Date published: 2005/08/06
The Financial Times says (subscription service), in a review of a lecture:
An avuncular figure walks to the lectern, beams at the audience and asks: how happy can the state make us?
The economist, Richard Layard, now Lord Layard, will go on to say that the answer is: very. But his colleague on stage in the Old Theatre lecture hall of the London School of Economics, psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud, believes otherwise.
The two men are here to debate "the politics of happiness" in front of a packed, international audience. Both speakers have written a book about contentment but they disagree about how best to achieve it. The two specialists in the human condition outline their arguments, suited with ties and standing at lecterns on either side of the stage. They are polite and non-confrontational; happy, indeed, in each other's company, while the audience sits, attentively.
Layard argues in his book, Happiness: Lessons From A New Science, that happiness, not growth, should be the objective of our economic policies, and governments should attend more to problems that demonstrably make us miserable, such as mental illness, unemployment, and even advertising - especially ads aimed at children. "Life is complicated. We're picking up our norms from other people whether we want to or not. We're reading their advertisements, we're having our purses nicked. So many forms of involuntary interaction go on that the first role for the state is to see how these could be made more wholesome."
Layard may be sharing a space with the trim, modulated and more earnest Persaud, an industrious psychiatrist, author and broadcaster, but that proves to be about all.
Persaud argues in his book, The Motivated Mind, that happiness is up to the individual and his or her attitude more than any macroeconomic interference. Happiness, he says, is too personal to be prescribed like the pills that the visionary novelist Aldous Huxley had the regulated inhabitants of Brave New World ingest, a book he reads from to underline that human experience has texture and meaning when exposed to some distress.
"When people are asked about the different pathways of achieving happiness, there are as many pathways as there are individuals," Persaud argues. "I'm worried about the notion that government should be charged with the responsibility of determining our happiness."
It's worrying when a psychiatrist makes more sense than an economist. It's currently fashionable amongst certain sectors of the chattering classes (e.g. the Green Party) to claim that economic growth is irrelevant and happiness is all, because they hate consumption (at least by the working classes, not by themselves). Unfortunately the government is hopeless at almost anything to do with the economy (the most successful Labour Party policy of the past eight years has been making the setting of interest rates independent of government interference) and they would be even worse trying to regulate our happiness (imagine all the politically correct rubbish that would be endorsed). Of course happiness is strongly correlated with wealth and income, as even Layard manages to recognise:
Layard notes that the National Child Development Study shows that the least happy people in society are two-and-a-half times more likely to be poorer "than the rest of us".
Now who would have thought that? Of course from this correlation you could try to make the illogical deduction (confusing correlation and causation) that if you make people happy you will make them rich (whereas of course the most likely causative effect is the other way around, although even that is obviously not the entire story).
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