New Podcast Release: Richard Layard

In the latest episode of Lives Well Lived, the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, we talk to economist and well-being advocate Richard Layard

In the latest episode of Lives Well Lived, the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, we talk to economist and well-being advocate Richard Layard about happiness—what drives it, how governments can foster it, and what we can do as individuals to increase our own well-being.

Richard has spent decades researching happiness, mental health, and public policy, shaping how governments think about well-being. He co-founded the World Happiness Report, led the push for the Improving Psychological Therapies program in the UK, and has argued that economic growth alone does not guarantee greater life satisfaction. His work has influenced policies worldwide, from mental health care to education reform.

In our conversation, we discuss the key drivers of happiness, why relative income matters more than absolute wealth, and the role of trust, relationships, and purpose in a fulfilling life. Richard also reflects on his own experiences and why he believes young people should pursue careers that maximize their impact on the world.

Below are some highlights from our conversation, lightly edited for clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform.

On the Connection Between Well-Being and Politics

Peter: "Richard, we're having this discussion just three days after Donald Trump won the US presidential election. In your book, Wellbeing, written with Yann Emmanuel Deneve, you say that the way people answer the question: Overall, how satisfied are you with your life these days?” predicts their voting behavior better than the state of the economy does. Do you think Trump was elected because most people in the US are not satisfied with their lives?"

Richard: "I don't know about most people, but enough people. And we have found, especially my colleague George Ward, that life satisfaction is a powerful predictor of the outcome of an election and whether the incumbent party gets re-elected. This is done both in European countries and national elections since the 1970s, but also in previous US presidential elections. It turns out that the people who vote against the government are people who are not satisfied with their lives. This incidentally, Peter, is of course a hugely important piece of information when we're trying to persuade governments to make well-being into their goal."

On the Push to Make Well-Being a Government Priority

Richard: "Where there's much less progress is on making it the goal. And that's the next step. So that's what, at this OECD conference just now, I was advocating. And of course, there are quite a lot of countries which use the phrase, well-being, as a sort of a phrase which they claim helps them to identify what is good, but it doesn't do that in any very systematic way

…The Japanese government did declare in 2020, and it's been reaffirmed by the new government, that their goal is well-being. And it's not only that they declare it, they also have a well-being key performance indicator for all of their thousands of policies. Each one has got a well-being indicator associated with it. So that's good, but they're not using well-being as the criterion for choosing between the policies yet. So they're poised in a very interesting state."

On Money and Happiness

Kasia: “…You published Happiness Lessons from the New Science in 2005. In it you assembled evidence for the claim that more money does not make us happier. The book became a bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages. But after Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton published a study supporting the idea that there is a point at which more money does not make you happier, Matthew Killingsworth responded with a study contrasting that finding. Then, in a rare example of adversarial collaboration, Kahneman and Killingworth got together with Barbara Mellors and published an article entitled “Income and Emotional Well-being, a Conflict Resolved.” In that resolution, the authors agreed that for most people, higher income does lead to more happiness. And it is only for the least happy 15 or 20 % of the population that it does not. So do you accept that this finding is correct and resolves the conflict?”

Richard: “Of course the finding is correct and I never meant to imply that at a point in time within a society if you compare richer and poorer people, the richer people are not happier, other things equal. This is one of the most robust findings that's always been there and was very much pointed out by Richard Easterlin in his original article. What Richard Easterlin questioned was whether that same relationship would hold if you compare a country as it evolves over time. Would it be the case that when the country becomes richer, its citizens become happier? And this is still a matter of active research, I'm partly involved in a project on it. I think what one can say fairly clearly is that in rich countries, particularly if you include other non-monetary variables that are correlated with income, like trust, social support, lack of corruption, freedom and so on, if you include these other variables, the rise in household incomes has not been making people happier, it hasn't had that impact.

…I think that that is largely because of this phenomenon which I talked about in 1980 that people who are richer at a point in time are happier than people who are poorer, not because they have a high absolute income, but because they have a higher relative income. So of course, to the extent to which what matters to people is their relative income, obviously if you take a country over time, it's impossible for the whole population to have an improvement in its relative income."

On the Most Important Predictors of Happiness

Richard: "If you take adults, you explain what they say about their life satisfaction by the other things that you know about them. And you look at how powerful the variation of those other things is in explaining the inequality in life satisfaction. Always first come health measures, especially mental health. We typically have separate measures of mental and physical health. Then come human relationships. Whether you have a family and stable family life, very important. Whether you have work, which is a kind of relationship, and whether you are in a satisfactory relationship at work with your colleagues, also very important.

…Then somewhat less important as an explanatory factor: how you feel about your community, do you feel safe, do you feel good in your community? And then comes income. I think it's really important that we recognize the importance of income, but we keep it in its place. So in these statistical analyses... income is explaining at most 2% out of the 20% of the variation in happiness that we can explain across the population."

On the Role of Trust in Happiness

Richard: "The extent to which people think wallets will be returned is in fact very closely correlated with whether they actually are returned. So we've got quite good measures of culture like that—the degree of trust in a country, the degree of trust that people in a country have in other people in the same country. And that's very important - one of a number of important variables that explain this inter-country variation.

…Of course, another hugely important variable is conflict. So the countries at the bottom are almost all ones which have been experiencing conflict like Afghanistan, Iraq, and so on."

Rawls or Bentham?

Richard: "It seems to me inconceivable that we could judge a society entirely by the well-being of the least happy person. I mean, the least happy person is almost certainly in prison or a lunatic asylum. You know, should we... let the prisoner out? Should we let the prisoner out to improve his or her happiness at great danger to the whole of the society? Obviously not. On the other hand, I don't agree with Bentham and I think I'm perhaps different from you on this point.

Peter: “This is a new critique of Rawls. I haven't heard this one. I haven't seen it in the literature yet.”

Richard: “I do think that it is important to raise the people at the bottom and more important to do that than to raise the people higher up. And I think it, actually what we should be doing and I'm planning to do this, is to try and find out actually what people, what the population think about this."

On his Biggest Achievements and Reflections on Life

Richard: "When I'm asked what makes you happy, I always say three things. My wife, my work, and tennis. I actually think that that kind of summarizes what I think are the three most important things.”

On Filling the Ethical Void

Richard: "There is no systematic set of ethical beliefs in our society at the moment. And we have to collectively, by whatever we can, fill this void."

Peter: "We’re making progress in the right direction towards a broadly well-being-based view of what we should do as a country and what we should try to promote in the world."