In an interview on Progress

Your third book is more recent. 

David Halpern was a colleague of mine in Number 10 (now back in Downing Street advising David Cameron) and I admire him very greatly. Hidden Wealth of Nations is a lovely book. David is one of these people who loves statistics and it is full of fascinating angles on why it is that some societies seem to have higher levels of happiness, compassion, caring, volunteering, and on how you generate these things. It is a very timely book because if we are moving into a period of public sector austerity, the capacity to look after each other will need to become much greater. So this ‘hidden wealth’ as he calls it, this ability and desire to look after each other, to build strength in communities – and also people’s resilience – will become more important. 

There are certain things that David talks about in the book that you find yourself repeating again and again. For example, the reason that the Danes are the happiest people in the world isn’t just because of material circumstances. When you ask the Danes what the most important thing in life is they say ‘relationships’. Whereas the Bulgarians are the most miserable people in Europe. If you ask them, they say the most important thing is ‘money’. 

Isn’t that inevitable if they haven’t got any? 

Partly, but it’s not the whole story. The Danes are half as worried as the British about crime, but the crime levels are the same in Denmark and Britain. So it seems to be that the differences between nations are not just to do with their material circumstances or levels of social pathologies, but also to do with a deeper set of characteristics. You could read this alongside The Spirit Level, which is also about why some societies seem to be healthier than others – this is an area of general enquiry at the moment. 

I think there is a lot of interesting literature out there about national differences. David Halpern also writes something very surprising in this book, which is that in spite of migration, differences between countries are actually persisting or, if anything, increasing. In other words, national character is still a very powerful idea even though nations are becoming more diverse. 

Does this dovetail with Richard Layard’s ‘happiness movement’? 

I am all in favour where it means the kind of thing we have been talking about: teaching young people to understand self-control and the real drivers of contentment. The happiness movement is very contested territory. I am rather Greek in this and I go with the ancients, which is to say that happiness is really an aesthetic view of life, to do with having a certain symmetry, a sense of duty and fulfilment. Talking just about happiness always sounds slightly utilitarian to me. 

There is also the idea in John Kay’s recent book Obliquity, which was also John Stuart Mill’s argument as well, that happiness is like business success and profit in that it’s a by-product – if it’s all you look for then you never get it. Also, what are you talking about? Happiness over what time frame? At what point do you measure your success in life? Is it on your deathbed? Is it now?