5.1 Critical questions
As well as making sense of what you read, you have to think about whether or not you are convinced by the arguments being
presented. At degree level, you don't simply accept what you read – you read ‘critically’, weighing up the strengths and weaknesses
of the case the author makes. This means asking another set of questions, such as the ones discussed here.
5.1.1 How much trust can I put in this text?
You would generally assume that any set texts for a are trustworthy. But when you find a text through your own research you need to run a few checks to assess the soundness
of its content.
Who is the publisher?
If an article is from an academic journal, you can assume that its quality has been vetted by the journal's editors. Also
if a book is published by a major academic publishing house, you would expect it to be ‘respectable’. And if it's a book from
an academic series, you would expect the series editor to have vetted the quality. However, in other cases you need to run
a few checks. Richard Layard's article is published in a weekly magazine. This does not guarantee academic soundness, so I
need to consider other information.
Who is the author?
At the end of Layard's article, a note says that he is Co-Director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School
of Economics. This gave me confidence in the quality of his scholarship. I did a little further research on the internet and
found out that he is an advisor to the government, particularly with respect to its New Deal for the unemployed, and that
he has been made a Lord.
5.1.2 In what context was the text published?
This amounts to asking, when was it written and for what audience. Academic texts are written to make a contribution to the debates going on within the field. To understand where an author
is coming from and why arguments are being presented in a particular way, you need to be able to place the text in context.
Layard's article was published in 2003 in the UK, and was drawn from a prestigious series of public lectures. So the context
is a major statement by a prominent academic to colleagues and policy leaders, during the sixth year of a New Labour government,
after nearly 25 years of growing incomes inequality.
5.1.3 Does the argument follow logically?
As I was making sense of paragraph 3, I did pause to consider whether it was logically possible to say that on average richer
people are happier, yet getting richer has not made us happier. Later, when I read that women in the US were less happy since
their incomes had come closer to men's, it occurred to me that they would be unlikely to volunteer to revert to previous levels
of inequality. This made me question what happiness really means, if it is not necessarily a state that a person would opt
for. I then wondered whether the measures of happiness that Layard was quoting were as straightforward as they might seem.
That did not stop me from taking a strong interest in his arguments, it just made me a bit more cautious about accepting them.
Generally, though, I found Layard's logic stood up very well to the questions I posed.
5.1.4 What evidence is offered?
Layard frequently offers evidence for his main points. I had the impression that this was just a sample from a wide range
of relevant evidence that he had reviewed. Because of the prestigious context, I tended to assume that the evidence would
be reliable and that Layard's interpretations would be pretty watertight. Nothing in the evidence seemed to conflict with
my existing knowledge. However, if I were studying the subject more thoroughly, I would go back to the lectures from which
his article was taken, as published on the internet, so that I could look more closely at the kind of evidence being quoted
and how it was gathered.
5.1.5 Is there an alternative school of thought?
I guessed that plenty of economists would disagree with Layard's point of view, if he is right that they have not used measures of happiness and have treated rises in real incomes as an unquestioned ‘good thing’. If I were studying this
topic seriously, I would search for an article which tackled Layard's arguments from another perspective. When you encounter
new ideas, it is useful to get more that one perspective on them, so that you can weigh one against the other.
5.1.6 Are the conclusions justified?
Though I was interested in the idea of treating high incomes as ‘pollution’, I did wonder whether taxing people to pay for
the pollution caused by their rising incomes would work. In general though I was reasonably convinced by the conclusions Layard
drew. On the other hand, if I was studying the subject more seriously, I might find that wider reading and further thought
would make some of the conclusions seem less convincing.
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