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Richard Layard: ‘Money is not the only thing affecting people’s happiness’
   backed the notion of happiness as “the new GDP”.
   for his 2005 book, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. A leading
   that government “does not do enough” to ensure the happiness of its
   citizens, that happiness is a more realistic measure of success than
   income, and that achieving a work-life balance should be the
   As befits the father of “happiness science”, he’s got one of those
   This latest work is an extension of the earlier one, pursuing the claim
   tackle the source of so much unhappiness, namely mental health, and
   “Ever since I wrote Happiness I’ve been concerned as to what can be
   cover the whole country. “People are crying off sick from work because
   of mental health; or people are just absent from work, again because of
   mental health; or if they’re at work, they’re not performing properly,
   mental health on the workplace, on the daily lives of working people.
   ex-wife of Labour MP Michael Meacher. A social worker, she was created
   His career, as he puts it, divides into three. “In the 1980s, I worked
   unemployed people to get them into work, and made that help conditional
   on them trying to get work. That became the basis of the European
   ‘Welfare to Work’ approach, and Labour’s New Deal.”
   Then, in 2001, he started work on Happiness. “It was about making
   governments realise that the happiness of their country was not
   wealth. Money is not the only thing affecting people’s happiness. Money
   working environment is good for a better home environment.”
   He’s a leading lights in Action for Happiness, along with thinker Geoff
   World Happiness Report. It’s produced by an offshoot of the United
   Nations and ranks countries according to happiness. In the last survey,
   For today, though, his  passion is happiness and, in particular, mental
   health. “I’ve always been interested in happiness. I became aware of
   happiness of the old people in an old peoples’ home.”
   But what about his own work-life balance, does he find any time to
   rule; I’ve never worked in the evenings. It’s always important to have
   a happy personal life, and to have other interests beyond work, like
   Performance at LSE; developed “happiness economics”, wrote in 2005,
   Happiness: Lessons from a New Science; in 2014, co-author of Thrive,