The Wild Problem (center): Pathways to Prosperity
Wild Issues (C):The Road to Prosperity
We move on to the book Wild Issues by Russ Roberts. The last lecture talked about how you should seek prosperity in life, so how do you become a prosperous person?
You actually know by imagination alone. A prosperous person, at the very least, must be a generous person, to stand there especially frank, very big, rather than the kind of calculating, stingy, small-minded temperament.
Then how to be considered generous? Let’s look at Roberts himself.
Roberts was in Stanford Hoover Institution as a researcher, with a very high salary, every day to do their own small research, home and very close to the unit, a very pleasant life. When he was asked to become president of Shalom College in Israel, there was a big downside to this option, according to the way the average citizen thinks about things.
The salary in Israel is low, the living conditions are obviously not as good as in the U.S., and the place in Jerusalem may not be safe. It’s not as easy to be a dean as it is to do your own research. Also, moving to Israel with a family in tow makes it difficult for the family to adjust to a completely foreign environment.
Every Chinese mother-in-law knows what to choose when faced with this situation.
But if Roberts refuses to go to Israel for these few reasons, he is just a good son-in-law and far from prosperous.
Shalom College is an experimental humanities college just established in 2013 with the goal of giving college students a liberal arts education so that elite Israeli students can study the great thinkers and philosophers of history, rather than the usual college students who now go on to learn computers and other life skills. Shalom College is a place to explore how to develop the next generation of Israeli leaders. Seizing the opportunity to participate in such great things is called prosperity.
What this event teaches us is not to think of the wild problem and the domestication problem together. The domestication problem can be solved by utilitarian calculations. Utilitarianism and prosperity are two different dimensions that cannot be directly compared in size.
And of course utilitarianism is something everyone needs to consider - if the living conditions in Israel are so bad that you can’t even work in peace, then you shouldn’t go, but that’s an extreme case.
- The underlying principle is that if you want to be prosperous, the prosperity dimension should be decisive, and utilitarian considerations should be secondary, with prosperity taking precedence over utilitarianism. *
Based on this foundation, Roberts talks about several ways to achieve prosperity, and we’ll start with four of them in this talk.
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- The first method is identity. * Our column just said [1] that you should try to make decisions from an identity perspective rather than a profit perspective.
Why did you choose to make a career in Shanghai instead of staying in your cozy little hometown town? Because you want to be a big city person. To prosper, think more about who you want to be rather than calculating value for money.
Why did many Brits choose to leave the EU? Some people say is it because if they stay in the EU, the British government always has to subsidize the EU finances and the British people are worried about losing out? In fact, if you do some public opinion polls, this is not what the people think. What the British people think is “I want to be British” - they feel that the British leaders don’t value Britain enough. By contrast, those who want to stay in the EU see themselves more as citizens of the world, not just as British citizens.
The fact that a modern person can think on such a spiritual level as political identity is definitely not troublemaking - it’s a step forward for society.
Then again, economists often say that it is irrational to go out and vote on election day: because there are so many voters in the country, more of you is not too much, less of you is not too little, and your vote will not have any substantial effect on the outcome of the election. So why do people go to the polls? It’s not really to sway the outcome of the election, but to fulfill a civic duty: ‘it’s my duty’.
And then there’s religion. For a person who takes religion seriously, he should believe in it only to find the truth. The sense of belonging, the sense of community, the comfort of the soul, all of that is an unseemly appeal.
If you don’t think these are grounded, then imagine this person - a person who looks for a job only asking about wages and housing prices, who doesn’t care about anything political, who laughs at others for running for social justice, and whose only spiritual life is to pray to God. Do you want to be that person? That’s the opposite of ‘prosperity’.
What’s more interesting is how we identify ourselves in various relationships such as couples and friendships. If you were to engage in utilitarian calculations, you’d only think about what you gained and lost from the relationship - whereas Roberts says we should be thinking about how the relationship affects our identity. How has this relationship shaped you? It is a part of your identity.
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Which leads us to * the second way, which is to find a partner. * On the road to prosperity, you want a partner to walk with you. It can be a couple or a friend. Some people who don’t want to get married have lots of friends, and Roberts understands that. Let’s focus on couples for the sake of conversation.
How should you choose your significant other? In our previous column, we talked about the 37% rule [2], when we used the example of looking for a partner, but that’s not really true. 37% algorithm is a utilitarian approach, which is fine for recruiting employees in a company, but Roberts advocates that you can’t look for a partner in life in this way.
There is a website called eHarmony that helps people find marriage partners in the U.S. I’ve heard of studies that have found that the success rate of finding a marriage partner through eHarmony is higher than that of offline relationships. People have interpreted this to mean that the site’s algorithms are particularly good. It’s true that registering on eHarmony is a pain in the ass, and you have to fill out an incredibly long questionnaire that tests your personality traits before the site can match you.
Roberts has an acquaintance within eHarmony, and this person told him privately that the most important reason for eHarmony’s high matching success rate is not how good the algorithms are - it’s because the people who sign up on eHarmony’s website are people who sincerely want to get married. When two people who sincerely want to get married talk together, then of course it’s easy to get married!
The lesson is that ‘strong matches’ don’t mean much. Don’t try to find ‘the best person for you’, you have no idea what’s right for you.
If there’s any guide, you can find someone who is more like yourself. This person can talk to you, tolerate your habits, has values and principles that are the same as yours, respects you, has a good heart, and preferably makes your heart sing.
Generally speaking, people like that are people who have a similar background to you. This is why traditional marriage makes sense. The family helps introduce you to someone with a similar background, and see that there is no conflict in religious beliefs or habits.
Darwin didn’t say he was looking for the best woman in the world - that kind of thinking is silly. What Darwin did do was propose to his cousin, who agreed, and they ended up with a great marriage.
It’s not really about who you get, it’s about how you get along-
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Which leads us to the third way, being willing to play a supporting role. *
A reader of our column recently asked me, you talk a lot about what the world might be like virtually, so when you spend time with your family in general, do you feel like your kids are virtual too? I replied that one really doesn’t. I sometimes think tables and chairs and benches are virtual, but never any person is virtual. At best I imagine the world as a multiplayer online game where everyone is a player and only the game scenario may be virtual.
But if you play life as a game, you’re likely to get the false sense that you’re the only protagonist of the game, and everyone else is an NPC here to play along. this feeling is, in Mr. Wu Zhihong’s words, ‘mega-baby’.
Why do activities like meditation, religion, reading, literature, and books change people for the better? One of the most important effects is that these activities put you in touch with something bigger than yourself, making you realize that you are just a part of nature and that you are not the center of the world.
Instead of making yourself the main character, it makes you play better.
For example, you may have had the experience of having a pretty important conversation with someone and coming back and constantly reflecting on it, did you perform well enough today? Which words were right, which words were wrong? Was I too stupid today? The real stupidity is that you only care about your performance in that conversation. You’re not looking at the conversation as an organic whole with multiple parties involved.
Roberts’ advice is to engage in any activity by imagining that you’re participating in a great performance - you may be an insignificant supporting player, but you care about making that performance successful. You can make others play well, and that’s fine.
In fact, we look at the mature people in our society - especially those with children - who are more than willing to be in supporting roles. But being a supporting actor doesn’t mean hiding, it means getting involved in something in a spirit of exploration and seeing what interesting things you can come up with.
That said I have some feelings. When I was in college I had a few good friends, we spent all day together, and when each of us talked about a topic, everyone was interested and very happy. When I went abroad to study, I realized that I couldn’t make use of my language advantage, and I didn’t enjoy any interesting conversation for a long time. When I came back to China one year, I met two of my classmates again, and the three of us chatted together, and I immediately regained the feeling I had back then. Everything they said was a benign stimulus for me, and I could tell a joke with almost every word. But without them, I don’t have that sense of humor.
That’s what interaction does. You’re just a part of the whole, but you can make that whole funnier.
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Roberts’ *Fourth way is to talk about principles. *
An example. You’re walking down the road one day and you see a wallet on the ground with a lot of cash in it. Assuming that no one sees you picking up the wallet, and that there is no risk to you in taking the money, will you take the money? There are three responses to this question.
The first reaction is that since there is no risk, I will take the money if I don’t. Some economists would agree with this position.
The second reaction is that even though there is no risk, I enjoy helping others and the pleasure I get from helping others is much greater than the money - so in order to enjoy helping others, I decide to return the wallet to the owner. I choose to be a good person because being good makes me happy.
The third reaction is that I don’t even think about it and just give the wallet back to the owner. I do it because it’s the right thing to do.
Roberts advocates the third response because it is the principled thing to do. People at a lower level will find it hard to speak principles, but for people at a higher level, speaking principles is actually the easiest.
This is because speaking of principles is the attitude of ‘impetuousness’; you do what you think is right without having to think about it. Impetuousness is much easier than mediocrity; you don’t have to carefully study the most appropriate ‘degree’, you don’t have to worry about doing it wrong. Being principled allows you to make instant decisions on any issue you face.
The second advantage of speaking principles is that it will make you uncompromising. If you don’t have strong principles and bargain a little every time, you can easily help yourself to find reasons to lose them. Do you still want to run today if you’re quite tired? No need to discuss it, your principles require you to run every day. It’s easier not to compromise on the little things instead.
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We talked about four approaches in this talk. The first is to think in terms of identity; the second is to find a partner to explore prosperity with you; the third is to be willing to play a supporting role when you are with your partner and others and to value the interaction; and the fourth is to be principled.
These all sound very simple, but I see very little mention of them in today’s formal education. It is unlikely that your “Civics” teacher will give you a lecture on “how to get along with friends”.
If the teacher wants to, he might talk about business contracts in the context of a market economy - and then he will give the students the misconception that the ideal relationship between people in modern society is a contractual one, and that this is the way it is in the capitalist world.
I don’t know that Roberts, or David Brooks [3], who we’ve talked about in this column before, is emphasizing that a husband and wife and friends, or you and your business, are not contractual relationships, but rather “covenant” or “commitment” relationships.
In a contractual relationship, everyone has to calculate the rights and obligations, and if you give a lot and get very little, you will feel that you have suffered a loss. But a covenant relationship is a commitment: you make a promise, you do it well, and it doesn’t matter what the other person does - what matters is that practicing the covenant makes you a better person.
And these truths aren’t just any ‘Western culture’; they’re also true of the ancient Chinese spirit of nobility! The Qin system took away a lot of this spirit from the Chinese people, because the scholars were turned into “institutionalized people” who only knew how to be loyal to the king, who had to do everything according to the system, who had no independence and lacked the sense of self-prosperity.
I am afraid that China is in the greatest need of such an educational experiment as Shalom College.
Notes
[1] Persons with one identity and persons with multiple identities
[2] Mathematicians tell you when to end your singleness
[3] The Second Mountain 4: What Marriage Is All About
Getting to the point
Four ways to reach prosperity: first, think in terms of identity; second, find a partner to explore prosperity with you; third, be willing to play a supporting role when dealing with your partner and other people, and cherish the interaction; and fourth, be principled.