YES says Andrew Oswald, professor of economics, University of Warwick.

Andrew Oswald, professor of economics, University of Warwick. Photograph: University of Warwick

If it is feasible to measure happiness, then we should. It is, and we do. For the last four years, for example, the UK government has been collecting annual data on people’s feelings of happiness, life satisfaction, anxiety, and worthwhileness of life. These numbers are now gathered from large statistical surveys run by the Office of National Statistics, and the figures are already proving their worth.

It seems obvious that the happiness of our citizens is what ultimately matters (though if you believe that the rights of non-human animals are just as important then I might be sympathetic to such a caveat). Growth and all those other economic things that newspapers and prime ministers have gone on about for decades are not ends; they are means.

It was only a strange error that led to the historical obsession with gross domestic product (GDP). To see why, go back to the very beginning of the assessment of GDP. In 1934, Simon Kuznets, a Harvard professor and the Nobel-winning brain behind the idea of how to construct a measure of GDP, wrote the following in a report on national income to the US senate: “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.” Governments did not listen, and prime ministers and presidents have until recently continued to ignore his wise statement.

It was only a strange error that led to the historical obsession with GDP

As someone who has worked on these issues for three decades, I have observed that, sadly, most people who criticise the idea of measuring happiness are handicapped by the fact they know little about the research literature on the topic.

If you are reading this and disagreeing with me, and you have worked through the formal empirical literature in the journals, and you know what a fixed-effects regression equation is, and how to read an fMRI scan, and you truly understand the strengths and weaknesses of the most recent articles on the topic in journals such as Science, the American Economic Review, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, and you still believe we should not measure happiness, then I respect your view even if I am afraid I disagree with it.

Having said all of that, researchers like me need to be honest: there is still much to be understood about how to measure human wellbeing. The latest move is towards biomarker data. We have discovered that information on heart rate gives helpful data on mental strain, and that cortisol readings from saliva are valuable as an objective happiness and stress indicator. Yet we still have, as a research community, an embarrassingly large amount to learn. Even 100 years from now, it is likely that there will be subtleties that remain cloudy about how exactly we should gauge the mental wellbeing of a nation’s citizens.

But the task of measuring the approximate happiness of individuals and countries can be achieved; it is being achieved, and will go on being achieved, in better and better ways. That is a good thing. Politicians like Tony Blair and recently David Cameron deserve to be congratulated because over some years they have helped to usher in a vision for the measuring of national wellbeing. National happiness has arrived, and common sense along with it.

The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being, William Davies. Photograph: Adly Elewa

NO says William Davies, senior lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London and author of The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business sold us Well-Being.

Will Davies, senior lecturer at Goldsmiths University, London. Photograph: Oliver Krimpas

In October last year, Dubai launched a ‘happiness index’ aimed at collecting detailed data on how government services affect the happiness of their users. Smart devices were distributed around the city, allowing individuals to give real-time feedback on their feelings.

The director general of Dubai Municipality, justified the scheme as follows: “The UAE has been ranked as 14th among the happiest nations in the world. We hereby pledge that we will spare no efforts until Dubai government achieves its vision to be one of the top 10 happiest cities in the world by 2021”.

This aspiration to anchor policymaking in psychological measurement dates back to Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. Methods have come a long way since then, and are experiencing a burst of innovation today. The Dubai scheme still relies on individuals reporting how they feel by pressing a button. But ‘affective computing’ companies, such as the US firm Affectiva, have mooted that their software could be used in tandem with Dubai’s extensive CCTV network to measure the moods expressed on people’s faces. Paranoid fantasy? So was the idea of Facebook running secret experiments on our emotions until last summer.

Happiness measurement comes in many varieties, some frightening, others motivated by sincere concern for the public good. I’ve little doubt that most happiness statistics, such as those collected by the ONS, and happiness economics, as practised by Andrew Oswald, fall into the latter category.

The problem is that happiness measurement flips all too easily into a tool of social control

Where it identifies previously unnoticed suffering, such as that experienced by the unemployed, happiness measurement makes a valuable contribution to public debate. The problem is that it flips all too easily into a tool of social control. Faced with a choice between promoting happiness through political change - by reducing advertising or meaningless work, for example - and doing so through new behavioural or medical interventions, the latter invariably end up seeming most expedient.

For example, Richard Layard’s work on happiness has focused a great deal of attention on mental illness. In the course of this, he constructed an economic case for investing public money in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which he argued would save the government money given by getting people back to work. It is then only a short step to forcing people to receive CBT, often as part of a workfare program or on pain of losing their disability benefits. The caring, listening, patient relationship of therapy can flip 180 degrees into yet another form of punishment to be visited on the weak.

This is the slippery slope that well-intentioned happiness metrics are sitting on. The current frontier of happiness measurement, as practised by neuroeconomists and neuromarketers, is to circumvent how people report they feel, in search of how they ‘really’ feel. Wearable technology offers further feedback on the ‘facts’ of wellbeing, while people are increasingly viewed as unreliable narrators of their own lives.

For democratic politics, this is a disaster. We need to accept that people often have reasons to feel happy or unhappy, and that those reasons are as important as the feelings themselves. Recognising this would lead us to focus on institutions that grant people a voice that is heard, both as individuals and as groups, and less on the vagaries of sensation and sentiment.

If Dubai ends up at the bleeding edge of real-time, high-tech happiness measurement, what does that tell us about the latent political vision underlying this science?

Andrew Oswald and William Davies will be joining the Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman and psychologist Philippa Perry for a Guardian Live event: Buying happiness, on Monday 18 May.