Utilitarian argument

Much of Layard’s research is concerned with the UK. But the lessons it provides are relevant to most other nations. For example, average scores are misleading because they conceal wide variations, and not just in geographical terms. Ten percent of the UK reports an average happiness score of 9.4 and another 10% have an average score of just 3.8 – that’s getting down towards war-zone figures. In other words, a sizeable minority are profoundly happy, whereas an equal number are utterly miserable.

Although Layard believes that we should judge a society by how much people are enjoying their lives, he says it is the extent to which people are relieved from misery that is the critical factor. As he writes: “This is my concept of social justice: I am concerned with how happiness is distributed.”

Not wealth, not opportunity, not minority rights, which are the causes most social-justice activists embrace, but happiness. It isn’t that Layard is against these principles, only that, by his reckoning, they should be judged by what they do to increase happiness.

It’s a rather utilitarian argument that may not inspire many placard-carrying idealists. But for Layard the issue is quite straightforward. As he puts it: “The role of government should be, as Thomas Jefferson said, to sustain the life and happiness of the people. All the other objectives of government matter because they affect how happy people are.”

If that’s the case, how do we actually improve happiness or, to put it more urgently, relieve unhappiness? In recent years there has been a lot of promotion of a universal basic income to narrow inequality and remove the stigma of unemployment. The theory goes that it’s also a preparatory step towards a future in which machines and artificial intelligence render humans obsolete as workers.

Layard has little to say on this subject, which some may see as a missed opportunity, given the experience of a two-year Finnish trial in 2017-2018. The experiment was restricted to the unemployed, and they were given a basic wage to help them find jobs without losing the money if they were successful. In the event, there was no effect on employment levels the participants did report being happier and less stressed.

Layard concentrates instead on the importance of work. Jobs, he says, are something from which people draw meaning, “a social connection” and “a sense of being useful”.

As you’d expect, physical health is strongly related to well-being but perhaps the most neglected cause of unhappiness is mental illness, which Layard says is “by far the most important single factor” in the UK and elsewhere. It’s a problematic category, though, because who’s to say if poor mental health results in unhappiness or vice versa? Layard, the son of a psychiatrist, is too solutions-based to get bogged down in such distinctions.

He is an advocate of the positive psychology movement and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). Both approaches have their critics. In her book Smile or Die, the American writer Barbara Ehrenreich placed positive psychology within a dubious “cult of cheerfulness”, alongside motivational speakers and self-help gurus. A few years ago, a leading positive psychologist, Barbara Fredrickson, was exposed for cooking her figures in an influential academic paper on “human flourishing”. Added to which many psychotherapists suggest that the efficacy of CBT has been overstated, precisely because, just like GDP, it lends itself to empirical measurement.

Layard is not persuaded by these arguments. He says that CBT has a 50-70% success rate in treating anxiety disorders, with limited relapse, and a 50% cure rate with depression and a halved rate of subsequent relapse. He laments the limited availability of CBT, but acknowledges the prevalence of psychotherapeutic counselling. Real improvement in mental health, he writes, “needs to be based on solid science”.

After mental and physical health, come relationships – our family, our partners, whether we have a partner, and whether we’re happy with that partner. As this is all the messy stuff of being human, you may think a) that it’s unchanging, and b) that there is not a lot of external influence that can be brought to bear. Layard believes otherwise.

He says that familial relationships have radically changed in recent times, noting that children now enjoy a much more equal position in the family hierarchy. He also produces evidence to support his belief that CBT and social care can have a positive effect on dysfunctional families.

Fearful of crime

The last major factor governing happiness levels is community engagement. In the UK, 15% of people aged between 16 and 79 feel lonely. For those over 80, the number doubles. We are innately social animals, but we live in increasingly unsocial environments – cut off from physical interaction by the growing prevalence of social media and computer technology, and fearful of crime, even though it has been declining in the West for several decades.

When we consider how much crime dominates news reporting and TV drama, the preoccupation is perhaps not that surprising. It seems that people are more inclined to stay in their homes, reading and watching stories about the murder and mayhem they fear is taking place outside.

“In Britain,” writes Layard, “a doubling of the local crime rate reduces the average health of the average local resident by 0.1 points [when measured on a scale of 0-10].”

If that’s a classic liberal answer, a more complicated area for progressives is the finding that greater ethnic diversity tends to lower levels of trust and satisfaction – at least in the US and the UK. Looking at the world as a whole, Layard writes, there is no evidence, when all other things are equal, that societies with a high proportion of people born elsewhere are less happy.

“I think the story of migration is that in the end, the migrants become the natives,” says Layard. “So, in that sense, zero migration is a ridiculous idea.”

All the same, he wants to see a more controlled flow of migration to sustain “a harmonious community”. He also calls for greater assimilation of migrants, a position that is anathema to the multiculturalist vision of society, which prizes cultural difference and discrete communities.

Taken as a whole, the book is a careful and rational attempt to shift our view from a fixation on economic performance to what is the most important outcome for most of us: our own happiness. But it’s hard to escape the fact that so many of Layard’s recommendations require investment – in jobs, mental-health treatment, management training, migrant language teaching and much else besides.

To pay for it, nations will have to look to their GDP, which brings us back to where we started. Last year, New Zealand joined a growing number of countries challenging the economic over-reliance on GDP by placing “well-being” at the centre of its budgeting decisions. When the Government, led by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, introduced its Wellbeing Budget last May, Layard hailed it as a “game-changing event”.

Ardern is mentioned in passing in the book but he does not examine the New Zealand experience, doubtless because it’s far too early to reach any conclusions. Critics point out that in terms of allocating resources to key areas like heath, welfare and education, the well-being budget was no different to previous budgets. A government that promised to be “transformational” also said 2019 would be its year of delivery. So, was that it?