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

**Amol Rajan** (0:08)
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 plain old Richard for the next 20 minutes?
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. 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?

**Richard Layard** (0:51)
One of them.

**Amol Rajan** (0:51)
One of them. You're the main reason that we've got talking therapies on the NHS which has now helped 8 million people.
You're the reason that David Cameron instituted the measuring of well-being, which still goes on today.

**Richard Layard** (1:04)
Others were involved in all of it.

**Amol Rajan** (1:07)
I'm married to an academic, so I know all about sharing credit. We've had lots of questions for you, Richard, from people who are very 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, Fatima, that's a lot of questions. Let's take them in order. First of all, Richard, should medical training prioritize well-being literacy or is that asking medicine to solve a political failure?

**Richard Layard** (2:18)
Well, I think it's very important that doctors have a holistic view of patients. That's important because, in particular, the inter-relation 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, the body is an incredibly complicated thing.
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. So 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 are 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 to call them customers, so that they feel that they are being treated as one person.

**Amol Rajan** (3:45)
I will come back to Fatma's other questions in just a minute, but it's worth saying, 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?

**Richard Layard** (4:22)
Well, 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-collar people.
So somehow that imbalance has got to be rectified.

**Amol Rajan** (4:43)
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 wellbeing carries its own risk, that measuring and professionalising happiness might quietly undermine the very thing that produces it?