The World

President Sarkozy has taken the political lead in promoting “happiness” economics. He even appointed a Stiglitz-led commission to report on alternatives to GDP-per-capita as measures of national well-being. It reported last month and made some interesting points.

But there is a snag. France – the champion of “quality of life”, “the art of living”, the long lunch and sexual liberation (see Carla Bruni, Roman Polanski, Frederic Mitterand etc) – also seems to be a startlingly miserable place. I was shocked by this article in last week’s Economist about the rate of suicide in France. Only the Japanese seem to be killing themselves at a significantly faster rate. Champions of Anglo-Saxon capitalism might note, with grim satisfaction, that suicide rates in Britain and the US are significantly lower than in France. But then Italy has the lowest rate of all the countries on the Economist table.

So what is the explanation? I suppose you could argue that suicide is such an extreme, and thankfully rare,  event that it does not tell you much about the state of mind of the nation as a whole. But The Economist piece cites a a figure that is arguably even more startling. One in ten French people is on anti-depressants. Still, even that may not the clincher. The French are notorious for guzzling (and inserting) pills of every description.

So, it is a bit of mystery. But perhaps it is one that President Sarkozy could usefully concentrate on before becoming a happiness evangelist for the world. Physician, heal thyself, and all that.