I recently picked up a copy of Richard Layard's book on Happiness from the local library. I have been fascinated by positive psychology ever since I read Martin Segilman's Authentic Happiness and it worries me that it isn't top of the political agenda. After all as Andrew Marr notes what is the point of politics if it's not about making people happy?
The aim of the book is to argue that the study recent research developments in the psychology of happiness can inform better economic policy. It's a point of view that I'm certainly sold on.
The book begins outlining the central problems of modern day society and to some extent mainstream economic thinking. Traditional economic theories have frequently associated GDP with happiness, unfortunately this contradicts both human nature and the experience of the Western world over the past 50 years. We are much better off today financially than we were at the end of WWII and we have more expendable income but happiness has reached a plateau.
Communism was an utter disaster, based on a faulty view of human nature, but at the same time the economic policies of Western governments over the past few years have been informed by a highly reductive view of human nature. We have been successful in creating wealth but unsuccessful in creating happier more fulfilled citizens. Insecurity, unemployment, rampant consumerism and a relentless rat race are the unintended results.
Layard suggests that the solution to the problems of this plateau in human happiness is within our reach. Old views of economics that see correlations between wealth and happiness stem from a time when it was assumed that happiness was a immeasurable phenomenon. Recent research into happiness however has started to make happiness an measurable phenomenon. The use of new brain imaging techniques show that the left hemisphere of the brain becomes more active when we experience positive emotions. There is also increasing amounts of data about the significant factors in human happiness such as family, employment, comfort and meaning. Research conducted across cultures allow us to generalise on the sources of human happiness.
The book comes to a number of sensible conclusions that could lead to significant improvements in wellbeing:
- Governments should work towards full employment and helping people back into work. Work gives lives purpose and meaning, unemployment can ruin self esteem and make people feel useless.
- Progressive taxation should be introduced based on the fact that the poor benefit far more from increased levels of income than the rich will ever suffer from reduction in their income. The specific level of taxation should be balanced so as not to effect free enterprise.
- The provision of psychiatric help to those with clinical depression needs to be improved.
- Advertising to young children should be banned and pictorial advertising should be taxed.
What this book offers is not just a few suggestions on policy though. It actually proposes something that is far more valuable: a new rallying point for people of all classes, cultures and religions. Layard's outlook harks back to the enlightenment thinkers particularly the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill who once said that:
"Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain."
John Stuart Mill
The major difference is that the new utilitarianism of Layard doesn't rely on the kind of theoretical hierarchy of pleasures that John Stuart Mill proposed: it is based on a scientifically deduced understanding of happiness. If these ideas become mainstream happiness could become a new compass for human culture and that, I have to say, is something I would be very favourable indeed. Read this book!
