I'm not sure it's ever appropriate to speculate on what elements of life drive happiness for other people. Everything everyone does is by definition in pursuit

I'm not sure it's ever appropriate to speculate on what elements of life drive happiness for other people. Everything everyone does is by definition in pursuit of satisfying some internal motivation, and it doesn't seem reasonable to me to second-guess other people's choices for the purpose of optimizing their happiness against external criteria -- only for the purpose of preventing externalities that harm our own pursuit of happiness. Attempting to create macro-scale metrics that attempt to approximate the optimality of of individuals' subjective experience, rather than measuring objective consequences of their manifest behavior -- like their actual economic activity -- seems both too abstract to be useful and too susceptible to manipulation by those with ulterior motives. So I agree that economic productivity is the best measure, but for quite different reasons.