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Writer's pictureIulia Tsvigun

Who shall I make happier: the rich and happy or the poor and miserable?


In my late teens, I attended a church, ironically named God's Design. Andre, our priest in all his funny, almost stand-up like sermons, said that the relationships between people (and God) are the most important thing in our lives. And, in his book - 'Happiness. Lessons from a new science', Richard Layard (who started the well-being movement) comes with the data to support this statement - our family relationships and friendships are the biggest sources of our happiness and unhappiness (if they go wrong). Relationships rank first in both the US General Social Survey and World Value Survey (Layard, 2011, pp 63-65) and divorce rates (among other things) explain the difference in happiness across different countries.


The author looks at the concept of happiness from different disciplines: philosophy, sociology, psychology and neuroscience, policy-making and economics. The later discipline receives a great deal of criticism for its very narrow definition of and views on happiness, which argues that the more developed is the economy, the happier are the people who take part in it.


Richard Layard looks into why and how money matter to people. He also looks into how people perceive loss and gain (in money and valuable things) and in what circumstances loss can be accepted. It turns our that loss has greater impact on people than gain.


As a designer of services, this book teaches us that if we want to improve people's lives and we have to chose between services (policies) that can either increase happy people's happiness or reduce the misery of unhappy people, than we should choose the latter as it it will have a greater impact on their lives than the opposite would have on the (already) happy (and presumably rich) people.

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