And what were doing when we burn fossil fuels, is that we are taking carbon that was buried under the earth over the course of hundreds of millions of years, and we are transferring it back up into the atmosphere. So were basically running geological history backwards and at a very high speed. Were taking a process that took hundreds of millions of years to run in one direction, and were running it in the other direction in a matter of centuries. And if you were an alien and you came to visit the earth, you could easily conclude that what were doing, that the fundamental purpose of modern industrialized society, is to affect this transfer as quickly as possible. To see how much carbon we can get out of the ground and put up into the air and how fast we can do it. And thats a look at some of the chicago tribunes top books for 2014. To link to the full list and to see other publications selections, visit booktv. Org. Okay, now its time for hillary. You wrote that she captured your attention like no other human being. Why was that . Well, here was a woman who could speak in paragraphs without notes, who was, you know, indomitable in the face of the horrifying kind of criticism and sexist behavior, and in particular really hated by women like her, other highlyelected and, you know highlyeducated and, you know, prominent women. There was just a tremendous wall of anger at hillary for having, for staying with bill clinton. I knew from early on when i interviewed her and followed them that she would never leave bill clinton, although people would constantly say, well, shell leave him when that are out of the white house, or shell leave him when she goes to the senate, or shell definitely leave him they were symbiotic. You know, can you imagine anybody being able to be like hillary for bill clinton . I mean, you know, it took a hillary to make a president. And it took a bill clinton to put hillary in the position where she can actually run for president. So they were symbiotic and still are. And i, im still fascinated by them because they have dominated Democratic Politics for 25 years, longer even than the roosevelts. Thats right. Right . I mean, they were 17 or 18 years, both teddy and fdr. And these people are still doing it. Quite amazing. Despite certain flaws. [laughter] that are very well known. So i find im fascinated by this up until the end of the summer, i was hearing from hillarys, some of hillarys friends and colleagues who had been with them in the white house saying they really didnt want her to run, they told her not to, theyd tell her not to and that she was really having very great, conflicted thoughts about whether she was going to run. Because she has a very nice life now. She has plenty of money, she has a portable bully pulpit. Anywhere she goes she can make an issue. Shes one of the most famous women, if not the most famous woman in the world. She now has a grandchild shes longed for for so long. Rehashing of everything that they will have to endure. Well, this one really overriding reason i finally figured out, from the very beginning hillary has been about improving the lives of women and girls, and she made that part of the Foreign Policy portfolio of the secretary of state when she bargained with obama about whether or not she would take that role. She said that was it. If he didnt agree to that, she wasnt interested, and he did. So anywhere she went in the world, she did put that into practice. And she would be able to do much more as president. But more than that, when she finally acknowledged obamas victory, it took her three days to digest that reality, and when she finally made her speech at a big hall in washington im sure you were will too there were many, many women supporters there, and they were crying bitter tears. It was a very bitter, angry crowd. The feeling that hillary listen denied because, you know, somebody else had jumped the line. And her last words were, dont spend a minute thinking about what might have been. Life is too short, time has to be spent well. We need to Work Together for what still can be. And that was the promise. And if she didnt fulfill that promise in 2016, there would be a lot of women who would feel failed by her, and i dont think she could live with that. Uhhuh. You can watch this and other programs online are at booktv. Org. The next three hours are your chance to speak with author and think tank president Arthur Brooks. The former french hornist turned social scientist will talk about his research on charity, happiness and Free Enterprise. The head of the American Enterprise institute is the author of four nonfiction books including New York Times best sellers Gross National happiness and the road to freedom. Host Arthur Brooks, where did the phrase Gross National happiness come from . [laughter] guest the phrase comes from the government of bhutan, i should say the king of bhutan about 30 years ago realized that a process of development, of economic development, was great. It would pull millions of people out of poverty. People wouldnt starve to death, but it wasnt enough for human flourishing. So instead of counting narrowly the amount of money people had per capita, he had the idea of trying to measure the amount of happiness. He started an index called Gross National happiness. Thats where the expression comes from. Host and what did he find . Guest he found that a lot of the traditional measures of Economic Growth were, as i said, great and kind of a predeterminant for living a good life, but they werent sufficient, and so some of the things of cultural integrity, of family values, of being able to maintain ones faith, ones faith in god, that these are the things people needed for a truly flourishing life. And in so doing in a developing country, had a lot of lessons for the rest of us. Host can you measure happiness via economic success . Guest no. You can find some predeterminants for having a relatively good life by looking at economic indicators, but that doesnt get you far enough. There are really four things that can lead us to happiness, and they dont involve money per se. Let me back up for a second, peter. Money, one of the things that we find is enwhen people are poor and that when people are poor and they have deprivation and deciding whether or not to pay for medicine or food, theyre less likely to be happy. And some of the most miserable places in the world are places where people die of starvation and preventable diseases. Once you get beyond basic subsistence, the four things that bring happiness are faith, family, friends and work. Those are the things we have to keep in mind, those are part of human flourishing. Host from your book, Gross National happiness, this is a book about americas happiness. Doing sums across our population, can we say that the United States is a happy country . Whats your answer to that question . Guest the answer is generally, yes. Now, theres so many indices of which country is happier than another, and theyre generally not reliable. And part of the reason is because different cultures answer the question differently. So just getting a survey how happy are you, youre going to find that countries that have germanic languages answer the question different than those with romance languages, for example. Its that, its really that ridiculous. But that said, you find that the United States is a country of largely of immigrants and strivers, and these are some of the people that are most optimist inabout their lives. And so i optimistic about their lives. I think its pretty fair to say on balance were a happy country. That said, happiness has suffered in recent years in part because of the recession, in part because of the great kind of malaise that a lot of people are feeling about, you know, optimism about the direction the countrys going. And i think this is a real opportunity for policymakers and leaders around this country to try to change the direction that were going. Host so should our politicians make us happy . Guest well, our politicians, no. Our politicians dont have a responsibility to make us happy. And in point of fact, throughout history the politicians that have called themselves the purveyors of happiness are usually the worst dictators. The american secret is not that leaders make us happy, its that they help us to be able to pursue our own happiness. Thats the key. Thats the reason that faith, family, friends and work are so important to it, because theyre part of the pursuit of this elusive goal of happiness that politicians per se cant give us. Host from green gross natil happiness, conservatives are happier than liberals. My own reaction to this, you write, is primarily one of surprise because virtually everything about the politics of happiness turns out to be at variance we heat intellectual elite intellectual opinion and what i always thought. But the evidence is the evidence. Guest indeed, it is. When you find that the intellectual elite around the world, not just the United States, is relatively hostile to organized religion. Tells us that traditional Family Organization is wad deal and that its is a bad deal and its kind of keeping people down, that community as we traditionally understood it is a force for repression which we often hear and that work, work is something that we should actually do less of. What we need is more leisure time as opposed to more work. It turns out all of those pieces of advice, all of those elements of philosophy are wrong when it comes to having the happiest life. Host if you asked me how you could be happier and i told you to vote republican or go to church, you might justifiably tell me to go jump in a lake. But if i told you to give to charity, i would for i would be giving you excellent advice. Everyone can give and give more today. Each and every one of of us can afford to dig a little deeper. Giving to charity makes one happy. Guest its true. Its true. Theres a lot of evidence on this. But, you know, we dont have to dig very far in each of our own lives to think about cases in which we felt happier by serving others. The most miserable people are the most selfconscious, the most inwardly directed, those who are serving their own purposes and not thinking about others. The fast way to break the cycle of melancholy in your own life is to stop focusing on yourself. I mean, this is a common this is not my philosophy, this is what the Research Indicates to us. So there are a lot of really interesting studies on this, peter, and some of this i lo. There are i love. You study the happiness of High School Seniors where you have a natural experiment, kind of like a drug experiment. Treatment and control. Half the kids just play board games and the other half are randomly assigned to help little kids with their homework. The kids who were helping the other kids are happier after the experiment. One of my favorite experiments recently is kind of related to this. Theres one at the university of liverpool that was just published where the researchers asked men to come into the laboratory with their significant other, with their wives or girlfriends, and they said, okay, heres the experiment. You need to walk from one building to another, its that simple. When theyre halfway through, theres an alleyway and a panhandler came out and asked the man for money. When they got to the other building, they did the interview, and they asked the man how much did you give the panhandler. They asked his wife or girlfriend, how attractive do you find him . The more money you give panhandler, the more your wife likes you. So it turns out people are healthier, happier and even more handsome when they give to charity. Host so we should give to panhandlers. Guest absolutely. On the way home, and your wife will like you more. Host political extremists. You write that they are happier on average, but you also write that there is evidence that people with extreme views affect everybody adversely. Because they are less compassionate than average, less honest and less concerned for others. Guest yeah. The thing about political extremism, i wrote about this in the New York Times a couple of years ago, as a matter of fact. People with extreme political views are not troubled by the idea that somebody else might be right. I mean, its its actually, its hard to be secure in your point of view when theres a possibility that your philosophy is wrong. Political extremists never entertain that possibility, and so the result is theyre more secure and they tend to be happier. The problem is if youre not willing to entertain the possibility that you might be wrong, youre not going to humanize other people who dont share your point of view. Now, we all deserve to be able to have a world view, we deserve to be able to say this is right and this is wrong, i think, but its the right thing to do to be tolerant of other peoples point of view. If youre not, youre probably going to have an easier time of it in life and maybe a little bit happier, but youre going to be spreading more misery around you. Host Arthur Brooks, when you talk about the concept of flow in Gross National happiness, what do you mean by that . Guest flow is a state. It was first described by a great psychologist who was a philosopher, actually, a social psychologist. He teaches at Claremont Graduate University in california. He was at the university of chicago for many years, and he wrote a famous book, and his research looked at the state in which people are in the zone. When theyre doing work thats not too easy, but not too hard. Theyre challenged, but theyre not overwhelmed by a task that completely engages them emotionally, cognitively, psychologically and even spiritually, and the hours turn into minutes. I bet youve had these experiences in your life where you say, whoa, three hours, are you kidding . I cant believe it, it felt like ten minutes. Thats the state of flow, when youre doing just what youre supposed to be doing, and the hours fly by. Host so translate this talk of Gross National happiness and u. S. As a happy country into politics. Guest well, you know, politics, its a funny business. As i mentioned a minute ago, the job of politics is not to make us happy people. Thats a very dangerous thing. Stalin was called the purveyor of happiness. Theres virtually nobody in the 20th century, save hitler and maybe a couple of others, who created more misery and, you know, deep sort of the deep moral malaise that was such a transgression across the 20th century. So when politicians claim this, theres a problem. But when they talk about giving people the pursuit of happiness, creating the conditions for the pursuit of happiness, then its a uniquely empowering situation. This is the secret to the American Dream, its the secret to the Great American life is giving us the ability to pursue our happiness, and thats what politicians should be talking about. Thats the reason opportunity is the most important thing that politicians can be fighting for today. Host so translate that whole concept into a policy. Guest the policies that we should be working for are getting people to the starting line. What should we be talking about with respect to education . Making sure that people at the bottom have the opportunity to get ahead. We should be thinking about policies not that redistribute money such that everybody can have the same amount of money or closer to it, but rather, that people can work so they can be rewarded on the basis of their hard work and merit. These are the Opportunity Society policies that actually lead to the pursuit of happiness. Host Arthur Brooks, in your most recent book, the road to freedom, you write that increasing income equality as a social goal means either you dont understand the evidence, or you think it is desirable per se to punish people at the top because they are rich. Theres no way around this fact. Guest indeed. Now, my view is that the problem with income inequality that we have today is that some people are living in poverty, and its an avoidable error. Its something that as a rich society we can avoid. The way not to worry about it, however, is on the basis of equalizing incomes so people have the same amount of stuff. Thats material itch. Materialism is tyranny, and its wrong on the right and the left. But when the president of the United States or a politician or a Business Leader gets up and says the greaters scourge of our society, the greatest problem we have is income inequality, what hes saying that you, peter, because you have something less than someone else you are a victim of society, and thats to reduce you to pure economic men, and that is a disservice to you and to our society. Host reading a little bit more from the road to freedom, added up the evidence is clear america has already effectively slipped into a Big Government social democracy. About 40 cents of every dollar americans earn goes to the state. Guest its true. The size of the government has continued to grow. Virtually without pause. And the result is that we like to tell ourselves that were not a offpeenstyle europeanstyle social democracy, but the truth is that we are. We have redistributive tax code thats more progressive than most of our european allies if you measure that in terms of the people who dont pay anything. You see regulation thats on par with the regulatory regimes of the big states of europe. The difference is that Americans Still dont consider them to be European Social democrats, and thats a really earn couraging thing. Encouraging thing. We may have the economic characteristics of our european cousins, but we still dont have their mentality, and this gives us a possibility for a way of escape. Host well, how do you square that, that we like Government Programs, and we dont like Big Government . Guest well, its, the american the basi