Ugh, this is so embarrassing.
I'm Angela Duckworth.
I'm Steven Dubner. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.
Today on the show, does healing yourself necessarily heal society?
In case of emergency, put on your oxygen mask first.
A million dollars to the person who can replace that metaphor with a better one.
Angela, there's a magazine that comes out once a year that I love from the New York Times magazine, which I happen to have worked at.
My favorite issue is a year -end one called The Lives They Lived, which looks back at interesting people who have died in the previous year.
I've seen that. We actually created that special issue when I was an editor there, so I was involved in it.
And it was really fun to look back at all the people who had died in the previous year and not just commissioned pieces on the most famous or the most influential or whatnot, but really the most interesting, tangent upon a tangent.
We originally called it Not the Lives They Lived, but Lives Well Lived, which I think ended up being a little too saccharine for our taste.
I like it though. You know, life well lived.
It's very Aristotelian.
Eudaimonia, the good life.
The problem was that lives well lived, that phrase kind of excluded scoundrels.
Oh, do you include scoundrels?
Well, you want to have the latitude to include people whose lives were not, quote, well lived.
In fact, I may be misremembering this.
I think I wrote a piece once about a young guy who was driving on a rural road in Maine and hit Stephen King with his car and almost killed Stephen King.
I've read Stephen King's side of that in the book.
What is it like on writing?
Yeah, exactly. He was reading a book because Stephen King reads while walking, even down the sidewalk in New York.
And this guy almost killed him.
And then not that many years later, that guy died.
And I had already written a piece about Stephen King and I'd spent some time up in Maine with him.
But then I think I wrote this lives.
They lived piece on the guy who hit Stephen King and then died shortly after.
Anyway, there was one piece in this year's issue about a fellow named Renny Davis, who was one of the so -called Chicago seven.
So for anybody who doesn't remember the Chicago seven, they were the activists and intellectuals who assembled famously in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
And they were protesting not only the U .S.
involvement in the Vietnam War, but also what they saw as basically the U .S.
government's inhumane treatment of its own citizenry.
Right. But not long after that dramatic appearance in Chicago, Renny Davis, one of this group, he essentially abandoned that mission.
And the Times magazine piece in this special lives they lived issue was written by Benoit Denizae Lewis.
And here's how he put it.
Activism, Renny Davis now believed, had failed to fix a broken country.
The new solution to war, poverty, racism was spiritual enlightenment.
And so this guy, Renny Davis, Chicago seven member, began following this young Indian guru.
And he set off on a life of meditation and self enlightenment and trying to build what he called a new humanity movement.
Now, he had been incredibly popular as an activist, calling out the sins of the U .S.
government. And these people who had supported Renny Davis now felt totally abandoned and ticked off.
They ridiculed him.
There was a socialist newspaper called Workers Power, which argued that Renny Davis had, quote, learned the wrong lesson and decided that politics doesn't work.
So if you can't change the world, change yourself.
And that's what he means by spiritual enlightenment.
I think that's basically right.
He felt that he should improve himself and it would radiate into the world and maybe be more powerful than politics and policy.
But when I read that sentence, he decided that politics doesn't work.
So if you can't change the world, change yourself.
I have to tell you, Angie, it hit me right between the eyes.
That writer had put into words something that I've been feeling for years about this, I guess you'd call it a high end self -improvement movement, which you and I are arguably a part of.
We are right there in the eye of the storm, are we not?
That's a question for debate.
But I think the work that you've done as a researcher and as a writer with Grit and some of the work that we've done with Freakonomics and Freakonomics Radio, some of it is pointed in that direction.
And it's this idea that if you focus on your own goals, your own Grit and work habits and your interpersonal relationships, you are inevitably having a good effect on the larger world as well.
Yeah, help yourself to help others.
In case of emergency, put on your oxygen mask first.
A million dollars to the person who can replace that metaphor with a better one.
A billion dollars, actually.
I hope we have some takers.
But here's the thing.
I'm starting to wonder if this self -enlightenment, this self -help, this self -improvement is really more of a self -deception.
I'm wondering if instead of all of us trying to optimize ourselves, instead of supporting what I think of sometimes as this self -help porn movement of podcasts and books, that we should all spend more time optimizing the opportunity set for as many people as possible, especially people who don't have the resources or the inclination to
pursue this high -end self -help.
You think about the notion of trickle -down economics that President Ronald Reagan practiced.
And a lot of liberals dismiss that as unrealistic and even cruel.
Like, what do you expect that good economic outcomes will just trickle down from the rich people to the poor?
The thinness of rationalizations.
But I'm wondering, are we engaging in and supporting trickle -down self -improvement?
And if so, is it any better than trickle -down economics?
I am not the person to comment on trickle -down economics.
I do, though, see that there is a tension here between helping yourself inward -directed improvement, like how happy am I?
Am I taking care of myself?
Am I sleeping enough?
There is a contrast, a tension, between that inward focus and outward structural change, like change the government, change the laws.
I think we should start with the tension and then see if we can resolve it.
Like, I talk to people and they're like, why do you study grit?
Why don't you study structural inequality or racism or poverty?
Like, I'm not a sociologist.
I'm not a politician.
What psychologists do is study the individual, the individual's motivation, the individual's emotion, the individual's behavior.
Sociologists study the group.
Anthropologists study culture.
So it's kind of just not my trade.
Yeah, but at the risk of insulting my good friend Angela Duckworth, let me just say, that sounds a bit of a cop -out for a couple of reasons.
The biggest one being that you're really contradicting your own actions to some degree because while you consider yourself a psychologist who essentially studies the self, the fact is you helped launch this massive project with a bunch of other academics called Behavior Change for Good.
And this was an incredibly ambitious, wide -ranging project.
I mean, it's in the title there, Behavior Change for Good.
You're trying to understand and encourage behavior changes across the population that will improve society at large, yes, one by one, individual by individual, but it's not about the self entirely.
Well, not about the self, but I think when people are impatient or even angry that there's talk about, again, grit, growth mindset, agency, individual psychological stuff, I think what they're annoyed about is that seems to be stealing attention from things that are really external to the individual.
I've talked to people, they're like literally mad at me for bringing up psychology.
Often, frankly, they are my sociology friends, like I'll send around an article about an intervention that improved life outcomes for middle school students who learn to say no to drugs and to communicate better.
And I'm sometimes astonished, honestly, at how angry that can make people like, why are you talking about fixing these kids?
You have to fix society.
You know, the reason I brought this question to you today is in part because I've been looking back lately at Freakonomics Radio because we've been at it.
We're about to hit our 500th episode.
What? There are these round numbers that are pretty much meaningless except they make you assess the past.
Yes, research shows.
Fives and zeros right at the end of a number make you reflect.
It is true. And there's a reason things are priced $4 .99 and $19 .99 instead of $5 .20 and so on.
And I'd noticed that even before COVID, but especially during COVID, we have done a lot more episodes on fairly serious policy questions, whether it's about voting, poverty, minimum wage, et cetera, et cetera.
We used to do more quirky, sometimes cute and often personal -ish stories about how people could optimize their lives as opposed to optimize policy.
And I was wondering why I had changed my focus to some degree, not entirely.
I was thinking partly it was maybe COVID that made some of those other stories feel a little bit less relevant somehow.
And I believe this transcends whatever political and cultural divisions we may have, because I believe that progressives and conservatives, young people and old people, whatever, I do feel a common human sentiment is that we want to not only succeed and thrive for ourselves and our families and our
friends, if not to necessarily help others do the same, at least help create an environment where anybody can.
I really think that most people do want to live in a world where it's not that they're just fat and happy and everyone else is miserable, but it seems that we're in an era right now, whether it's politically or economically or socially, where it's not at all obvious what the average person can do to
create a rising tide that lifts a lot of boats.
And therefore, there is this frustration and I don't really know how to respond to that.
So I think there are two different questions.
One is, should I work on society at large, things that are outside of the individual, or should I work on the individual?
Right. That's one tension, sociology versus psychology.
And then there's another tension, which is like, should I care about other people or should I care about myself?
I guess they're related, but I think they're different.
I was thinking more about sociology versus psychology, like assume that you're completely altruistic.
This is not about you, it's just about how to help humanity.
And now you have the question of, should you work on structural problems or should you work on individual agency and individual psychology?
But maybe you're more asking, should we be pro -socially oriented or personally oriented?
Well, as always, you've taken a kind of shallow question and deepened it really nicely.
I think both tracks are really relevant.
And look, for the sake of this conversation, for the sake of our listeners, I think it's probably best to talk on both tracks because some people may wish to pursue one over the other.
So which one should we take first, Stephen?
Me versus they, or inside versus outside.
Let's do the inside versus outside.
We'll start with the big and maybe work our way back to the small.
You know, when I was a teacher in my 20s, I was teaching among other places in New York City public schools.
And when you close that classroom door, and you're like staring at these kids, you don't think about zoning ordinances and legislation.
You also aren't in the moment thinking about how cruel it is the way public school funding works, you know, systematically advantages the advantage is like the most regressive school funding that you could have.
What you're doing is you're looking at these girls and boys, and you're trying to help them that day.
And I think in a way, this internal versus external, like, should I be trying to get my kids to have more confidence and figure out how best to teach them?
Or should I be thinking about structural things that loom larger in their lives, but they're not inside my classroom.
Maybe it was all those years of teaching that inclined me not to think so much about the structural things that for me, it was not obvious how I was going to change.
Like, I do not know how to change the history of school funding in the United States that goes with zip code.
You know, when I was in high school, I read Candide.
Did you read Candide by Voltaire?
Let us go cultivate our garden.
Yes, we must cultivate our garden was this kind of like, well, the world is complicated, and there's all this stupidity, and there's politics, and there's almost nothing stupider than politics and people fighting each other over small things, not for the greater good.
And even as a junior in high school, I was like, Oh, you have to cultivate your own garden.
Don't try to do things that you can't change, even though you know that they should be changed.
Like grow some lettuce, you know, like pull the weeds.
So I feel like I had the same attitude as a teacher.
And for better or worse, and I guess I could be criticized with I am criticized for this.
I just find it more useful to focus on something that I can change.
And maybe like this guy, Renny Davis, I'm kind of at a loss for how to change these structural things, which I agree are bigger.
Well, I think it's such a spectrum we're talking about here, because I think it'd be very easy for me to make the argument that you are having a big impact.
Yeah, I don't know how much impact I'm having.
Well, I could make the argument that you are.
But part of my challenge to that argument is, is it mostly high status people, for instance, who read a book like Grit in order to help themselves become a little higher status?
Is the research that you're doing around kids and education, is it having the impact that you would like it to have versus what might be a much broader impact of a larger commercial or policy initiative?
It's one of the reasons, Angie, I've always liked journalism, which is the idea that you have a lot of leverage.
One person writes something and a thousand can read it.
Now, there's obviously a lot of leverage in other realms in politics and policy and business and commerce.
I mean, Mark Zuckerberg has a lot of leverage.
But even in those areas, I think self -interest is often trumping the common interest.
And I'm not so naive as to think self -interest should either be diminished or that it's even a bad thing.
So now you're talking about the second thing.
Should I work on my own life and make my life better?
Or should I try to make other people's lives better?
Right? Yes, except I wouldn't want to make it binary.
I'm not suggesting that everyone within the sound of our voices, including ourselves, should give up all the things that we love to do, even if they are purely for self -interest, because that's an important part of human life.
And one could argue that without that sort of motivation and incentive, that people wouldn't do a lot of the things that do benefit a lot of other people.
So I don't mean to kill off those incentives.
It's more about balancing selfish pursuits and how one should think about that balance.
Do you know about the Schwartz values survey?
I feel I have heard those three words from your mouth.
So Shalom Schwartz, the project was, what are the core values that are universal across culture, across countries, even across history?
And Shalom came up with a list of 10.
There's a couple of them that he would argue are the self -transcendent values, benevolence, caring about your family, your friends, people, and universalism, which is caring about humanity, caring about equity and fairness in a more abstract sense.
And at the opposite pole, there are these self -enhancing values, and they are things like power or personal achievement or hedonism.
And then there were other values that are more about openness to change versus being conservative or traditional.
But let's just take that self -transcendent versus self -enhancing dimension, that dichotomy.
The reason why they're on two ends of the spectrum is that he finds that they're not very correlated, but it is possible.
Like I look at my own values, I had to rank them recently because I gave it as a homework assignment in my class, like rank your 10 Schwartz values.
And I do all the homework assignments that my students do.
And when I did this in a moment of honesty, first of all, I put achievement first.
I was like, oh, this is so embarrassing.
But honestly, look at my life.
I have to say it's revealed preference.
My second one was benevolence.
So one is self -enhancing, the other one is self -transcendent.
But like, if I teach really well, if I just kill it in my class, I feel like a winner.
And I also feel extraordinarily pro -social.
There's so many ways that we can do both.
I think about that when I'm trying to ask whether I'm spending my time on this planet well, you know, my chosen profession, which I'll be honest, I enjoy a great deal.
And then I think, well, do I try to justify it a little bit more by pretending it's more pro -social than it is?
For instance, on Freakonomics Radio, we did an episode years ago on
