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The United Nations hosted a 'High Level Meeting on Happiness and Well-being' in New York this week. The confab's point was that judging the success of societies solely by material measures such as Gross National Product fails to capture everything that goes into a life well-lived. True enough, but I do wonder how accurate a sense of happiness anyone can have who is willing to sit through a U.N. conference.

The Gross National Happiness business is generally taken as a rebuke of U.S. culture. Look at the trap we're in -- for all our grasping and getting, we aren't any happier! Why not be more like those happiness chart-toppers in Denmark? And I'm inclined to agree as long as we're talking about pickled herring and aquavit. (Though let me state for the record that, having grown up in Arizona, I refuse to believe that anyone can be happy someplace that is cold and dark half the year.)

Why should we care if Danes claim to be marginally more content than we? It's remarkable how eager we are to compare our happiness to that of others. And yet for all this comparative happiness anxiety, not to mention the many books about how to be happy, we don't like the idea of being too happy. We worry that all joy and no strife makes Jack a dull boy. Take an episode this season of the television comedy 'Modern Family,' in which daughter Haley finds herself flummoxed by her college application essay. She has to write on the theme, 'What is the biggest obstacle you've ever had to overcome?' Which turns out to be a problem given her life of sylvan suburban affluence. 'I can't do this!' Haley whines to her mother. 'I've never had any obstacles to overcome.' 'Well,' says her mother, searching, searching for a worthy impediment, 'you're lactose intolerant.' Despairing of the requisite despair, Haley blames her mother: 'It's all your fault. You've shielded me from everything interesting and dangerous.' Run-of-the-mill happiness, it turns out, can be a problem -- it lacks the grand emotional drama our Young Werthers long to suffer. Or as Haley laments, 'I've lived a boring, sheltered, pathetic life.'

It's a complaint especially common to the creative class, who has long held that the biggest impediment to their arts is a lack of impediments in their lives. 'One form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts,' Thornton Wilder once said in a bout of misery-envy. 'Perhaps I should have been a better man if I had had an unequivocally unhappy childhood.' We've all been preached the benefits of Tiger Mothers and French Mothers; maybe it's time for a book on the advantages of hateful, neglectful mothers.

Adele is hardly the first singer-songwriter to credit heartache with her best work. The biggest risk to her chart-topping, Grammy-winning ways may not be balky vocal chords but the newfound happiness of her situation. It isn't just art that demands unhappiness for success. 'A miserable childhood in the worst part of Memphis was typically excellent emotional preparation for what was required on a football defense,' Michael Lewis wrote in 'The Blind Side.' Who, among the happy, have the requisite anger and aggression? 'The NFL was loaded with players who had mined a loveless, dysfunctional childhood for sensational acts of violence.' These are all variations on a theme -- that being happy, being satisfied, saps the will to strive, to create. It's why we don't usually expect trust-fund babies to be cracker-jack entrepreneurs. For all our happiness talk, we actually cultivate dissatisfaction vibrating screen. We don't want to hog-wallow in the useless sort of contentment that H.L. Mencken derided as 'the dull, idiotic happiness of the barnyard.'

Such questions are for philosophers and theologians (and yes, for each of us in our own lives) -- what's the right sort of happiness? what's the right amount? But as the U.N. conference shows, economists are eager to horn in on the action rotary kiln. They may not be able to predict when housing bubbles will burst, but they're prepared to unravel the mysteries of the human heart. Good luck with that.