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Arthur Brooks

Professor of the Practice, Harvard Kennedy School · 1 appearance on the record.

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academicauthorscientisthostexecutivejournalist@arthurbrooks ↗LinkedIn ↗arthurbrooks.com ↗Wikipedia ↗YouTube ↗Instagram ↗

Arthur Brooks is an academic and social scientist specializing in the science of happiness and human purpose, having previously served as president of the American Enterprise Institute. He has authored multiple bestselling books and currently hosts the podcast Office Hours with Arthur Brooks.

14statements → 4claims → 4claims resolved → 75%fully supported → 4.14/5average certainty → 2.5/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated →

3 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

4 assertions · 3 opinions · 7 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 4 are resolved. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Arthur argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Brooks: US poverty rate stayed at 10-15% despite $20T spent
“We have, the poverty rate has bounced around between 10 and 15% every year since then. Despite the fact that we spent somewhere around 20 trillion dollars in the war on poverty.”
Arthur Brooks Jul 13, 2021 ▶ 9:40 Arthur Brooks: Finding Happiness -- What Most People Get Wrong and Few Get Right · Joe Lonsdale

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Brooks: Happiness and unhappiness are processed in different prefrontal hemispheres
“Happiness and unhappiness are, as cognitions are processed in different hemispheres of the prefrontal cortex. Literally, a different part of your brain is lighting up when you're having unhappy feelings as opposed to happy feelings.”
Arthur Brooks Jul 13, 2021 ▶ 4:23 Arthur Brooks: Finding Happiness -- What Most People Get Wrong and Few Get Right · Joe Lonsdale

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
100% certainty 4
0% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: not measured why? →

We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Arthur Brooks on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.

Everything Arthur Brooks said on American Optimist that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
Brooks: The bucket list is a destructive concept that fuels dissatisfaction
“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.”
Arthur Brooks Jul 13, 2021 ▶ 6:51 Arthur Brooks: Finding Happiness -- What Most People Get Wrong and Few Get Right · Joe Lonsdale
Insight
Brooks: Authentic Happiness Comes From Faith, Family, Friendship, and Work
“There are four idols that people chase in life. Money, power, pleasure, and honor, by which he meant fame, and which we mean prestige in life. Those are idols that never bring satisfaction. They run you in the wrong direction. If you want to be ambitious for t…”
Arthur Brooks Jul 13, 2021 ▶ 8:02 Arthur Brooks: Finding Happiness -- What Most People Get Wrong and Few Get Right · Joe Lonsdale
Assertion Supported
Brooks: US poverty rate stayed at 10-15% despite $20T spent
“We have, the poverty rate has bounced around between 10 and 15% every year since then. Despite the fact that we spent somewhere around 20 trillion dollars in the war on poverty.”
Arthur Brooks Jul 13, 2021 ▶ 9:40 Arthur Brooks: Finding Happiness -- What Most People Get Wrong and Few Get Right · Joe Lonsdale
Insight
Brooks: Satisfaction equals what you have divided by what you want
“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.”
Arthur Brooks Jul 13, 2021 ▶ 6:37 Arthur Brooks: Finding Happiness -- What Most People Get Wrong and Few Get Right · Joe Lonsdale
Assertion Supported
Brooks: 10th percentile US housing size matches 1980 median
“Today, the person at the 10th percentile economically in America lives in the same square footage of housing as the person at the 50th percentile in 1980.”
Arthur Brooks Jul 13, 2021 ▶ 10:35 Arthur Brooks: Finding Happiness -- What Most People Get Wrong and Few Get Right · Joe Lonsdale
Insight
Brooks: Society treats poor people as liabilities instead of assets
“The problem that we have is we treat the poor as liabilities to manage, as opposed to assets to develop.”
Arthur Brooks Jul 13, 2021 ▶ 13:55 Arthur Brooks: Finding Happiness -- What Most People Get Wrong and Few Get Right · Joe Lonsdale
Insight
Brooks: Government applies complicated engineering fixes to complex human problems
“All of life's big problems that are hard to solve are complex, adaptive, human dynamic problems. And all of the solutions that we get from government are complicated.”
Arthur Brooks Jul 13, 2021 ▶ 17:45 Arthur Brooks: Finding Happiness -- What Most People Get Wrong and Few Get Right · Joe Lonsdale
Insight
Brooks: Social media cannot solve loneliness through engineering
“The problem with social media today is social media is a complicated solution to a complex problem of loneliness. It's a basically, it's an app based complicated engineering solution to the problem of love. That's why it's utterly inadequate and not up to the …”
Arthur Brooks Jul 13, 2021 ▶ 19:07 Arthur Brooks: Finding Happiness -- What Most People Get Wrong and Few Get Right · Joe Lonsdale
Opinion
Brooks: Expanding bureaucracy and tech has made Americans less happy
“We turned the keys in America over to bureaucrats and engineers 30 years ago. We, I mean, it's like, we basically pump all of the money and resources and time and affection and energy into bureaucracy, which is massively expanded, and to engineering and tech, …”
Arthur Brooks Jul 13, 2021 ▶ 19:35 Arthur Brooks: Finding Happiness -- What Most People Get Wrong and Few Get Right · Joe Lonsdale
Opinion
Brooks: US Happiness Has Suffered a Secular Decline Since Late 1980s
“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…”
Arthur Brooks Jul 13, 2021 ▶ 23:27 Arthur Brooks: Finding Happiness -- What Most People Get Wrong and Few Get Right · Joe Lonsdale
Assertion Supported
Brooks: 50% of Individual Happiness Is Determined by Genetics
“And 50% of your happiness is genetic, by the way.”
Arthur Brooks Jul 13, 2021 ▶ 24:19 Arthur Brooks: Finding Happiness -- What Most People Get Wrong and Few Get Right · Joe Lonsdale
Insight
Brooks: Escaping poverty reduces unhappiness rather than creating happiness
“Money never bought happiness. Even early on, you find that people actually have a higher affect balance. They feel better about their lives when they go from poor to not poor. It's absolutely true, but it's not because they're getting happier. This sounds like…”
Arthur Brooks Jul 13, 2021 ▶ 2:55 Arthur Brooks: Finding Happiness -- What Most People Get Wrong and Few Get Right · Joe Lonsdale
Insight
Brooks: Entrepreneurs View Money as a Scorecard, Not the End Goal
“Josef Schumpeter, the father of modern entrepreneurship, the understanding, the professor at Harvard, 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.”
Arthur Brooks Jul 13, 2021 ▶ 7:20 Arthur Brooks: Finding Happiness -- What Most People Get Wrong and Few Get Right · Joe Lonsdale
Assertion Contradicted
Brooks: Happiness and unhappiness are processed in different prefrontal hemispheres
“Happiness and unhappiness are, as cognitions are processed in different hemispheres of the prefrontal cortex. Literally, a different part of your brain is lighting up when you're having unhappy feelings as opposed to happy feelings.”
Arthur Brooks Jul 13, 2021 ▶ 4:23 Arthur Brooks: Finding Happiness -- What Most People Get Wrong and Few Get Right · Joe Lonsdale

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Arthur Brooks: Finding Happiness -- What Most People Get Wrong and Few Get Right · Joe Lon Jul 13, 2021 20m
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