Happiness: Lessons from a New Science

"There’s just one point I really want to take from this book: he makes it very clear in this book that more trusting people are happier people. The less trust we show, the more we are suspicious of others, the less happy we become. The people who are happier are more trusting, so they have more friends; the less trusting are more isolated because they are more suspicious."

"So what Seligman did was give us a new approach to life, from a psychologist’s perspective. What Layard did is take happiness issues from an economist’s perspective and say, ‘Come on, if we’re so rich, which we are in the West, how come general happiness has been declining and depression rising? What’s going on? Not at an individual level, but at a country level?’ He synthesises lots of economics and sociology and religion , and psychology , too. And makes it very digestible: it’s presented in short, easy chunks. Sometimes it feels a little random. For example, why is Performance-related pay in between Respect and Advertising? He strongly makes the case that standard economic policy doesn’t really take into account feelings, when actually feelings are the only reason you ever decide to do anything. You can look at all the data, but in the end you think does it feel right? That’s the reason you buy a house or take a job. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So he challenges standard economic theory and says we shouldn’t look at wealth, but at wellbeing. It’s quite simple. What is it you say you want for your kids? You want them to be happy. And there are lots of golden nuggets in the book, like the fact that self-help books make you happy. People shouldn’t pooh-pooh them and sneer. Alain de Botton actually says the same thing; the Romans were full of self-help books, so were the Victorians, how come we think self-help is somehow fit to be pooh-poohed? Not much, which is part of the reason I wrote my own book. There were some unanswered questions for me in reading it, and there wasn’t that much about work in there. He says things like only $20,000 makes you happy at work, happy in life. That’s bullshit – that may make you very happy if you’re living in Niger, but if you’re living in New York City, $20,000 is not enough to live on. So there is this kind of mythical number out there, which I’m not sure exists. Layard does make the point that unemployment makes you very unhappy. It makes a big, big dent in your happiness. Work does make you happy. And I think that’s because you get a chance to stretch yourself and achieve your potential."