Happiness Rules: Should Wellbeing Dictate Government Policy? (Lord Richard Layard)

23:05Amol Rajan:Because if you don't have growth, and that's the condition of Britain at the moment, you create a kind of zero-sum game where the argument is just sort of how do you divide up a finite amount of resources, in fact, a diminishing amount of resources. So he would argue that growth, as you say, is very important. And it's important that reducing inequalities, once you've got growth, you can work out how you help people, perhaps in terms of their mental and physical health. Yes. I mean, growth helps families without income issues, but it also produces more taxes and gets people off benefits. and that gives money to the state, which it can spend on public services or on redistribution.

23:44So growth is an important means, but growth cannot be the objective. And I think it's been a bit of a mistake to say it's the objective of the government. I think it doesn't resonate with people. I mean, what resonates with people is remarks about their own quality of life and growth is something out there. It's a sort of common pot from which different people can benefit, but it doesn't resonate. So I think we need to get back much more to a language of talking about the quality of life. People do, of course they do. But let's be precise about it. We do mean now, when we talk about quality of life, something which can be measured and something where we can get actual numerical evidence on what is the best ways of spending money in order to promote it.

24:33Amol Rajan:I just wonder, you know, you're a Labour peer, we have a Labour government. One criticism of Keir Starmer that's often made, whether it's true or not, is that he doesn't know what he believes in. Would you say that if this Labour government wants to make Britain the happiest place in the world, that would be a pretty radical idea and it would be a pretty good North Star? I think it would be terrific. Incidentally, I mean, I did have a talk with him about five years ago now, and he was very sympathetic to that idea. Was he? But I think what happened was that the public finances are in such a bad way.

25:08There is such a worry, not only about collecting enough taxes to keep public services going, but also to reassure the bond market that the government is serious about tackling the public deficit and so on. that somehow or other that kind of not very human objective crept up too high into the rhetoric. These are very important things to worry about. Bond markets matter. And we spend a huge amount of money now on servicing public debt. For the public at large, we want something more inspiring about what are the opportunities for your children? What are we going to do for the problems that are besetting you in the health service and so on.

25:55These have got to be much more central.

25:57Amol Rajan:The utilitarians call themselves the philosophical radicals. What do you think makes it radical, the idea of recasting the modern British state around general well-being rather than growth? Well, radical means getting to the root. And in general, it's something which you use, at least, to mean something good. And I think that would be a very good thing to do. I think I use it in the sense of something brave. Given the challenges of the age, which I think are so profound, so immense, so huge, given the forces, the rate at which the world is changing because of these underlying forces and trends, I think it's a time for radical ideas.

26:39Amol Rajan:And it's so interesting what you say about welfare and the bond market. And I wonder if we should just touch on that for a moment. It is the case that in this country, the second biggest item of government expenditure is servicing our debt, debt interest. It is also the case that the amount spent now on welfare relating to work is something like 330 billion. I mean, lots of people measure this. You can quibble with this because you can measure it in different ways. But that now exceeds the receipts from income tax. Well, I think you're including pensions in that. Including pensions, maybe including pensions.

27:10Amol Rajan:But we're spending a huge amount on welfare, broadly defined, including pensions. One of the reasons we're spending so much on welfare is because of mental health, which is in a very bad way particularly amongst young people why do you think so many people and particularly young people are unhappy well first let me agree with what you said about the situation because this is what is shown in these surveys in these international surveys there are two of them that happen every four years or so britain has always been the lowest in europe for the last 10 or 15 years, but it's also gone down more than any other European country.

27:53I think that it's partly, I'm sure, connected with social media. I think another big problem has been our schools have increasingly become in clam factories. And if you look at the Children's Society survey, you have a plummeting of satisfaction with life, but if you ask them satisfaction with different aspects of life, They haven't all gone down. Satisfaction with family is flat. But what's really plummeted, satisfaction with school, satisfaction with schoolwork. And increasingly, since 2010, schools have been under pressure to produce exam results on the theory that that will produce good workers.

28:35But it produced, in fact, a generation of young people who feel a bit empty of purpose. And I think that takes us back to the original idea we were talking about, that if you're told your purpose is to do better than other people, better grades, get a better job, get better income, that's a zero-sun game because if one person does better, somebody else has to do worse if it's all relative. That kind of competitive, ultra-competitive ethic, which has been increasingly pushed on the schools through the league tables and all the rest of it, I think has been very, very unhealthy. What we want people to do when they learn is either to do it because it's just so interesting or to do it because it's going to enable them to make a contribution to society and the well-being of others with some reward to them from being useful.

29:33And we've got to get a different spirit into the education system in order to restore a sense of purpose, a satisfying purpose to young people, because passing exams is not a satisfying enough purpose because somebody does well, somebody else does badly.

29:51Amol Rajan:You know, one of the great privileges of doing this podcast and meeting such great minds is you sort of come to your own views about particular issues. And I'm starting to wonder if basically the last 15 years have been a uniquely difficult time to be young. Since 2010, social media, smartphones, even before the pandemic, which was incredibly rough and tough on young people, we do have this absolutely astonishing, not just crisis, but really, I'd say worse than that, catastrophe for young people in this country. The team sent me some statistics, which I just want to put to you because I think it's really important that people listen to this, have the facts.

30:27Amol Rajan:In 2023, a couple of years ago now, three years ago now, about one in five children and young people aged eight to 25 had a probable mental disorder. This was 20.3 % of eight to 16 year olds, 23.3 % of 17 to 19 year olds and nearly 22 % of 20 to 25 year olds. In other words, if you're 18 in this country, there's about one in four chance you've got a mental disorder. That's an absolutely astonishing fact. Next, we get onto NEATS. 957 ,000 people aged 16 to 24 are neat or were in the last measure that's 12.8 percent of that age group so these are young people who should be in the prime of their lives and one in eight of them roughly one in seven of them roughly are not in education employment or training of course if they move on to welfare they're likely to stay on welfare for a very very long time it's hard to get off it.

31:22Amol Rajan:And a final thing here, this is from the charity Mind. As of April 2024, a record 4.5 million children in the UK were growing up in relative poverty. Now, the Labour government have changed the two-child benefit cap and they're doing a lot, they would say, to try and reduce that. But I find those statistics so palling and so shocking. And it suggests to me that something quite dramatic has happened quite recently, which has pushed those numbers up. What do you think that is? Well, I think social media are a very big problem. They obviously take people into themselves. They socialize less. They get out and about less.

31:58They play less. That's what they lose. But what they gain is increasingly an obsession with how they're appearing to other people and how other people are appearing to them. Everybody's trying to put the best image of themselves on the screen. Everybody else feels their own average is worse than the other person's best. So this is very negative, leaving out altogether the sextortion and all of those extreme cases. So I support the social media ban under 16. I think that's an absolutely essential step and the banning of phones in schools. But I think that something more radical has got to up and end schools.

32:44The well-being of the pupils has got to become a much more central objective. There's got to be a much more professional approach to teaching of life skills. So we've got what used to be called PSHE, one hour a week. But the surveys are not encouraging about what it's achieving. And we have, in fact, got very good evidence-based programs, which should be the the basis of an agreed curriculum, there should be an inventory of approved evidence-based materials for teaching that curriculum. And in secondary schools, the teachers who teach it should be trained. And it's been demonstrated over and over again that why it's ineffective at the moment is because of lack of teacher training and lack of structured materials.

33:30So one huge thing which could be done would be to improve the teaching of what used to be called DHHG. But how are we going to get that to happen? And I agree with those who say we will not get schools to take the well-being of the children more seriously than they currently do unless we put something into the scales. At the moment, you've got scales where there's a heavy weight on exam results and there's no weight on well-being. We've got to get some weight on well-being. We do it by measuring it and there are very good schemes for doing that it's done in wales it's done in south australia very systematically organized and made easy for the schools

34:20Amol Rajan:i really hope you're enjoying this conversation with richard layard professor layard lord layard but richard to you and me if you are please do subscribe to this podcast on bbc sounds that way you won't miss future episodes. And yeah, if you do subscribe, just make sure you've got your push notifications turned on. And that way you will get an alert whenever we publish a new episode, and you'll never miss out. Thank you. And now back to Richard Layard.

34:47Amol Rajan:Let me just put a principled objection to your position, if I may, which is that if you focus more, not ignoring knowledge and all the rest of it, and you're one of those highly educated men one could come across and you've been a public intellectual for seven decades. If you focus more on well-being and less on, if you like, crunchy subjects, knowledge, is there a danger that people just know less, are less equipped? No, I mean, there's really good evidence from interventions that if you have an intervention that raises well-being, it also improves exam performance and test performance. How would you improve well-being in schools?

35:25It's a conflict because basically happy children learn more. I mean, it's just simple as that.

35:30Amol Rajan:How would you make for happier children? How would you rethink, you know, what would you do that was radical in schools to make happier children? What does that actually involve? Well, I think you need a well-being strategy. You need a code. What's done in some schools is periodically you have a big debate about what are the values of the school involving the parents, the teachers, and the children, and they adopt the values, and then they try to live out the values. And if somebody goes amok, they are sat there to think about the values which are written up around the school. There are different ways of doing it, but it's got to be central to the purposes of the school, what the values are.

36:15It's got to be embedded, obviously, as it is in very many schools, in assemblers and so on, but also as far as possible in lessons in English or science and so on. And it's got to be very strongly promoted through this weekly PSHE lesson. But there's one other thing I want to say in relation to the mental health of young people. When we got involved in the previous Labour government in promoting psychological therapy, We realized that to persuade Tony Blair initially, then Gordon, it would help if we could show that it was going to pay for itself. And you could see the returns are more obvious when you do it for adults than when you do it for children, because that comes later.

37:04So that's why we went for the adult program. But 10 years later, when Jeremy Hunt was the health secretary, and we persuaded him to set up a parole service, psychological therapy in schools, mental health support teams in schools. That has been going rather slowly. It's covering about half the country now. It's been promised to cover the rest of it by the end of the parliament. But it's also, it's remarkable that this happened. The standard of the service in terms of the training of the therapists is lower than for adults. Now, just think about that. More than half of adult problems are already manifested in childhood.

37:48Think of not doing as much for children as you're doing for adults. It doesn't make any sense. So I just want to say on another thing, there are two main forms of child mental health problems. One lot are anxiety, which are well handled in this service. The other are what they call conduct disorder. And conduct disorder is the best predictor of what you said before, becoming need, not an employment educational training. This service, psychological therapy service I mentioned, hardly treats conduct disorder. This is extraordinary because there is a very, very good treatment for children with moderate conduct disorder called Incredible years.

38:32It's a system of group training of parents how to deal with these young people themselves, which has been shown to more than half, 10 years later, the antisocial behavior of these children whose parents have been trained to bring them up in a way that is better for their self-respect and their behavior. So we know what to do. It's just a matter of having some energy behind it. And these are tiny sums of money compared with HS2 or road program. I'm slightly frustrated that we have not managed this time around, but maybe we can in the next spending review, to get money into these mental health services, these very cheap enterprises to improve teaching and well-being in schools and so on.

39:19Tiny sums of money, which would also repay for themselves.

39:23Amol Rajan:But it's interesting you say that because most people would have an assumption that we're spending more on health than ever. Maybe we're spending on different things. Maybe we're spending on beds or cancer treatment or dementia. But most people would say we are spending a huge amount on health already. And the issue is the underlying causes, type 2 diabetes, obesity, these underlying chronic health conditions, and we need to fix those in lifestyle changes. you know a lot of liberals libertarians even just people who've worked in the government if they were sat here listening to you now and perhaps they'd had the pleasure of reading your book they would say this is all lovely stuff and yes we agree happiness matters but the function and the role of the state is to feed the people is to keep them safe and to increase wealth and then let them live the lives that they want a liberal and it's interesting we spoke recently to adrian Waldridge, who's at Bloomberg, former writer for The Economist.

40:20Amol Rajan:He's written a book called Centrists of the World Unite. And his position would, I think, be more towards saying that actually it's not necessarily for the government to tell you what you need to do to be happy. It's for the government and the state to create the conditions in which you can pursue your own happiness. And the best way of doing that would be to create some economic growth. And that is why GDP should be the prime focus of every government department. Well, I would say first that increasing GDP is quite difficult. So don't assume that that's the easiest thing to do. But second, I think it's quite good to think about history.

40:59I read history. So if you go back to the days of Gladstone, the state did nothing in education, very, very little in health, public health. All of these things have come into the sphere of the state since then for very good reasons that the state is a better agent than any other for producing a good coverage of education that makes people good citizens and also effective workers. The state is actually a good provider of health care because of the asymmetry in the medical market. The patient doesn't know what the doctor knows, etc. So there are so many of these areas, and the same is true with mental health, where the state is actually the most effective provider.

41:50So since we're talking about well-being, what do we know about the size of the state in relation to well-being of the people? Because it's often asserted that a big state and the high tax rate are inimical to the well-being of the people. Well, there's no evidence that supports that. In fact, if anything, the evidence suggests that, you know, over time, as states have increased their coverage, well-being has increased as a result of that. So I think that the liberal position just doesn't have the evidence to support it.

42:26Amol Rajan:Do you feel that the agenda that you've advanced, it's not made as much progress as you want, but do you feel that it's basically got a receptive audience? I say that partly because we had on this podcast a very interesting man called Ed Davies, who is the research director at the Center for Policy Studies, which is an anti-poverty kind of right of center think tank. There's got people from a range of different political perspectives. And he mentioned that David Cameron's initiative to measure well-being, which was done at your instigation, still goes on. But my sense is that talk of well-being and talk of happiness is not as high up the agenda as it was perhaps 15 years ago.

43:05Amol Rajan:What's your sense? I think that it's not at the very high level talked about so much. But I think at the low level, there's a great tide coming in of people who are interested in it. not just the ordinary citizens, but at work, at the workplace, there's a huge transformation in the amount of talk about the well-being of workers. That's a very healthy thing. It's still got a long way to go. Even in political discussion, we used to talk about health, people now talk about health and well-being. So they've got a wider concept of what health is, that it's something which involves the mind as well as the body.

43:48And in fact, people are very much more conscious than they used to be of the way that the mind affects the body. I mean, here's an extraordinary fact, that if you ask people just simple question about life satisfaction, and you give them a medical examination, and you want to predict whether they'll be alive in 10 years time, the life satisfaction question is as good a predictor as the medical examination. I I mean, there is that huge interaction between the person's mental state and their physical well-being. People are increasingly aware of that. I think people are much more willing, psychologically aware, they're willing to talk about mental states as the ultimate reality for people.

44:32So I think the condition is there. I think we do need, though, a set of politicians who are radical, daring enough to talk about this. I mean, I'm thinking, you've got my textbook on well-being in front of you. There is a huge body of knowledge, which we try to reflect in that textbook, that shows how different things affect people's well-being. And that should be the centerpiece of thinking about government policy.

45:02Amol Rajan:If you were to do three things, radical things in government straight away, there would be funding for therapy for children in schools. There would be an addiction hotline along the sort of groove or kind of the kind of the model set with your talking therapies, which is affected or being used by 8 million people, high success rate. And that's for anxiety and depression. You'd have a similar one on addiction. What else would you do? What is a Layard program for government? Well, the other thing, I mean, you mentioned the dire situation of young people, and we're talking particularly of non-graduates.

45:35So I think it's really shocking that we haven't got a proper career progression system there. You mean through vocation? We've had a halving in youth apprenticeships in the last 10 years. This is absolutely extraordinary that this hasn't created an absolute outdrawal and a scandal. Only one in three young people who apply for apprenticeships get one. So almost my top priority of everything is to have a government commitment to a system where any qualified applicant for apprenticeship, just like any qualified applicant for university, can expect to receive one offer. I think that is critical because employers are turning their backs on young people, as you know.

46:25that they partly have been allowed to use the apprenticeship levy for in-service training instead of a new house. That's been a terrible mistake. They're partly worried about the characters of young people for reasons that you've mentioned. And we're in danger of really abandoning a whole generation, a whole cohort going into our society, which we shall pay the penalty for.

46:51Amol Rajan:One of the underlying trends of the last 25 years has been the very rapidly diminishing amount of wealth or money that makes its way to the labor force. Workers are getting a smaller slice or share of the pie. It used to be in the post-war years. And I'll be interested, you were born in 1934, I think. I wonder if you forgive me for raising it. I don't remember that year. Don't you? Do you remember the start of the war? Of course I do, yes. How old were you, five, six? I was five. I remember coming up from the beach and listening to Neville Chamberlain's speech at 11 o 'clock in the morning. Were you separated from your family when the war began?

47:30Amol Rajan:No, no, we were all together, no. What was your experience of the war itself? So you went from what being five to 11, so those early years were shaped by the war. What was it like? Well, it was an idealistic period. As you know, it brought this strong sense of social cohesion and a very strong belief that we could have a better world after. You said that we've got a very good new science of happiness where everyone gives themselves a score from zero to ten. Zero being completely unhappy, ten being completely happy. I've mentioned a couple of times that you're 92. I hope you don't mind me doing that.

48:08Amol Rajan:But at 92, having spent 60 years at the LSE, having seen the war as a child, how do you score your own life? My whole life? Well, I think I've been actually very lucky. I've had good friends. I've got a wonderful wife. It took me a while to find her. I've had really interesting work. I still have interesting work. I've got my health. I've gone on playing tennis until earlier this year. so I do rate myself as very lucky. Eight? Could we get you from a seven to an eight? Are you an eight or a nine? Not nine, no. I mean, you see, I think that if you're trying to influence the world, I mean, you're bound to feel a certain sense of frustration.

48:55I think they call it divine discontent. So I experienced quite a bit of that.

49:01Amol Rajan:Well, Richard, it's a pleasure and a privilege talking to you. We've had lots and lots of questions from our listeners. And you're very kindly going to stick around and answer some of those for our bonus episode, which is coming out on Monday. But for now, thank you very, very much for telling us about the new science of happiness. Well, thank you. And let me wish you a lot of happiness.

49:30Amol Rajan:there is just something extremely charming if i may say about a 92 year old a man who's born in 1934 who has seen an awful lot who's thought an awful lot arguing for a very very very radical reconsideration of the entire function and workings of the british state and that in turn follows from a social revolution, really, in that we start prioritising very different things. And when Richard Layard argues that happiness, that wellbeing is the fundamental, it's the unarguable things, the thing that everyone wants. And when he argues that we've got a huge new science that says we can measure now what gives people satisfaction, what gives people a sense that they've led happy lives, it is quite hard to argue against that.

50:13Amol Rajan:I try to, as you'd expect. I try to apply some scrutiny to it. I tried to say, how would this work in public policy terms? And there again, he's got some pretty radical ideas. So talking therapies, which is that NHS treatment that 8 million people have been through. He wants one on addiction, a similar program for addiction, just as he's affected 8 million lives, which are affected by anxiety and depression. He's got some very radical ideas, hasn't he, about how we need to rethink the entire nature of our school system. Not to denigrate exams, not to say that it's not about achieving academic standards, but just to say that well-being of our children, because happy pupils make for happy learners, is just much, much more important.

50:52Amol Rajan:And I just thought there was something of a sort of clarion call or something kind of wonderfully focusing about him saying, everyone's got an answer. If you ask everyone how happy they are from zero to 10, most people have got an answer. and it was also very interesting that he said most people think we should give more attention and time to getting people from sort of two to three than getting seven to eight. Made me think that actually this is potentially a kind of galvanising new idea for the party of the left in Labour, which made him appear and maybe the future of the Labour Party is going from being a party of work into being a party of well-being.

51:30Amol Rajan:That's certainly how Richard Layard sees it. And at a time when the transatlantic left and centre left is doing an awful lot of soul searching and trying to work out what it's for, maybe for them, the answer could be Richard Layard's work, which is pretty radical and yet pretty simple too.

51:50Amol Rajan:And that is it for this episode. To make sure you don't miss future conversations, please do subscribe to Radical with Amol Rajan on BBC Sounds. And if you do subscribe, just make sure you've got your push notifications. And that way you will get an alert every time we release a new episode. Speak to you next week. Goodbye.

52:15Amol Rajan:The CIA has been carrying out covert operations around the world for decades. How has it shaped how people feel about the US? I'm Asma Khalid. And I'm Tristan Redman. And together we host the Global Story podcast from the BBC. As part of our series to mark the United States' 250th birthday, we're exploring the CIA's hidden history. Do you think the word of the United States will be trusted in years to come? For more, check out The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.