This was the message of a programme on BBC Two last Wednesday, The Happiness Formula. A succession of academics and psychologists lined up to assure us that, despite massive improvements in health, education, prosperity and so on over the past 50 years, our national level of happiness has not risen at all. The Government should therefore end its obsession with raising economic growth and concentrate instead on increasing levels of happiness.

Even by the BBC’s standards, this show had it in for the aspirational classes. Accumulating wealth was portrayed as a Neanderthal instinct: “Struggling with our shopping bags, we get the same thrill cavemen felt, returning from the hunt,” the voiceover intoned as primitives ran wild.

Lord Layard, a professor at the London School of Economics, argued that because relative wealth made poorer people unhappy, rich people should be taxed more. “The heavy hand of the State should be brought to bear,” he said. Professor Andrew Oswald, of Warwick University, called for Wednesdays to be abolished so that we could all have more free time — which would doubtless be ample compensation for a 20 per cent pay cut.

These arguments are either banal or sinister. Can money buy you happiness? Of course not — and no one suggests that it will. Family and friends are more valuable than anything we can purchase. Moreover, personal tragedies can befall anybody, rich or poor.

Yet despite all this, money is useful. It lets us provide better healthcare or education for our families and helps us to hold down homes near our friends and support our parents as they grow old. By saving wisely we take responsibility for ourselves. Money can also buy insurance against life’s pitfalls. Virtuous spending like this should not be belittled.

Also banal is the idea that we should aim for gross national happiness, rather than gross national product (GNP). In his book, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, Layard writes: “We need a revolution in government. Happiness should become the goal of policy.”

Well, maybe I’ve missed something, but I thought that happiness was the aim; that would be what all those government departments are for.

If the Government really did use GNP as its only yardstick, it would end all taxes, benefits and public services overnight. Millions would suffer, but there is no doubt that it would boost the economy. Does it really need to be pointed out that our Government, which grabs more than 40 per cent of our income to use as it sees fit, bears no resemblance to this ultra-libertarian picture? Raising the growth rate is certainly an aim of the Government (one which it is currently failing to achieve), but it is only a part of the picture.

Layard, who is much in vogue in Whitehall, turns sinister when he lauds high taxes for “holding us back from an even more fevered way of life”. In other words, if our taxes were cut, we might, heaven forbid, be so short-sighted as actually to work harder.

And why do we all have such a screwed-up set of priorities? Well, it’s all the fault of the economists. Perhaps because he is one himself, Layard believes that economists have vast, mystical powers to direct society: economists “have great public influence and have thus inevitably helped to promote the public esteem in which money is held”.

This is an injustice. People do not desire money because of some neo-Marxist false consciousness. Instead, they struggle constantly to provide the best standard of living they can for their families. Sometimes that encourages them to spend long hours at work; other times it leads them to give up work, or work part time. But no psychiatrist can make those decisions better than they can themselves. The Government should not try to outguess their choices.

So be wary of these arguments. Their only merit is to give Gordon Brown a fresh-sounding excuse to raise taxes. When academics and politicians lecture us on raising our level of happiness, we should all watch our wallets.

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