An avuncular figure walks to the lectern, beams at the audience and asks: how happy can the state make us?
The economist, Richard Layard, now Lord Layard, will go on to say that the answer is: very. But his colleague on stage in the Old Theatre lecture hall of the London School of Economics, psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud, believes otherwise.
The two men are here to debate “the politics of happiness” in front of a packed, international audience. Both speakers have written a book about contentment but they disagree about how best to achieve it. The two specialists in the human condition outline their arguments, suited with ties and standing at lecterns on either side of the stage. They are polite and non-confrontational; happy, indeed, in each other’s company, while the audience sits, attentively.
Layard argues in his book, Happiness: Lessons From A New Science, that happiness, not growth, should be the objective of our economic policies, and governments should attend more to problems that demonstrably make us miserable, such as mental illness, unemployment, and even advertising - especially ads aimed at children. “Life is complicated. We’re picking up our norms from other people whether we want to or not. We’re reading their advertisements, we’re having our purses nicked. So many forms of involuntary interaction go on that the first role for the state is to see how these could be made more wholesome.”
Layard may be sharing a space with the trim, modulated and more earnest Persaud, an industrious psychiatrist, author and broadcaster, but that proves to be about all.
Persaud argues in his book, The Motivated Mind, that happiness is up to the individual and his or her attitude more than any macroeconomic interference. Happiness, he says, is too personal to be prescribed like the pills that the visionary novelist Aldous Huxley had the regulated inhabitants of Brave New World ingest, a book he reads from to underline that human experience has texture and meaning when exposed to some distress.
”When people are asked about the different pathways of achieving happiness, there are as many pathways as there are individuals,” Persaud argues. “I’m worried about the notion that government should be charged with the responsibility of determining our happiness.”
Persaud does applaud Layard for “reorienting politics and economics towards emotion and well-being” and “pushing psychology into the centre of public policy”. He says, though, that fear and anxiety are equally necessary, helping our ancestors survive and pass on genes by making them alert to danger. The same, incidentally, is true of neurotics.
Layard notes that the National Child Development Study shows that the least happy people in society are two-and-a-half times more likely to be poorer “than the rest of us”. They are four times more likely to be mentally ill, too. Despite this, psychiatry and psychology are “Cinderella sections” of the National Health Service.
The two agree on some things, especially that paying the unemployed without strings attached is pointless. “You’ve seen in France and Germany the coexistence of very high unemployment with often very high vacancies,” says Layard. “I think that’s wrong and I think it’s based on the wrong philosophy for the welfare state, where people are seen as victims.” Any work is better than none for keeping people happy and healthy. But he challenges Persaud’s libertarian instincts, saying a “value system” that encourages getting ahead is bound to fail because, self-evidently, not everyone can.
Layard has a clever way of gently using the phrase “of course” before controversial observations, such as when dismissing the idea that values are a private matter. “Of course, they never have been. In every society, people have been concerned with the values other people’s children absorb, because they affect all of us.”
When the debate is opened up to the floor, a young woman, who sounds French, wonders whether “modern people are happier than ancient people”. Layard answers: “I think we’ve got just about the best of all worlds that have been, but I’m also quite sure we could do better.”
A man with a thick African accent and a carrier bag intervenes from the front row to promote his idea for a “global happiness campaign”, one that began when he wrote a four-page happiness contract for his children to witness. (They are obliged to remind him of this when he is unhappy, he explains.) Layard and Persaud listen politely, but stop short of an endorsement.
It is hard to decide who wins. Layard makes the broadest observation, adapting Einstein to note that “the key question is whether the world is a friendly place.”
But Persaud has the best anecdote. The former prime minister Harold Macmillan asked Madame de Gaulle what she was looking forward to most when her husband retired. “A penis,” she replied. Macmillan diplomatically disguised his surprise, only realising later that what she had actually said was “happiness”.
As Persaud notes: “Right there you have the problem at the heart of happiness, which is that when people are talking about it, they’re not often talking about exactly the same thing.”
