Layard's Lectures

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Richard Layard's Lectures (Happiness: Has Social Science a Clue?)

1st Lecture: "What is happiness? Are we getting happier?"

Definition

• Layard defines happiness as feeling good - enjoying life and feeling it is wonderful. He defines unhappiness as feeling bad and wishing things were different. He believes that there are countless sources of happiness, and countless sources of pain and misery.
• He believes that all of our experiences have a dimension which correspond to how good or bad we feel.

The fluctuation of mood

• People's feelings fluctuate from hour to hour and from day to day.
• But can people identify what feelings they are feeling? In other words, do the feelings which people report correspond accurately to reality?

Evidence from neuro-science

• To understand how the economy actually affects our well-being, we have to use psychology as well as economics.
• Layard says that we need to be sure that when people say they feel something, there is a corresponding event that can actually be measured. Thanks to work done by psychologists over the last 20 years, in which they have been studying feelings in great depth - measuring them, comparing them across people, and explaining them - we know that the feelings which people report correspond closely to activities in the brain which we can measure. The main finding is that positive feelings correspond to brain activity in the left side of the pre-frontal cortex, and negative feelings correspond to brain activity in right side of the pre-frontal cortex.

The desire to feel good

• Approach and avoidance
  • Psychologists believe that we are always, often subconsciously, evaluating our situation and the elements in it. They also believe that we are attracted to the favourable elements and seek to have them or to prolong them; and we are repelled by the unfavourable elements and seek to avoid them or try to bring them to an end.
• There is a subconscious, evaluative mechanism in all of us that tells us how happy we are and it then directs our actions towards improving our happiness. From the various possibilities open to us, we choose whichever combination of activities will make us feel best.
• This is similar to the economic model of happiness. We want to be happy and we act to promote our own happiness, given the possibilities open to us.

The overall social outcome

• The standard economic model
  • Private actions and exchanges can make someone happy without effecting anyone else's happiness.
  • The higher the real wage, the happier the population.
• What is wrong with this model?
  • The standard economic model assumes that everyone has constant tastes. It does not take into effect that our wants, once we are above the required level to survive, are largely affected by society. Our wants are major factors affecting our happiness.

Trends in happiness

• When asked: "Would you say you are very happy, pretty happy or not too happy?"

• People in the US have got no happier in the last 50 years. They have become much richer, they work much less, they have longer holidays, they travel more, they live longer, and they are healthier, but they are no happier.

Comparing happiness across countries

Trends in depression and crime

Bentham: "In the eighteenth century Bentham and other proposed that the object of public policy should be to maximize the sum of happiness in society. So economics evolved as the study of utility or happiness, which was assumed to be in principle measurable and comparable across people." "Bentham also believed that happiness matters because it is what people want. Indeed he argued that in the end all actions are driven by the desire to feel good."

1st lecture: [1]

2nd Lecture: "Income and happiness: rethinking economic policy."

2nd lecture: [2]

3rd Lecture: "How can we make a happier society?"

In this lecture, Layard focuses on 7 main factors that are affected by happiness

1. Income
   • If a society's income as a whole falls, individuals will not be impacted because every one in the community suffers.
2. Work
   • Unemployment is a disaster
     • Trying to keep low unemployment should be a goal for governments
     • In most instances, having any job is better than none
     • Welfare-to-work should be implemented
   • job-security
     • if people have secure jobs, they tend to be happier
     • governments should provide reasonable job security to members of the community
     • pace of work also impacts workers because the pressure for them to reach certain targets. This pressure leads to stress
     • Although everyone does not have the same preferences, everyone wants job security
3. Private Life
   • geographical mobility
     • economists favor geographical mobility but there are some problems with people always moving
     • increases family break up and criminality
   • growing up and staying in the same community creates closer ties amoung individuals. Individuals in these communities are more trustworthy
   • individuals that move around a lot sometimes become less bonded to others
4. Health
   • mental health is very important to happiness
     • mental disorders lead to unhappiness such as depression
5. Community
   • Happiness is not only affected by how you treat yourself but how you treat others as well
   • how you perceive others is important too
   • issue of trust
     • people are happier if they can trust others
6. Philosophy of life
   • over the years there has been a decline in religious belief
   • an individual can obtain happiness from not being self interested but rather from the good fortune of others
7. Freedom
   • Communist governments were not well received by the people which caused unhappiness
   • post-Communism countries, such as Hungary, are much happier with their government

3rd lecture: [3]

These lectures were accessed through the London School of Economics and Political Science website, at http://www.lse.ac.uk/.

Happiness studies main page: [[4]]