I wrote about facts, not what i believe. Of course in the First Administration he gained after he went into training after the assassination recovery inch your 70s, thats no small accomplishment. We do thank you, tom, for this special look, and as he does say, its a very factbased, very interesting focus on a period of the president s life that we dont often see as clearly. We do thank you again for coming to join us, and thank tom. Thank you for having me. [applause] up next, author and think tank president , Arthur Brooks. The former french hornist, tunnel social scientist, talks 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 bess sellers by Gross National happiness and the road to freedom. Arthur brooks, where did the phrase, Gross National happiness, come from . Guest the phrase comes from the government of beaut buttan, who 30 years ago read the process of Economic Development was great, would pull millions of people out of poverty. People wouldnt starve to death but instead of counting happy money had he had the idea of measuring the amount of happiness people head. He start an index crawled Gross National happiness. Thats where the expression comes from. Host what did he found . Guest that divisional measured of Economic Growth were great, and kind of a predeterminant for living a good life but werent sufficient. So some of the things of cultural integrity, family view us, being values, being able to maintain ones faith in god. These are the things people need editor a flourishing life, and developing countries 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 but that doesnt get you far enough. There are really four things that can led us to happiness. And they dont involve money per se. Let me back up for a second, peter. One thing we find is when people are poor, and they have deprivation and theyre deciding whether or not to pay for medicine or food, theyre less likely to be happy. Some of the most miserable countries in the world are place where people die of starvation and preventible diseases. Downs get beyond basic subsistence, the four things that bring happy in the are faith, family, friends, the work. Those are the things with ha to keep in million those are part of human flourishing. Host from your book, this is a book about americas happiness, which is to say the number of americans who are happy versus those who are not. Can we say that the United States is a happy country . Whats your answer to that question . Guest the answer is, generally, yes. Theres so many indices which country is happier tan the other and theyre generally not reliable. Part of the reason is different cultures answer the question differently. So just getting a survey, how happy are you . You going to fine that countries with germanic languages answer the question different with than those with romance langes. Its really that ridiculous. That said, you find that the United States is a country largely of immigrants and strivers and some of the people that are most optimistic about their lives. Its pretty fair to say the United States on balancees relatively happy country. That said, happiness has suffered in recent years, and in part bass of the recession in part because of the great malaise that a lot of people are feeling about optimism about the direction the country is going. That is a real opportunity for policymakers and leaders around the country to try to chang the direction we are going. Host should our politicians make us happy . Guest our politicians. No hour politics dont have a responsibility to make us happy, and thought history the politics 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 to us be able to pursue our own happiness. Thats the key. Thats the reason that faith, family, friend, and work, are so important because theyre part of the pursuit of this elusive goal of happiness that politicians cant give us. Host from Gross National happy possess. Differences are happier than liberals own reaction you right, is primarily one of surprise because virtue hill everything about the politicked of happiness turns out to be at variance with elite intellectual opinion and what i thought but the evidence is the evidence. Guest indeed it is. When you find that the intellectual elite in around the world, not just the United States, is relatively hostile to organized religion, tells us that traditional Family Organization is the bad deal and that its just 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. It turns out all of those pieces of advice, all those philosophies are wrong when it comes to having the happiest life. If you ask 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 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 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 people who are most selfconscious, people who are most inwardly direct led, serving their own purposes and not thinking about others. The fast way to break the cycle of melancholy in your life is to stop focusing on yourself. This is a common this is not any philosophy. This is what the research indicates. There are a lot of really interesting studies on this, and some of them i love. Cases in which people are that you study the happiness of High School Seniors where you have a natural experiment. Kind of like a drug experiment, treatment and control and half the kids just play board games and the other half are randomly assigned to help little kids with their homework. The kids helping the other kids are happier after the experiment. One of my favorite experiments recentry, kind of related, university of liverpool, where the researchers asked men to come into the laboratory with their significant other, their wives or girlfriends, and they said, okay, heres the experiment. You need to walk from one building to another. Thats that simple. With your wife or girlfriend. They say, fine. When theyre halfway through theres an alleyway and a panhandler came out and asked the man for money. Then when they got to the other build they asked the map how much money he gave to the panhandler and then asked the woman, how much are are youached to you and there was a correlation between the more money you gave to the panel handler the more your wife likes you. Would chev give to panel hasnters. Guest absolutely, on the way home, and your wife will like you more. Host political extremeis. 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 theyre less comp passionate than average, less honest, and less concerned for others. Guest yes. The think about political extremism i wrote about this in the New York Times people with extreme political views are not troubled by the idea that somebody else might be right. Its actually hard to be secure in your point of view when theres a possibility that your philosophy is wrong. Political extremists never enter tape that possibility. So the result is theyre more secure tend to be a little bit happier. The problem if youre not willing to entertain the possibility you might be wrong, youre not going to humanize other people who dont share your point of view. 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 toll rapt of other peoples point of view if if youre not youll have an easier time in life and maybe a little happier but spreading more misery around you. Oo when you talk about the concept of flow, in Gross National happiness, what would you mean by that. Flow is a state it was first described by the great psychologist, a philosopher actually a social schoolist who teaches at claremont graduatant in california. At the university of chicago, and he wrote a book called flow. And his research looked at the state in which people are in the zone. When theyre doing work that is not too easy but not too hard. Theyre challenged but not overwhelmed bay task that completely engages them emotionally, cognitively, psychologically, even spiritually, and hours turn into minutes. I bet you have had experiences where you say, three hours . Are you kidding . Thats what were doing here. Were going to say, 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 the u. S. Is a happy country into politics. Guest well, politics its a funny business when it comes to Gross National happiness. The job of politics is not to make us happy people. Thats a very dangerous thing. Stalin was called the per seer of happiness. Thesaurus nobody in the 20 income center, save hitler and a couple of others who created more misery and deep the deep moral malaise that was such a transgression across the 20th 20th century, so when politicians claim theres a problem, but when they talk about giving people the pursuit of happiness, creating the conditions for the per pursuit of happy is in, its a uniquely empowering its the secret to the Great American life, giving us the ability to pursue our happiness and thats what politics should be talking about. Thats the reason opportunity is the most important thing that politicians can be fighting for today. Host traps late the concept into a policy. Guest the policies 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 to bottom have the opportunity to get ahead. We should be thinking about policies not that redistribute money such that everybodying have the same amount of money but rather that people can work so they can be rewarded on the basis hard work and merit. These are the Opportunity Society policies that lead the pursuit of happiness. Host in your most recent book, the road to freedom, how to win the fight for Free Enterprise, 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. My view is that the problem with income inequal today is Senate People are living in poverty and its an avoidable error. Its something that is a rich society we can avoid. The way not to worry about it, however, is on the basis of equalizing income so that people have the same amount of stuff. Thats materialism. Materialism is tyranny wrong on the right and wrong on the left. But when the president of the United States or a politician or Business Leader or anybody gets up and says the greatest scourge of our society is income inequality, he is saying you, petitioner, because you have less than someone else, are victim of society, and thats to reduce you to what we often call in my business, home hoe economicus. Thats disstops you and a disservice to our sew sow site. Host reading more, 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 . That true. 40 kens of every dollar goes to the state. The size of the government has continued to grow. Virtually without pause. And the result is that we like to tell yourselves that were not a european democracy but the truth is we are. We have redistributive tax code that is more progressive than most our european allies measuring in terms of the people who dont pay anything. You see regulation that is on par with the regulatory regimes of the big states of europe. The difference is that Americans Still dont consider themselves to be European Social democrats and thats a really encouraging thing. The reason im optimistic is because we may have the economic characteristics ofunder european cousins bun dont have the mentality, and this gives us at least a possibility for a way of escape. Host how do you square that . That we like Government Programs and we dont like Big Government. Guest well, its the american the basic american zeitgeist, the philosophy that we are ruth individualist. The problem is government has worked like a ratchet. So, when Big Government programs and social Welfare Benefits come, they almost never go away. Theyre very, very hard to get rid of. The main area of Government Spending that is redistributing in this country is entitlement, as everybody watching. Doesnt matter if people are conservatives liberal, 70 of every dollar goes to government goes to the special spending programs, entitlemented, Social Security, met care, medicaid. The problem is we havent been responsible as a society about a way to rein in these programs in a way that wont beg gar our childrenwont make it harder for my kids and grandkids and yourses and everybody elses out there to have the same opportunities you and i had because well be spending so much money. With the stillover benefits as well of the United States not being able to take its rightful place as a leader among nations. All of the oxygen in the government or will increasingly be devoted toward the special spending, the suboptimal socially and internationally and thats the big problem we face. Host again, translate that into a policy. How do you reform these programs . Guest the first thing we need to do is we need to have leaders that lead as opposed to leaders that follow. If youre putting your finger in the air and saying, tell me what the opinion polls say, people dont want Social Security reformcant do that, youre being a follower. Youre actually not being a leader. What leaders do is that they can actually induce sacrifice, they can help people in a country. They can help citizens to see something bigger than themselves. Great leaders can take a country to war, the ultimate sacrifice. If we can go to war when we need to, we should be able to reform entitlement programs and make the sacrifices as a society to protect america for future generations. Okay so how do we do it . Practically speaking speaking we need politics who have policies that will reform Social Security and especially met care and medicaid, which we know how to do in a way that will cause some temporary discomfort among certain interest groups. But where those groups will be empowered to be hourly in charge of saving our country. Now, theres specifics on how to do it. We can talk about how to count inflation differently and change the formulas so that people are not retiring at 65 and 67. Theyre retiring in line with the demographic profiles of the American Public, where we allow states more latitude and how they use their funding, where medicare is actually not a system that is completely openended and where people are responsible for seeing the prices of medical care and making the decisions on the basis of that. Thats the basis of good policies, where we can rein in spending and americansening take care of their own before i gobbles up the american bring. Host george w. Bush tried Social Security reform ten years ago. Guest yes. Its a tough thing. Nobody expects it to be easy. If it were easy it would already be done. But there are ways to do this. Ronald reagan did this in a bipartisan way to help reform and save Social Security for a long, long time. How would we do it . Just a couple of basics we dont count inflation in the right way. We actually have an inflated Social Security benefit stream. We need to take care of that. People are retiring at relatively close to the same age as when the Social Security system was implemented decades ago. Yet theyre living for decades longer. Thats an obvious actuarial problem. You and i are going to live to be whatever were going to live to be, let hope, 85 or 87 or 88 years old, yet were retiring at 65. Something the public cant maintain and we have to reform that as well. From road to the road to freedom, the job of a social safety net starts with an answer to this question what is an unacceptable standard of living in america . In my view, youite, it is unacceptable for someone in americas Wealth Society to go without access to basic medical care, sufficient food, and basic shelter. Pretty uncontroversial, i think. Guest youd think, wouldnt you, yet we have lots of people who are not going who dont have basic access to those things. These are effectively unforced errors. Were spending more more money y