The best bet would be to get Richard Layard on the phone to discuss solutions.
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The diagram, shown to Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, Layard recalled, persuaded Chernomyrdin to shift policy.
But Lord Layard's argument implies that people have a tendency to work too much.
The answer is to be found in the analysis of my old professor, Richard Layard.
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The pursuit of happiness, Lord Layard's book will convince most people, is a private matter.
Both Oswald and Richard Layard argue that relationships are more important than money--and that includes professional relationships.
The unhappiness that one person's extra income can cause to others, argues Lord Layard, is a form of pollution.
While running Layard Horsfall Solicitors, he wrote a letter for Edward Davenport which led to businesses handing over money.
As Lord Layard himself says, unemployment visits terrible unhappiness on those it afflicts.
Wilkinson and economists like Oswald and his compatriot Lord Layard are thinking about the policy implications of happiness research.
Yet even if Lord Layard's theory is right, his figure for the optimal tax rate looks like little more than convenient guesswork.
Certainly my old Professor, Richard Layard, who wrote this chapter would think so for he says that unemployment is a source of deep unhappiness.
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To counter such Panglossian logic, Lord Layard draws upon the findings of behavioural economists, who make use of the insights and techniques of psychologists.
"I've come to believe in the old-fashioned view that one should be tender in one's dealings with colleagues, " Lord Layard told me in an interview.
And so, near the top of Lord Layard's list for improving human happiness, comes the following recommendation: much higher rates of income tax to tame the rat race.
The result of this, suggests Lord Layard, is that developed societies may tend to work too hard in order to consume more material goods, and so consume too little leisure.
LSE's Mr Layard argues that the stability and growth pact will not constrain the role of fiscal policy in stabilising the economic cycle, because the British budget is in balance.
So, Lord Layard's thinking goes, by spending 90 hours a week in the office, you may be improving your own income, but you are also causing other people to feel less satisfied with theirs.
Lord Layard's analysis suggests an alternative view: it is not that Europeans are working too little, but that Americans work too long, driven to choose more income instead of leisure by an urge to keep up with the Joneses.
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