Amol Rajan

speaker

3,997 appearances 23 recordings 6 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 16 Jul

Amol Rajan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 23 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 12.

Appearances

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Radical · Happiness Rules: Should Wellbeing Dictate Government Policy? (Lord Richard Layard) · 2 Jul 2026 podcast

Richard Layard, Lord Layard, welcome to Radical.

Very wonderful to be here on your wonderful series.

I have to say, I'm not easily starstruck, but we have never met, or we haven't met until about five minutes ago, and I have been looking forward to this.

Not just because, if I may say, some people will be charmed by the idea that a man in his 90s, if I may say, is radical, and you are pretty radical.

But also because your book and your work and your thought has been a significant influence on my life.

You wrote this book called Happiness, which I'm holding now.

Happiness, Lessons from a New Science.

In 2005, when I was an undergraduate reading an awful lot about utilitarianism,

And I thought you were going to unleash a moral revolution in Britain.

You've also, you are the key figure or influence behind talking therapies on the NHS.

There'll be people listening to you now who have received such therapy and benefited from it, perhaps.

That's now touched, what, millions of lives?

must give you a feeling as you reflect on your contribution to public life in Britain that you have made a really significant difference to a lot of people and that you have increased happiness.

And we also, I mean, we have a huge amount of unhappiness amongst young people and actually we'll get there.

But one of the, I think, great challenges of the age is that we have something like approaching a million NEETs, as they're called, people not in education, employment or training, 18 to 24 year olds.

And there's been a very sharp rise in the proportion of them who say that their mental health is holding them back.

In broad terms, Richard, why do you think that happiness or well-being to closely related ideas should be the focus of public policy?

So Jeremy Bentham, for those who, most people listening to this may know, but some may not, he's an English philosopher who is a proponent of utilitarianism.

And utilitarianism is the approach to ethics, which says that you should aim for something called the summum bonum, that is the maximum happiness, the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Jefferson, and later people like John Stuart Mill in the mid-19th century, who wrote a book called Utilitarianism, I think it was published in 1861.

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