Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, by Richard Layard, London: Allen Lane (2005)
Reviewed by William Davies
Anyone whose intellectual endeavours take place in close proximity to day-to-day policy formation cannot duck questions of why and by whom they should be used. Richard Layard’s Happiness is a prime example of such intellectual endeavour, and Layard is refreshingly open about the book’s objectives for public policy. It is fitting that a book dedicated to reconstituting utilitarianism for the twenty-first century goes to great lengths to be useful. Even those with no involvement in the LSE-Westminster public policy complex will find long stretches of this book that offer practical recommendations as to how to make themselves happier. In any case, as one of the most decisive influences over New Labour, Layard has already demonstrated that he is not the sort of intellectual to toss books down from an ivory tower and disregard their practical implications.
With other intellectuals it might be deemed churlish to ask who they have written for, and on what authority, but not so with Layard. In answer to the first question, this book is clearly targeted at economists, policy scientists, politicians and the self-help market. What is somewhat baffling is that Layard appears to believe that he has written a radical, even iconoclastic book, but as we shall explore in a moment, much of it remains within the conventional limits of economics, policy science, New Labour philosophy, and common sense. More troubling is the question of authority, because this is a fiercely moralistic book. As an economist and policy advisor, Layard is rightly revered, but his sophisticated handling of evidence does not in itself qualify him to supply society with its “single over-arching principle” as this book intends. To put these concerns another way, is this the book that New Labour needs, and is Layard the man to supply it?
Happiness begins with the presentation of a “devastating fact”, namely that income levels in Western societies have doubled, while happiness levels have remained the same. This is not simply a piece of cultural pessimism, according to Layard, but an empirically verifiable claim, based on surveys, interviews and a growing body of physiological evidence. Moreover, as the science of happiness develops, we are getting a much clearer idea of exactly what does and doesn’t make us happy. For Layard, this science represents the missing piece of Jeremy Bentham’s moral philosophy of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’: we are no longer guessing about what makes other people happy, we know.
So why have we failed to get happier over the past fifty years? The reasons are varied. Firstly, beyond a certain level of wealth, individuals are unable to translate increases in income to increases in happiness because they constantly compare themselves to others. As a society gets wealthier over all, and once basic needs are taken care of, consumers feel better or worse off depending on how those around them are doing. Consumer capitalism tempts us with opportunities to improve our lives, and we neglect the forms of social and emotional commitment that are proven to make us genuinely happy.
Secondly, policy-makers and economists have collaborated in elevating economic growth to the status of society’s raison d’etre. Economists, says Layard, are woefully ‘behaviourist’ in their outlook, taking the fact that someone buys something as sufficient proof that it benefits them. By this perspective, increases in purchasing power will correlate directly to increases in happiness, something which we now know is false. However, policy-makers have also bought into this world view, allowing increases in GNP to become a proxy for collective betterment.
Yet underlying these twin errors is something more fundamental. “The decline of orthodox Christianity and then of social solidarity has left a moral vacuum,” argues Layard, echoing Emile Durkheim. The social facts which cause us unhappiness – divorce, loneliness, crime – tend mostly to be symptoms of moral deficiency. Meanwhile, happiness increases in circumstances where we become locked into circumstances of trust and cooperation. The spiritual emptiness of Western society is manifest in empirically verifiable physiological symptoms, and vice versa. Layard is so comfortable in switching between metaphysical and physical claims that one begins to wonder if he even knows he’s doing it.
Solutions are multi-fold. Individuals must themselves develop greater awareness of how to make themselves happy, so “we should praise, not scorn, the self-help movement” and recognise the truths in Buddhism. Education should furnish people with a better understanding of their obligations to others and to themselves. But most of all, “we desperately need a concept of the common good”, which should be the greatest happiness of all. And how are we to assess this? Through monitoring “the development of happiness in our countries as closely as we monitor the development of income”.
Happiness provides a wide range of fascinating empirical evidence from across the social sciences and biology. But its moral validity slightly relies on the reader sharing Layard’s surprise about the “devastating fact” that is his starting point - the non-correlation between wealth and happiness. Who is he trying to disillusion? Which of Layard’s audiences really believes that capitalism satisfies all our emotional and metaphysical needs?
Firstly, it is difficult to imagine economists being very troubled by this book. Certainly, it does an excellent job of defining the limits of economics, and the inadequacy of the neoclassical worldview as social description. But economists never claimed to be philosophers, Layard being the exception which proves the rule. Moreover, his philosophy does not disrupt the neoclassical paradigm as much as he might like to think. Not only does he attempt to extrapolate a moral system from the logic of individual psychology exactly as Adam Smith did, he attacks one guiding quantitative metric for policy (GNP) by erecting another in its place (happiness).
Secondly, there is little here to challenge the preconceptions of New Labour policy-makers. Who on the social democratic left ever did view economic growth as an end in its own right? The reason to pursue growth, surely, is that it is a precondition of high employment and a robust welfare state. See how the Democrat Party in the US has traditionally prided itself on being the party of growth, precisely because it was growth in the 60s that paid for Lyndon Johnson’s welfare expansion, and growth in the 90s that fuelled real wage increases for the working poor.
But more profoundly, New Labour philosophy is already deeply utilitarian. The ‘evidence-based policy’ movement, which Happiness is clearly a contribution to, judges government actions purely around their measured outcomes. Tony Blair has used utilitarian reasoning in the most severe of circumstances, when justifying the invasion of Iraq. Normative distinctions between right and wrong, legal and illegal, have been repeatedly dismissed by Blair, in favour of the question is Iraq now better off? Layard is aware of the dangers of excessive moral ‘consequentialism’, but he never seriously engages with opposing moral philosophies, and there is no space given to John Rawls’s critique of utilitarianism which might genuinely have inspired Ministers to pause for moral reflection.
So is this the book that New Labour needs, and is Layard the man to supply it? Certainly, the Government desperately wants to improve its grasp of moral language, and Happiness provides plenty of lessons in this regard. But New Labour is already too obsessed with manipulating outcomes and quantifying benefits; in its dogmatic empiricism, ‘evidence-based policy’ might be part of the problem, as well as part of the solution. What the Government needs alerting to is not more social science – be it new or otherwise – but the importance of a priori moral reasoning, constitutionalism, privacy rights and international law.
Layard is an out-standing social scientist, but the ease with which he switches between empirical claims about the functioning of the brain and moral claims about the state of the West suggests that he is not such an adept philosopher. The ‘lessons from a new science’ (the book’s subtitle) are just that – scientific lessons. They no more resolve condundrums of morality than extensions in life expectancy resolve the conundrum of mortality.