Halving travel-to-work time might achieve more than doubling the number of cars. Improving air quality to cut asthma might do more than a quarter point cut in interest rates.In previous centuries nations measured their success by military power. For most of this century they measured it by their economic power and their ranking in GDP tables By 2020 my guess is that we will have moved on again. Our obsession with growth and GDP will seem as odd as the 19th century fetishisation of armies does to us now. Increasingly, societies will be judged by very different criteria: by quality not quantity, well- being not income, balance not growth.When that happens we will see earlier dissenters, like Wordsworth and Ruskin, Carlisle and Gandhi, in a new light.

But don't hold your breath; the new politics of quality and ecology, of ethics and meaning, will undoubtedly prevail in time. It won't happen for a while, not until a generation or two of civil servants and politicians have retired and taken their assumptions with them.Geoff Mulgan is the director of Demos, the independent think-tank. His Analysis programme `The Pursuit of Happiness' will be broadcast on Radio 4 on Thursday at 8pm.. The full implications of the Barings crisis are still incalculable.

That its effects will be severe - and costly - nobody should doubt. It is 20 years since the Bank of England last organised a full-blown rescue like the one it has been orchestrating over the weekend. As on that occasion, all those involved will be waiting nervously for the reaction of the financial markets when they reopen again today. It is of real importance that the current crisis leads to changes in the method by which bank regulators monitor and control the use of derivative financial instruments.

There have been too many warnings about their potentially destabilising effect for governments and market regulators to be able to plead ignorance of the risks involved. Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, is just one of several eminent bankers to have warned of the dangers in a world where fast-moving financial markets are now inextricably linked. So far, the burden of trading losses from derivatives has tended to fall mainly on big industrial companies: Procter & Gamble, Volkswagen and Allied Lyons have all incurred heavy losses. But the risk that an important bank would one day follow has long been regarded as dismally inevitable.If the official account of events is to be believed, this crisis was triggered by a single Barings trader in Singapore who took huge, unauthorised positions in the futures market. What was designed to be a relatively simple hedging operation became, in the hands of a wayward individual, a huge bet on the Tokyo stock market The position moved against Barings.