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

There would be an addiction hotline along the sort of groove or kind of the model set with your talking therapies, which is affected or being used by 8 million people, high success rate.

And that's for anxiety and depression.

You'd have a similar one on addiction.

What else would you do?

What is a lay-out program for government?

One of the underlying trends of the last 25 years has been the very rapidly diminishing

amount of wealth or money that makes its way to the labor force workers are getting a smaller slice or share of the pie it used to be in the post-war years and i'm interested you were born in 1934 i think i wonder if you forgive me for um for raising it i don't remember that yeah don't you do you remember the start of the war

What was your experience of the war itself?

So you went from what being 5 to 11, so those early years were shaped by the war.

You said that we've got a very good new science of happiness where everyone gives themselves a score from zero to 10, zero being completely unhappy, 10 being completely happy.

I've mentioned a couple of times that you're 92.

I hope you don't mind me doing that.

But at 92, having spent 60 years at the LSE, having seen the war as a child, how do you score your own life?

Well, Richard, it's a pleasure and a privilege talking to you.

We've had lots and lots of questions from our listeners, and you're very kindly going to stick around and answer some of those for our bonus episode, which is coming out on Monday.

But for now, thank you very, very much for telling us about the new science of happiness.

There is just something extremely charming, if I may say, about a 92-year-old, a man who was born in 1934, who has seen an awful lot, who's thought an awful lot, arguing for a very, very, very radical reconsideration of the entire function and workings of the British state.

And that in turn follows from a social revolution, really,

in that we start prioritising very different things.

And when Richard Layard argues that happiness, that wellbeing is the fundamental, is the unarguable things, the thing that everyone wants, and when he argues that we've got a huge new science that says we can measure now what gives people satisfaction, what gives people a sense that they've led happy lives, it is quite hard to argue against that.

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