The Exchanges

Q These are really unhealthy. But isn't it, isn't it good for people to be striving to work harder and build things though as an economist?

A This is your point. This gets to your point. So you said, okay, so does that mean that, you know, money doesn't matter and none of it, no. Money per se doesn't matter, but what you're actually being compensated for matters. So Josef Schumpeter, the father of modern entrepreneurship, the understanding, the professor at Harvard, but, but he was a visionary. He said that entrepreneurs actually don't care about money per se More than the fact that it's a scorecard for what they're building. This is the key thing. And so for entrepreneurs who are being really successful, don't think that your satisfaction is actually coming from the money. It's not. Your satisfaction is actually coming from the prosperity that you're creating.

AI assessment note: “Your satisfaction is actually coming from the prosperity that you're creating.”

Q They're working too hard to try to make them more money or what's what? Why is it a problem?

A It's a problem because they're never, they're on the hedonic treadmill. They actually never get the satisfaction. They want more, but they never get what they want, but they're always fooled. This is why it's very important for all of us to remember. Satisfaction doesn't come from what you have. Satisfaction comes from what you have divided by what you want. And each of us, if we actually want to find enduring satisfaction, no matter where we are economically, we need a wants management strategy. So each year, the worst, most metastatically stupid idea in Western society, in American society is the bucket list. The bucket list is like, I'm going to make a list of all my cravings and attachments and desires, and I'm going to pour over it. And all that does is it lowers my

AI assessment note: “It's a problem because they're never, they're on the hedonic treadmill.”

Q But what's your, what's your instinct though? You must have an intuition. Yeah.

A My intuition is that really it turned around in the late 19 eighties and that since the late 19 eighties, we actually have been a relatively secular decline where we came up a little bit at the end of the nineties, beginning in the 2000. And most definitely we have been in decline since then. And that's a really, as far as I'm concerned, that's a really big problem. But in, in, in, in a way, it's not that I'm an optimist. It's that I'm hopeful. And the difference between optimism and hope is that optimism says it's going to be okay. Hope says, I don't know, but there's something that can be done and I can do something about it. And so I'm a really, really hopeful person. The reason I'm dedicating my career, my life to the idea of, of, of, of happiness. It's not just because I'm trying to be sort of a pan glossian character in all of this. It's because I think there's a lot that we can do.

AI assessment note: “My intuition is that really it turned around in the late 19 eighties”

Q up to somewhere around nine or a 100,000 dollars that actually affects you to make more money and you're happier because you can, you can afford basics or whatnot, but after that, it doesn't really help with happiness. It's interesting because you've worked on prosperity for so long at AEI. But does prosperity really matter to happiness then beyond a certain point, or how should we be thinking about that?

A So the, the way that the, the data basically work, and we don't actually know where the threshold is because different estimates say different amounts, whether it's 75,000 dollars a year, a 150,000 dollars a year, but it doesn't matter. At some point we inflect and get very flat in the, what we call the affect balance curve. Now what affect balance is, is this balance between unhappiness and happiness. And, and for the longest time people would interpret this and say, You know, people would say how good they feel about their lives. They would get really, really flat around a 100,000 dollars a year and say, okay, turns out your grandma was right. Joe, money doesn't buy happiness. I know you love your grandma and, and we don't, we all love our grandmothers and, and they were starting a 101 in July.

AI assessment note: “At some point we inflect and get very flat in the, what we call”

Q step back. This is called the American optimist. Um, a lot of, there's kind of a wave of pessimism that we're in right now. Yeah. And, You know, in our country, do you think America's in decline or are we, are we just in a little interregnum where it's going to grow again? Is it actually still doing well right now? We're just confused. Like what's, what's, what's going on?

A So there, of course, you know, you can, you can look sort of salami slice what you're looking at and you can find any time where things are worse than they were before and say that's declined because axiomatically it's true. The question is whether in the longterm dynamics of the situation, you're actually in, in, in, you know, a nadir or, You know, what, you know, what, what is, and whether indeed you can turn it around. Now, there's a huge cottage industry out there of saying, we're doomed, we're in decline, there's nothing that we can do, and, and, and everybody's profiting from that, whether you're a culture warrior on the right or a culture warrior on the left, whether you're worried about people's morals or you're worried about global climate change, you profit by saying, we're super screwed. I mean, that's just kind of how it works. I just don't buy it. I don't buy it because looking at the longterm of history, I mean, things turn around. What I'm really worried about is the fact that we're in this kind of secular decline right now in, in wellbeing and happiness and happiness. Yeah.

AI assessment note: “I just don't buy it because looking at the longterm of history, I mean, things turn around.”

Q really worked. Uh, we're about to spend trillions more right now. I think we're about to print four trillion more dollars as a current debate and discussion to supposedly help with poverty. Doesn't seem to be working. We're still doing it. What's, what's going on? What should we be doing? And is it going to work this time at all if they're spending all this money? What are they doing?

A Well, what, what we've done since 1964, 1964 when the war on poverty was declared by Lyndon B. Johnson. And, but it's really 1966 when the programs were up and running. Is that we, we, we have, the poverty rate has bounced around between 10 and 15% every year, every year since then. Despite the fact that we spent somewhere around 20 trillion dollars in the war on poverty. And so that's, you know, that, that's failure in any industry except government, quite frankly. I mean, you wouldn't get the investment year after year after year. However, let's not underestimate actually how much it, it has allowed people, the war on poverty and the programs have allowed people to suffer less, suffer less than, than, The depredations of poverty, the, you know, the, the, the public health crises, the, the, the deaths that didn't have to occur, which is really good.

AI assessment note: “the poverty rate has bounced around between 10 and 15% every year”

Q Should we have a philanthropy that brings people to the dentist who can't afford it?

A So this is the, yeah. So this is the question. I mean, that there's, there's all kinds of good reasons, by the way, to say that we need a basic level of healthcare. And in point of fact, we do is called Medicaid. Now the question is whether or not it should be means independent. And these are all public policy questions that we need to answer, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking what people ordinarily do. The big mistake that people make in their lives is that they go from the bottom through kind of these low economic levels, noticing that they're feeling better. And then they say, oh, Therefore more money. I'm going to feel better. And they chase the cookie for the rest of their life. It's like Pavlov's dogs. You got programmed early on to thinking that your affect balance is going to get better.

AI assessment note: “these are all public policy questions that we need to answer, but let's not fool ourselves”