wellbeing and also in london we have christopher snowdon he's a research fellow at the institute of economic affairs all right gentlemen this is cross-eyed that means you can jump in anytime you want mark do you believe in an index of happiness because we all know what g.d.p. is we can all follow the stock markets and we know what financial institutions are doing if they're going up or down we know about mortgages we know just about everything you can imagine about the economy except for maybe if people are happy i think we should believe we already have the gallup well-being index the united states so we already are setting precedent i think we need a new accounting system not simply another index by the accounting system that actually measures well being ok christopher what do you think about that can you do it can you i can measure g.d.p. but can i how could how do you measure happiness. all you can do really is asked people how happy they feel generally on a scale of zero to ten and people generally say in reasonably wealthy western societies that there are seven or eight and this is been the case f