The price of happiness

12 March 2005

Petronella Wyatt talks to Richard Layard, who believes that higher taxation can reduce envy and make us all happier

Layard has worked hard all his life. He lives in a large house in Highgate. He admits to never having had ‘financial issues’. Nor has he suffered from depression. So why, in his book, does Layard blame high incomes for the alleged increase in mental illness over the past 50 years? One of the reasons our society is failing, he says, is that more people claim to suffer from clinical depression. Yet clinical depression has only recently been diagnosed. Past generations would not have admitted it, or would have told the depressed to ‘snap out of it’.

Perhaps we have become too preoccupied with happiness. Happiness has become an industry, with magazines and newspapers encouraging us to measure our feelings, conversely making people more unhappy. What is the answer, then? It seems we are at an impasse. On the one hand, seeing someone else do better makes us unhappy, as, on the other hand, does the prospect of equality. Maybe one should simply accept that man was not made to be happy?

I wonder if Layard has given a copy of his book to Tony Blair. ‘No, I haven’t.’

‘Do you think he is unhappy? I mean, he is the ultimate product of the rat race.’ Layard looks wary. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘But you’ve written a whole book on it!’

In 1997 Layard was a consultant to David Blunkett at the Department for Education and Employment. ‘You didn’t do a very good job of making him happy,’ I chide. ‘Will he be getting a copy in the post?’

‘Er, no. Poor man. But I will send a book to Gordon.’

‘Gordon Brown. What an admission! So he is very unhappy, is he?’

‘Um, he likes reading.’

Layard is an odd man. A happy man who bangs on about unhappiness. A comfortably off man who rails against wealth. I can’t quite see how this makes him fully qualified to tell the government what to do about our wellbeing. In any case, in the end happiness is no one’s business but our own. If Lord Layard told my plumber that he should give up the rat race and pay more taxes, he would probably get a bop on the snozzle for his trouble.