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91 of 103 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great beginning, disappointing conclusion, March 6, 2005
Richard Layard's book has two parts: (1) The Problem (Why People aren't happier even though income is way up), plus lots of good studies on the subject, and (2) What can be done (To make us happier than we are).
The first part is loaded with great information coming from research studies--what time of day most of us are the happiest, which countries are happiest, the role genes play in happiness, what activities make us happy, how stable happiness has been in the U.S. over time, how jealousy of the income of our peers has on our happiness, and why Jeremy Bentham's concept of maximizing the most happiness for the most people should be the basis for personal and governmental decisions. So far, so good. I totally agree, and found the reading very worth while and educational.
Part two--how to solve the problem of stable instead of rising happiness--is where the book gets into big trouble. Not only does Layard not come up with any down to earth specific suggestions, but he often uses gobbledigook to explain murky solutions. Example: "A society cannot flourish without some sense of shared purpose. The current pursuit of self-realisation will not work...." What exactly this means in concrete ideas, he doesn't make clear--at least, to me. He has oversimplified obvious ideas with no great plans on how to implement them. Example: Unemployment causes unhappiness--so, we need to reduce unemploymnent. Duh!
In other words, Layard appears to be an economist who wants the government to reduce our stress. Since when has the government reduced our stress? That's what I want to know.
If you look at most advanced countries trailing the U.S. in happiness, they include France and Germany, two countries which give their people cradle to grave medical care and enough vacation time to put any U.S. citizen into extasy. Yet France and Germany trail the U.S.A. by several percentage points in happiness.
Layard leaves out possibly the most important factor in determining the happiness of the people in a given country--economic freedom. [...] Those with the least economic freedom trail behind.
If the reader wants tips on how to improve his or her personal happiness, I suggest reading Authentic Happiness by Seligman. Having said all this, there is so much great information on the subject of happiness in this book I found it well worth reading and I'm glad I bought it. Just don't expect any great ideas on how to solve the problem.
I still do agree with Layard that legislation and government policy should be concerned with the happiness of the people effected by it. And, each government should do its best to measure the happiness of its citizens. Whether a given policy will increase or decrease happiness--now that's not so easy to predict.
One gets the feeling that Layard is using his research on happiness to bolster his views on economics. Whether they do is highly debatable.
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Happiness as an Economic Issue, March 15, 2007
It can sometimes be incredibly helpful for an "outsider" to have a look at a problem. So it proves in this excellent book by Lord Richard Layard, a former Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, and now an active member of the British House of Lords.
What can an economist tell us about the science and the art of happiness? The answer is a great deal. In 2004 Layard wrote a report - that is available online - in which he pointed out that despite the advances in the economy and in the provision of healthcare, we are no happier than we were fifty years ago. He went on to say that psychological problems and mental illness are amongst the biggest causes of misery. At a time when political action only seems to happen when we can attach a dollar cost and potential savings, he added that human suffering imposes severe burdens on the economy. At the same time we already have good evidence that the tools for dealing with all this psychological distress already exist. In his report he went on to propose that the United Kingdom needs 10,000 new cognitive behavioral therapists to make a major dent in all this suffering. What was different was that he went on to show that this expenditure made good economic sense.
The book is broken into two parts. The first is an excellent review of the factors involved in happiness, as well as a foray into the work of the English Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who believed that personal and societal decisions should all be based on the idea of creating the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. In the second part Layard discusses his report and his prescriptions for action. One weakness of the book is that it does not stand well on its own. His action plan is easier to understand if you have read the report. (I cannot include the website address in this review, but if you look for Layard's name and "Prime Minister's Strategy Unit," you will quickly find it online.)
This is not in any way a book about how to create more personal happiness. It is instead an interesting attempt to draw up the bare bones of a strategy for increasing the happiness quotient of a country. It rather begs the questions about whether the creation of happiness is a legitimate concern of government. Not long ago there were news reports of one Asian country in which moves were afoot to make happiness not just a right but also a duty!
Nobody wants to pathologize ordinary life, and few would claim that cognitive behavior therapy is the only way to help people in trouble. But the fact that a powerful economist and advisor to the British Government has seen not just the human cost of unhappiness, but also added the dollars and cents that may lead to action is remarkable.
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Book provides useful review, March 4, 2005
Richard Layard provides an excellent review of recent research on what determines human happiness. He interprets this in light of his own committment to a utilitarian philosophy, but most of the research findings he reviews, and the policy conclusions he reaches, should be relevant to readers of a variety of philosophical and religious persuasions. For example, page 64 of the book has a facinating table, attributed to research by John Helliwell, which reports that being divorced, rather than married, has about two-and-a-half times the depressing effect on happiness of losing one-third of your family income. Being unemployed, rather than employed, has about three times the depressing effect of a one-third loss in family income. Even if you are employed, if the general unemployment rate goes up by 10 points, this reduces happiness more than a one-third drop in family income. All of these effects consider a change in one factor, holding all other factors constant. These findings are surprising and important to take into account. They are important to take into account even if you reject the claim of utilitarianism that human happiness should be the be-all and end-all of philosophy and social policy.
I should note that Layard is a very well-regarded British economist who has done important work on unemployment issues and benefit-cost analysis of public policies.
I suspect that this may be the only book by an economist that discusses how the Buddhist meditation techniques taught by Jon Kabat-Zinn (for example in his book Wherever You Go, There You Are) affect human happiness in a controlled experiment. It turns out that the "treatment group", which meditated for eight weeks, compared to the control group, which did not do so, when interviewed 4 months after the eight week treatment, were happier by 20 percentile points. This is a very large effect.
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