Can We Be Happier? by Richard Layard review – a breathless tribute to the “science of happiness”
This hard sell from the former ‘happiness tsar’ may be a work of passion but it is slapdash, paternalistic and liable to cause some misery
Almost any product can be branded, in the wearisome idiom of advertising, a “revolution”. So it is with the happiness industry which, in Richard Layard’s brash sales pitch, is both a “happiness revolution” and a “world happiness movement”. This book is a long-form advertisement that brooks no dissent – a breathless tribute to the “science of happiness”, encompassing “mind-training”, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and behavioural economics. No one could be better placed to write this than New Labour’s former “happiness tsar”.
It was Layard, as he reminds readers, who persuaded New Labour to offer CBT to depressed and anxious patients on the NHS. Despite a glut of studies challenging the efficacy of the treatment, he has lost none of his confidence in it. Indeed, far from engaging with the bad news, he now suggests it can treat everything from schizophrenia to domestic abusers. Neither the backlash against the happiness industry, nor questions about the integrity of mindfulness – a bowdlerisation of Buddhist meditation – are acknowledged, much less allowed to check his enthusiasm. The book approaches even its most cliched subjects, from 18th-century moral philosophy to New Age thought, with new-born astonishment.