Richard Layard, Baron Layard

Last updated

The Right Honourable
The Lord Layard
FBA FAcSS
Lord Layard 2006.jpg
Lord Layard in 2006
Member of the House of Lords
Lord Temporal
Assumed office
3 May 2000
Life Peerage
Personal details
Born
Peter Richard Grenville Layard

(1934-03-15) 15 March 1934 (age 90)
Nationality British
Political party Labour
Spouse Molly, Baroness Meacher
Education Eton College
Alma mater

Peter Richard Grenville Layard, Baron Layard FBA (born 15 March 1934) is a British labour economist, co-director of the Community Wellbeing programme at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, and co-editor of the World Happiness Report. [1] Layard is an economist who wants public policy to be targeted at the wellbeing of the people. To this end he has written 6 books and some 40 articles.

Contents

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.

Family and education

Peter Richard Grenville Layard is the son of John Layard and his wife Doris. He was educated at Eton College, where he was a King's scholar; at King's College, Cambridge; and at the London School of Economics.

Work

Layard was Senior Research Officer for the Robbins Committee on Higher Education, and later developed a reputation in the economics of education (with Mark Blaug at LSE), and in labour economics (in particular with Stephen Nickell).

Labour economics

In the 1980s he and his colleagues developed the Layard-Nickell model of how the level of unemployment is determined. This has become the most commonly used model by European economists and governments. It assigns an important role to how unemployed people are treated, and provides the intellectual basis for the welfare-to-work policies introduced in many countries, including Britain, Germany and Denmark.

The basic message is in Unemployment: Macroeconomic Performance and the Labour Market. This was first published in 1991, and a second edition in 2005 showed how well the model predicted the development of unemployment in different countries over the years between 1991 and 2003.

Drawing on this work, Layard was active in the policy field on unemployment, both in the UK and outside. In 1985 he founded the Employment Institute to press for welfare to work policies, and his proposals were largely implemented in 2007 in the Labour Party’s New Deal policies for young people, and then older adults. His influence also spread to Europe. In the 1980s he was Chairman of the European Commission’s Macroeconomic Policy Group and in the 1990s the Hartz reforms in Germany were influenced by his work. From 1997 to 2001 he was a part-time consultant to the British government on welfare-to-work and vocational education.

On inequality, his work shows the key role of education in influencing the income of individuals and families. He has been a strong advocate of better vocational education (including apprenticeship) for less academic youngsters. The case he made led to major increases in apprenticeship and the 2009 Apprenticeship Act which guaranteed access to an apprenticeship for qualified applicants (unfortunately repealed).

He advocated many of the policies which characterised the New Labour government, particularly the New Deal, partly by founding the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. He supported the idea of welfare-to-work, where social welfare payments are structured in a way that encourages (or forces) recipients back into the job market.

As well as academic positions, Layard worked as an advisor for numerous organisations, including government institutions in the United Kingdom and Russia.

In 1990 he was founder-director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics where he is presently a programme director. The Centre has become one of Europe's leading research institutes

Happiness and wellbeing

Layard became active in the study of what has since come to be known as happiness economics. This branch of economic analysis starts from the argument that income is a bad approximation for happiness. He has always believed, as in the 18th Century Enlightenment, that societies should be judged by the happiness of the people. And since the 1970s he has urged fellow economists to return to the idea that public policy should maximise a social welfare function depending on the distribution of happiness. In 1980 he wrote (according to Richard Easterlin) "the first paper to focus specifically on the policy implications of empirical research on happiness". In 2005 he wrote Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, which was published in 20 languages.

In his early research on wellbeing, he focused heavily on the role of relative income as a determinant of wellbeing. He showed how in many countries the income of one’s reference group reduces one’s own happiness – and he showed the implications of this for tax policy and the measurement of the “excess burden” of taxes. He also studied (with co-authors) the form of the income-happiness relationship. This pioneering and much-quoted study found that happiness was approximately linear in log income.

He then turned to the whole range of influences on wellbeing as it develops over the life cycle, using longitudinal data from 4 countries. This co-authored work was published in 2014 and more fully in a book called The Origins of Happiness: The science of wellbeing over the life course (2018). It revealed, among other things, the huge impact of schools and teachers upon subsequent wellbeing, and the huge role that the independent variation of mental health plays in explaining the variance of wellbeing.

Mental health

Given this, he argued strongly for more attention to mental health, both as a key factor affecting wellbeing, but also as an important factor of production affecting productivity and employment. He argued that the economics is quite different for mental and physical health. Mental illness is mainly a disease of working age, with huge economic costs, while physical illness is mainly a disease of retirement. Thus, inexpensive treatments for mental illness will pay for themselves in reduced welfare and increased taxes.

Working together with the distinguished psychologist David M. Clark in 2007 resulted in the development of Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT), an initiative to improve access to psychological therapies in the United Kingdom. [2] It established a new psychological therapy service for anxiety disorders and depression (renamed in 2023 to NHS Talking Therapies). This was established in 2008 and now treats over 700,000 people a year, of whom half recover within an average of 8 sessions of treatment. The programme has paid for itself and has been copied in 5 other countries. In a series of co-authored articles he showed how psychological therapy affected employment and thus paid for itself in savings on welfare benefits and lost taxes. This work also showed what factors affected the recovery rates in different local services. This led to significant improvements in recovery rates. He summarised his analysis on mental health in a book (co-authored with Clark) called Thrive (2014).

He also helped develop a major programme for mental health prevention in schools. This was a weekly 4-year curriculum in life skills for pupils aged 11-15 called Healthy Minds. It was highly manualised and when evaluated in a randomised trial in 32 schools, was found to be highly cost-effective.  

Wellbeing science

Meantime in 2012 he became a founder co-editor of the annual World Happiness Report in which he has written numerous articles. In one of these (2021) he published the first estimates of the Wellbeing-Years (WELLBYs) a person could expect to experience if born in different areas of the world. His central aim has always been to develop wellbeing science to the point where it can provide key evidence for the selection of all policy priorities. In 2014 he laid out the framework for this approach in one chapter of the report Wellbeing and Policy, chaired by Gus O’Donnell. But the crucial need was to bring together the evidence on all the factors which affect wellbeing. In 2023 he did this in the first comprehensive textbook on wellbeing (with Jan Emmanuel De Neve) – Wellbeing: Science and Policy. This aims to persuade policy-makers that wellbeing is a feasible goal for them, and also to develop the cadre of trained analysts to help them target it. As the book makes clear, the aim is not to supplant traditional cost-benefit analysis (based on revealed preference), but to supplement it in the myriad of cases where revealed preference can provide no plausible evidence, but direct measures of wellbeing can. Layard’s current research is focused on showing how this approach can illuminate public priorities through worked examples of benefit/cost ratios across the whole field of policy.

Wellbeing policy

Layard’s policy work has reached far beyond mental health. He has been a major leader in the effort to put wellbeing at the centre of the movement to go “Beyond GDP”.  In 2010 he persuaded the British Prime Minister David Cameron  that wellbeing would be a major government objective, and be regularly measured in the national statistics. The measures were then recommended by the OECD to all member countries. More recently his team have been influential in getting evidence on subjective wellbeing officially accepted in the UK Treasury's manual on subjective evaluations. Internationally,  he chaired the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Health and Wellbeing, which in 2012 launched a report at Davos “WellBeing and Global Success”.  

Since then the World Happiness Report has provided a stream of evidence for policy-makers on the ways in which they can improve the wellbeing of their people. Layard summarised more of the evidence on what can be done in each sphere of life in Can We Be Happier? (2020). Layard has co-founded two movements to promote the wellbeing of society. One, called Action for Happiness (founded in 2012), is a popular movement for personal change to produce a happier world. It now has 600,000 members and 6,000 trained volunteers providing courses and leading groups. The other is the World Wellbeing Movement (founded in 2022), a top-down movement targeted at decision-makers.

Subsequent books have included "The Good Childhood" (2009), [3] Thrive (2014) [4] Thrive (2014), Can We Be Happier?: Evidence and Ethics (2020), [5] and Wellbeing: Science and Policy (2020) [6]

Other roles

Russia

From 1991-1997 he was a part-time economic adviser to the Russian Government, and co-authored The Coming Russian Boom (1996), which correctly forecast the rapid growth in Russia over the following years.

House of Lords

In 2000 he was made a member of the House of Lords. He has served on various Committees including the Gambling Industry Committee, Youth Unemployment Committee and for much of his peerage, since 2004, has been a member of its Economic Affairs Committee.

Climate change

In 2015, he was co-author of the report that launched the Global Apollo Programme, which calls for developed nations to commit to spending 0.02% of their GDP for 10 years, to fund co-ordinated research to make carbon-free baseload electricity less costly than electricity from coal by the year 2025. [7]

Critique

Recent research on happiness questioning part of Baron Layard's thesis and suggesting that people do obtain happiness from increased income [8] forms part of ongoing investigations into the Easterlin Paradox. [9]

Personal life

In 1991, he married Molly Christine Meacher, who was formerly married to Michael Meacher. Molly, styled Lady Layard between 2000 and 2006, was herself created a life peer in 2006 as Baroness Meacher. They are one of the few couples to both hold titles in their own right.

Layard has said he was strongly Christian at school, lost his faith at university, and in his later years 'has to be believe there is some purpose in the universe... which gives me comfort.' [10]

Honours

In 2000 he was made a Labour peer of the House of Lords.In 2003, Layard was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). [11] In 2016, he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS). [12] In 2020, the Economic and Social Research Council recognised Richard Layard with a rare Lifetime Achievement Award to celebrate the outstanding contribution he has made to social science and society in the UK and beyond.

Selected bibliography

Books

Arms

Coat of arms of Richard Layard, Baron Layard
Coronet
Coronet of a Baron
Crest
Out of a Ducal Coronet Or, a Mullet of six-points radiated Or, pierced Gules.
Escutcheon
Quarterly: 1st & 4th, Gules, a Chevron between in chief two Mullets of six-points radiated Or, pierced Gules, and in base a Crescent Argent, on a Chief Azure, three Mullets of six-points Or, pierced Gules (Layard); 2nd, Gules, a Cross Or, in the dexter canton a Lion rampant supporting an Anchor erect with Cable Or (Croze, anciently Croissy); 3rd, Vert, three Doves volant Argent (Balaire).

See also

Related Research Articles

Quality of life (QOL) is defined by the World Health Organization as "an individual's perception of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals, expectations, standards and concerns".

David Graham Blanchflower,, sometimes called Danny Blanchflower, is a British-American labour economist and academic. He is currently a tenured economics professor at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, part-time professor at the University of Glasgow and a Bloomberg TV contributing editor. He was an external member of the Bank of England's interest rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) from June 2006 to June 2009.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Oswald</span> British economist and academic

Andrew Oswald is a Professor of Economics and Behavioural Science at the University of Warwick, England. He is an ISI highly cited researcher and has been a professorial fellow of the ESRC. He is currently a member of the board of reviewing editors of Science. He held previous posts at Oxford, the London School of Economics, Princeton, Dartmouth and Harvard. Andrew Oswald serves as the chair of the IZA Institute Network Advisory Group.

The economics of happiness or happiness economics is the theoretical, qualitative and quantitative study of happiness and quality of life, including positive and negative affects, well-being, life satisfaction and related concepts – typically tying economics more closely than usual with other social sciences, like sociology and psychology, as well as physical health. It typically treats subjective happiness-related measures, as well as more objective quality of life indices, rather than wealth, income or profit, as something to be maximized.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Molly Meacher, Baroness Meacher</span> British politician (born 1940)

Molly Christine Meacher, Baroness Meacher, known from 2000 to 2006 as Lady Layard, is a British life peer and former social worker.

The Easterlin paradox is a finding in happiness economics formulated in 1974 by Richard Easterlin, then professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and the first economist to study happiness data. The paradox states that at a point in time happiness varies directly with income both among and within nations, but over time happiness does not trend upward as income continues to grow: while people on higher incomes are typically happier than their lower-income counterparts at a given point in time, higher incomes don't produce greater happiness over time. One explanation is that my happiness depends on a comparison between my income and my perceptions of the average standard of living. If everyone's income increases, my increased income gives a short boost to my happiness, since I do not realize that the average standard of living has gone up. Some time later, I realize that the average standard of living has also gone up, so the happiness boost produced by my increased income disappears. It is the contradiction between the point-of-time and time series findings that is the root of the paradox: while there is a correlation at a fixed point, there is no trend over multiple points. That is, in the short run, everyone perceives increases in income to be correlated with happiness and tries to increase their incomes. However, in the long run, this proves to be an illusion, since everyone's efforts to raise standards of living lead to increasing averages, leaving everyone in the same place in terms of relative income. Various theories have been advanced to explain the Paradox, but the Paradox itself is solely an empirical generalization. The existence of the paradox has been strongly disputed by other researchers.

Lars Osberg has been a member of the Economics Department at Dalhousie University since 1977. He also worked for a brief period at the University of Western Ontario. He is well known internationally for his contributions in the field of economics. His major research interests are the measurement and determinants of inequality, social exclusion and poverty, measurement of economic well-being, leisure co-ordination and economic well-being, time use and economic development, economic insecurity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Relational goods</span>

Relational goods are non-material goods that can only be produced and consumed within groups, and which are intrinsically linked to relationships and interaction. Popular examples include the enjoyment of a football game in a stadium, where the collective enjoyment of the game adds a relational good in terms of excitement and enjoyment to all in the stadium. This constitutes an experience that cannot be had when watching alone. Other examples include group charity work, friendship or reciprocal love. Relational goods can be necessary for the optimization of an activity like the football game example. On the other hand, like Nussbaum suggest, a relational good may be the relationship in itself, with the good being dependent on the existence of the relationship. Friendships is an example of a relationship in which the value that come from the relationship are tied up in the existence and maintenance of the relationship.

Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT), also known as NHS Talking Therapies, for anxiety and depression, is a National Health Service initiative to provide more psychotherapy to the general population in England. It was developed and introduced by the Labour Party as a result of economic evaluations by Professor Lord Richard Layard, based on new therapy guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence as promoted by clinical psychologist David M. Clark.

Bernard Marinus Siegfried van Praag is a Dutch economist, and distinguished university professor at the University of Amsterdam, noted for researching the measurement of welfare, as well-being and happiness.

Action for Happiness (AfH) is a global movement and charity based in the United Kingdom. It aims to increase the happiness in the world by bringing together people and supporting them to take practical action to build a happier society. The patron of Action for Happiness is the Dalai Lama. The movement has over 270,000 members in 190 countries.

Subjective well-being (SWB) is a self-reported measure of well-being, typically obtained by questionnaire.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Dolan (behavioural scientist)</span> British behavioural scientist (born 1968)

Paul Dolan is Professor of Behavioural Science in the Department in Psychological and Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is Director of the Executive MSc in Behavioural Science which began in September 2014. Dolan conducts research on the measurement of happiness, its causes and consequences, and the implications for public policy, publishing in both scholarly and popular outlets. He has previously held academic posts at York, Newcastle, Sheffield and Imperial College London and he has been a visiting scholar at Princeton University. He is the author of two popular press books: Happiness by Design and Happy Ever After and the creator and presenter of the Duck-Rabbit podcast.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">World Happiness Report</span> Publication ranking national happiness based on respondent ratings of their lives

The World Happiness Report is a publication that contains articles and rankings of national happiness, based on respondent ratings of their own lives, which the report also correlates with various life factors. The report primarily uses data from the Gallup World Poll. As of March 2024, Finland has been ranked the happiest country in the world seven times in a row.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Centre for Economic Performance</span>

The Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) is an interdisciplinary research centre at the London School of Economics dedicated to the study of economic growth and effective ways to create a fair, inclusive and sustainable society. Currently led by Prof. Stephen Machin, it is one of the world's most prestigious economic research institutes, being the most important economic research institute in the United Kingdom, jointly with the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Its research performance has been particularly strong in the research areas of labour economics, productivity, happiness economics, human capital, the knowledge economy, ICT, innovation, education, and European microeconomic issues.

Gross National Well-being (GNW), also known as Gross National Wellness, is a socioeconomic development and measurement framework. The GNW Index consists of seven dimensions: economic, environmental, physical, mental, work, social, and political. Most wellness areas include both subjective results and objective data.

The World Happiness Council is a think tank of politicians and researchers based in the United Arab Emirates, intended to promote happiness and subjective well-being through the identification of public policy for policymakers worldwide and the standardization of happiness as a measure to guide governments.

Well-being is a multifaceted topic studied in psychology, especially positive psychology. Biologically, well-being is highly influenced by endogenous molecules that impact happiness and euphoria in organisms, often referred to as "well-being related markers". Related concepts are eudaimonia, happiness, flourishing, quality of life, contentment, and meaningful life.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jan-Emmanuel De Neve</span> Belgian economist and professor

Jan-Emmanuel De Neve is a Belgian economist and University of Oxford professor where he directs the Wellbeing Research Centre. He is known for his research on the economics of wellbeing which has led to new insights into the relationship between wellbeing and income, productivity, firm performance, and economic growth.

Money worship is a type of money disorder. The core driver of this behaviour is the belief that having more money will lead to greater happiness in the afterlife.In modern society, "money is revered, feared, worshipped, and treated with the highest respect". It is doubted that money cannot buy everything when people sell their organs, souls, and even children for money. Individuals with this disorder are obsessed with the idea that obtaining more money is necessary to make progress in life and, at the same time, convinced that they will never have enough money to fulfil their needs or desires.

References

  1. ↑ "World Happiness Report" (PDF). Earth.columbia.edu. Retrieved 3 July 2022.
  2. ↑ "Fit for purpose". The Guardian. London. 18 February 2009. Retrieved 26 April 2009.
  3. ↑ A good childhood: Searching for values in a competitive age. Penguin UK. 2009. ISBN   978-0-14-191053-6.
  4. ↑ Thrive. Penguin UK. 2014.
  5. ↑ Can We be Happier?: Evidence and Ethics. Pelican. 23 January 2020.
  6. ↑ Wellbeing: Science and Policy. Cambridge University Press. March 2023.
  7. ↑ Carrington, Damian. "Global Apollo programme seeks to make clean energy cheaper than coal". The Guardian . No. 2 June 2015. Guardian News Media . Retrieved 2 June 2015.
  8. ↑ Stevenson, Betsey; Wolfers, Justin (2008). "Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox" (PDF). Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. 2008: 1–87. doi:10.1353/eca.0.0001. JSTOR   27561613. S2CID   245905976. (comments and discussion pp. 88–102).
  9. ↑ "Can Money Buy Happiness? Take 15 with Justin Wolfers (Video)". Blogs.cfainstitute.org. 11 November 2014.
  10. ↑ "Richard Layard's Confessions – History, happiness and mental health". Soundcloud.com. Retrieved 3 July 2022.
  11. ↑ "Professor Lord (Richard) Layard of Highgate". British Academy. Retrieved 5 August 2017.
  12. ↑ "Eighty-four leading social scientists conferred as Fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences". Academy of Social Sciences. 19 October 2016. Archived from the original on 6 June 2019. Retrieved 5 August 2017.
Orders of precedence in the United Kingdom
Preceded by Gentlemen
Baron Layard		Followed by
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.