If somebody told you that Colombia was the second best place on the planet to live, the UK 108th and the US 150th you would suspect them, I am sure, of having ingested copious amounts of the marching powder that is Colombia's most famous export. While I am, as a staunch libertarian, all in favor of your right to consume such products unhindered by the law, that doesn't mean I wish to listen to (much less agree with) the drivel spouted by those who have.

The information comes in this report from the new economics foundation. Yes, they are so hip they conserve capital letters, obviously unaware that ee cummings was doing it half a century ago. The actual listing of countries according to the "Happy Planet Index" has Cuba in 6th place, Vietnam 12th, Bhutan 13th and Sri Lanka 15th. You might notice a pattern. All the countries are absolutely dirt stinking poor. The index was, I have to assume, deliberately set up to produce such a result for our friends at the nef (as Madsen Pirie, my part-time boss at the Adam Smith Institute calls them, the non economics foundation) are proud followers of the environmental ideas first laid out in Blueprint for Survival. That is, that we'd all be much happier leaving this capitalism stuff alone and living as happy peasants. Tending our own fields, craftsmen working with local resources to make the few tools we need and rarely, if ever, straying from walking distance of our hut.

It's even possible to have a certain amount of sympathy for this view. Certainly, all those who purchase weekend cottages have bought into the idea, but my own experience of such Rousseau-esque primitivism did not survive a toothache and the prospect of treatment with tools hand crafted in the local blacksmith's forge. Nature is all very well but best kept to the weekend, I feel.

The nef's calculations look at how happy people say they are, how long their lives are, and the size of their ecological footprint. There are a certain number of problems with such measurements: once basic amenities like sewage treatment and vaccination are available, expectations for life-span are based more on genetics than anything else (it's the quality of life that medical treatment changes, not so much the length of it). Happiness is a notoriously difficult thing to measure, highly culturally based (why would places like Finland and Sweden have such high suicide rates, given their egalitarianism and happy smiling socialism, if this were not so?) and I'll come to ecological footprints in a moment.

There is also the problem of measurement in communist police states like Cuba (and, less so now than before, Vietnam). When a man with a clipboard comes around to ask you how happy you are, would you be entirely confident in admitting that building socialism wasn't quite all it is cracked up to be? The point is that the first two are considered positive and the third negative. So a rich country, one with a large ecological footprint, will always do badly on such a test.

Craig over at Heavy Lifting has done some real economics, looking at how the three measures are not actually as independent as the nef seems to think. If graphs and equations are what you lust for on this subject that's the place to look and he finishes with:

"My take is that while it is possible to be happy with less, it is far easier to be happy with more."

The problem with the use of ecological footprints is not that the idea doesn't have merit in and of itself. But straight away we might want to ask if the nef study begs a question along the following lines: We want to prove that people are happier when their ecological footprints are smaller, so we'll measure the ecological footprint to determine how happy they are. Assuming such implicit circularity wasn't intended -- yes, it could be interesting to measure the impact of lifestyles upon resource-use around the planet. More importantly, we might be interested in seeing the impact on something a great deal more important: ecosystem services. But the way that eco-footprints are calculated makes them nearly meaningless. The main, in fact the only major, finding is that CO2 emissions are higher than the natural world's ability to process them through the carbon cycle.

Yes, thank you, we know that; we can see the concentrations rising in the atmosphere. All the yammering about "Gaia's precious resources" comes down, in these calculations, to this one single point. What's worse is that the actual method of calculation is so shoddy. On page 14 of this report (on how the sums are done) we get: "Nuclear power, about 4 per cent of global energy use, does not generate CO2. Its footprint is calculated as the area required to absorb the CO2 emitted by using the equivalent amount of energy from fossil fuels."

I beg your pardon? Nuclear does not generate CO2? This is flat out untrue! But then, to go on and state that we'll calculate as if it is belching out the stuff like an open coal fire is intellectual casuistry of the highest order. So France, as an example, which generates 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear, has a similar footprint to a country that generates the same from coal? Perverse nonsense, and it obviates the need to take these people seriously in any manner. Just as an example of how foolish this is: "Electricity produced by a pressurised light water reactor, when all its carbon costs have been taken into account, emits around 16 tonnes of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour. Gas produces 356 tonnes and coal 891."

That's Georges Monbiot writing in The Guardian. If even the Moonbat-in-Chief regards your information as extreme to the point of perversity then there really isn't much point in listening to arguments based upon it now, is there?

I'm sure that this Index will make it across the pond at some point and be hailed as a new and excitingly meaningful way of proving that the Industrial Revolution was all a bad idea. When it does, you'll now be forewarned for the exercise was constructed to prove exactly that. Machines bad, wealth bad, progress bad. The authors are really not sure that we should ever have left the Stone Age.

By the measures of this report the happiest place on earth is Vanuatu. The Wikipedia description of one island:

"Some of the villages are known as kastom villages, where modern inventions are restricted, the inhabitants wear penis sheaths (Bislama: namba) and grass skirts, and the children do not go to public schools. According to anthropologist Joël Bonnemaison, who has studied the Tannese extensively, their resistance to change is due to their traditional worldview and how they "perceive, internalise, and account for the dual concepts of space and time.""

Avoiding the public schools works for some home schoolers, but I don't see penis sheaths catching on anytime soon in Red State America. Perhaps the nef's admiration is for the New Age mysticism? Or is it the gross poverty? Your call.

One other possible reason for this apotheosis of the human condition could be this:

"The island is the center of the Jon Frum cargo cult and also a cult (at Yaohnanen) which worships Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh."

Worshiping a Greek/German member of the British Royal Family as a living God may indeed be the path to nirvana but it really isn't what I'd expect a progressive think tank to tell us and I'm sure that it wouldn't catch on in the US. Didn't the Yanks decide against such things back in the 1770s?

Tim Worstall is a TCS Daily contributing writer living in Europe.