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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 23 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 12.
Appearances
The evidence from the new science of happiness is that, first of all, most people are more kind of ethically motivated by the idea of getting people from two to three than from seven to eight.
But also, if...
your aim is a kind of a happiness or well-being public policy, and that involves reducing unhappiness.
If you want to reduce unhappiness, the evidence would suggest that in order, it's mental and physical health, number one, relationships and connections and bonds to other people, number two, and income, number three.
Because it would suggest that the focus of our politics, which is really aimed at growth.
I mean, most public conversation in this country is aimed at kind of how to increase growth and stop economic stagnation.
It would suggest that growth should be just a little bit lower in the pecking order of priorities.
Well, can I just say that that's a very important point which Paul Johnson, the former director...
of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
He's now provost of the Queen's College in Oxford.
One of Britain's most influential economists.
He's just produced a book with some colleagues called Challenging Inequalities, in which he said that growth is a precursor to reducing the inequalities that matter.
Because if you don't have growth,
and that's the condition of Britain at the moment, you create a kind of zero-sum game where the argument is just sort of how do you divide up a finite amount of resources, in fact, a diminishing amount of resources.
So he would argue that growth, as you say, is very important, and it's important that reducing inequalities, once you've got growth, you can work out how you help people, perhaps in terms of their mental and physical health.
I just wonder, you know, you're a Labour peer.
We have a Labour government.
One criticism of Keir Starmer that's often made, whether it's true or not, is that he doesn't know what he believes in.
Would you say that if this Labour government wants to make Britain the happiest place in the world, that would be a pretty radical idea and it would be a pretty good North Star?
The utilitarians call themselves the philosophical radicals.
Showing 721–740 of 3,997 · page 37 of 200
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