In an attempt to make good on a centuries-old idea, that the happiness of a nation’s citizens is the ultimate goal of all government, British Prime Minister David Cameron is planning to ask for a survey of the general well-being of residents of the United Kingdom.

Allegra Stratton of the Guardian reported on Monday that Mr. Cameron’s government will ask Britain’s independent national statistician, Jil Matheson, to add questions to an annual household survey in an attempt to gauge the national mood. Ms. Stratton explained:

It will be up to Matheson to choose the questions but the government’s aim is for respondents to be regularly polled on their subjective well-being, which includes a gauge of happiness, and also a more objective sense of how well they are achieving their ‘life goals.’ The new data will be placed alongside existing measures to create a bundle of indications about our quality of life.

Mr. Cameron has been talking about the concept of putting well-being at the center of the national agenda for several years. In 2006, a few months after he became the leader of the British Conservative Party, Mr. Cameron said in a speech at the Google Zeitgeist conference:

It’s time we admitted that there’s more to life than money, and it’s time we focused not just on G.D.P., but on G.W.B. — general well-being. Well-being can’t be measured by money or traded in markets. It can’t be required by law or delivered by government. It’s about the beauty of our surroundings, the quality of our culture, and above all the strength of our relationships. Improving our society’s sense of well-being is, I believe, the central political challenge of our times.

As the BBC reported that day in 2006, Mr. Cameron’s remarks echoed words Tony Blair had written in 1999:

Money isn’t everything. But in the past governments have seemed to forget this. Success has been measured by economic growth, G.D.P., alone. Delivering the best possible quality of life for us all means more than concentrating solely on economic growth.

While Mr. Blair was prime minister, in fact, his strategy unit published a paper which suggested that happiness might be measured and encouraged, by developing “a happiness index,” encouraging volunteerism, “teaching people about happiness,” and introducing higher taxes for the rich.

While Mr. Cameron is unlikely to follow the final one of those suggestions, the idea that happiness is a central concern of government is not a new one — in fact, it is extremely old.

In 1789, a few years after Thomas Jefferson put “the Purfuit of Happinefs” near the top of America’s founding document, the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote, in his “Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation,” that “the happiness of the individuals, of whom a community is composed, that is their pleasures and their security, is the end and the sole end which the legislator ought to have in view.”

How exactly such an elusive concept as happiness is to be measured, though, is far from clear. In the United States, Gallup regularly polls people about their well-being, but the end product, a dizzying array of charts and graphs, offers anything but a clear picture of how happy Americans are.

A European think tank, the N.E.F., also carries out surveys of well-being in several countries, but, again, the final data set can be hard to parse, even when expressed in the form of interactive, color-coded maps.

Some recent research, however, might suggest that Mr. Cameron has not chosen the best time or place to ask British citizens if they are happy. In 2006 a BBC study of national happiness found that “the proportion of people saying they are ‘very happy’ has fallen from 52 percent in 1957 to just 36 percent today.”

On Monday, Randeep Ramesh of the Guardian reported that a new study, “due to be published next month in the British Journal of Industrial Relations, says there is increasing evidence that ‘psychological health and mental well-being’ is getting worse across Europe.” Mr. Ramesh explained that the researchers found that even before the recent economic crisis, Europeans were apparently becoming less happy:

While Britain became richer by more than 40 percent between 1993 and 2007, the study says, measures of “neurotic symptoms and common psychiatric disorders” rose during the same period. Similar results are observed across the continent.

While it might be argued that some degree of dissatisfaction with one’s life could be a spur to greater achievement — after all it was an English poet, Robert Browning, who wrote that “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp” — another recent study found that, next to Ireland, Britain is by some measures the worst place in Europe to live.

In September, uSwitch.com’s European quality of life survey found that life in Britain was essentially “miserable,” with Britons enjoying worse weather, less vacation and a shorter life expectancy than several of their neighbors. As Mark King explained in the Guardian, an even more galling finding of the study was that Britons are just across the Channel from the best place to live in Europe:

U.K. workers enjoy a week less holiday than the European average and three weeks less than the Spanish, while the U.K.’s spend (as a percentage of G.D.P.) on health and education is below the European average and U.K. food and diesel prices are the highest in Europe. Unleaded petrol, electricity, alcohol and cigarettes all cost more than the average across the continent…. France enjoys the earliest retirement age (joint with Poland), spends the most on health care (11 percent of G.D.P.) and has the longest life expectancy in Europe at 81.09 years. Its workers also benefit from 36 days holiday a year — compared with just 28 in the U.K. — and it comes only behind Spain (second in the rankings) and Italy for hours of sunshine.

So, will Britain’s happiness survey discover a nation of malcontents ready to rise up in revolt, or perhaps flee their frequently cold and dark home for happier shores? Maybe not.

To start with, national pride — even while splintered — is still quite strong across the U.K. As another resident of rain-soaked British Isles, John Stuart Mill — a philosopher who was also a member of Parliament — observed long ago, “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”

Then there is also the fact that, in at least one of the categories measured by the European think tank, Britons did quite well: “resilience.” Toughing it out — “stiff upper lip and all that” — has long been a national characteristic the British are proud to talk about. As the writer John Lanchester explained in a New Yorker article on the election that brought Mr. Cameron, eventually, to power: