Quotes from Richard Layard

No society can work unless its members feel responsibilities as well as rights.

We need a revolution in academia, with every social science attempting to understand the causes of happiness.

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.

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.

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.

Continuous reoptimization (sometimes dignified by the name "flexibility") is the real enemy of happiness, as can be observed among young people who spend the day reorganizing their evening arrangements each time a better opportunity arises.

Society takes enormous trouble over who is allowed to adopt a child, but none about who is allowed to produce one. This has led the psychologist David Lykken to suggest that parents should have to get a licence before child-bearing, or otherwise risk the danger that their child will be taken away for adoption.

The rich are so near the top that their reference group is likely to include people who are poorer that the are, while the poor are so near the bottom that their reference group is likely to include people who are richer than they are. That helps to explain why the rich are on average happier than the poor.

Viktor Frankl concluded that in the last resort "everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances."4