Richard Layard
Peter Richard Grenville Layard, Baron Layard FBA, is a British labour economist, currently working as programme director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics.
His early career focused on how to reduce unemployment and inequality. He was Senior Research Officer for the famous Robbins Committee on Higher Education. This committee's report led to the massive expansion of UK university education in the 1960s and 1970s.
Following research on happiness begun in the 1970s by economists such as Richard Easterlin at the University of Southern California, he has written about the economics of happiness, with one theme being the importance of non-income variables on aggregate happiness, including mental health.
His main current interest is how better mental health could improve our social and economic life. His work on mental health, including publishing The Depression Report in 2006, led to the establishment of the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme in England. He is co-editor of the World Happiness Report, with John F. Helliwell and Jeffrey Sachs.
“We need a revolution in academia, with every social science attempting tounderstand the causes of happiness.”
“External effects are everywhere. Almost every major transaction we make affects other people who are not a party to the transaction. When someone buys a Lexus, he sets a new standard for the street. When a firm advertises a Barbie doll, it creates a want that was not there before.”
“It is actually a rather sorry tale. In the late nineteenth century most English economists thought that economics was about happiness. They thought of a persons happiness as in principle measurable, like temperature, and they thought we could compare one persons happiness with anothers. They also assumed that extra income brought less and less extra happiness as a person got richer.”
“The more television people watch, the more they overestimate the affluence of other people. And the lower they rate their own relative income. The result is that they are less happy.”
“No society can work unless its members feel responsibilities as well as rights.”