Here’s some information for fans of “the capability approach”:http://www.capabilityapproach.com/Briefings.php: the “Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency”:http://www.mnp.nl/en/index.html released “a report”:http://www.mnp.nl/en/publications/2007/Sustainablequalityoflife.html that I co-wrote on how to conceptualise the quality of life for national policy purposes in affluent countries – we argue for a capability metric and are rather critical of the happiness metrics. I should add, though, that the proof is in the eating of the pudding, and we don’t have any funding to collect the necessary data that a capabilities-based index of the quality of life would require; our work remains at the conceptual level only. It may well turn out that we would need a very long questionnaire in order to collect all data, which in turn might jeopardize the viability of a capability-index of quality of life (since the non-response-rate would be higher). And there are more problems to solve before we would arrive at a capability index, certainly one as (relatively) easy to measure as either GDP per capita or happiness indicators. Anyway, if anyone has more money and more time and thinks this is a fun project to pursue, let me know what comes out of it.