. Just because you don’t have three decent meals a day and live in Malawi doesn’t mean you’re a lot more miserable than the third generation in a family of jobless from Redcar. The Easterlin Paradox – named after a Californian economist who wrote a famous 1974 article entitled ‘Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot?’ – suggests that, contrary to expectation, happiness at a national level does not increase with wealth once basic needs are fulfilled.

A new happiness index will at least give us all something to talk about. How happy we are compared to our next door neighbour is at least as interesting as whether our car or TV is larger. There’s already loads of data. A ‘happiness index’ survey regularly conducted by City and Guilds, the country’s largest vocation awarding body, concurs that engineering ranks in the top 10 professions, ahead of journalists, architects and the bottom-ranked fields of banking, finance, nursing and IT specialists. Other surveys suggest that just 16 per cent of engineers are unhappy, compared with 40 per cent of media and 24 per cent in medicine. Nearly half those in media miserable. Perish the thought.

It does create a problem, though. Once the government finds out where the most unhappy members of society live and the depth of their misery, it will have to do something to cheer them up. And that’ll require more than a few vague ideas about Big Society.