A STIMULATING report released last week by the OECD, a think tank, attempts to measure people's well-being across 40 developed countries. The report, called “How's Life?”, looks at some common economic metrics like income, employment, health, education and the environment. But it also includes less familiar measures such as social-network support, victimisation, life satisfaction, leisure time and commuting times.

Among the report's findings:

The report is part of a welcome drive within the economics profession to take the assessment of well-being beyond measurements of gross domestic product per head. (A piece by The Economist covers this argument in detail.) Some of the findings above are in areas that affect well-being and that would not have been identified through traditional economic analysis.

Some may balk at all this touchy-feeliness. Attempts to measure happiness are fraught with problems of subjectivity: different people derive happiness from different activities. But GDP per person is a similarly imperfect measure: a bigger pie does not necessarily mean bigger slices for everyone. And subjectivity is part of conventional economic gauges, too. Purchasing-manager surveys are commonly used to forecast expected demand; economists regularly survey interest-rate expectations. Are economists really better at predicting interest rates than the average person is at rating their own happiness?