Happiness Index

With all this talk of recession and depression it would be interesting to gauge the well being of a country before the recent economic downturn. There are 2 measures that I found that could be used: the first is called The (un)Happy Planet Index or HPI for short which reflects the average years of happy life produced by a given society per unit of planetary resource consumed. Here are some trends since 1961 for a few countries I am interested in comparing (Spain's HPI increased steadily after Franco's death in 1975 but started to decline again after 1985 - so it appears to have been a temporary blip?):

The second index is based on a paper from the University of Leicester in the UK called the Subjective Well Being Index. According to this index Denmark comes out with the best SWB Index in the world; Ireland is 11th; USA 23rd; UK 41st; Spain 46th.