The British are increasingly wealthy. The economy has grown for 15 consecutive years. Per capita income is now higher than in France and Germany. Anyone who owns a house in London, or even a few of its bricks, is moving rapidly up the international rich list.

Yet the British are not content with their lot. Nothing satisfies us. Crime rates have fallen consistently since 1993, yet we think law enforcement a shambles. Trains are faster and safer than ever. Still, we consider the railways a disgrace. Waiting lists for surgery are shorter. Third World health service!

Upon meeting the wave of English immigrants in the 1970s, Australians dubbed them “whinging Poms”. Well, the Aussies should hear the Poms who stayed at home. It is a shame there is not an Ashes for complaining. An urn containing the cinders of a thousand self-combusting letters to the Editor would find an unchallenged home in a trophy cabinet at the offices of the Daily Mail.

Why should people who are so much better off complain so much? Why are the British so grumpy? Many consider it a mystery. And some consider it a shame. Surely a little gratitude is called for.

But it is not a mystery, as anyone who has worked in an expensive hotel could tell you. The rich are hard to please. Not because they are ungrateful egomaniacs who deserve a slap. They are hard to please because, unlike the poor, it is hard to know what they want.

If you doubt it, imagine you were a contestant on a game show called Spend My Money. The object is to allocate the spending of people you do not know as they themselves would choose to: 35 per cent on housing, 10 per cent on food, 5 per cent on clothes and so on.

The task would be relatively easy if you were spending on behalf of a pauper. He would put all his income into the basics: food, shelter, and clothing. But imagine you were spending for a billionaire. You wouldn’t know where to start. Or, rather, you would know only where to start. The basics consume less than 1 per cent of his income. How will you allocate the other 99 per cent? Should you buy a football team? A Picasso? Case loads of Château Palmer 1961? Everyone buys roughly the same things with their first £10,000 of income. Then they start to show some individuality.

Spend My Money is not a real game show, but it is a real model of government. And it explains why the increasingly rich British are increasingly grumpy about their “public services”.

Take education. Given even modest incomes, most seek schooling for their children. And their basic expectations are similar. They want their children to learn reading, writing and arithmetic. As people can afford more education, however, their preferences begin to diverge. I want an impractical education for my children: Latin, cello, hockey and all that. But I know people who would not waste a penny on such piffle: computing, accountancy and into the job market with you!

The same goes for healthcare. We may agree on what a service that costs us £500 a year should provide. But what extra should we get when we are spending £2,000? Nicer hospital rooms? Better-paid doctors? Viagra? People differ in how much and what flavour of icing they want on the basic healthcare cake. Force them to pay for any given quantity or flavour and most will feel cheated.

A natural reaction is to be sparing with the icing. If preferences are predictable only where the basics are concerned, a government may be reluctant to provide any more than basic tax-funded services. That is where things were headed under the previous Tory Government.

This may be tolerable if we could easily top up government spending to buy the kind of services we really wanted. But we cannot. I do not want my children to go to a bog-standard comprehensive and then get Latin and cello lessons at the weekend. I want them to go to a school with Latin and cello teachers. I might be able to pay the fees of such a school, if only I were not taxed to fund bog-standard comprehensives. By forcing me to spend £5,000 on an education I do not want, government stops me from paying £10,000 for one I do want. This explains the apparently perverse fact that the state provision of something often leads to low levels of aggregate spending on it.

New Labour and the Conservatives are dimly aware of the problem. In this age of “empowered consumers”, they declare, we must offer more choice in the public services. But this Third Way cannot work, and not only because monopoly suppliers are hopeless at responding to consumers’ preferences. Choice between equally expensive options does not address the Spend My Money problem. We empowered consumers differ not only in what kind of £5,000 education we want, but also in whether we want any kind of £5,000 education.

If Tony Blair and David Cameron are dimly aware of the problem, Gordon Brown seems dimly unaware of it. He has reversed the natural logic of Spend My Money. As we have grown richer he has increased the portion of our incomes that he allocates on our behalf. Either he believes that we all want roughly the same things, and that he knows what they are, or he thinks our preferences do not matter very much. Either way, he is on course to make us some of the grumpiest rich people in history.

Times Recommends

• Never believe Demjanjuk is a ‘victim’
• A strong City is not just good for Britain
• Class warrior ready for one last battle