There always seems to be a group of pseudo-economists pushing some kind of Happiness Index or Quality of Life metric that comes out with a new number every 5 years or so. The problem of course is that it’s impossible to quantify the value that certain groups of people derive from any given set of activities. And whenever one manufactures these indexes or measures, you at some point have to put a subjective value element that’s really a reflection of your own preferences. So no matter how precise the statistic ends up being or how reliable the results, the fact remains that any input into model that at some point was subjective will render a subjective result. Wealth distribution analysis always seems to devolve into this.
The problem is that Labor Economists have just enough data to make themselves incoherent.