What Is The Secret To Happiness? (Your Radical Questions with Lord Richard Layard)

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0:57Amol Rajan:hello and welcome to your radical questions this is where i put your questions to one of our supremely smart thoughtful influential powerful and radical guests it's your chance to engage very directly with the very very smart very interesting people that we have on this podcast to ask them about their ideas for the future. Lord Richard Layard, Lord Layard, Richard Layard, Professor Layard. Well, I've got a lot of titles for you. I could call you a Lord. I could call you a professor. Can you just be playing old Richard for the next 20 minutes? Please. He's a Labour peer economist and one of the foremost experts in the world today, certainly writing in English on happiness, well-being and the science thereof.

1:35Amol Rajan:He's had a huge influence here in the UK in terms of, I think, are you still the editor of the World Happiness Report? One of them. one of them you're the main reason that we've got talking therapies on the nhs which has now helped eight million people and you're the reason that david cameron instituted the measuring of well-being which still goes on today others were involved in all of that i'm married to an academic so i know all about sharing uh credit we've had lots of questions for you richard um from people who are very uh interested in your work our first question is from fatma fatma thank you very much indeed for your question fatma says richard i'm about to start medical school as a graduate acutely aware that much of what i'll treat loneliness poverty lack of purpose is rooted in unhappiness rather than disease should medical training prioritize well-being literacy or is that asking medicine to solve a political failure and she goes on in a similar vein the nhs is chronically underfunded despite being at its core a well-being institution which makes me wonder whether the economic case for happiness still isn't compelling enough to win budget battles overall are you concerned richard that institutionalizing well-being carries its own risk that measuring and professionalizing happiness might quietly undermine the very thing that produces it right fatwa that's a lot of questions let's take them in order first of Richard, should medical training prioritise wellbeing literacy or is that asking medicine to solve a political failure?

3:08Well, I think it's very important that doctors have a holistic view of patients. That's important because in particular the interrelation between the mind and the body. So mental health is a part of health. It's not a separate phenomenon. When it comes to how people should be trained, they should be trained to understand that. But I think that in the end, you know, the body is an incredibly complicated thing. And personally, if I'm going to have my foot operated on, I would rather have it operated on by somebody who is an expert on the foot than by somebody who is an expert on everything else, including the mind.

3:51So I strongly support the intense specialization that goes on within the National Health Service. I think a third point, though, is how patients are treated. Somehow the NHS doesn't now manage to treat patients as people. They're treated as beggars, essentially. And there's a lot of confusion and a lack of any kind of an integrated approach as far as many people are concerned. I think the NHS really has to rethink the actual handling of it, if you like, like to call them customers, so that they feel that they are being treated as one person.

4:34Amol Rajan:It's very interesting you say that. I'll come back to Fatima's other questions in just a minute. But it's worth saying, yeah, we have a Labour government. We have a Labour health secretary. And he's talked about the big, big idea that you basically need to make public sector interventions to make people healthier in their lives so that they don't impact the NHS. so they don't have to go to hospital or be treated for disease in the first place. And we also expend a huge amount on the NHS and on health in this country, an amount that's growing because we've got an ageing population. So is it really fair to say that the NHS treats people as beggars?

5:12Well, we are receiving a favour. I mean, that's how we experience it. I think even middle class people experience that. and I think it must be so even more the case for blue-collared people. So somehow that imbalance has got to be rectified.

5:34Amol Rajan:Fatma says in the secondary question, she wonders whether the economic case for happiness still isn't compelling enough to win budget battles. She says, overall, are you concerned that institutionalising well-being carries its own risk, that measuring and professionalising happiness might quietly undermine the very thing that produces it. Well, some people say that, you know, the growth in the share of national income going on health can't go on forever. I think it's a ridiculous remark. I mean, as we become richer, you know, we can't go on eating more and more food. What we will want is to have more, a rising share of our income devoted to these matters which are so central to our lives and such a major source of anxiety.

6:20So that's got to go on. We always have to make sure that the money is well spent. That's a different and complicated organizational issue.

6:28Amol Rajan:Given you raise money, I got a couple of questions on Instagram, which I'm going to put to you. People got in touch and they had these two questions, which are both similar. Anna said to me, why do we confuse, this question for you, why do we confuse the pursuit of wealth with the journey to happiness? Can we reframe? And Catherine said, I agree with him. I agree with Richard. Surely you need a certain amount of wealth to do the things that make you happy. Let me just focus on Anna's question for a second. Why do we confuse the pursuit of wealth with the journey to happiness? Well, I think it's so salient.

7:00It's so easy to see compared with anything else. And you can measure it? You can measure it. Actually, I mean, rich people, Of course, they don't need the money at all, but it's a talisman, a sign of virility, how much you can make. For that reason, because it's so visible, it probably attracts more attention than it deserves.

7:25Amol Rajan:Got a question from Melanie. Melanie says, what is the most important day-to-day achievement? Is it tags of objective career success or is it finding ways to be happy, content and fulfilled? Well, I would say it's a third thing. It's making a contribution to the happiness of the world, including your own. Of course, you have to have some skill that you can contribute. That can be in a career, but you shouldn't see exactly how high you rise in the pecking order as the most important aspect of your career. What matters in your career is what you've done for people. But also, of course, you have to take care of yourself.

8:05There's a wonderful director of this Action Happiness movement, Mark Williamson, just published his book, Make Life Happier. And he is very, very keen on the idea that you absolutely have to have a different concept of success. the right concept of success is not doing better than other people, but contributing to the lives of other people and, of course, enjoying your life at the same time. And in fact, as Mark constantly stresses there, you have to take care of yourself if you're able to help other people. This is the oxygen mask principle. In the aeroplane, it says put the mask on yourself before you put the mask on anybody else.

8:52It's also just the case, isn't it?

8:53Amol Rajan:and this goes back to the foundation principles of what you argue for, that when we die, when we have funerals, people don't talk about the CV. They don't talk about the career or how old he was when he became a professor or such. They talk about your contribution. They talk about your relationships with other people. They talk about, if you like, not your resume or your CV virtues, but your moral virtues. And perhaps maybe in our public life and in our public domain, I mean, we think more, because it's salient, about those sort of objective measures of wealth and success, and talk a little bit less perhaps about our moral successes, our kind of immaterial successes.

9:33Yes, I mean, I think that people, they don't want to brag about how good they are. I mean, that's not a part of virtue, is it? So there's always this very proper understatement of the importance of virtue. but yet in the end that's what you come back to I mean I'll tell you what I do in the morning when I go out of the house I think about this extraordinary woman Etty Hillerson who was a Jewish lady in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation and she knew she was going to die but from it she became this shining personality and what she felt the secret in life is to connect with the deepest and best in yourself.

10:20And I actually try and do that every morning because one gets so bothered with all the things on the surface. To connect with the inner depth is really important, but not to talk about it, but just to do it.

10:33Amol Rajan:Would people understand what you mean if you use the word mindfulness or meditation? Do you meditate? No, I have a sort of practice which I learned from a guru in Bhutan, you know, one of these people who spent three years above the snow line. What's that practice? Well, you're not meant to tell people. Okay, but you do something. You have a morning ritual. But I do something. I said to him, do you have any way of just lifting your spirits? And he said, yes, of course. And so I said, well, what is it? And he told me. Well, Bhutan rather notoriously has a happiness index, doesn't it, Bhutan? As a country, it does.

11:12Amol Rajan:it elevates, no pun intended, it elevates happiness to a much higher role and principle and esteem than perhaps you do. It does, it does. Yeah. Would you recommend to people listening, they're not going to get your morning ritual, but would you recommend to listeners of this great podcast that every morning they just took a moment to, what, to recenter themselves and to connect themselves to what's best in them? I think there's a lot to be said for that, definitely, yeah. I find it definitely has an effect on my mood for the rest of the day that do sort of five minutes of that, definitely. Melanie, thank you very much indeed for your question.

11:47Amol Rajan:The next is from Joel. Joel says, Richard, why in 2026, oh, this is interesting, why in 2026 are we not listening to the latest scientific insight and stopping unnecessarily harming animals for food? I know this would be inherently a bit of a personal question involving our life choices. However, surely we must practice what we preach, talk about liberal, compassionate tolerance, happiness and health, actually act according to it? No. I think this is interesting partly because in the main episode, which people may have heard, which came out on Thursday, you mentioned an Australian utilitarian called Peter Singer, who decades ago now, more than 50 years ago, wrote a book called Animal Liberation.

12:27Amol Rajan:And he's a key figure in the global vegan movement. And one of his arguments about happiness and about suffering is there's no good reason for our concern and our compassion to stop at the species line? You know, why should we feel compassion and concern for the happiness and well-being and suffering of our fellow homo sapiens or humans and not extend that to at least other mammals? What do you say, Richard, to Joel's question? Why are we not stopping unnecessarily harming animals for food? So we know animals feel. I mean, every pet owner knows that anyway. But I like the experiment which was done when there were two lots of chickens, one of whom had a sore foot and the other didn't.

13:12And they were both given the choice between two types of cereal, one of which had got a painkiller in it and one of which hadn't. And the chickens with the sore foot just went for the cereal with the painkiller, whereas the ones without sore foot, they just didn't care which they took. So it's absolutely clear, going right down to chickens, quite possibly further than that, that animals have feelings while they're alive. So I was a very strong supporter of measures to promote the well-being of animals while they're alive. I think a slightly more difficult issue is whether it's wrong to shorten their life just suddenly.

13:52Do you eat meat? I actually don't eat meat because I don't like meat and I haven't got enough teeth. But I eat fish.

14:02Amol Rajan:Right. Like, is there any good reason to stop our compassion for animals? No. But you think there's an important distinction between how they live and how they die? I think that's true, of course, for humans. But I think for humans, we do value the length of life. And it's not so obvious to me that we have to do that for animals. Joel, thank you very much indeed. Here's a question from Charlie Beaumont, who has a question about a word that I don't think we hear very often in the public domain these days. But given that we're living in a time of multiple wars in the Middle East, in Ukraine, all around the world, in fact, it's surprising we don't hear it more.

14:43Amol Rajan:This is a question about pacifism. And Charlie says, as humans, we all have the same needs and we all have only one life. Yet during that life, we have a responsibility to future generations and to their likely quality of life. Pacifism tends to be seen as naive, but surely it is a route to a much greater state of happiness than armed conflict will ever achieve. Are you a pacifist? I'm not a pacifist, but I'm kind of appalled by the way international relations are conducted, even perhaps by civilised countries. I mean, there is the assumption that the aim of a country is to outsmart other countries.

15:24that that's the kind of what the diplomatic service is meant to do. Once you have that strongly competitive element in the mentality of the nation's leaders, you're always in danger of losing sense of perspective and getting into a war over doing better than others. So I think that a philosophy that focused on well-being, including the well-being of people in other countries is a pretty important step towards a more peaceful world.

15:59Amol Rajan:But pacifism as a principle you don't subscribe to because? I think in the Second World War, I would have fought fascism. I think that probably was the right thing to do. Did your parents fight? My dad was overage, so he had a helmet which said FAP, first aid post. and what about your mom did she contribute to the war effort beyond she she worked in the soup kitchen yes wow can i ask you finally when you reflect on your life going back to 1934 how you feel britain is doing at the moment compared to how it was when you were growing up and the reason i ask you that is because one of the absolutely dominant themes of this podcast and actually of our national life at the moment is a concern about decline is a feeling that basically the post-war years were pretty good.

16:51Amol Rajan:You had a demographic dividend, five to six workers per retiree, relative peace, the cultural excitement of the 60s and the white heat of technology that Wilson mentioned. And yes, there were dips, the 70s oil crisis and so forth, and another surge during the 80s. A lot of people fetishize the 1990s at the moment. That's a big trend online. Are we right in Britain to feel a certain gloom at the moment? I mean, I'm always an optimist. And I think humans have an extraordinary capacity to regroup. They regrouped astonishingly after the Second World War, which was a devastating war. The recovery of Germany is particularly extraordinary.

17:34It's an amazing story. So I don't think there's any reason why Britain can't recover.

17:40Amol Rajan:Can we end on an optimistic note? You mentioned lessons from history, German story post Second World War and so forth. Optimism itself feels to me rather a radical thing these days. Why be optimistic about Britain in 2026? Well, I think we're a civilized country. We have a very, very strong intellectual life, especially in the sciences. We are a scientific superpower, certainly relative to our size. We have basically good values. I think that there is a real problem about our political system and whether it attracts the best people. This is a serious issue. And I think that one of the effects of the media and social media has been to make it very rough to get into a position in British politics.

18:35That's something which we've got to find a way of dealing with. But by and large, the people who come to rulers are basically well-intentioned people with not bad values. and we've got tremendous strength and depth in the country. And I would be surprised if in 50 years' time, Britain, France and Germany, plus the smaller countries in Europe, weren't still thought of as the most civilised parts of the world.

19:09Amol Rajan:What a wonderful and happy note on which to end. You've certainly increased the happiness of our listeners in these conversations. Richard, thank you so much. Thank you. It's such a pleasure to get to know you. Thank you all so much for your questions. Thank you, Richard, for answering them. I'll be back with another episode of Radical on Thursday. But until then, from Richard Layard and from me, goodbye.

19:34Amol Rajan:Silence in court. I'm Lucy Worsley. And in my brand new series, I'll be hearing about the women involved in some of history's most infamous legal battles. Women accused of murder, bigamy and adultery. through to the shocking offence of not knowing their place. With a team of all-female detectives, I'll explore the lives at the centre of some extraordinary courtroom dramas, asking, has the justice system truly changed? Lady on Trial with Lucy Worsley from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds.

20:15Amol Rajan:Is the American dream still possible? I'm Asma Khalid, one of the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. One of the most successful exports the United States has ever sold the world is the American dream, that tantalizing promise of a better, freer, richer life. But is it still attainable? I feel like the American dream is alive but not well. For more, listen to the Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.