JOY TO THE WORLD

‘A large income,” wrote Jane Austen, “is the best recipe for happiness …” By and large, economists have tended to agree. But it’s the income, not the happiness, that has been their subject of study, the means rather than the end. After all, happiness is a fleeting emotion, not something that can be analysed, quantified, modelled and predicted. Money, by contrast, is reliably mathematical.

That’s why the most important metric for a nation’s living standards has long been the value of its goods and services, what’s known as its gross domestic product (GDP). The modern understanding of GDP dates from 1934, when Russian-American economist Simon Kuznets introduced it to a US Congress report. Tellingly, Kuznets warned against taking GDP as a measure of welfare. It was a warning that went mostly unheeded, at least until very recently.

But in recent years the science of “happiness economics” has been steadily gaining attention and influence. Arguably, its most respected proponent is Richard Layard, programme director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics (LSE).

Layard is an intriguing character. The son of the distinguished British anthropologist and Jungian psychologist John Layard, he used to run his fingers over a bump on his father’s head when he was a child. Before he met Richard’s mother, his father explained, he was depressed and he placed a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He somehow survived, though he had to have the bullet removed from his skull, leaving the scar that fascinated his young son.

Learning that your father had tried to kill himself might have troubled many other young boys, but Layard was more interested in his father’s work with his patients. From an early age, he nurtured a desire to help improve people’s lives. Having abandoned his plan to become a psychiatrist, he became a teacher and then an economist who