You say these are five books that have influenced your view of progress.

The first three books have very much influenced my thinking about the politics of a new liberal, social democratic fusion. It’s a fascination with human nature, but then an interest in what makes societies tick, so as to look behind short-term public policy.

The Progressive Dilemma is a really important book to me because it’s all about the tension between two models of progressivism: the Fabian state-focused model of reform on the one hand and the bottom-up, empowering, moral model of reform advocated by New Liberals like T H Green and L T Hobhouse. What Marquand does in this book is to show that dilemma between statist reform and bottom-up reform, mainly through the prism of a whole set of people’s lives, including individual politicians – he touches on David Owen, for example. So it’s a collection of essays, really, but each essay returns to this recurrent theme.

There is a group of people on the centre left – including myself and David Miliband, who also talks a lot about this book – who have always seen our politics as being about trying to reunite those two strands and who have despaired, really, of the kind of statism that is still dominant in the Labour Party and was part of its undoing when it was in power.

And that battle is still to be won.

It has not been won at all. Furthermore, some Liberals clearly now think that their model of an empowering progressive agenda may be better met by working with the Conservatives. They are attracted to the notions of David Cameron’s ‘big society’, they are attracted to the fact that the Conservatives are doing the right things on surveillance and civil liberties, on scrapping ID cards and scrapping targets. This is a fascinating time because the government has without question already dismantled a lot of state control. When Labour was in government they assumed that you had to have all that state control because people wanted to know public services were being driven forward, so they wanted targets and reassurance about whether public spending was achieving outcomes, and they were very worried about crime and terrorism, so they wanted ID cards and those kind of things.

So the coalition is confronting a set of assumptions about what the public wants and it looks – so far – as though it is doing that very successfully. Of course all the professions will love it: the teachers and doctors will love fewer targets. But the challenge will come with events. When you see schools or hospitals failing or you get a terrorist attack, will people maintain that position of support? But I say good luck to them. The tragedy for Labour is that some radical Liberals will say, ‘Well we don’t really like the Conservatives’ approach to the economy and to social justice but when it comes to this kind of empowering, letting-go agenda, we are getting more traction out of the Conservatives than we would have got out of Gordon Brown.’ 

So where do we look for progress in the absence of Marquand’s progressive reunion? 

My second choice is called Stumbling on Happiness, by a guy called Dan Gilbert. I just read this out of the blue but it really got me excited about where human nature, neuroscience, behavioural economics and psychology meet. For a lot of people it was Nudge or Freakonomics that got them interested in that debate, but for me it was this, which is a beautifully written book. 

It shows that human beings are very bad at predicting what will make them happy, and, in fact, are even bad at describing what has made them happy in the past. So it is all about our cognitive frailties. The other book that is really good in that space is The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt. 

In my last RSA annual lecture, I talked about how we really need people to understand what actually makes them happy, to understand that their desires are not the same as their needs, and that their appetites are not the same as their satisfactions. It’s a difficult argument because it can sound authoritarian or paternalistic but it is true. We are just not that good at knowing what is going to make us happy: I have made lots of mistakes in my life and so part of this is quite visceral for me. I wish I had known more about the real sources of contentment earlier. 

Isn’t this argument a bit contentious, because everyone has to discover these things for themselves? 

There are some things that you can only find out for yourself. I have a 17-year-old son. You can’t tell a 17-year-old boy what it is like to be a 40-year-old man because he doesn’t think he ever will be a 40-year-old man. But, having said that, I think you can tell them things that are so clear-cut that they stop and think, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’

You can say, for example, that buying stuff won’t make you happy for more than a few weeks, but what makes you happy is the way you feel about yourself, having hobbies and pastimes that you enjoy, friends that you enjoy. 

I also think that there are now lessons for all of us here about relationships. I think there are a series of big insights into the mistakes that people make and the way in which they manage their lives and their long-term relationships. 

Another book that influenced me a few years ago was by Sylvia Ann Hewlett called Baby Hunger – now this is really difficult territory. It was about how women put off having children and they comfort themselves by saying, ‘Oh the fertility treatment will be fine.’ They think that it will be OK to make a decision in their 40s, and then they are shocked to find that the success rate isn’t very high, and they end up not having children and feeling very miserable about it – feeling that they never really made that choice, but that it was a structured non-choice. 

Arguably you should say to women that it’s much more fun to have children when you are younger because you’ve got more energy.