The Lord Layard | |
|---|---|
 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 15 March 1934 |
| 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.
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.
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.
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). 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.
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. Based on modern happiness research, Layard's early work cites three factors that economists fail to take into consideration:
From these observations, Layard concluded that taxes serve another purpose besides paying for public services (usually for public goods) and redistributing income. The third purpose is to counteract the cognitive bias that causes people to work more than is good for their happiness. That is, taxes help citizens preserve a healthy work-life balance.
In 2005 Layard published the book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, in which he emphasised the importance of non-income variables on aggregate happiness. His book summarises the prior empirical findings produced by economists such as Richard Easterlin, David G Blanchflower, Andrew E Clark, Rafael Di Tella, Robert MacCulloch, and Andrew Oswald. In particular he stressed the role of mental health and argued that psychological treatments ought to be much more widely available.
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.
Subsequent books have included "The Good Childhood" (2009),[2] Thrive (2014)[3]Thrive (2014), Can We Be Happier?: Evidence and Ethics (2020),[4] and Wellbeing: Science and Policy (2020)[5]
In 2012 he co-edited, with Jeffrey Sachs and John Helliwell, the World Happiness Report, and remains co-editor to the present day.[1]
Layard co-founded Action for Happiness in 2010, and continues on the board.
Layard's mental health[6] work[7] resulted in the development of Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT), an initiative to improve access to psychological therapies in the United Kingdom.[8]
In 2014, with the clinical psychologist David M Clark, he published the book Thrive: The Power of Evidence-Based Psychological Therapies, in which the authors demonstrate the potential value of the wider availability of modern talking therapies, and include a chapter on mental illness prevention.[9]
Layard has shown that mental illness[6] is the main cause of unhappiness.[10]
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.[11]
Recent research on happiness questioning part of Baron Layard's thesis and suggesting that people do obtain happiness from increased income[12] forms part of ongoing investigations into the Easterlin Paradox.[13]
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.'[14]
In 2003, Layard was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA).[15] In 2016, he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS).[16]. 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.
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