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
And the issue is the underlying causes, type 2 diabetes, obesity, these underlying chronic health conditions.
And we need to fix those in lifestyle changes.
You know, a lot of liberals, libertarians, even just people who've worked in the government, if they were sat here listening to you now, and perhaps they'd had the pleasure of reading your book, they would say, this is all lovely stuff.
And yes, we agree, happiness matters.
But the function and the role of the state is to feed the people.
is to keep them safe and to increase wealth and then let them live the lives that they want.
A liberal, and it's interesting, I spoke recently to Adrian Waldridge, who's at Bloomberg, former writer for The Economist.
He's written a book called Centrists of the World Unite.
And his position would, I think, be more towards saying that actually it's not necessarily for the government to tell you what you need to do to be happy.
It's for the government and the state to create the conditions in which you can pursue your own happiness.
And the best way of doing that would be to create some economic growth.
And that is why GDP should be the prime focus of every government department.
Do you feel that the agenda that you've advanced, it's not made as much progress as you want, but do you feel that it's basically got a receptive audience?
I say that partly because we had on this podcast a very interesting man called Ed Davies, who is the research director at the Center for Policy Studies, which is an anti-poverty, kind of right-of-center think tank.
He's got people from a range of different political perspectives.
And he mentioned that David Cameron's initiative to measure wellbeing, which was done at your instigation, still goes on.
But my sense is that talk of wellbeing and talk of happiness
is not as high up the agenda as it was perhaps 15 years ago.
What's your sense?
If you were to do three things, radical things in government straight away, there would be the funding for therapy for children in schools.
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