Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (Second Edition) - Hardcover

In this landmark book, Richard Layard shows that there is a paradox at the heart of our lives. Most people want more income. Yet as societies become richer, they do not become happier. This is not just anecdotally true, it is the story told by countless pieces of scientific research. We now have sophisticated ways of measuring how happy people are, and all the evidence shows that on average people have grown no happier in the last fifty years, even as average incomes have more than doubled. In fact, the First World has more depression, more alcoholism and more crime than fifty years ago. This paradox is true of Britain, the United States, continental Europe, and Japan. What is going on?

Richard Layard is Co-Director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, a large research centre covering most areas of economic policy. Since 2000 he has been a member of the House of Lords. Reacting to the series of lectures on which this book is based, Polly Toynbee called him 'a necessary guru for our times, with a new moral language for some good old sentiments' and Will Hutton said 'a breath of fresh air...Richard Layard is on to something'.