Positive psychology encourages the writing of gratitude letters. This one will be quite long, because I would like to thank all those who have contributed most to my philosophy of life – and to say what I have learned from them. There are two things they all have in common: a generous spirit and a strong desire to improve the quality of human life.
I should begin with the German doctor who saved my father’s life (and thus mine). In mental torment in Berlin, my father put a pistol in his mouth, pointing upwards. The bullet missed his brain but lodged in his skull. Following the operation to remove it, he recovered swiftly and soon met my mother. In due course I appeared. I was a love-child.
My father’s basic belief was in original virtue. Children, he thought, were born happy, but were made miserable by the way they were treated. We now know more than he did about the role of genes. But it was not a bad starting point, and it was got through hard experience. After an unhappy time at Bedales School and Cambridge, he went as a barely trained anthropologist to the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu). It was the best year of his life. But he contracted malaria and spent the next ten years in a state of physical and mental breakdown. He had many psychoanalysts and in the end become a leading Jungian analyst himself as well as a writer. Patients felt he was on their side and he helped many of them. But he could never relate to his equals as well as he did to his patients, and quarrelled with almost everyone except me, because I refused to quarrel with him. I experienced him as a lovely and creative father until I was ten, when he essentially left the family.
My mother by contrast was someone everyone loved. She was very positive, with a good common-sense philosophy of life. She too became a Jungian psychoanalyst, of a very practical kind. Like my father she grew up as an atheist, but in 1942 they both became Catholics – because of the symbolism and without any belief in the creed.
I was born five years before the Second World War. I was a happy child and I was brought up in a progressive way with reasons given, and I went to a progressive day school in London. But, after war broke out, we moved for safety to Oxford. There I made a wonderful friend, Peter Westwood, with whom I played every non-school day for seven years. He had as sweet a nature as any I have ever known, and most of what I know about friendship must have been learned from him. We were wartime children, but untouched by the war until the Allies started winning when I was eight years old. In Peter’s garden there was an earthen air-raid shelter, rather like a long barrow. We called it the rock of Gibraltar and on it we installed gun emplacements and a hospital. One day, I’m told, a grand Oxford lady called Mrs Haldane came to look at it and saw three soldiers lying on their backs in the hospital. She said, ‘Oh dear they must be feeling awful,’ to which I replied, ‘Not really, they’re only suffering from venereal disease.’
I went as a day-boy to the Dragon School in Oxford. This remarkable institution was not a progressive school, but it had a winning level of informality: the teachers all had nicknames. One, in particular, known as Jacko, gave me a lasting love of history. The morning assembly was focused on values, not the creed. We learned great phrases such as ‘Others before self’ and ‘Fight the good fight with all thy might’. And of course we played team games which embodied the idea of collective effort.
At the age of thirteen the top students from the Dragon School won scholarships to Eton College or Winchester College. I went to Eton, which I loved. But the whole experience was fraught with contradiction. On the one side, it was hugely competitive. Each term there were exams which generated the ‘form order’ for the next term. This ‘form order’ determined where you sat in chapel and in lessons, and which table you sat at for your meals. On the other hand, you had to be a team player and to be modest. I was not comfortable when a winner of the Victoria Cross told us we should walk with our heads held high.
On the whole we managed the combination of competition and team spirit quite well. Academically I was in competition for top place with my dearest friend, Kit Welchman. But it didn’t interfere with our friendship, and from him I learned so much about poetry and the arts. We lived in a house called College which housed all the boys who had won scholarships. It was a precocious place and we were discussing the main issues of philosophy by the age of fifteen. We were all left-wing. This was natural under the great Labour government of 1945–51, but Eton scholars at other times have often been non-conformist – including Maynard Keynes and George Orwell. When we were there, the great headmaster Robert Birley was a known Labour supporter. I already knew about the Webbs and the Fabians through my mother and, when I discussed with Kit what we wanted to do in life, I said I wanted to be a social reformer.
For me, a key aspect of school was chapel and evening prayers. We worshipped twice a day, except Sundays when it was four times. None of us believed in the afterlife, miracles, the virgin birth, the resurrection or the ascension. But we believed in God, transcendent and imminent; in trying to fulfil our appointed roles; and in accepting whatever happened to us. On the war memorial were inscribed the words from Milton’s ‘Samson Agonistes’:
All is best, though we oft doubt,
What th’ unsearchable dispose
Of highest wisdom brings about,
And ever best found in the close.
And we had a strong belief in ‘calm of mind, all passion spent’. We believed that one should cultivate noble feelings, and, when my father came to tell me that he and Mum were getting divorced, I duly reacted ‘more in sorrow than in anger’. We evaluated the masters and older boys according to whether they were ‘great men’, noble in spirit. One master, Brian Young, we admired particularly. He taught us about Aristotle and the great-hearted person. We deplored pomposity, but loved the concept of the happy mean. This included the idea that life should involve a lot more than work – friendship, poetry, acting, painting, music (clarinet) and of course sport. In the sixth form I specialized first in classics. But one day an egregious preacher stated that ‘before Jesus, no one smiled’. I thought I had better study history.
After school, we all went into the Army. I chose the Artillery, a non-Etonian regiment, and was stationed in Germany as an officer at Belsen, renamed Hohne. I enjoyed it a lot – the technical aspects of gunnery, but above all working with men from every kind of background. In my first week I drove my 3-tonne lorry into a cul-de-sac in a forest. At that moment my battery commander Marcus Lipton arrived. I was mortified, and even more alarmed on the next day when he sent for me. But, instead of mentioning my failings, he gave me additional responsibility. I have never forgotten that lesson on trust.
Next came King’s College, Cambridge, where I took a degree in history. From reading Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill I quickly became a utilitarian (though modified by a preference for equality of happiness). King’s was a stimulating environment, more encouraging of non-conformity than Eton, and I learned more from student societies and fellow students than from the teachers. From my second term I belonged to the Apostles, a small group that had met every week for earnest debate since 1830 and had included Tennyson, Keynes and Bertrand Russell. This was a major influence on me and through it I duly lost my Christian faith.
That process accelerated when the Dean of the college threw himself from the roof of the great chapel on to the hard paving stones below. From then on I rapidly became a humanist (but with a touch of pantheism). I also concluded that mental health was a major issue, as my father had already taught me. So I asked the tutor of the college, John Raven, whether I could study psychiatry. The college generously agreed to finance this. I had to take four A level exams in physics, chemistry, biology and organic chemistry, which I did in a year, and then moved on to dissect head and neck, and thorax. By then I was twenty-five. Medical students were treated with less respect than history students and I realized I couldn’t continue being a student. But I am extremely grateful that I learned the science which has stood me in good stead in my studies of happiness.
Instead of pursuing medicine I became a history teacher in a comprehensive school. This was a lovely experience, putting me in touch with an even wider range of people than the army. It filled me with belief in the educability of nearly everybody. I expected to remain in teaching and teacher-training for the rest of my life. However, in the evenings I was going to the London School of Economics (LSE) to broaden my mind with a course on sociology. As part of that I had taken a class with the statistician Claus Moser, who was to change my life.
Claus was appointed adviser to the so-called Robbins Committee on Higher Education and asked me to become its senior research officer. It was an extraordinary experience – a real voyage of discovery. It had not occurred to me (or to most of my generation) that one could study the present in a scientific way. For the Robbins Committee I organized three big surveys and wrote four appendix volumes, as well as short sections of the report. Most importantly we demolished the idea of the so-called ‘pool of ability’ which opened the way to mass higher education in Britain. Philosophically, I learned for the first time about the wonderful concept of cost–benefit analysis, which could be applied to anything including educational policy. So, when the writing of the report was ending and I was asked to work on educational policy at the London School of Economics (LSE), I readily agreed.
But my first week at the LSE revealed an awful truth. I could not do this job without becoming an economist. So I had to become a student again at the age of thirty-one. What a change. Until then I had been someone born with a silver spoon in his mouth, for whom most things came easily. Now I was ten years behind. For years it was a real struggle, but in the end I was rescued by a sequence of wonderful colleagues, who further extended my intellectual horizons.
The first of these was Amartya Sen. When I joined the economics department at the LSE it was mostly very right-wing – and not too different from Milton Friedman’s department at Chicago. I felt uncomfortable questioning the free market orthodoxy. And then Amartya arrived. He treated me with respect and we ran a seminar on Equality together – it generated massive interest. From Amartya I also learned a huge amount about the theory of social choice and the conditions necessary for the Happiness Principle to be valid. Though he has become less enthusiastic about the principle, we are not far apart when one considers the whole spectrum of objectives that different people support, from GDP at one end to happiness at the other.
Another surprising supporter was Alan Walters. Though very right-wing and later an adviser to Margaret Thatcher, he was a strong meritocrat with many left-wing friends. For many years I taught the microeconomics course that Alan started, and eventually turned it into what Amartya called the most left-wing microeconomics textbook around. It was Alan more than anyone who taught me that, if you want to influence policy, you should get to know politicians.
But the two economists to whom I owe the most are Richard Jackman and Stephen Nickell. In 1974 the LSE formed the Centre for Labour Economics, with me as Director. It later evolved into the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), superbly administered by Nigel Rogers. Initially we worked on inequality, but in 1979 unemployment rose to new heights. So, for ten years in the 1980s, we ran a weekly seminar and an annual international conference to get to the bottom of what was going on. Richard is wonderfully intuitive and insistent on rigour. Steve is not only that, but also a powerful mathematician and an indefatigable collector of relevant evidence – one of the best economists of his generation. Both have massive common sense, and working with them on unemployment has been one of the best experiences of my life.
After 1979 unemployment in the UK remained high for many years. It did not feel enough to write about it; we wanted to influence the British government. For some years I had known the delightful politician Shirley Williams and through her I helped the new Social Democratic Party to develop a coherent set of labour market policies. But in 1984 we decided to launch a cross-party movement to reduce unemployment, by reforming the way unemployed people were treated (on the supply side) together with demand expansion. We founded the Employment Institute and my wife Molly ran a parallel Campaign for Work. These organizations had a significant influence on the Conservative government, but more on the Labour opposition, which at the time had an employment spokesman called Tony Blair. In due course Tony Blair and Gordon Brown implemented many of our proposals, and persuaded European leaders like Gerhard Schroeder to follow suit.
All these efforts were helped greatly by our economist colleagues based in the United States. The first of these was the outstanding labour economist Orley Ashenfelter, who has been a huge supporter of our work over the years. But then something unusual happened. I was invited to join a five-person European Macroeconomic Policy Group chaired by Rudi Dornbusch. Rudi was not only a brilliant macroeconomist but hugely inspirational – he made you feel you could do things you never dreamed of. We met regularly in Brussels and later regrouped as the WIDER World Economy Group. The other key member of the group was Olivier Blanchard, a macroeconomist who is equally at home in labour economics and in macro. Many of our ideas about unemployment emerged somewhere in the space between Olivier and ourselves. Olivier and I later visited Poland three times as it emerged from Communism, and he has remained a friend and supporter to this day. Finally, I must mention Stanley Fischer. We have never worked together, but Stan has been a huge support and a wonderful friend. On one occasion I called him when he was No. 2 at the IMF and he asked me to lunch the next day, at which point he produced the New Yorker cartoon with which I began my book, Happiness. All three of these friends (Rudi, Olivier and Stan) have been strong supporters of my work on happiness. And it was Rudi who got me involved in Russia.
Our big book on unemployment was published in 1991 and in the same year Russia rejected Communism. Earlier that year I had visited the institute run by Yegor Gaidar and we had planned a joint research project to begin in August 1991. In the week before going to Moscow, my wife and I were holidaying in Yalta. One day we learned that Gorbachev had been imprisoned nearby by a group of reactionaries. However, within days this counter-revolution had collapsed and Gorbachev was released, but discredited. Boris Yeltsin came to power and the following November invited Gaidar to form a government. Gaidar asked me to be an adviser to one of the other Deputy Prime Ministers, and I was given an office on the floor beneath Stalin’s old office. However, it was not easy working at that level – things moved so fast and they happened in Russian. Again I was very lucky. I moved one level down to work with Sergei Vasiliev, a brilliant and well-placed official in Gaidar’s group. We worked together for five years. Our team produced Russian Economic Trends each month, which included an up-to-date analysis of the whole economy, plus an in-depth analysis of one new topic. The report was presented by me at a Russian government official press conference each month, chaired by Sergei. From my time in Russia I learned the importance of culture in human history.
In 1997 Labour came to power in Britain and in 2000 I was made a Labour member of the House of Lords. I had been advising the Labour Party on labour market policy since 1990, and from 1997 to 2001 I was a part-time consultant to David Blunkett, the remarkable Secretary of State for Education and Employment, and his Minister of State, Tessa Blackstone, a lifelong friend and supporter. It was a great chance to help implement ideas I had been developing for years. The first of these was active help to unemployed people in return for the ending of life on benefits. The second was the development of a proper system of apprenticeship. For years Hilary Steedman and I had been advocating a system in which the main alternative to university was apprenticeship – learning while earning. Apprenticeship had in earlier times been the main route to social mobility, and we argued that it should become as automatically available to less academic children as the academic route was to those who were suited to it. It took a decade to convert the Labour leadership to this view, and in 2009 they passed the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act which guaranteed an apprenticeship to anyone qualified. Two years later the Conservatives repealed this clause. But by then apprenticeship had established itself as a fashionable concept in Britain, even if subject to constant changes of policy.
During the 1990s I became increasingly aware of the progress of happiness research. Among economists in Britain, this was led by Andrew Oswald, first from within our Centre for Economic Research (CEP) and then at Warwick University. But a key figure in the field was the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who later won the Nobel Prize for economics. We invited him to give three public lectures at the LSE in 1998. He told me of the neuro-scientific research of Richard Davidson which shows that the subjective experience of happiness is an objective electro-chemical phenomenon that is measured reasonably well by what people say. So in early 2001 I decided it was time to remake the case for the Happiness Principle, since we now had the science to make it a practical proposition. That has remained my main purpose ever since – to get individuals and policy-makers to use our knowledge to create a happier world.
The book I wrote on Happiness (2005) clearly struck a chord and was translated into nineteen other languages. But I wanted to apply it in practice, so I asked Ed Miliband if I could write a paper on mental health for Gordon Brown. Instead it became a paper for the No. 10 Policy Unit. It was written with help from my wife and presented at a Cabinet Office seminar in January 2005. The key figure at that seminar was David Clark. One of the world’s leading clinical psychologists, David is also an incredible persuader and organizer, who since then has devoted his life to creating the Improving Access to Psychological Therapy (IAPT) service. This was launched in 2008, but it was not a foregone conclusion. There was an election commitment to the idea, but then massive resistance. The idea was said to be ‘unevidenced and too expensive’. It took sixty one-on-one meetings to persuade everyone who needed to be persuaded. I later discovered that at key meetings it took only one person to say the idea was controversial for it to be blocked. But, thanks to support from the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, it was eventually funded. However, even after that, the programme was threatened with collapse in 2012 when the job of improving health care was handed over from the Department of Health to the newly created board of the National Health Service. The NHS decided to continue all the six physical health-care development programmes (e.g. on cancer and heart disease), but it judged the IAPT development programme was now mature enough to be dropped. I still have the letter. In fact the service was only 25 per cent of the way to maturity and without further national leadership it would have deteriorated rapidly. That was when being a member of the House of Lords helped. I let the NHS know that if they did not change their minds, I would make a dreadful row in Parliament. Eventually, the NHS relented and the service has gone from strength to strength.
The key challenge now is to secure a deal for children with mental health problems – something similar to what we have for adults. Our basic proposal was developed jointly with the child psychiatrist Stephen Scott when I was drafting the Good Childhood Report, published in 2009. Ten years later it has now been accepted, but implementation is only just beginning.
Of course prevention is even better than cure. A key figure here is Martin Seligman, a leading psychologist and founder of positive psychology. I had learned much from him and in 2007 a CEP-led consortium did a trial of his Penn Resilience Programme in twenty schools. In it, eleven-year-olds received eighteen hours of special instruction. The programme was moderately successful, but I concluded that if we wished to transform children’s lives we should spend more than eighteen hours in doing so. So we formed the Healthy Minds consortium to trial a programme lasting an hour a week over four years. It has been very well organized (by Lucy Bailey) and well taught (by Emma Judge) and the results are discussed in Chapter 6.
These are useful achievements, but what we really want is for all public policy to be directed at the goal of happiness. The key figure here has been Gus O’Donnell, who was a brilliant head of the UK Treasury and then its top civil servant and Cabinet Secretary. A long-time believer in the happiness objective, he made major efforts to move policy in that direction. With the backing of the prime minister, David Cameron, he introduced the annual measurement of national subjective wellbeing and made it an official national statistic. Since leaving the civil service he has worked tirelessly to make the Happiness Principle the goal of government. In 2014 he chaired a committee on what this would involve – and the resulting report is still the definitive work on this topic.1 And in 2014 he got the government to establish a What Works Centre for Wellbeing which aims to collect the research evidence into a form where it can be used by British policy-makers. Our small research group at the CEP has formed part of that Centre.
Some years back it became clear that policy-makers could not evaluate policy in terms of its impact on happiness without a large, organized, research base. They needed to know how every conceivable experience affected a person’s happiness – in quantitative terms. This required original research on a range of datasets, but always using the same method of analysis. We carried this out with the help of an excellent team at the LSE and it was published in 2018 as The Origins of Happiness (by Andrew Clark et al.). With Gus and others I’m continuing to press the case for happiness-based policies in Britain – using, among other things, a dining club where we interact with key ministers and policy-makers.
In the meantime, there have been major developments on the international front. A key figure has been the leading economist Jeffrey Sachs. Once a strong free-marketeer, he has become one of the strongest challengers of neo-conservatism and a passionate believer in the happiness objective. In conjunction with the former Prime Minister of Bhutan, he organized a conference on happiness in 2011. It was during that conference that he invented the idea of the annual World Happiness Report, edited by him, John Helliwell and myself. John Helliwell is an amazingly resourceful economist and his analyses of the Gallup World Poll have enlarged our understanding of the causes of happiness, but also generated interest in the subject in every single country.
However, in the end, it is the citizens of the world who will decide the direction of our culture. That is why Anthony Seldon, Geoff Mulgan and I decided to form Action for Happiness. Geoff had been head of policy for Tony Blair and had tried unsuccessfully to interest him in the happiness objective. Anthony had boldly introduced the teaching of happiness into the curriculum at Wellington College, the secondary school where he was head. We were unbelievably fortunate to find Mark Williamson, who became the full-time director of the movement. With few resources Mark has worked wonders, and the public’s reaction confirms that there is a huge demand for such an organization. It is my dearest wish that it can provide the spiritual and moral uplift for which people are looking worldwide.
On this score I need to mention one other thing. In 1995 my wife and I began attending the Hampstead Quaker Meeting. This rekindled my interest in the inner life. We belonged to a small Quaker study group and met every month for five years with two other couples (the Barneses and the Gilberts) from whom we learned so much. This experience inspired my belief that there is a huge role for regular meetings that can inspire and uplift people in a secular age. And that is what Action for Happiness aims to provide.
As for my own beliefs, I was asked recently by my LSE colleague Tim Besley what I believed. I attach my answer as online Annex 15.1.
So if you ask me where my attitudes and ideas come from, I would have to say, ‘All of the above’. From my parents I got the progressive viewpoint that each person is a child of circumstance and we should empathize with everyone. From Eton I got the idea of acceptance and the desire to make a difference, while Cambridge introduced me to secular ethics.
But it was economics which gave me, for the first time, a way to think about public policy, and it also made me look at the quantitative aspect, which is essential for public policy. At one point I wrote a book about traditional cost–benefit analysis. But without the pioneering work of Ed Diener and Andrew Oswald I would never have dreamed that economics could be expanded to tackle the huge range of human problems for which traditional cost–benefit analysis is inadequate.
And the same applies to the issue of cultural change and secular ethics. I never liked the ultra-competitive culture spreading out of the USA. But how to tackle the selfish side of our nature? From the Quakers, from CBT and from the Dalai Lama I learned that we can all gain some control over our inner life and increase our compassion for ourselves and for others. But to create an organization to push these ideas required the chutzpah supplied by the other co-founders of Action for Happiness. The happiness movement in all its forms is going well and I’m confident that history is on our side – both in the public policy arena and in the hearts of people.
Though I have done a number of different things since 1964, I have always been at the London School of Economics. I have worked there for fifty-six years. It has been a uniformly happy experience. The LSE is an amazing institution, where people really help each other and where you can pursue almost any interest that you believe to be important. Within the LSE, the Centre for Economic Performance – where I still work – has always been a happy place and it continues to go from strength to strength. In my years at the LSE I have had only four assistants: Pam Mounsey, Marion O’Brien, Harriet Ogborn and Jo Cantlay. They have all been wonderful, and without them I could have done nothing.
On this book, the hero is George Ward. He is one of the two brightest young researchers I have ever known and a virtual co-author of the book. We planned every chapter together; he researched the literature, did further analysis and greatly improved the resulting chapters. Another hero is Jo Cantlay, who handled the many drafts of the manuscript so brilliantly, from beginning to end. Friends and colleagues have been extremely generous with the time they have given to commenting on the book. In September 2018 David Clark kindly hosted a two-day conference on the draft of the book at his beautiful Magdalen College in Oxford. Those who came were Tim Besley, Jan De Neve, John Helliwell, David King, Paul Litchfield, Molly Meacher, Gus O’Donnell, Michael Plant, Anthony Seldon, Peter Singer (online) and Mark Williamson. They all made huge contributions and have massively improved the book. I have also had great help from Oriana Bandiera, Don Baucom, Andrew Clark, John Collins, Carolyn Cowan, Paul Frijters, David Halpern, Gordon Harrold, Vanessa King, Christian Krekel, Sonia Livingstone, Geoff Mulgan, Stephen Scott and Richard Wilkinson. As with earlier books, I have been incredibly lucky to have such a wonderful agent in Caroline Dawnay and such an outstanding Penguin editor as Stuart Proffitt, who much improved the draft. I am so grateful for all their support.
In my private life I have also been blessed, though it took me until I was fifty-one to find my ideal woman. Molly is brilliant, caring and lovely. She goes straight to the heart of every issue; she campaigns fearlessly; and I love her look. From the beginning she has been a huge supporter of my work on happiness – and on mental health, which she knows more about than I do. This book would not have been written without her. And she has brought me four wonderful step-children (David, Nigel, Sally and Ros), nine amazing grandchildren (Tom, Maddy, Lovis, Elizabeth, Mark, Lucy, Lauren, Dylan and Violet) – and our lovely tennis group. What more could I want?
Thank you all so much.
Richard