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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 23 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 12.
Appearances
It's a home for radical ideas, but we want to make...
life better.
And making life better is about making good ethical choices.
Utilitarianism is that ethical system which aims to increase the general happiness or promote the maximum happiness of the maximum number.
Are you a utilitarian?
The aggregate in a society.
That gets us into something called the Easterlin paradox, which is about countries and their approach to wealth, which is this idea that people ask, what's the connection between happiness and wealth?
Actually, if you have a philosophy, which you might call it, I don't know, Layardism, which says that happiness should be the aim of public policy.
If your aim was happiness, you might give greater weight to reducing unhappiness for those who have very little wealth.
You give greater weight to that than you would to increasing happiness for those who already do.
And the Easterlin paradox gets us into the fact that if you increase happiness,
the happiness.
If you get people in poor countries, if you like, from two to three, if you increase their wealth, you might increase their happiness.
But once societies get to a certain level of happiness, increasing wealth produces diminishing returns.
In other words, if you're going to increase the wealth by a certain amount, it makes a huge difference to happiness for those who go from very poor to poor.
But those who go from rich to very rich, it doesn't actually make that much of a difference in the end.
It's about the margins.
What do you think that says about us?
What do you infer from the fact that all your studies suggest that most people are more interested in getting people from 2 to 3 than 7 to 8?
That's so interesting.
Showing 701–720 of 3,997 · page 36 of 200
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