Anyone for happiness? The ball’s in your court
Tom Ough challenges Britain’s happiness emissary to a tennis game and feels positive – despite the result
It’s the last Monday of January, a day known to scholars of pop science as one of the unhappiest days of the year. I suspect Richard Layard is aware, seeing as he’s one of Britain’s leading minds in the field of the economics of happiness, but he doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, as Layard (aged 85) overpowers me (27) in a game of tennis, he seems to be quite enjoying himself.
I’ve come to his local tennis club to have a rally on the all-weather court and to ask him about his new book. The book is called Can We Be Happier? Evidence and Ethics, and it discusses the growing significance of Layard’s field, which provides the studies of national happiness that are beginning to influence government policies here and abroad. It’s a fascinating and in some ways heartening read. The book’s main concern is the refashioning of society towards one whose priority is its citizens’ happiness, but it also offers more granular proposals of how individuals can improve their well-being, whether it be in marriage, the workplace, in communities and within ourselves.
Baron Layard, to give him the title he rarely uses, is a terrific emissary for these ideas. He is thrice my age but twice the tennis player. Dressed in garish trainers, tracksuit bottoms, a blue woollen jumper and a Tango-coloured baseball cap, he makes his way around the court just quickly enough to keep himself on top. He plays doubles tennis every Saturday, with players much younger than him, and he hits the ball with real skill.
Pock! He hits a friendly underarm serve to the back of the court. My ungainly young limbs propel me to the baseline – thwack! Layard comes forward a yard or so, sufficiently close to the net to slap the ball diagonally across it. THWACK! It’s beyond my reach. The ball bounces across the red clay, and I’ve lost the rally. We’re 15 minutes into our knockabout and I’m sweaty and out of breath. I’m pretty sure I can hear Layard chuckling.
Layard began crafting policy in the Sixties, when, as teacher-turned-economist, he was senior research officer on the Robbins committee on higher education. The committee’s findings led to a large-scale expansion of British university education, and in the decades that followed, Layard became part of the nascent field of happiness economics.
An early landmark in this field was the “Easterlin paradox”, which refers to the finding by the American economist Richard Easterlin, in 1974, that once we’ve reached a certain point of wealth, increased income doesn’t make us any happier. This prompted the question of what does make us happier, a question that economists became increasingly interested in during the Nineties. Layard was one of those economists, and his advice contributed to policies such as Tony Blair’s “New Deal”, which sought to reduce unemployment through training, and Gordon Brown’s expansion of psychological therapy.
Thanks in part to the publication in 2005 of Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, Layard, who had been created a Labour life peer four years earlier, became something of a public figure. He has consistently called for governments to pay more attention to their citizens’ self-reported well-being, and this school of thought eventually reached the mainstream with David Cameron’s creation of a national happiness index.
Layard and I finish our game and walk back to the clubhouse. Our seats, warmed by winter sun, overlook outdoor courts on which some more vigorous games of tennis are being played. Now that we’re no longer across the net from each other, I can see, beneath the orange cap, his shrewd eyes and his laughter lines. He’s a learned, friendly interlocutor, and it seems from his relaxed and cheerful demeanour – as well as his age-defying tennis playing – that he might enjoy enhanced well-being of his own. I want to ask him about his own happiness, but we talk first about his belief that societies across the world need a change of culture, moving from stressful competitiveness to a more beneficent wholesomeness.
“Somehow or other,” he says, “we’ve got to get away from feeling that our lives are justified or not by how successful we are compared to other people, which is a zero-sum objective – because for every winner there’s a loser – to one where people are getting their happiness much more from contributing to the well-being of other people. That is a much better way of thinking how to make sense of your life, and a lot of people feel life doesn’t really make sense as a rat race. Even if you’re successful, it’s pretty stressful.”
He bemoans the “ruthless decimation” of institutions such as children’s centres, youth clubs and old people’s centres, and speaks sadly of British schools’ progression towards into “exam factories producing a lot more anxiety on the part of children”.
Layard has a clear vision of what is wrong with public policy, and a clear vision of how it could be better. He recounts research showing that income is much less important to people’s happiness than, their mental health, their physical health, their relationships, their enjoyment of their job and their place in their community. “And yet here we are assuming the best thing to do in Britain is to build physical infrastructure!”
He lauds New Zealand, Scotland and Iceland, three countries to have proclaimed well-being, rather than GDP, the most important measure of their government’s success. “Those are, as it happens, all headed by women, so there’s a great chance for Boris Johnson to do the same thing and to be the first male prime minister in the world who did it.”
Layard is doing what he can in the meantime. Aside from pushing governments to measure well-being (Britain began doing so in 2010), he co-edits the World Happiness Reports. In 2011, he co-founded an organisation called Action for Happiness, which promulgates evidencebased ways of making our lives happier and more meaningful.
Citing our increased acceptance of practices such as meditation and mindfulness, Layard says that “we have better methods of taking care of ourselves than 50 years ago,” he says, and he should know. His father, John, had attempted suicide during a mental breakdown that followed his contraction of malaria. The bullet missed his brain but became lodged in his skull. He was saved by a surgeon, became a Jungian psychoanalyst, and met Doris – another Jungian psychoanalyst – with whom he produced Richard. “The extraordinary thing is that he survived,” Layard says, “but I think my interest in mental health came more from the fact that he was a healer and I thought what he was doing was important”.
The Second World War broke out when Layard was five. Living through it, he thinks, must have changed the way he sees the world. “We’re much more collectivist, in our attitudes, in my generation.”
Layard’s generation, our society’s older cohort, is now at one of the two high points of the “happiness curve”, a term used to describe humans’ tendency to be happiest at their youngest and oldest ages, bottoming out in middle-age. The curve, he says, “is not a huge factor in explaining the variation of happiness across people, but it’s the case. It’s true.”
The surveys of the kind favoured by Layard tend to ask people their life satisfaction as a score out of ten. What’s Layard’s score? “Well I usually say eight!”, he says, chuckling. The most important component of his happiness, he says, is being with his wife, Molly Meacher, who is a baroness and peer in her own right and was the first wife of the late Labour MP Michael Meacher. Through his wife, Layard has the stepchildren and step-grandchildren who are part of the “wonderful family I’ve married into”. He derives satisfaction from his work (he continues to work at the LSE, and is investigating the disparities in life satisfaction that may have swung the last election), enjoys tennis (“there’s one thing you have to do, which is take care of your body”), and, having met and read the work of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist spiritual leader, he practises mindfulness. Although he lost his faith at Cambridge, Layard has begun attending Quaker meetings with his wife. “I think the great thing about it for me is that it forces one to do one’s meditation.”
Layard’s work, and the field of which it is a part, is not without criticism. Some observers believe surveys to be a flawed way of measuring well-being; others consider happiness economics to be paternalistic. But the fundamental question posed by Can We Be Happier? is about as important a question as it gets, whatever its answer. As a neo-utilitarian of sorts, perhaps Layard would approve of my feeling about his book: the greater the number of people who read it, the better.
Can We Be Happier? Evidence and Ethics, by Richard Layard with George Ward, is out now (Pelican, £22)