An Economist’s Guide To Avoiding A Life of Misery - Erik Angner

Why is economics not any sexier than it is? I think economics has the um disadvantage of being associated with lots of like very uncool people. You know, numbers, data, models. I- I- in the formal sense, you know, these are not things that attract our attention. But it's a shame because economics is actually pretty cool. Now, I may not be the best person to pitch that idea, but it is. And um I wish more people saw that. What is it that people misunderstand about what economics contains then? So, one thing that people might not get is just how broad it is, right? So, so many people think of economics in terms of like stock markets, housing markets, inflation rates, and things. And that is part of economics. That is one of the things that were some of the things that economists study, but economics is so much broader than that. It's about anything and everything connected to human well-being. Any choice that you make that has any implications for the way you live your life and the way things turn out. So, that means you can do economics and study crime, uh child rearing, uh climate change, uh family formation, whatever you like, there's likely to be an economic angle to it. And in fact, if you think about like the big problems, like whichever problem you're thinking about, I bet there's an economic angle to that as well, right? There's going to be some economic implications or some economic perspec- perspective, and in many cases some economic tool that you can use to address it. What do you mean when you say an economic angle? Like, what are you referring to? What is the toolkit or the worldview or the paradigm through which economics looks at these sorts of things? What I'm thinking about primarily is a way of looking at human decisions. And basically everything is a result of human decisions, right? Everything's social. And even if it isn't, the solution to whatever problem you're thinking about is going to involve human behavior. And when economists think about that, what they think about is the various values that are at stake. Often times, we have to make choices, right? Cuz there's a limited amount of whatever we care about. And what that means that we have to strike a balance between the different things. We have to give up a little bit of this in order to get a little bit of that. Now, some people out there want everything always at once, right? That's childish. Once you see that the world isn't designed like that, you got to think about the ways in which things come at a cost. And that's the core of what economics has to offer. A way of looking at decisions that brings to the fore the values that are at stake, the costs involved, but also the benefits that you can get from making the best available decision. Speaking of making economics a little bit sexier, a Yale economics professor has some ideas for how to deal with the burdens of Japan's rapidly aging society. The only solution, he said, is mass suicide of the elderly, including ritual disembowelment. I noticed that you shared this article with a massive face palm about what your uh Japanese colleagues are doing. In in interviews and public appearances, Yusuke Narita, an assistant professor of economics at Yale, has taken on the question of how to deal with the burdens of Japan's rapidly aging society. I feel like the only solution is pretty clear, he said during the online news program in late 2021. In the end, isn't it mass suicide and mass seppuku of the elderly? Seppuku is an act of ritual disembowelment that was a code among dishonored samurai in the 19th century. Um mass seppuku or throwing yourself off a cliff like in Midsommar, he suggested a little bit later. With with all respect to my colleagues at Yale, I think that's a fundamentally uneconomic way of looking at the world, right? Anytime somebody says, "This is the only way. This is the only solution." That means that they're not recognizing the tradeoffs involved. I think if we're going to think about aging populations and the sort of burdens that that's going to come with and the benefits as well, we've got to look at the full range of of costs and benefits. At the end of the day, the economist is not going to be best situated to say, "Well, this is the right option." Right? Given all the costs and benefits, cuz that's a question about values at the end of the day. And that's not really what we do. What we do as economists is to think about, "Well, if we want to attain this goal, like what do we have to sacrifice in order to get there?" And if we want to avoid mass suicide, right? Which we do, then we we as economists can say things like, "Well, here are the options, right? We can go down this path. We can go down that path. And now, you people decide." You people meaning voters and, you know, fellow citizens out there. What are some of the potential advantages of an aging population? This isn't really my area, so I hesitate to sort of speak out of line, but um there are benefits with older populations, clearly. You could see it in the workplace, right? We have We have what as Speaking as one of the older people, um we have experience and knowledge and things that uh it's got to be possible to take advantage of. Yeah, it's an interesting one. I think the difference between an an aging population and an elderly population is is probably pretty important because what we're talking about is a uh larger cohort of people that can contribute in terms of innovation, in terms of being part of the workforce, driving GDP, etc., etc. Um but as is told, demography is destiny, which means that that aged workforce population will eventually end up becoming the elderly population. You can end up with an inverted pyramid, which is not necessarily fun. So, what I think is interesting about your perspective is that you've got the economics wing, and you've got the philosophy wing, as well. You're also a philosopher by training, but philosophers also not exactly renowned for being well-liked and well-respected. They're often disliked and disrespected. And and now you're telling me? Look, I I I'm not saying that it's you, Eric, that's causing this to happen, but what is it, do you think, about philosophy, as well? It seems like there need There's a branding problem. There's like a a PR nightmare that's occurred with both economics and with philosophy. What's your postmortem on the uh brand positioning of philosophy and philosophers? I worry what it might say about me, the fact that I sit at the common denominator You're the common denominator here, Eric. such a bad reputation. Um I don't know. I think we are um for one thing, terrible at explaining to people what we do. So, philosophy and economics are both sort of abstruse. They're abstract. They're done in a language that's inaccessible. We use mathematics in philosophy, as well as in economics, right? And this means that the average Joe can't pick up one of our journals and get something out of it. But that doesn't mean that the stuff we're doing isn't relevant to the people on the street. In fact, it's immediately and directly relevant to many of the the things that we're thinking about, the ways in which we live our lives, and whatever. We just don't translate it into a language that's comprehensible to people. And much of that is a function, I think, of of professional norms. So, we care about each other's approval, right? We talk to each other. We care about what other people care about think about us. We don't pay enough attention to the the out there and the various ways in which they might want to engage in conversation. Because the fact is, it wouldn't just be good for them, it would be good for us as well. When we talk about big decisions, for example, we need stakeholder involvement, right? Economics can't provide the values. We need people out there telling us what matters to them, what they think of as the big problems, and what sort of constraints apply to the solutions that that we develop. So, I think there's a lot of there would be a lot of benefits to be had from actually talking to each other, which, you know, we don't do in part because of this terrible reputation that you that you identified. Okay, so you did a fantastic lecture that I really enjoyed to do with happiness and and how it's worked into a whole host of different factors. Just taking a broad view as someone at the intersection of philosophy and economics, what do you think common misunderstandings about happiness miss? What is it that people don't fully conceptualize when they're just considering happiness overall? So, the central thing that I like to underscore is the difference between happiness and well-being. So, well-being, as I think of it, as philosophers think of it, is what we have when our lives are going well, when our things are in place, when we're flourishing, and so on. Happiness is what we have when we're in the certain mental state, a mental state that feels good, that that that sometimes psychologists refer to as as positive affect. And it's true that historically people have thought of these two things as very tightly sort of intertwined, but I think it makes a lot of sense to think of them as slightly separate. Sure, a good life is a life that includes a great deal of happiness. It would be weird to think of your life going well if you're miserably unhappy, but there are situations when these things come apart. So, there are values in life, there are goals in life that are important to us, even if they don't come with an additional dose of happiness and even if they come at the cost of happiness. I like to think about children actually falling in this category. There is a lot of evidence from the science of happiness suggesting that having children makes you less happy than not having children and that if you're a parent when you're spending time with your kids, you're less happy than when you're doing many other things like hanging out with your friends or chilling in front of the television or or something. But never mind, having a child can still be a good thing for you, right? Even if it comes at a cost. So that's that that's got your philosophy angle, right? But it's got your economics angle as well. And this is a a really important thing to appreciate. Some things are good for us even if they don't make us happier. What is the way that having children does contribute to the uh improvement of our lives, whether that be through well-being or meaning or or whatever? There is a fair amount of evidence suggesting that people with kids have more meaning in their lives. They feel part of a bigger whole. They feel like they're part of the shifts of the generations. They give satisfaction to their parents and and so on. Non- sat non-financial satisfaction as people say increases when you become a parent. The problem is that other kinds of satisfaction go down. Um notably financial satisfaction. So having a child costs a ton of money. Right now, the estimates suggest it costs like $300,000 before college, right? Up to the age 18 or something. And then you stack college costs on on top of that. It's a lot of money. And what that means is that when you have a child, unless you suddenly become, you know, $300,000 richer, you're going to have have make sacrifices. And those sacrifices are going to cost you in terms of, you know, happiness among other things. I've had a lot of conversations on the podcast about declining birth rates, crises of fertility, and then crises of mating overall. People just getting into relationships and and not saying that they are going their own way or retreating into much more siloed atomized lifestyle. And one of the things I've considered, which you've touched on there, which is pretty interesting, is an over- prioritization of the immediate. And because we live in a world which is hyper-convenient, the immediacy I I said to you before I got started, it's 39° here in Austin, Texas, but I'm cool. I'm cool because I've got air conditioning. I don't have to wait for the air conditioning to come on because it's on a timer. Uh so, the immediacy of our comfort and the immediacy of any discomfort has never been more acutely felt. And I get the sense that with declining religiosity, which is sort of a lack of awe and dread, a lack of sort of connection to the grander plan, the more meaning-making, also the more community-based activities that we would have done previously, what people see when they look at childhood having children and and the sort of ensuing $300,000 prison sentence is that it's an awful lot of non-immediate happiness. Look at all of the things that I'm going to have to pay a price for up front. There was a a famous TikTok that a girl released called The Girl With a List, and she printed off 300 something reasons why not to have a kid, and they included things like I can't go to brunch with the girls, no longer able to wear cute heels. So, you know, people really are It's kind of tongue in cheek, but also people really optimizing for this stuff on the front end. What you're saying is that overall, the meaning-making machine that children are is perhaps a net positive, but it does require you to pay a cost up front with regards to freedom and in-the-moment happiness continuously as well. If it's 3:00 a.m. in the morning and this is the second time that your baby has uh pooed in its diaper, it is not going to be an enjoyable, happy experience. You know, you will accrue meaning across the period of your life, but current culture pedestalizes happiness in the moment and uh absolutely hates any detraction away from that so much that I think we have a a culture which is essentially unconducive to meaning-making and given that children are mostly meaning-making machines, I think that that explains at least part of of what's going on. What do you think about my bro science hypothesis Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. So, one off like first off, recognizing that having children is awfully hard is really important, right? You have these nights when you cannot sleep at all cuz they're screaming, cuz they're sick or whatever. Um sleeplessness is terrible. It's terrible for your thinking, for your affect, for your irritability, right? It's terrible for your immune system. And there's just so much evidence suggesting that that's bad for for a person and and hard. It's also true that we tend to focus on short-term gains to a very great extent. There's a ton of evidence on hyperbolic discounting as as they call it, right? If you're standing, if you have the choice between a a remote uh benefit, a remote good like, you know, adoring children or something, or going to brunch with your friends, going to brunch is going to seem like such a good idea when it's right in front of you, even if when you reflect on it, you recognize that adoring children is a much bigger value to to you. So so that's really important. And And I think in certain ways parenting has gotten harder, right? We There In other ways it's gotten better, but we live um we're lonelier now in a sense. We live, especially in America, very far from our families. We can live thousands of miles, obviously, from our our families. In um other times and in other places, you would live closer to your family. You would have parents, um cousins, nieces, nephews, aunts, and uncles, some of whom wouldn't have their own children, who might really benefit from hanging out with yours. And then raising a child is a more communal endeavor, uh which which is really really important. Now, we live alone, uh very far from family. We're expected to do all this on our own at the same time as we're working maybe 60 hours a week, right? 80, in the worst case. If If you're a young person, you're trying to build a career, you need an apartment, you have payments on your car, right? You can't just stay home with a kid if you also have to uh make ends meet. And so, we're putting an awful lot of uh awful awfully heavy burden on the shoulders of young people who might otherwise want to have kids. Now, it's true that not everybody does, right? Probably not everyone ought to have kids, but many people do. And the obstacles are are very tall. Yeah, it seems that the biggest disparity between uh desired and realized fertility. So, um the people who wanted uh the number of kids that they have compared to the number of kids that they wanted is the biggest uh educated women. And the more educated and the more smart you are, the bigger that disparity. And I don't know whether there is a correlation between desire to have children and uh IQ or whatever in women, but I can imagine that if you are somebody who is uh quite smart and quite well-educated, the bottom line is you've just spent lots of time in school. That's lots of time being poor and relying on student loans, and probably living away from your parents and all of the support structures, and not having kids yet. So, you know, even aside from the motivations, you just don't have the time as much. I will say that constraints differ across countries. So, this is one thing that pops up in the happiness data. If you look at like Gallup data, for example, which comes out of basically every country across the world, the effects of having a child varies by location. There are a couple of things going on there, I think. So, some of it might have to do with culture, right? In some cultures, you're more family-oriented, you can depend on your relatives to much greater extent than you can in in others. Um development matters. If there's more money to go around in a country, that makes it easier to be a parent there than if you're in a place with very little resources. But, also, some places offer public policies that make life easier for parents. So, things like parental leave, right? Allowing you to spend a year maybe with your kid uh with a salary, and then being able to return to the workplace, right? That cushions you against some of the financial strain that you might feel otherwise. Um healthcare, right? So, having a child isn't just expensive, it's also unpredictable. Like, some people have kids who are always healthy and happy. They you know what they cost is not too bad, but other kid kids have very large needs and need a lot of additional resources. If you can depend on support for those sorts of of needs, well, then that's going to make your life a lot easier. So, there are things that some places do for people that make it easier to have kids, and that make happiness um if not go up, at least not go down by as much as it does in the US. Continental Europe looks better from this perspective than the US and the UK, for example. And the suggestion is that it has to do with the public policy and the conditions that new parents in particular are facing. America is ruthless. You get 3 and 1/2 days off and you're expected to be back in the office answering emails while they're still cutting the umbilical cord. Right. And healthcare is tied to your employer to a very great extent, right? So, if you want to be home, you risk getting fired. You would also lose your health insurance, right? That's a very good during during a period of time where you're physically more vulnerable perhaps than you would have been previously. Exactly. And every new parent worries about their kids, right? Even if they're perfectly healthy, there are so many things you're going to worry about. And having access to medical care is obviously critical for thought about that. I I never I never thought about the essential ransom that new parents are held to in America by the the fact that their medical cover is covered by their employer. Yeah, that's very interesting. Going back going going back to the the money and happiness relationship, what is the answer to whether or not money can buy happiness in your opinion? It can. It can. So, this is slightly bizarre conversation going on, but people have been doing happiness research for literally 100 years and there's never been any doubt about the fact that more money makes at least some people happier. So, if you look at poor people, people at the bottom end of the income scale, everyone has found that giving them more money on the average will make them happier. The conversation, the scholarly conversation that's been going on for some time has to do with what happens on the other side of the income distribution. So, if you look at the very rich, does the curve become flat, meaning there's no additional benefit from making more money after a certain point, or does it continue to rise? And right now, it seems like a consensus is emerging which says that happiness increases at every level of income, but it increases less and less the more money you make. So, economists talk about diminishing marginal returns, right? And that's what we seem to find in the happiness data. Now, it matters what you have to give up in order to get that additional chunk of cash. It's not always going to be the case that you should try to make more money if you want to be happier, because you might have to sacrifice leisure, right? Golfing, time with friends, time with family, time with your kids, things like things like that. So, you shouldn't sort of infer that you should always try to maximize your your income. There's a point at which you would be better off not. But, all things equal, getting more money seems to be making you happier, no matter where you are in the distribution. What is the relationship between money and life satisfaction, well-being, meaning, happiness? Where do Where are we accruing the biggest gains? Where are we paying the biggest prices? Well, so those things are all correlated, right? Meaning, happiness, satisfaction, money, they're they're correlated at the national level and at the individual individual level. They do seem to come apart in certain places. So, if you look at the very rich, there's evidence that satisfaction keeps rising faster than happiness, meaning sort of the way you feel, positive affect. So, if you ask somebody like how satisfied they feel with their lives, like that the response to that keeps increasing even if like your happiness tapers off. Why do you think that's the case? That I I I don't know. Um, a judgement it tends to respond to slightly different sort of factors in your life than than your affect. Our feelings are a little weird sometimes, right? They respond to things that might rationally not make such such a big difference. So, one thing about um happiness is that it seems to respond quite strongly to expectations and whatever you're used to or whatever. It's possible that um happiness is more responsive to things like expectations and aspirations and and things than judgements of satisfaction. But here I'm just guessing on the basis of the data that I've seen. Yeah, talk about the role of aspiration. What's that What's the name of that guy? The dude who um tried to beat the railway machine. John Henry. Thank you. What's the story of him? So, African-American folk hero, right? Tragic hero. He was a railroad man. Um, he built railroads at a time when people started producing machines to compete with humans. He he John Henry uh thought he was going to be better than the machine. He went um into a competition with a machine and he's a tragic hero because he won. He was right, but he died in in victory. This is interesting to to me and to some other people because you can think of a personality characteristic along these lines. Some people are just more like John Henry than others, right? Some have ambition, goals in life, you know, they set um they have aspirations, they don't give up easily and so on. Other people are more like couch potatoes. They don't really have goals and and so on. They don't have very high expectations or aspirations. And there's a certain amount of evidence suggesting that how happy you are is a function both of what you attain and how much you aspired for, what you were hoping for. in such a way that the more you get, the happier you are. But the more you aspire, the less the more you aspire to, the less happy you are. And I've worked a little bit on this and and what you expect to find in the data is exactly what you find. People with very high goals in life may attain a little more than others, but they look less happy than other people. I feel like I see this in class, right? I teach college. Um some students come in, they got a B on the exam, they hate it. They're so upset cuz they expected an A, right? Other people come in, they got a D, they're going to go partying, they're so pleased cuz they were sure they were going to fail. And so, how happy you are with your performance is going to reflect not just the score you get on the exam or whatever, but your expectation, right? And a slightly sort of scary thing about this is that what this might suggest is that in order to be happy, you should just like lower your standards, right? Lower your goals. Never try to pursue anything, never go for anything, always give up if you run into trouble or whatever. But but that would be the wrong conclusion to draw, right? Precisely because happiness and well-being don't always go together, right? There are things that you can do that will leave you better off even though you're less happy. Having kids would count for me, at least. But also accomplishing things like running a marathon or climbing a mountain, things like that, you know, might make you feel miserable. Sailing might make you feel awful. But nonetheless, if you set yourself a goal, you attain it, right? You're a reason to be proud of yourself. You're living a good life for you in spite of the fact that you're miserable because you're cold and whatever. Yes, no one's ever been happy whilst running a marathon, but afterwards many people that complete it will probably say, "Yeah, that was very meaningful." or whatever my sense of well-being. Have you ever seen any interventions that are able to decrease expectations whilst not decreasing aspiration? I am not sure about that. I can't think of any intervention that I'm aware of that That would be the magic pill. Yeah, maybe you should work on one. Yeah, I don't know. The It's interesting the standard thing, right? And language is so messy here because what people are talking about they're often conflating lots of different things together. You know, falling short of what it is that you wanted to do makes you feel bad, but we also know that there is a degree of good that comes along with the achievement overall. So, we're talking about expectation and well-being and happiness and aspiration. It all kind of gets bundled up together. It's a nice conception to think about the fact that you know, in the ideal scenario you would regularly beat your expectations. I suppose the problem is that your expectations and your aspirations are going to be quite tightly tied together, which suggests that the more you expect of yourself, the more you aspire to, the higher your goals, the closer you get to achieving some things. You know, the the people that consistently overachieve, like ridiculously overachieve over and over and over again, that doesn't happen by accident. They're not just doing this like, oh, there we go again, king of the world for the third time in a row or whatever. Like it's just it doesn't happen. It's people purposefully, neurotically going out of their way to very carefully design a system that creates this outcome or one that's very similar to it. I think Well, actually, how how have you given this sort of knowledge that you have around where satisfaction comes from, happiness, aspiration, expectation, how have you adjusted your own approach to your life to try and integrate this to maximize your sense of well-being and happiness? Now, I don't want to hold up myself as a model in this regard at all, but I did read up on a literature on goal regulation. There's a whole psychology of goal regulation, which is precisely about this. Like, how do you select goals in life to motivate you to accomplish things, you know, to live the best life that you can without tripping yourself up, right? So, we agree that you need some goals to to perform, right? We ought to have goals. They make life worth living. They structure our existence and so on. But, at the same time, there are limits to the the goals that you should set for your for yourself. And I'll say that one of the things that I've done quite successfully is to be satisfied with being mediocre in almost everything. If it comes to like sports, uh all sorts of activities, music, I sometimes enjoy engaging in these activities, but I'm perfectly happy being mediocre. Then, there are a couple of things that I do in my work. I want to do the best possible work. Like, the best work I can do, the best work that that anyone can do. I fail, right? In all sorts of ways, but that's my goal. But, in this very narrow little domain, in my sub sub sub discipline of the academic world or or whatever. But, being happy with mediocrity, I think is is really great. And it's something that more people should try. That's very interesting because there would be an argument to be made that how you do anything is how you do everything. That setting yourself high standards is advantageous and it will begin to bleed across you know, if you make your bed and your pajamas are always folded and the kitchen counter is always cleaned and so on and so forth, that this is just going to seep into all of the other areas of your life and the reverse as well. That if you don't do those things, you're just going to become a lazy piece of [ __ ] in your academic career. Now, I don't disagree with you. I mean, maybe that works for somebody else, right? But what worked for me is just settling in like almost every domain except the ones that I really care about and that I focus on on this. Yeah. So, I have Economists talk about comparative advantage, right? Is focusing where you do best relative to what others are up to. And this is an application of that idea. Yeah, I would not be the best at house cleaning or whatever, which is why we've got a maid. We have a maid that comes around and she does the house, so I've sacrificed some of those things that I am good at, which is making money, for something that she's good at, which is cleaning the house. Um one of my friends has a uh coach of some kind and he told me a few months ago that this coach has got him he made him take up a hobby and he had to not care about how good he was at the hobby. And I think the hobby that he took up was something to do with art. It was some kind of watercolor painting or drawing or some sort of something. Maybe it was even in a class, still life class or something. And there is a part of him, he's quite a hard-charging type A type guy, and there was a bit of him that just wanted to, right, I'm going to go home and I'm going to watch all of the YouTube videos about how to become better at my art style and I'm going to get all of the best pencils and I'm going to do extra work outside. And his coach said, "You are forgetting the purpose of the exercise. The purpose of the exercise is to do a thing simply for doing a thing. Do you enjoy it when you go and you try this thing?" He's like, "Yeah, I'd enjoy it more if I was better." And she's like, "That's not the point. The point is for you to be able to let go of the desire to be better at this thing." It's a very, very interesting it like intersection or vector that we're talking about, which is in a world where everybody applauds growth and development, and I do too. It's one of the things that I've taken an unbelievable amount of joy from in my life. How do you draw Is it possible to draw boundaries around that beyond which you can let go, which actually teaches you lessons of where to which hills to stand on with a flag and then start swinging a sword, and which hills to say, "Looks like the cleaner is going to get this one." Or looks like I'm going to be [ __ ] as an artist. Or do you know what I mean? Because I do think I do think that there's a an associated psychological suffering that comes with holding yourself to an incredibly high standard across the board. And And this is the I suppose the behavioral uh economics element of this or the behaviorist element of this. It's unrealistic. Like you know You know that if expectations, as soon as you posit an expectation for yourself and you fall short of it, that's going to create a degree of suffering. The fewer expectations that you have, especially the ones that you do not need to have, does it matter about how straight the bed is? Does it really matter? Or would it be better? Let's imagine a world in which you could silo off uh compartmentalize the different elements of things that you have to be good at in your life. Okay, well, if I could be great at academia and not give a [ __ ] about how the bed's made, I would no longer need to make the bed. So, it's almost like our expectation of this global how you do anything how you do is how you do everything movement is become self-fulfilling in a way and and inescapable and and maybe not actually that advantageous. This isn't exactly an answer to your question, but so often it seems to me that we should focus more on consistent practice than on outcomes. If I wanted to become a marathon runner and I measured my performance by reference to the best marathon runner out there, I would fall short every day, right? I would feel awful about myself every time I went out there. So, the key to becoming a runner is to commit to a certain training schedule. You go out there, you train every day or whatever, and if you keep it up, even if the only thing you care about is the outcome, you're better off focusing on consistent practice than constantly trying to measure up your performance against some effectively unattainable yardstick. And I think that it applies in lots of domains. I had a phase in college when I wrote poetry. I sat down, I wrote a poem, I compared it to like the best poem of whoever I was reading at the time, Leonard Cohen, and then I said, "Look, this is not as good as his." And I tossed it, and I stopped, right? That's a sure path to failure. If I really wanted to become a poet, I would have had stick with it independently of how good it was, right? And so to some extent, we need to select like which hill we're going to climb, right? To stick with your metaphor, and then just do it, right? Now, which climb which climb should you attempt? Well, that's going to depend on your values. It might depend on like what you have a natural talent for and so on, for sure. It might depend on things like what your friends are up to. Sometimes it's more fun to climb in the presence of of your friends. But at the end of the day, that's going to be a matter of of values. But once you've committed, the best way forward is probably to commit to a plan, not to like constantly assess your performance. Yes. So, it's got me thinking about um something I used to do in my old business. I ran nightclubs for a long time, and when you do that, you get a guest list of people that are sent through. And this was a period where we were the biggest events company in the city by an absolute mile. And this Saturday party that we had was a a monster. Thousands and thousands of kids would turn up every week. So, we would just have hundreds and hundreds of groups of people, and it would be submitted as uh first name, second name, plus group size, right? So, it'd be John Smith plus five, Chris Williamson plus three, whatever. I remember that there was a a long period of probably 6 months to a year where I went through and meticulously moved the plus number into a separate column so that all of the numbers were completely aligned straight up and down. Let's not forget that this was a night a club night that was making like thousands and thousands of pounds of profit a week. And I was spending my time in the build-up to the event moving individual numbers that had been texted in by 18-year-olds that were pre-gaming battered most of them wouldn't even show up, right? You know, 50% or more of the guest list wasn't even going to show. But I had convinced myself that this was one of the important things that needed to be done. And this is why I think a degree of uh reflexive reflective practice. Okay, what are the things that I'm doing? Does this contribute to the particular hill that I'm supposed to go up? No, it doesn't. You're spending 90 minutes a week [ __ ] about with an Excel spreadsheet. Perhaps you could spend that doing anything even if it was just watching TV or chilling out or or exercising. I guess many very successful people have this insane attention to detail, right? In architecture, design, or movie making, or whatever, you find that. But in order to be great at something, you have to pay attention to the right details, right? And if the orientation of the pluses or whatever really has no effect on the outcome of the event, then you know, the opportunity cost is overwhelming. What role does inequality have in happiness? So, we've spoken about the fact that um there is a relationship, although it does taper off to do with money and happiness. It continues to go up, so there's number beyond which $70,000 a year happiness doesn't increase. I'd already heard that that was mostly bollocks. Diminishing returns seems to make sense. But I would imagine that the curve is different if you are living on a street filled with millionaires. So there has to be inequality and the keeping up with the Joneses comparison that we have in our brains must mediate our happiness with regards to wealth. Yeah, I mean there's a lot to be said about happiness and and inequality. First off, there are ways in which at least some inequality is good for total happiness. So um some inequalities reflect preferences. For example, maybe I just want to lay in bed, read a book. Maybe you want a ton of money in order to travel the world and play golf or something, right? Um then a maximally happy society where both of us get to do what we want to do requires a certain degree or entails a certain degree of of inequality. So some inequality is probably good for for happiness. There are other effects as well. But then there are various ways in which an inequality or inequality can harm total happiness. So for example, if you're desperately poor and I'm super rich and an additional dollar would make a much bigger difference for you than for me. Like you can imagine scenarios where some degree of distribution redistribution would make a difference. And then the keeping up with the Joneses is is really important, I think. When we assess how well we're doing in life, very often we don't look at some objective yardstick cuz those things really don't exist. What we do is we compare ourselves to somebody around us. Like what's a nice car? What what do I know, right? I'll look at the other people in my office and see what they're driving. What's a nice watch? What's uh you know, reasonable salary or whatever. And to the extent that we spend a lot of time comparing ourselves to others, we might get involved in these like very harmful arms races where I try to make a little more to have a shinier car or whatever than you and you respond by working a little more to have a shinier car than me. At the end of the day, we're the same, right? But both of us work a lot more, and we're applying money into like, you know, capital goods that neither one of us really wanted. And so, I think one key to happiness is sort of opting out on this of this process when it makes sense. All right, I want the shiniest new iPhone. Many of my friends get the latest iPhone, and I feel the urge to buy one, too. But I succeed in talking myself out of that, and I save a lot of money that way that I can spend on things that give me more happiness. Yeah, I I've I've thought about this an awful lot. I don't have much materialism. Like, I'm not a very keeping up with the Joneses person with regards to what I own or what I wear or Good. anything. I feel quite fortunate. Like, I don't know everything's heritable, right? You know, whatever everything that you are psychologically is on average 50% heritable. So, I guess I have my parents to to thank for it. But I would love to know what that is, a materialism set point or something or a comparative set point, what psychological dimension that sits upon, and what interventions we could use to nudge people away from that. Because I do think that it's a very low-cost way to improve people's quality of life. Like, you get more bang for your buck because you are not spending your bucks on things that you don't need to spend them on. Right. I mean, we're living in a world where one of the fastest-growing sectors of the economy is like storage, right? People have so many things so many things that they become a problem for them, a psychological problem. People seek therapy to deal with the quantities of stuff that they've accumulated. So, I think there's a lot of evidence both from the science and from everyday experience to suggest that we tend to favor material belongings to a greater extent than we probably should if we wanted to be happy. Like so many people love going camping, right? Their best moments is when they're in a tent somewhere in front of a campfire and they've got a guitar and a couple of beers. Uh right? That's the That's the spirit. Like some of us really want quite simple things. And if we can see that and and favor those sorts of things, we can make ourselves happier. Now, of course, camping is can be super expensive, right? Depending on where you go and what sort of gear you bring. So, this is not like a solution that's going to work for everyone. But I think the general insight is true, right? As a result of external pressure or, you know, upbringing or whatever, uh we tend to give too much weight to material belongings when there are other things that are cheaper and better for us. One of the things I was considering to do with the level of inequality that you could have within a a society or within a country, you could have a correlation between high GDP and high happiness, but that could be skewed with high earners. Because high GDP is contributed to overall by everyone. And let's say that you have a country which has captured some non-insignificant percentage of the world's billionaires. Okay, the the GDP is increasing and there would be a way that that could uh skew the relationship between GDP and happiness. Have you ever looked at this? Have you looked at happiness versus inequality and GDP and how all of that folds in? Y- Yeah, so I haven't looked at it myself, but I think the general point is true in the sense that like GDP is an average, right? It takes like all the stuff that gets produced in a country and you divide it by the number of people. GDP doesn't say anything at all about how it's distributed. And the happiness data seems to respond to the ways in which various resources are distributed. Is there one guy who owns everything or things are distributed in a in a different way? People who need things, do they get things and and so on. So, you can you can modify as it were the relationship between happiness and GDP by distributing it in in various ways and it's worthwhile thinking about that, I think. Is there a sex difference in happiness? Um I don't think there are any major sex differences to my knowledge. Um it's not a major factor anyway in the literature that to my to my knowledge. Yeah, because we have um increasing rates of depression and anxiety in young girls. I think that uh females overall uh got a a higher risk for uh depression and anxiety, but I think uh white men between the ages of 40 and 45 are at the highest risk for suicide at the moment. So, there's you know, there's kind of a a U-shaped curve to life satisfaction, which I'm sure that you'll have seen and it seems to bottom out at around about like 44 or something like that. Yeah, these sorts of things that you're talking about ought to be visible, it seems to me in the happiness data. I just haven't looked at it. Like there is evidence as as you said that happiness over the course of the life cycle is like U-shaped. You're pretty happy when you're young, you're pretty happy when you're old, you're miserable in the middle. But then it turns out like where I am, right? I'd be at the trough there. But then it matters what you control for. So, you know, do you control for whether you have kids or not? Well, many people have like teenage kids in in in middle age and having teenage kids is awful, right? They're super expensive. They stab you in the back like every day. Um so much disappointment. Treacherous. And whatever. Treacherous bastards that they are. Right. And so, the phenomenon like what it looks like is going to depend on to a great extent like what you control for. And then these are averages, right? It doesn't apply to each and every individual. What Yeah, this is one of the things I was having a conversation about, um, What was I talking about? I was talking about the differences in the pains that people feel within the dating market, that, uh, the problems that women have and the problems that men have, and like, um, how many men that can't grow any taller is worth a woman that can't afford a boob job. Basically, if we were to talk about, uh, trying to create an equivalency between the challenges that presenting, uh, both men and women have for increasing their visual mate value. Uh, and it's not it's it's you can't compare these two things. There is no currency uh, exchange between these two things. And I think that the conversation here as well about, you know, are men or women happier on average? Well, women have got a predisposition towards depression and anxiety, and young girls, whatever, 60% of them say they've got persistent feelings of hopelessness or listlessness or something. But men in the 40-45 range that are killing themselves at unprecedented rates. These aren't the same things. And I think that trying to fold them into happiness, this is one of the reasons why, um, I appreciate guys like you breaking down happiness, uh, well-being, uh, into component parts. Because I do think that there is a lot that can't be captured when we just use happiness to talk about how's life going overall. It's just not sufficiently precise. Yeah, no, I think I think that's a very important point. So, you mentioned depression, right? And of course there's a correlation between, uh, depression and the opposite of happiness, but they're not as correlated as you might think. And some people report laughing a lot, and, uh, they also score high on on depression. These things can come apart. So, so I guess, uh, mental health or well-being is a multi-dimensional thing. And if you want to grasp what's really going on in your life or in society, you have to pay attention to these these various things. When it comes to unhappy people on on the dating market. I I I I wouldn't know myself, but to some extent this has got to involve aspirations, right? If you're alone at home in your bedroom and you're thinking, "Oh, the woman or the man of my dreams is going to look like this, is going to have this profession, is going to make this much money, whatever." You're bound to be disappointed, right? It would make so much sense to go for somebody who's kind and generous and caring and you know, shows up when you need them to and whatnot, um than uh the one with a certain height or a certain, you know, bra size or what have you. Uh right? Aspirations matter in in all domains, probably. What about race differences in happiness? Have you ever detected any of those? I have not looked at that. Um uh I haven't. Uh so, I hesitate to um So, the the reason I think it's interesting is uh you know, well religion religiosity seems to be pretty strongly correlated with uh levels of happiness. Um That seems to make sense to me. Community, um ritual, uh degree of connection to something beyond just you, you know, we talked about sort of meaning and this sense of awe and dread, which I do think is is really really important. Um but you will have racial disparities in religiosity. So, I totally spitball this and maybe get it wrong. Mexicans on average may be more religious than whites in America, let's say, right? So, if you have people from Mexico and that would show a race difference to Central Americans in terms of happiness, but where's it actually coming from? Maybe it's actually coming from something else that's hiding within that. So, the three or the four big things that seem to be um indicative of happiness, poverty, unemployment, poor health, and religiosity. Those seem to be the big four. Is that right? You're quite right about religiosity. So, that's something that people have studied extensively, and people who are religious seem to be on the average significantly happier than atheists. This is kind of interesting. It's not quite clear to me where that comes from. So, people who go to church regularly, for example, have more companionship, right? They see people. They have They're in touch with people. They belong to a community. And those things are also known to be conducive to to happiness. So, that might be that might be part of it. Now, an interesting or sort of curious thing about this result is that conservatives have argued for a while that this proves that we were right all along, right? That being religious, living a religious life, going to church or temple or whatnot is is good for a person. And they might be right about that. There might be sort of causal connection between these two things. But somebody else who might have been right was Marx. So, when Marx talked about religion being opium for the people, what he meant was not that, you know, religion allows you to go out and get high or or whatever. What he meant was that it has a soothing effect, much like opium or, you know, anesthesia might. So, it makes you feel less bad if you live under awful conditions. And that might be true, too, right? So, there's a sense in which both the conservatives and Marxists were right about religion. Wow, the horseshoe theory comes back to bite everybody in the ass again. It's that sort of thing, yeah. What about unemployment distinct from its effect on wealth and poverty? Yeah, so unemployment is a huge predictor of unhappiness. Obviously, part of getting unemployed is that you lose the source of income. And so, people who are unemployed should, you know, have make less money than people who are employed, and that matters. But, unemployment seems to matter beyond the loss in income. And the obvious suggestion there is that when you lose a job, it has effects like it makes you feel redundant, it makes you feel unappreciated, it makes you feel useless. Um you lose contact with maybe your friends. Yeah, many people socialize more with their friends or with colleagues at work than with anybody else in their their lives, right? You lose contact with with that. And so, having a decent job to go to seems to be really important for human happiness, even beyond the consequences for your income. So, that thing about companionship again, right? That's one of the things that people talk about in this literature. Seems to be really important, and it might be involved both in like the unemployment effect and in the religiosity effect. Mhm. Have you ever looked at relative happiness between only children and children with siblings? I haven't. Do you have siblings? No, I'm an only child, which is why I'm miserable. No. It's I It makes me think we I know this from a million conversations on the show to do with the importance of having community, the importance of having friends. But, if that's true, having Not everybody gets on with their brothers and sisters, but you have a degree of connectedness and community. And we've already said that you know, kids tend to move away from their parents more quickly. 18 years old, 19 years old, I'm off to university. That's maybe the last time that you you're going to live with your parents. That was how it worked for me. 18 years old, that was it. And I never once thought, "Oh, wow, like this is That's it now." Probably 90 7% of the time that I'm going to spend with my parents during my entire life is now over. Holy [ __ ] But That's not It's it's wild. When you think about that, when you think about the fact that at 18 years old, you've hit some unbelievable proportion of the amount of time that you're going to spend with your parents. It's it's kind of sad in a way, and you Parents talk about wanting to make the most of the time with their children, but children never think about having to take make the most of the time with their parents. And yet, it's something that all children should be taught. And yet, they don't have any perspective at all because you're 15, so what do you care? Like, you just don't want to be grounded, or you want to go out and play with your friends. So, I wonder what sort of impact it does have on happiness, you know, whether or not someone who Because if you're going to move away, and you go to Manchester University, and your brother or sister goes to Newcastle University, you're not together anymore in any case, right? So, is there a Is there a sense Is there a way in which just knowing that there is someone out there that is a sibling that kind of has your back, so to speak? Does that act as a uh a salve or an an anesthetic somehow to life's vicissitudes as it as it sort of wobbles around? I wonder. That'd be That'd be an interesting one to look at. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's true that people's relationships with their siblings vary a lot, right? Some are really, really functional, and some really aren't. And then, there is in fact where if you're a single child living with your parents, you might have more adult contact, right? If you have seven siblings, your parents are going to have less time for you than if you're an only child. And so, you had the benefit of getting your parents' attention to a much greater extent than you would have if there were six other Chrises around, Yeah, very good point. That depends on how likable you are as a child, though. As a a chronically unlikable child, so I uh I wonder whether that offset it a little bit. And then the final one, the fourth sort of horseman of this happiness apocalypse is poor health. Yeah. So, so health, right? Now, there's one thing about health, which is that we have a certain degree a certain ability to adapt to it. So, getting um symptoms is terrible, like getting a diagnosis is terrible, adapting to a new uh condition is terrible. But, when it comes to so many conditions, we have an ability to live a pretty good life um nonetheless. This is often surprising to people, but somebody who would not have been surprised is Adam Smith. So, Adam Smith talked about a man who gets a wooden leg. He loses a leg in an accident. He cries like a baby. He thinks his life is over. He's never going to have any fun again. And then as time passes, the man realizes that he can enjoy what Adam Smith called the pleasures of uh of solitude and uh society. You can still play chess. You can still talk. You can still go drinking with your friends. You know, you might could be able to go horseback riding, right? Um and as you realize that things aren't so bad, your happiness might return, not quite to baseline maybe, but it's going to get it's going to get better. So, health matters, um but it depends on the extent to which it affects your ability to enjoy the pleasures of uh solitude and society. Mm. So, And that in turn is going to depend on conditions. So, my vision is terrible, right? But, the fact that my vision is terrible has effectively no consequences for the way I live my life. I live in of glasses on, and now everything's razor sharp again. technology. I can afford it, right? I have a profession that allows me to wear glasses. Uh some people even think glasses are kind of stylish, right? So, given these conditions, having poor eyesight makes it no difference to my life. In a different era, even just a couple of hundred years ago, I would have been dead, like, you know, four decades ago. I would have been eaten by a bear or a lion or or something. And this is important, I think, because something similar applies to many other conditions as well. You're in a wheelchair, well, depending on what society is set up like, it might not make that much of a difference to your quality of life, or it might have a huge difference, right? live in mountains of Nepal or somewhere. If if if you can't get out of your house because there's snow banks, or, you know, the doorway is too narrow or something, of course it's going to have a massive effect on your quality of life, but it need not. And so, for many of these conditions, you having the condition doesn't like doom you to low happiness. A lot is going to depend on the sort of conditions under which you live, which is a decision, right? It's a political decision to build a world that can accommodate people with poor vision, wheelchairs, or or whatever. Is this adaptation, is this what's going on, where people are becoming acclimatized to their new level of health? I I think I think that that's a serious hypothesis. We have a huge ability to adapt, much like we adapt to different like levels of light in a room, right? Our eyes adapt, and we feel much the same independently of what the the level of lighting is. We have an ability to adapt to conditions around us to a very great extent. To some extent, that might be functional, right? If you end up in jail, unjustly accused of of some awful crime, you might adapt to conditions and end up being okay, even though you're imprisoned. Uh right? So, there are conditions when it's it's good, but then we also have an ability and a tendency to adapt to things that are quite good. We all know people who are like constantly whining, right? Objectively speaking, if you live in the US or the UK right now, you're one of the richest people who've ever walked the face of the earth, right? Um unless you're desperately poor right now. Most of us are hugely affluent by comparison to almost everybody who's ever lived, and yet some people do nothing but complain, right? And the story has got to be that they've adapted to the riches. Um they probably have genuine concerns and genuine things to be upset about, but some people don't, right? And um that's certainly um a sure way to make yourself unhappy unnecessarily. Fascinating insight. Yeah, the the whole thing is is um of particular interest to me cuz I ruptured my Achilles uh 2 and 1/2 years ago. So, full detachment, uh which is a serious injury. It's a 12-month rehabilitation process. Uh it's It's not good. You got to go through surgery. It's very painful, too, isn't that right? So, I didn't feel anything when it apart from I knew that something had snapped and it sounded a little bit like a gun went off. Um wouldn't advise it, but I I remember I was in the car. It's the first time I'd started playing cricket again, and my dad and me would do this thing It was the sport I played obsessively throughout my sort of from 10 to 19. It was all that I did. Mom and Dad would come to the games, especially Dad, who was a fan of the sport, and then he used to come. And I thought toward the back end of COVID while I was still in the UK, I might end up going away to America. This would be an amazing thing for me and Dad to rebond over. It would also be cool for me, probably good to get fresh air. COVID's kept me in the house for ages. Why don't I go and play some cricket? First game, having a great time, playing great, and uh bing. Yeah, don't take a sport back up at the age of 32 and think that you're just going to be able to to to to do it. The number of people that I've got friends of that uh started playing basketball again. They They were basketball players at the age of, you know, 14 to 21, and then they leave university, they don't play, and they play a game of pick up at 36, and they rupture a an ACL because their body is not conditioned to this [ __ ] men our age tend to not warm up properly and stuff. We didn't think we needed to. it's fine. We were fine last time, so Hey, yeah, last time I played two decades ago, I didn't need to warm up. Um, so anyway, my point being that at the time it was quite distressing. I'm very big into my health and fitness. I wasn't able to do the things physically that I wanted to. Um, and it's so immediate that the inconvenience is so rapid with its onset. I remember I was laid there the day the day it happened, the day it happened or the day after it happened and I was just laid up. I can't do anything until I get the surgery, so I'm not even on the the road to improvement at this point. I just have a foot which is essentially not attached to the rest of my leg. Oh, that's awful. And I'm just laid up, just feeling sorry for myself and feeling like [ __ ] And yeah, it it it felt it felt pretty sort of destitute, and I was kind of despondent, but I knew that I was working toward here's the next date and here's the next date. And this was probably one of the most interesting things that I've learned from your work, which was the difference between somebody who is dealing with chronic pain and somebody who is dealing with a malady that they are able to adapt to. Can you explain the difference between those two? Yeah, so chronic pain is is awful, right? Chronic pain interferes with basically everything you try to do during your day, right? It's constant reminder that that you're ill, and it's an obstacle in no matter what you're trying to do. That means it's very hard to adapt to something like chronic pain. You're unlikely to see a scenario where over time you adapt to to baseline. Other sorts of conditions might be easier to adapt to. So, something like prostate problems, like many men develop prostate cancer at some point in their in their lives. Like getting a diagnosis is is terrible, right? Nobody wants cancer and so on. But, in so many cases doctors will suggest, I guess they call it watchful waiting, where you know, you're monitoring things and then if you're lucky the cancer will develop so slowly that you're going to die from something else before you get killed by something else before the cancer gets And then, you know, you might be able to live your ordinary life in much the same way that you did before you got the cancer. And so, that sort of thing might be quite easy to to adapt to, relatively speaking, right? So, different the conditions aren't the same, is what I'm saying. Some are easier to adapt to, and the ones that are easier to adapt to are not going to harm your happiness quite as much over time as the others do. Yeah, it's really interesting to think What was the other thing? There was another example, it wasn't just chronic pain, there was something else you gave as a an example of a type of So, in one study that I did, we found that incontinence was a similar had a similar effect. So, people who have incontinence will tell you that it affects every domain of their life. It affects their dating life, it affects like whether they want to hang out with their friends, it affects their ability to go to the movies, and and things like that. It's a problem that makes itself known throughout the day, presumably, you know, when you wouldn't want it to, right? And that sort of condition is then going to be hard to adapt to, and you would expect to see what we found, which is a lasting effect on happiness levels. For all of the people who are not living with chronic pain or incontinence, I think we can breathe a sigh of relief. Eric Angner, ladies and gentlemen. Eric, I really appreciate you. I love the insight in this intersection of economics and philosophy. If people want to check out more of the stuff that you do, where should they go? I have a book called How Economics Can Save the World, which I recommend to everyone. Have a look, and maybe you'll learn something. Thank you so much, Chris. It was great talking to you. I enjoyed it. My pleasure. Thank you, mate. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe.