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.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

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

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

believed that the goal of not just individual lives, but of the state was to try to promote happiness.

They then sort of accommodated and responded to various criticisms of their position, which I'm going to air in a moment.

Before we get there, your book from 2005, which has been translated into many, many languages, it's a huge international bestseller, it's been very influential, has an interesting subtitle, which is Lessons from a New Science.

What did the new science of happiness reveal?

And your key sort of, if you like, update to it, the thing that sort of took you on from Bentham and Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill was you said that we now have the tools to measure this much better than we could in centuries gone past.

You use these words, I think, almost interchangeably, but what is happiness and what is well-being?

I know what you say about you can measure it using that one question, and I might end this podcast by asking you it.

What is happiness and what is human well-being?

What do you make of one objection, which says that actually to live a good and complete and full life.

So I'm very, I love the Aristotle word from his Nicomachean ethics, which is eudaimonia, human flourishing.

And somebody would say that to live a life that, you know, when you get to your nineties, you might say, well, I've lived a good and full and complete life that I, you know, it was a sense of human flourishing.

that there is actually a benefit to at times being unhappy.

For example, people who might be unhappy or dissatisfied with their life, that might be a spur to action.

It might be that their frustration or their suffering in some way causes them to take decisions which makes them happier many years hence.

Isn't there a value at various times in your life to being unhappy?

I'm going to do something which my 21-year-old self graduating in 2005 would be very proud of.

I'd like to spend a few minutes asking you about utilitarianism.

By the way, it's funny.

I have to think about the purpose of this podcast.

In a way, this podcast aims to make life better.

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