Layard

Children's wellbeing expert Lord Layard urged the Commons education committee to push for a national rollout before the end of this Parliament.

“Doing kindness makes you happier and being happier makes you do kind acts,” said labor economist Richard Layard, who studies happiness at the London School of Economics and wrote the new book “Can We Be Happier?”

Research has long shown that co-operation and social support are fundamental to happiness; Layard believes the coronavirus crisis will speed up changes that he and others have advocated for decades.

The report, which ranks countries according to happiness, will throw up crucial clues to wellbeing that will help in the weeks and months of the coronavirus crisis to come, says Prof Richard Layard, co-director of the Wellbeing programme at the LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance.

As Layard writes in today’s Observer New Review: “The rise in competitiveness has been made much worse by the advent of social media, which have encouraged self-advertisement and made more young people feel inadequate, anxious, depressed and ‘left out’.”