Lord Richard Layard – Happiness and Public Policy

I seem to be managing to update this blog every two days or so. So be it! That allows me time to process the conference over time, which I know is working for me. I hope it’s working for my readers as well. Comments always welcome and appreciated!

The plenary on Saturday June 20 was given by Lord Richard Layard from the London School of Economics and Political Science in the UK. His argument is that the government’s role in the world is to increase well-bring, and not so much about economic policy. It was an interesting concept and I’m still mulling it around in my mind. Typically the role of government has been, as I see it, the national regulation of finite resources, and “well being” is not a finite resource, so it’s a bit of a puzzle for me still… I’m not sure how the goverment would fill that role, but let me share a few tidbits from Lord Layard…

First of all, if you want to know more, please see his book titled Happiness – it will do a far better job of explaining his philosophy and theory.

Layard goes back to 18th century entitlement which set the quality of human experience, and he calls it a “tragedy” that early 20th century psychologists chose to focus on behaviourism, which also affected economists. While John Stuart Mills believed in promoting the happiness of citizens, psychologists said that happiness couldn’t be measured, and so that notion was abandoned in favour of measureable GDP and so on.

Layard believes that “happiness” is the over-arching good – if you ask about “why” we would pursue any other ambition, such as liberty, health, accomplishment, and so on, the answer always comes back to some form of “happiness”. But if you ask “why” about happiness, it is just taken for granted that this would be a natural thing to pursue. Therefore, if we accept that happiness is at the fundamental centre, then public policy needs to revolve around that.

I’m not going to get into his economic equations for considering policy changes and so on, but it was an interesting hypothesis. His “controversial statement” (self-proclaimed) is that all policy discussions should start by staing that “happiness is the only thing that matters”. I can see lots of trouble brewing around this one – not the least being that the positive psychology movement hasn’t defined happiness, and is already starting to move away from it (although it was a useful media buzzword to get the movement started…)

Overall, Layard proposed that five things have to change:

1. Family – more parenting education, training & support with parenting taught in schools, free parenting courses for all new parents (physical and psychological health of baby AND parents AND their relationship)
2. Mental health – not just treatment, but also prevention – one model is the Penn Resiliency Program which seems to have considerable traction in the UK
3. Community and Values – more social learning to combat the “terrifying growth of individualism” – direct teaching of social values such as empathy, altruism in school curriculum
4. Work and Income – to put stability before growth. Unemployment is a major cause of depression and human misery – people lose their sense of purpose.
5. Measurement and Social Science – to put new priorities on “happiness” and “well-being” over other economic indicators

I have to say that this is particularly telling in today’s economic climate. Would the same decisions have been made over the past 20 years if “happiness” rather than “growth” was the key consideration? I would suggest it’s highly doubtful.

Now I also have to say that, generally, I have found Positive Psychologists to be a rather liberal lot in their political inclinations. If there were any US political references at the World Congress, it was largely to praise the arrival of Obama and express relief at the demise of the Bush administration. I do wonder what other people of other political preferences might think or say. Anyone out there willing to go out on a limb?