0:33 Intro. [Recording date: September 20, 2012.] Russ: Guest is Robert Skidelsky, author of many books, including much-celebrated biography of John Maynard Keynes. Latest book, co-authored with son Edward Skidelsky, is How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life, subject of today's program. You start your book with a discussion of an essay of John Maynard Keynes's, quite a provocative and fascinating essay, which is titled "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren." It was written in 1930, or published in 1930. And it was Keynes's vision for the future. What was that vision? Guest: Well, I think basically the vision was that when societies became sufficiently rich, they would ease off on work. And he wrote, as you said, in 1930--he thought that by now the average standard of living in most societies in the West would be about 4 or 5 times higher than in 1930. Machines would to a large extent have replaced human labor. So, we could have achieved this higher standard of working, living, with a fraction of the work we then did. And so he actually thought that by now, most of us would only be working about 15-20 hours a week. And that would be enough, as he put it, to satisfy the old [?]--leisure would replace work as the central activity of the human race. And that was his vision. Russ: He was on to something. He was right about some of that. Guest: He was right about some of that. In fact, we have got a lot richer, uh, collectively, um, than we were in 1930. We're almost in the era of our grandchildren. But the interesting thing is that work hasn't declined nearly as much as he thought it would. And the average hours of work, which were 50 hours of so in the 1930s, still are about 40 hours. And recently they've even been going up a bit, in some countries like the United States. And the paradox is that the rich are among the hardest workers. The idea of the idle rich has been replaced by the idea of the workaholic rich. Russ: One of the challenges with the data on this question is we might prefer to look at lifetime hours. So, it could be that the rich work very hard in the early and middle part of their life, but maybe--maybe--they retire earlier. That is one speculation. Guest: Mmmh, mmhm. Yeah, if you take the average, the length of life as a whole, there is obviously more leisure in a life than their used to be, because of simply the fact that people live longer. But then you ask yourself: Is it really rational to sort of pack in leisure period of people's lives into their last 15 or 20 years, when they are less able--and that's just through normal wear and tear--less able to develop alternative ways of life, develop interests, which take time, to mature? Why not spread that leisure more evenly, throughout a life? I mean, that would be more rational, I would have thought. Russ: You would think so. Guest: Why work very, very hard for 30 or 40 years and then sort of almost do nothing in the last 20 years? Russ: I think the standard economist's argument--which, I agree with you, may not be the rational argument but it has some rationality to it, of course--is that when your productivity is highest and your reward is highest, that's when you want to switch your work effort. But as you put it, if your leisure is lousy, that's not a very good deal by the time you come to consume it. Guest: Yeah. And really: How much productivity and harm should societies be organized for? The basic assumption of Keynes is that we actually could afford, as we got richer, to be less efficient. Because productivity is designed to increase economic growth. I mean, output per person rises and rises and rises. And that's been the aim, to increase productivity. But if the aim is as we suggest--to lead a good life--then productivity, concentration of productivity, becomes less important. Less vital. I'm not saying we should deliberately try to be as inefficient as possible. But we shouldn't strive in that direction to the extent we do. Russ: There's an interesting part of that essay where he critiques--I'm going to go off the subject of your book for a second because I want to ask the biographer of Keynes this question: He critiques in that essay an obsession with purposiveness, of goal-setting, of always looking to the future. And he admits that compound interest over time will allow us this freedom, but in the meanwhile we are going to be in this world where rewards, the delay of gratification, the investments which allow us to consume more down the road which will eventually liberate us; but in the middle of that, he is very critical of saving. Guest: Yeah. Russ: And he is actually very critical of Jews. There's a strange passage in there where he critiques the race--speaking I assume of the Jews--who introduced immortality into the world; and also he conflates that with a love of money. And I've always wondered whether his dislike of saving, in his economic models came somewhere from this feeling that saving wasn't a healthy thing. That living for today was, in and of itself a good thing. Which is what--he is critiquing those who want to live for tomorrow in that. You want to react to that? What are your thoughts? Guest: I think he was conflicted. I think he recognized intellectually, in order for capital accumulation to go on, you have to have a high savings rate. But then, he didn't like saving. He didn't like postponement and always looking to the future as a moral and psychological quality. He admitted it was necessary but he hoped that it would give way as quickly as one possibly could to enjoyment, and getting enjoyment from the present rather than always thinking about the future. I think on the subject of Jews and avarice, it was very much a conventional view at the time. Russ: That's right. Guest: And he wasn't really dogmatic about it. Because someone pointed out when that essay was written--in fact, it was a Jewish professor from California, I think, who said: Look, you've got all this wrong: Jews rather have been conspicuous--here's another conventional view--for extravagant display rather than for saving. And Keynes immediately wrote back and said: You are probably right, and I was thinking on conventional lines; but still I think there's something in the idea that the postponement of satisfaction and saving is something to do with the Judaic-Christian religion. Russ: No doubt about it. Guest: It's an aspect of Puritanism. Russ: Yep. Guest: And so I think that's the way he dealt with it. I think now, of course, one would never use that language. Russ: And, you say, it comes from the Judaic-Christian tradition. This whole idea of purposiveness, of having a purpose in your life that you should be striving for rather than enjoying the moment is clearly a religious idea. And I want to come back to that later. Guest: I just wanted to add to what you said: Remember the Bible, when God expelled Adam from Paradise--with terrible words: In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread until thou return into the ground. You see the abundance of Paradise was never to be regained until the afterlife-- Russ: Yep. Guest: --and one's to on Earth was to sweat, to work by the sweat of thy face. Russ: Yep, that's exactly right.

9:16 Russ: Now, you talk at the beginning of the book why Keynes's--there are many possible explanations, of course--but let's talk about some of them. Why is it that we don't work 50 hours a week? Many of us do. Some do. Involuntarily. But in general, when the economy is healthy people do work 30 to 40 to 50 hours a week. They don't take that wealth, that productivity, and convert it into leisure. They want stuff. Why did that happen? How was Keynes wrong? What did he predict? Guest: Well, I think it's a very interesting question, very complex; a number of answers. I think one of them was that he thought of wealth much more in quantitative terms. You could only have so many houses, so many cars, so many pairs of shoes, clothes, and so on; and once you'd got there, there was something called diminishing marginal utility, as economists call it. Less satisfaction from each additional pair of shoes, pair of socks and so on. And what that underestimated was the continued improvement in the quality of goods. Russ: Yep. Guest: An improvement that constantly tempts us to acquire the next generation of appliances of all kinds. I'm a bit of a sucker for that. I still think that my iPad 4 is going to be better than my iPad 3. And things like that. So, I think there is an increased inequality [?], which means that in a way you never have enough. Because the next generation always promises more. But I don't think one should concede too much on that head because many technological improvements are quite trivial. And I don't think would count as net improvements at all, if you took into account the extra hassle of the work required to master them. So, I think that's one aspect. I think there are others. I could go on to the more important one, which is I think that he underestimated human insatiability. We always seem to want more, something different than we have got, no matter how much there is; and that's irrespective of improvement. Russ: And I just want to add--and this is going to be a theme that's going to run through this conversation, inevitably--this idea of insatiability. And it is, as you point out in the book, a very standard feature of economic theory: More is better. More is always better in most modern economics. Guest: And more is always better because after a certain level, our wants are relative, not absolute. We are always comparing our fortunes with others. Russ: We also compare them to our own youth. It's not just that we compare them to others. We also look back on when we were younger and we want more relative to then. Guest: I think so. We compare them with the past. We also either don't have as much as the next guy, and we compare, or we want to keep having more. Because we are snobs. That's very deep in human nature. And it's not just that. I don't know if you know of an economist called Tibor Skitovsky? Russ: Sure. Guest: He wrote a book in the 1970s called The Joyless of Society. And he also brought out this point of restlessness, an innate boredom or restlessness that we have, which also is the same thing as dissatisfaction. It's not quite the same as insatiability, but feeds into insatiability. Russ: It's the same problem we have with distraction. We don't like doing nothing for a while. You can put an attractive face on these issues and say we are strivers, we are always seeking to better ourselves. Which makes it sound good. Or you could make it sound not so good. Which is your main theme, really. So, what's wrong with it? A lot of people think this is good. Guest: Well, I think it means that you never get off the treadmill. But then on the other hand it's insane to stay on the treadmill. There's another aspect to insatiability, in fact the great American economist Veblen, pointed out this quality of conspicuous consumption. And it's very interesting. With Veblen, consumption, conspicuous consumption, was the mark that you didn't have to work. It was a mark of leisure. Whereas what's happened in recent times is that it's become the product of work. You work harder and harder in order to have more conspicuous consumption. And so the character of conspicuous consumption has changed. That came up very much in the review of our book--a rather critical review of our book--by Richard Posner in the NY Times, where he said: We can't really enjoy leisure without more and more gadgets. And so we have to work harder and harder in order to acquire these gadgets. Whereas this is actually contrary to the spirit of Veblen. He thought that a certain point you would have enough stuff in order to consume conspicuously and you wouldn't have to work any more. Russ: A man who says that we need to work more and more to earn more money to buy the gadgets to enjoy our leisure is a man who has never sung in harmony with his fellow man or woman. Guest: Well, I don't disagree. Russ: There are many joys. Guest: I think there's a lot to be said; yeah, I completely agree. Well, it was a peculiar review, but I thought it was representative of a certain strand of American opinion; he's very conservative, Richard Posner. He's very distinguished but very conservative. And it just seemed to me that--well, it's just one view. He also said in that review: If people have too much leisure they'd spend all their time fighting, brawling, swearing, not getting up in the mornings. So, it's a very peculiar, particular view of human nature. Russ: That's dark. On his behalf--I've not read the review; I try not to read reviews of books where I'm interviewing the author until later--but on his good side for your purposes, he became a big fan of Keynes after the crisis and wrote a very adulatory essay of his conversion to Keynesianism. Which I challenged him on this program with a while back. But that's another story. Let's get back to your book. Guest: I'm looking for the next conversion. Russ: He needs to come fully over, I guess. But I do think--you are right. It is a dark view of human nature. Some would say it's a realistic view, and that's part of what this debate is about: What are we fundamentally about? What are we capable of? Do we need to work all the time to keep us off the streets? That seems to be the implication. Guest: It goes all the way back to the 18th century and even earlier. If we didn't have to work, we'd be idle and dissipated and go to pieces. Work is the only thing that keeps us on the straight and narrow. It's a very old view. But what about the so-called leisure classes of the past? Shouldn't they have worked? No one thought that the nobles and gentry should work more than they did. In fact, it was a mark of a certain level of civilization that you didn't have to work. Russ: Correct. Well, they had good genes, they thought. They were better. They were something else. Guest: Yeah. That sort of thing. Russ: We got off the track a little bit. Let's go back to insatiability. If we think of this as a sort of modern economic theory--modern meaning going back 100 years or so, where people are "maximizing utility," trying to get the maximum satisfaction from life through the use of goods, this is to say one strand of neoclassical economics. It's not the only strand within that field, but it can become a sort of standalone view of humanity and rationality. And you reject that. In fact, you indict it as part of the problem. Why? Guest: I think it's interpretation. In principle--well, there's two things wrong with it. First of all, it's very individualistic--it's your own utility you are trying to maximize. There's an assumption that if people maximize their own utilities that this will add up to the maximum utility for the whole society. And that assumption I don't think works at all. The adding up problem is too great. But second, of course maximizing your own utility needn't be maximizing goods. It's maximizing whatever gives you utility, and that could be leisure, for example. Russ: For sure. Guest: But the way they've interpreted it is actually--they've interpreted it as maximizing your consumption of goods, goods produced by the market. I think that's the way that maximizing utility is generally interpreted by common economists. Because it links up with growth, and that strand. So, I think utilitarianism is wrong, but I also think that economists pay lip service to the idea that they are not against anything that you want to maximize, and if you want to maximize leisure, that's fine. But their whole emphasis on efficiency and growth really biases them towards a certain interpretation of the goals of human striving. Which is making more and more money. Russ: Yeah. I don't know if that's a fair criticism or not. It's certainly a fair criticism of how some of economics has been interpreted. I like to say economics is the study of how to get the most out of life. You can debate what I mean by that exactly, but there's certainly a huge difference. Guest: But it's how to get the most out of least. Russ: To some extent. Guest: You are always doing a calculation. You are trading off. Russ: Well, that's true. Guest: You are trading off work with leisure. So there's always an element of calculation in what you are trying to do; and that's part of their view of human beings. And that is not the same as the idea Keynes looked for: we shouldn't be counting the costs. There's a passage in "Economic Possibilities" where he said: We shouldn't be counting the cost of things, in the way we do now. And when we have enough, then to lead a good life, then we needn't count the cost any more. And that does seem to me where he breaks from the economics tradition, and looks for a world without economics, essentially. In the end he says: I hope economists will become as useful citizens as dentists. Which is, you know, they are useful for breakdown services. But their view: they shouldn't be a dominant position. And yet that's very different from what's true today. I mean, economists are the high priests of our civilization.

21:28 Russ: So, you are certainly right that this acquisitiveness idea, this idea of efficiency, of maximizing, is a modern idea; but it wasn't always the economic tradition. Certainly Adam Smith was an eloquent proponent of the idea that the goal of life is not to maximize how much stuff you have; that there are non-mathematical aspects of life, non-maximizing parts of life. And I also agree with you that we have become strongly interested in growth, as a policy. Whether that's economists' fault or politicians' fault, or our fault as voters. But we do like growth. And you critique that. You are very critical of that policy urge. And you start though, very interestingly, with two other critiques. The happiness literature and the environmental literature. So, start, and tell us about what you like and don't like about their critiques of growth. Let's start with the happiness literature. Guest: I will. But I think this point about acquisitiveness and Adam Smith--of course Adam Smith didn't think that acquisitiveness was the be all and end all of life. But he did regard it as the method. Acquisitiveness as a method for getting from poverty to wealth. And so in a way his ideas unleashed acquisitiveness from their traditional moral restraints. And the question, which he never answers, in my view, is how do you then rein in the Frankenstein's monster that you've created? That's a big problem, I think. We try to, we discuss it in part of our book. Acquisitiveness is the method, and now what do you do when you've got there, so to speak, to where--how do you then abolish acquisitiveness? You've let it loose. On happiness, yes, I think we felt, both of us as co-authors, that happiness, the ideal of happiness, making happiness the goal of life is very vacuous. We thought rather that happiness is a subjective state of feeling. And if what you want to do is maximize this subjective state of feeling--being happy--then I think all you have to do is invent a psychic aspirin that makes you happy the whole time. I think drug dealers sort of promise something like that as well. But you wouldn't want to say about someone made perpetually happy by being drugged or taking pills that that person is leading a good life. I think there's a moral objection to that immediately comes. People will say: We were built for something else. We were made for something else; not to be idiotically happy the whole time. So, it's the subjective element there that if you want to maximize happiness, you are really wanting to maximize just a state of feeling, divorced entirely from the pursuit of those things that would justifiably make you happy. I think that's our main critique of happiness. Happiness is a byproduct of an achievement of doing something well, of realizing your potential, flourishing, and things of that kind. And on environmentalism, I think the basic things is: We are taking a bet that the science will bring acquisitiveness to an end. But suppose the science doesn't. Suppose we invent some technical fixes that will enable us to go on growing and growing and growing. And people are already saying: Well, maybe we just set up shop on Mars. We'll have enough science to be able to do it. So, I think that check on growth comes in too late and it may not come in at all. We may find some way of going on growing by overcoming the environmental problem. Russ: Well, that's a great critique, and I think very provocative and one I'm sympathetic to. What I'm curious is how you reconcile that with the Keynesian idea of purposiveness being not so important and part of our delusion that keeps us on the treadmill. So, how do we get there from here? Not policy-wise; I want to come and talk about that at the end. I'm just thinking about just the logic of your argument. As a religious person, I'm perfectly comfortable with the idea that a blissful life free from pain is not meaningful. But American culture, and I assume European culture also--that's part of the goal. Lots of pleasure and minimized pain. And I agree with you: that's a thin life. But how do you justify that to the rest of the world? They don't seem to think so. Guest: Yeah. I think it's a thin life. Well, we have to get back to ethics, and ask the question: What are the ends of life? And what would constitute a good life? That's a moral question. It's independent of what makes us happy or miserable. Though there's a relation of course between those, of course. But it is independent of that. So we have to ask that basic moral question: Is there such a thing as the good life? And there, the critique of our position is: Well, everyone has their own ideas of what the good life is, and there's it's very wrong that you should even try to lay down a law about this, and shouldn't the state confine itself to constructing a neutral set of rules allowing people to pursue their own visions of the good life? Well, I think that, although variety undoubtedly exists, it's much less extensive than is often supposed. I mean, all the religions and all the cultures across the world encourage certain things they regard as good. There's a very large degree of consensus about what is good. And we have to look at those traditions--they are Christian traditions, Confucian, Buddhist, Islamic. All their philosophers--they didn't say exactly the same thing but there's a very large overlap in their opinions of what is good, what is a good life. And so we have to sort of, not reinvent those traditions, but we have to rediscover them. We have to decide ourselves what we think the purpose of life is. And then we can start reorienting our lives and start critiquing the idea that the only purpose of life is to get more and more goods, make us happier. This is all quite apart from the fact that getting more and more goods don't make us happier. Russ: Yeah. Well, that's another question.

28:55 Russ: But back to my question: There's no doubt an enormous cultural theme in many modern societies that the goal of life is to have fun. You can dress it up a little bit. As long as you don't hurt anybody. That's a parody of the libertarian philosophy. A parody of the libertarian philosophy is: it's all about fun, but just don't hurt anybody. And as a libertarian who cares about something other than fun, that parody rules out joining with others to help other people, to create, to play, to sing, to dance, to do all the things that make life, as you say, flourish and meaningful. I don't see any reason that you can't allow people the freedom to pursue what they want and many of us can still do glorious things that you would call good. But many people will not. They don't want that. They just want to have fun. What's your message for them? Guest: Well, I think it would be very wrong to equate leading a good life with absence of fun. You mentioned, you just used the word "play." Well, play is fun. And there are many ways one can play. And I think playfulness would be one of the elements of a good life. Because in play, you are not making calculations, you see. You are not thinking: Well, am I wasting time playing when I could be actually earning money. Russ: Right. Guest: So, I think it doesn't exclude play or fun. On the other hand, a life--one of our goods is security. And it's very hard to have fun if you are worried about your jobs or about where your next meal is coming from. So, I think the view to stress in all this is that there is a lot of fun in leading a good life. But it's not just a continual expression of one's hedonistic and sexual desires. That is I think one of the ways in which having fun is interpreted by our civilization, a kind of perpetual infantilism. You just give way to every desire you have, the whole time. And that's having fun. The fact is that it doesn't give you much fun. Especially if you take a slightly longer view of it. It comes back to this idea--if your idea is to have fun, why do anything at all? Why not just give yourself a pill that makes you feel you are having fun? You can't get out of the dilemma of in the end having to confront what is a good life. And having fun doesn't get you there. Russ: Again, I agree with that. But not everybody does. So, for those who don't agree, don't accept. Actually, why don't you lay out the basic goods that you think are components of the good life. And then we'll talk about what the challenges might be of this idea. Go ahead. Guest: Well, we suggest seven: health, security, respect, personality, harmony with nature, friendship, and leisure are our goods. They are not meant to be completely exhaustive and they are not meant to be dogmatic. And they also link up with each other in rather complex ways. But they are the basic goods. We think that without the existence of these goods to some degree in everyone's life, that life cannot be a good life. Russ: And how do those goods conflict with the modern view that says growth is good? Where does the idea of satiation or enough come into your idea? Guest: Well, I think the emphasis on growth to the exclusion of other things means that there is an insufficient quantity of these goods that I've outlined being produced. Our society under-produces the goods that make for a good life. And over-produces the goods that make for a bad life. And that's what our basic argument is: that if you are obsessed simply with maximizing the quantity of consumption goods--this is just one example--you under-produce something else that you want. Which is friendship and a sense of community and as you put it, helping others. You also destroy nature. Lots of things that a one-track obsession with maximizing economic growth destroy on the way which are components of what most people would regard as a good life. And yet we can't get there.

34:21 Russ: So, my view is that as human beings, as you mentioned earlier, we have this urge for more and to strive. And I view one of the tests of our humanity is to not let that destroy us, not let that overtake us, not let that overwhelm our time, as you point out. So, I don't disagree with you, right? So, where do we disagree? And I think where we disagree is: I like to preach that; I teach it to my children; I'm happy to tell it to friends if they are interested. What's the justification for putting that at the center of public policy? Which I think you'd like it to be. Guest: Well, you start from the insanity of not putting it at the center of public policy. After a certain plateau of wealth has been achieved, you have to regard it as insane to want to have a thousand pair of shoes. And if you think of the whole society as wanting more and more and more and more, it is a form of collective insanity. I mean, that's how you start. Then you get into the question of: Okay, what alternative goals would reasonable people set themselves? And then you get into the things we've talked about--happiness, or the environment. And into the inadequacy of those as goals. So, you are drawn through almost peeling the banana skin to something that's more fundamental. And ultimately to the question: What constitutes a good life? And once you get to that question, I don't think you'll get nearly as much disagreement as you've been suggesting. I think most people do regard these as goods. I don't think anyone would say that bad health is not a good thing, or that security isn't a good thing. There are some right-wing ideologues, as you've pointed out, which say: No, no, no, insecurity is the only thing that matters. But insecurity of course makes not only for a bad life, but for unhappiness as well. So, it fails on both those tests, whichever one you choose to use. And similarly, most people always think they want more time with their friends; they are deploring the decline of community. They want more room to express themselves, more space to express themselves. Most people when asked would like to work less at jobs they have to do in order to develop other bits of their personalities, their hobbies, things they feel they could do. So, you wouldn't get too much disagreement on a lot of this. Russ: So, why do we need-- Guest: It's a bit of a cliche I think to say that as soon as one starts a discussion that everyone goes off in all different directions. I don't think they do. It's not been my experience, anyway. Russ: I think you are right. I think many people who pursue happiness rather than meaning, however you want to parse that, regret it at some point. Look back on their life with regret, for whatever reason. The question is, again, what's the public policy implication? So, do you really think--I would suggest this is as much cultural as it is political, that we have our attitudes toward money and meaning and friendship and time and leisure. I'm not sure it comes from the public policy problem. It comes from inside us, doesn't it? Guest: Well, of course. It must do. You have to start from the individual, and individual realization that his or her own life is not getting to where they want it to. So, there has to be this cultural shift. Which I would say would be an ethical shift. And then, if there are enough people who believe this to be the case, then I think you start relying on the democratic process to reorient policy, as in a democracy it should. I'm not in favor of imposing the good life on people by a set of laws. It would be impossible anyway, certainly in any kind of free society. So, you get a sort of ethical shift arising out of the dissatisfaction with many aspects of our present life. And then that can suggest ways in which the law can be shifted to reflect that. And we do suggest certain ways in which the law can help realize what is a cultural or ethical shift. Russ: You do want to nudge people a little bit toward what you think your version of the good life is. Guest: I want to nudge people. I mean, people are being nudged the whole time. They are hardly aware of it. A lot of people talk about how you mustn't interfere with anyone's liberty to do this, that, or the other; and anything like that would be coercive, and yet they ignore the fact that the state already interferes in all kinds of ways. Even the American state does. What about the security state? The fact that more and more people are under surveillance? The fact that more and more goods are being prevented: there are lots of curbs on advertising, all kinds of things, on the grounds that the state believes that they are harmful. We're not allowed to indulge our free choice in pornography. The state already does do this. It already in certain areas does try to nudge people away from harm. We are suggesting that the nudging also include nudging them towards the good. Always starting from the principle that there's enough agreement that this should be done.

40:52 Russ: Well, I agree with you the state already does some of this nudging. And more than nudging in some states, obviously. The question is: Should they do more or less? I'd like to see them do less. I'd like to see the good life, as you define it, preached by people like you. I love that; I think it's a beautiful thing that you are encouraging people to look for meaning and not look for acquisitiveness, stuff, as I think Adam Smith did in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I think that's great. But what does this have to do with the government at all? Guest: Well, the government might make it easier for people to lead a good life if they want to. One example of that is the way work is organized. It should be easier for people to work less. A lot of jobs come as full-time jobs. Take it or leave it. If you say: I want to work 20 hours a week because I have other things I want to do in my waking hours, there are a whole range of jobs which you can't do this in. The organization of the labor market in fact is a very powerful determinant of how much free time or leisure you've got. I would be perfectly happy, as they do in many European countries, to impose limitations on work hours--for all kinds of jobs. Not for all jobs. I don't think that you and I think we are doing really creative jobs and want to spend 60 hours a week doing it that the state should come in and say, No, you are only allowed to spend 20 hours a week doing it. But there are a lot of jobs in which people are worked very hard; and they are not creative, and they would like to work less. I think the state should help them to do that. I think people are subject to an unbelievable bombardment of advertising. They think they are making all their choices freely. In fact their choices--what to buy, what to like--are being powerfully shaped by what they see on their television screens or internet. And I think you can find a way of lessening that bombardment. Now you might then say: But that interferes with the freedom of advertisers to display whatever goods they want, and the freedom of people to watch them. Russ: Yes. Guest: But in fact, these freedoms--I think the freedom of people in that respect is actually much less than we think. People enjoy watching TV programs. They enjoy watching all sorts of things that are perfectly reasonable for them to enjoy watching. But they have to take a whole load of advertising with it. Russ: My only response to that is that I don't think I'm suckered in. Maybe I'm naive. But I have more respect for folks in their autonomy than you do, I suspect. Guest: Well, you may be right. Why do advertisers feel it's worthwhile to spend so much money promoting their products if people aren't [?], if people aren't suckers? A lot of people aren't suckers. Russ: Well, because the world is a busy place. Guest: Huh? Russ: It's the same reason I tweet. And you do, too. I don't spend much time on a lot of other social meeting. But a lot of advertising is just reminding people I'm out here. It's like waving a little flag. I wish I could convince people to read my books or listen to my podcasts with an ad. But it doesn't seem to work that way, for me. Just keep up with the pace. Guest: Well, I'm a bit more cynical than that. Not about--I think they advertise because they think of it as a way of making money. Russ: Well, they do. Guest: Pure and simple. But the way they make money is--and often, they don't tell you about their products. You don't really want someone to remind you, a manufacturer, that he exists. You actually want to learn something about what he's producing. And a lot of ads don't tell you that at all. They just say: You'll feel a lot better if you buy our product; you'll be sexier, you'll be better in all kinds of ways. And that's a sort of suggestion. Why do they bother with the suggestion if they think a lot of people aren't going to be influenced by it? That's the question I would ask. Russ: Well, I think it's a really interesting discussion. I think they are influenced to some extent; but I think I could say all day long that if you listen to EconTalk you'll get thin and make a lot of money and be very popular. I can say that. I don't think it's going to work very well. You could say: They say it better than I do. I just think--I really do think a lot of advertising is merely reminding people. But that's a long conversation, I guess.

46:03 Russ: You say at one point: "Economists have no ambition to remake human nature. They take people as they are, not as they should be. After all the horrors committed in the name of heaven and utopia, this seems to them a suitably modest stance." You don't want to remake human nature, either, do you? That's not your goal here. Guest: No, I don't want to remake human nature. I want to accept a lot of things as just being part of human nature. But I think our criticism is that the way civilization is constructed at the moment denies a lot of elements in human nature. They are not given enough expression. There is a bias. We are a commercial civilization. Our business is business. Business has become--I think it was one of the American presidents who said: America's business is business. Russ: It was an idiot president. But go ahead. Guest: But he said it enough. I mean, if you are in restaurant conversations, around the place, it's all about businesses. About doing deals. It's about how much can we borrow from the bank, what rate of interest. Much, much more than it used to be. The business psychology has spread throughout certainly the Anglo-American type of society, which I'm most familiar with. It's probably less important in others. So, that's an example of denying part of human nature. And simply shaping it in one direction. Russ: Maybe you are eating in the wrong restaurants. I have to say: I agree with you; a lot of the world is obsessed with money. A lot of the world is obsessed with deals. But there are a lot of people obsessed with backgammon and stamp collecting and fantasy football and all kinds of bizarre human forms of expression. Music, photography--they've never been richer than they are now. Never. Never in human history have people had so much access to glorious, creative opportunities and to share them with others. So, maybe the glass is half full, not half empty. Guest: Well, I applaud all of that. But if you work 50 or 60 hours a week, even with your holidays, you may not have nearly as much time as you want to do all these things. And all we're saying is, we should be getting to a point where people can make easier for people to make different choices between work and leisure. You see--I highly respect your position. You are an American libertarian who is also worried about the way society works but doesn't want to do anything about it. Except by way of individual conversion. Russ: Yup. One at a time. Guest: I mean, that's a perfectly respectable position. But I don't think it's enough. Russ: Well, I care about the soul. You can say it religiously or just in a spiritual way. I do think that should be an important part of our lives, and I agree with you. You are right. I just want to do it on an individual basis. Part of the reason is that I don't trust power to do what the Skidelskys want. They never have, the powerful people. They do their own thing. So, I assume you have some unease about making this too much a central role for the state. Guest: Yeah, of course. And that's why we have as one of our basic goods--it limits anything the state can do. And that is autonomy. You know. And respect. Those are central in our list. Respect includes autonomy. We respect the choices of others. We do not try and coerce people. And that limits completely the amount the state is entitled to do in our system. And we take that very seriously. But I agree--of course one should be suspicious of power. And one shouldn't allow it too much scope. I think perhaps the American tradition is a little too suspicious of power. Maybe the European tradition isn't suspicious enough. That may be a cultural variation. Russ: Yeah. Yeah. It goes back to 1776. Guest: It may well be.