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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

Richard Layard, the founder of the LSE Centre for Economic Performance, is a brave man. The Labour peer and adviser to the government has written a book on happiness. Or to be more precise, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. This is big stuff. I mean, happiness is the whole point of life, right? Philosophers since Aristotle have been trying to puzzle it out. And then this geezer with no philosophical training claims to have knocked out a tome containing all the answers.

Not only that; Layard thinks that governments should legislate to reduce unhappiness, as they legislate to reduce unemployment or crime. This will horrify not only Burkean conservatives and laissez-faire liberals, but also followers of Maurice Cowling who think that ‘the freedom, discipline and social solidarity of modern societies would not be possible without inequality and suffering’. Layard, you see, believes we should all be encouraged to be equally happy, and he says he knows how to do it.

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