Happiness & Public Policy

I haven’t piled on Richard Layard for a while now. So isn’t it time?

I found this transcript from an interview show on Autralian radio. I’ll emphasize the especially annoying bits:

Finally, let me end on values. Some people think values are a private matter; of course they never have been. In every society people have been concerned with the values which other people’s children absorb, because they affect all of us. So it’s very important what kind of values are being offered to our children in our schools. Now in a recent WHO survey, this is of 11- to 15-year-olds, they were asked ‘Do you agree with the statement that most of the students in my classes are kind and helpful?’ Here are the answers: Sweden, 77% yes; Germany, 76%; Denmark, 73%; USA, 53%; Russia, 46%; England, 43%.

Now I think that this is a pretty depressing picture, and it corresponds rather closely to another set of questions which I’ve often been asked of the population, namely, ‘Do you think most other people can be trusted?’ In Scandinavia, again they’re up in very high numbers, and in Britain, much lower and in both Britain and the USA, the numbers saying yes have halved in the last 40 years. And I attribute this to the growth of individualism, and it’s interesting that on the Continent the numbers of people who think other people can be trusted has not fallen.

So by individualism I mean the belief – which I think is becoming increasingly spread about by teachers, parents, media – that your main duty is to make the most of yourself, make the most of your life; this may be where we’re going to disagree. The extreme version of this is that your job is to get ahead of other people. Getting ahead is a completely hopeless objective for a society because it’s impossible for everybody to get ahead of everybody else, it’s a zero sum game and we shouldn’t be getting people putting their energy into zero sum games. I want schools to teach people that their job is to contribute to the happiness of others and to find happiness from doing that. So I want schools to teach people that their job is to contribute to the happiness of others and to find happiness from doing that. My feeling, however, is that it’s difficult for schools on their own to change a society, or to change a culture. So I’m currently looking for a city. I think you could do this perhaps more at the level of a city. If you could get a city to decide that its aim was to be a friendly city in which people felt the world was a friendly place, that that was taught in schools, that that was the ethos of local services, how they related to citizens, ethos of the police, ethos in the NHS – if that was what employers thought was their job to help enable their workers to lead satisfying lives and to feel that the world was on their side; I think we could do an interesting experiment because we could measure the outcomes. What is this doing to mental health admissions? What is this doing to offending rates? Now Albert Einstein once said that the key question is whether the universe is a friendly place. I think that’s a rather big question, but I do think that the key question is whether the world is a friendly place, and I do think the government can do a lot to determine how we answer that question. Thank you. [Applause]

Layard simply cannot abide the thought of pluralism. His system rejects it like some kind of philosophical virus. Naturally, our values affect other people, since our values affect our behavior. So this means, what? To Layard it means that a centralized body, the public schools, must socially condition children to have the correct values, namely Layard’s. Or you take a whole city. Don’t you like how whole cities can have aims? Somehow I don’t imagine Layard thinking all the citizens agree on a common aim, namely Layard’s. Of course they don’t. That’s because some of them (most of them?) are just wrong! The city is a benevolant dictatorship that runs everything in people’s lives: the police, schools, all health care. When it is said that a city has an aim, it is meant that the benevolent dictator, namely Layard, has an aim. But we should be happy about that, since the dictator is benevolent! Benevolent dictators know the truth about the good as it is illuminated by “science” and use the institutions that run our lives in order to condition all of us to have the values that will lead us to want to make each other happy. Be careful not to want to make yourself happy! That’s individualism, and that’s bad. But if everybody is trying to make somebody else happy, then it’ll come back around to you!

This stuff is seriously noxious. Perhaps it occurs to Layard that the decline in trust in the US corresponds with the rise of the American welfare state, which is just to say, the breakdown of community through the externalization of responsibility. Layard is in the grip of the social democrat fantasy about macro-level solidarity. Somehow, somehow (namely, Layard in charge is how) state coercion in the name of the common good will awaken our better angels, make us believe that we’re all in it together, since we all understand that we’re being coerced for our own good, and the individualist scales will drop from our eyes as we are warmed to our core by our mutual commitment to the production of many and widely distributed hedons.

Layard’s totalizing technocratic mentality seems to make him blind to the idea that if we put responsibility back into the hands of individuals, families, and communities, we would discover solidarity and trust in the local social attachments, agreements, and norms that produce our private and public goods. When the state substitutes for the father of your children as a source of financial support, or for the support of your family in retirement, or for a church bake sale as a way of reparing the gym, or for fraternal societies as a form of mutual insurance, then it is exceedingly difficult for me to see how it is that the state initiatives are combating bad old individualism. When you think of “contributing to the happiness of others” mainly as voting righteously for higher taxes, or for banning television advertisements, which Layard would like to do, it’s hard to see how your “values” are really reweaving the fabric of social trust.

I wish I did not recognize Layard’s world, in which it is apparently no good to make people happy by creating things that they want to buy, in which there are no churches, no Cub Scouts, no Rotarians or Kiwanas. I know he doesn’t mean to do it, and would likely claim a Millian love of non-conformism, but Layard is simply brilliant at conjuring up visions of an antiseptic world in which children wear identical grey jumpsuits to their bland, but well-funded public schools, and come home to parents who are smiling, but slightly distant after having spent the afternoon being peacefully, psychochemically “reeducated”  by the ministry of public values for teaching false moral doctrines (mother was spotted with a Book of Mormon) to the children. After all, their values values affect all of us.