Is G.D.P the correct measure?

Recently French president Nicholas Sarkozy asked a group of eminent economists to formulate a new measure for development that would have radically different parameters than the current standard Gross Domestic Product.This is a completely new school of thinking and the economist in me spent a lot of time thinking about the pros and cons as well as practicality of such a measure.Finally my question "Is G.D.P the correct measure?" was answered.

The team headed by Mr. Amartya Sen suggested that Public Happiness be used as an index to measure development rather than G.D.P. This argument may well be true considering the uneven distribution of wealth in this world.The G.D.P is just a statistical figure.Even though an increased G.D.P infers a higher economic activity and growth it never means that this growth is even and equal in all sections of the society.During the boom years the gap between the per-capita income of the rich and the poor doubled.That means the rich became richer and the poor...well they remained where they were or worse their condition degraded.

Then what was this middle class boom that we saw in the previous few years?Why was this so called middle class spending so much in the last few years leading upto the crash in 2008?Was any real wealth created by the middle class? The answer to all these questions is NO.
This high liquidity in the system was actually due to the availability of easy credit, even to people having a risky credit profile. As banks continued to lend freely to their customers there was enormous liquidity in the system.People spent mindlessly,credit card debt ballooned and the prudent habit of savings was conveniently forgotten.

While all this was happening the banker cowboys at Wall Street and the rest of the world were cheering the free markets for bringing in the mind boggling G.D.P growth rates which in turn led to lavish lifestyles due to free-flow spending by the middle class. Capitalism and unrestrained greed was considered god and G.D.P growth his blessings.But now that the world economy is in shambles and everyone is busy finding others mistakes ,that the talk of a new development index is picking speed.But is it realistic?

The first question is How Do You measure happiness ?. Do you go house to house,door to door to ask people how happy they are?.Do you conduct a survey on a small sample space and then extrapolate to generalize the results?. These methods simply don't work particularly in a populous country like India where each person has a different condition,standard and aspiration.
The method that the economists will turn to in the end, so as to measure happiness will again be customer spending.Their argument is "If the people are spending more they are happy aren't they??".But isn't this the same method of measurement that led to the present economic crisis?.

I think the best index to measure development will be a measure of social and economic attributes.The economic attribute can be G.D.P and the social attributes can be a combination of
unemployment percentage(lower the better), literacy percentage(higher the better) , opportunity factor(what growth opportunity people have) and the population growth(lower the better).