Wellbeing as a tool for tackling populism

Lord Richard Layard at the Wellbeing Economy Forum 2024

Richard Layard, the renowned economist from the London School of Economics and a keynote speaker at the Wellbeing Economy Forum in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 2024, believes that happiness has “never been more important.” He states, “As this year’s World Happiness Report shows, unhappiness is the main cause of populism, which is the scourge of our era.” According to Layard, it has long been known that whether a government gets re-elected depends more on the people's life satisfaction than on the economy's state.

An article published in The Guardian on March 22 highlights that the UK has fallen from being the 20th happiest country to the 23rd in this year’s happiness index, released in conjunction with the UN's International Happiness Day. Finland, Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden, the top four, remain in the same order as 2024. The United States, at No. 24, earned its lowest ranking yet in the 2025 report. “As this year’s World Happiness report shows, unhappiness is the main cause of populism, which is the scourge of our era,” he says. “By contrast, in Britain, the spending review process offers hope since it explicitly targets wellbeing.”

A group of French academics wrote one of the most interesting chapters in the report. It shows how populism can be explained not by economic conditions but by a broader sense of wellbeing in the population.