Almost any product can be branded, in the wearisome idiom of advertising, a “revolution”. So it is with the happiness industry which, in Richard Layard’s brash sales pitch, is both a “happiness revolution” and a “world happiness movement”. This book is a long-form advertisement that brooks no dissent – a breathless tribute to the “science of happiness”, encompassing “mind-training”, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and behavioural economics. No one could be better placed to write this than New Labour’s former “happiness tsar”.
It was Layard, as he reminds readers, who persuaded New Labour to offer CBT to depressed and anxious patients on the NHS. Despite a glut of studies challenging the efficacy of the treatment, he has lost none of his confidence in it. Indeed, far from engaging with the bad news, he now suggests it can treat everything from schizophrenia to domestic abusers. Neither the backlash against the happiness industry, nor questions about the integrity of mindfulness – a bowdlerisation of Buddhist meditation – are acknowledged, much less allowed to check his enthusiasm. The book approaches even its most cliched subjects, from 18th-century moral philosophy to New Age thought, with new-born astonishment.
Can We Be Happier? is a work of passion, a culmination of decades of research. It groans with statistics, factoids and allusions to neuroscientific studies. It is extensively bullet-pointed, leavened with cartoons and laden with diagrams of the simplest points – lest the reader fail to grasp that Jane’s behaviour can affect both her own happiness and that of others. It concludes with a blank square, slightly larger than a business card, inviting the reader to fill in “My Personal Manifesto to Myself”. This book has exceedingly low expectations of its audience.
The “movement” whose virtues it carols consists of “enlightened teachers, managers, community workers and volunteers” all working towards one key idea. Happiness, they agree, is the goal of every society. It can be measured and explained, and changed by policy. Societies must be judged by the happiness of their citizens, especially the least happy. Policy must be informed by this “ethics of happiness”, and it must avail itself of “the science of happiness” and the emerging discipline of “mind-training”. Crucially, economists should get “actively involved” in all areas of happiness and unhappiness because “they have the right analytical tools for the job”. This is understandable, since Layard is an economist. It is, though, decreasingly apparent that economists have the right tools to analyse the economy, let alone feelings. And one wonders if this is really the moment for another exercise in the imperialism of economic reason.
The founding dogma of this book is that happiness – and not, say, serving God, or enlightenment, or social revolution – is the goal of all human endeavour. Whatever is good makes people feel better in some way. This is alarmingly close to the economist’s recursive reasoning wherein everything that is good adds “utility”. The persuasiveness of such statements depends on no one unpacking exactly what “utility”, or “happiness” for that matter, consists of. Yet Layard’s expedient sweeping of big questions under the rhetorical rug gives rise to methodological incoherence. He relies on world happiness surveys as the basis of his data, and all the correlations and causal inferences he extrapolates. How can happiness be meaningfully measured across all countries, regions, classes, genders, religions and ethnicities, and always mean the same thing? Layard says that we can trust people’s statements about their mental state because there is a “good correlation” between what they say, and “objective measurements taken from the brain”. This, the footnote suggests, refers to a 1990 neuroscientific experiment by Richard Davidson: test subjects were shown short emotional films and the electrical activity in their brains measured. Yet this concerns not the background “life satisfaction” that Layard is trying to assess, but transitory emotional responses to a stimulus. It doesn’t back up Layard’s methodology. It just invokes, as the book often does, the irresistible authority of brain science.
Layard is no less slapdash in drawing his inferences. Where he finds a correlation, he immediately infers causation. Findings show that a child’s happiness is strongly correlated with which primary and secondary school she attends. The author concludes that teachers and classroom methods are the main drivers of childhood happiness. He does not entertain the alternative hypothesis that attendance at a specific school is correlated with other social factors giving rise to emotional problems, such as poverty. This approach becomes jarringly recursive. We are told that mental illness, defined as being diagnosed with depression or anxiety, is a strong cause of unhappiness. This is to say, suffering is caused by suffering. Layard goes further, asserting that mental illness is a bigger factor in unhappiness than low incomes. He declines to consider whether, mental illness being correlated with low incomes, poverty brings with it circumstances that make people unwell. By the time he is trumpeting the alleged successes of CBT, Layard’s handling of the data is verging on propagandistic.
What, though, is the hard sell in aid of? Politically, it seems, the answer is third way communitarianism. Layard rejects “extreme liberalism” in favour of “reciprocal obligation”. The “decline of deference” may have gone too far, contributing to the rise of “populism”. “Healthy competition” is “healthy” but not the “be-all-and-end-all”. Redistribution is good, but “the proportion of GNP which is raised in taxes has to be taken as given” – no raising taxes on profits or wealth. The poor should be given services, not cash transfers, since “people’s choices are inefficient – they fail to choose what will in fact make them happiest”. Welfare should be workfare. The author celebrates his role in persuading New Labour to offer young people low-paying jobs on pain of losing benefits, as this would make them happier than the rut of dependence.
One byproduct of the author’s breezy confidence that “we” know what happiness is, and that it is what life is for, is thus a creeping paternalism. This extends from the workplace to the home. Layard is astonished to find that people are least happy in the company of the boss, and that work is among the least pleasurable things we can do. He blames the problem on management philosophy. Bosses should inspire, value and pursue employee wellbeing. They should be trained to notice and inquire about possible mental health issues. As though employees might not dread that conversation. Or worry about bosses extending their reach into what William Davies calls the “surveillance, management and government of our feelings”. The obviously diverging interests of labour and capital are tellingly elided in this book. As to the potentially diverging interests of wives and husbands, the book genuinely suggests that not only can CBT solve marital grief, but it can also fix domestic abuse. The state, that is, should prescribe CBT to keep violently abusive relationships together. Much else in the book is humane, but this is verging on sinister.
Lynne Segal has suggested that the “happiness agenda” ought to be named the “misery agenda”. She reasons that it adapts citizens to the causes of their misery, rather than addressing them. This book seems determined to prove that point.
• Can We Be Happier? by Richard Layard with George Ward is published by Pelican (RRP £22). To buy a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.
