The Pursuit of Unhappiness: George Loewenstein on Why We're Wired for Misery
“I think our genetic makeup makes us miserable. We evolved to be miserable.” — George Loewenstein
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yeah, yeah. We’ve all heard that one before. When Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he remixed Locke’s “life, liberty and estate,” replacing the idea of property with happiness. As we know from last week’s conversation with the historian Joshua Specht, America’s age-old love affair with real estate has been perpetually mortgaged. And our guest today, the behavioral economist George Loewenstein, who happens — probably not coincidentally — to be the great-grandson of Sigmund Freud, offers a similar warning about the ideal of happiness.
Happiness’ antonym is misery. In his new book The Opposite of Happiness, Loewenstein explains that it’s misery, and not happiness, which has simultaneously broken humans and built humankind. We evolved to be miserable, the behavioral economist argues, explaining that English has four times as many words for negative emotions as for positive ones. The depths we can sink to are incomparably deeper and more interesting than the heights we can reach, Freud’s great-grandson reassures us. Happiness is a Disneyfied mush while misery is infinitely variegated, he tells us, building a twelve-part taxonomy from envy and regret to loneliness and anxiety. The behavioral economist even invents a “Misery Survey” and cites an experiment he conducted with married couples which found that doubling their sexual frequency left them less happy.
So much for sex. Loewenstein spent a lifetime escaping Freud and has ended up desexualizing him for modern America. I’ve always found behavioral economics to be a particularly miserable subject (ideology dressed up as science). But maybe that’s the point. Life, liberty and the pursuit of misery. A Loewensteinian redraft of the Declaration, anyone?
Five Takeaways
• We Evolved to Be Miserable. Loewenstein’s starting point contradicts the entire happiness industry: misery is the human constant, and happiness the occasional exception. Not because society ruins us — he takes exception to Rousseau’s idea that we are born happy and civilized into unhappiness — but because our genetic makeup makes us so. Every negative emotion evolved to push us toward behavior that served our fitness; that is precisely why they are unavoidable. His evidence is asymmetry. English has, by his count, four times as many words for negative emotions as for positive ones. The depths of misery are incomparably deeper than the heights of joy. And happiness is “a big mush,” while unhappiness is infinitely variegated — twelve specific miseries in the book’s second half, each with its own facial expression, its own pattern of brain activity, and its own behavior. Novelists, he says, have always known this; they are better psychologists than the academics, and misery is simply more interesting.
• Envy Is Local. Andrew’s cheekiest question: does Loewenstein, part of what he calls the second shift of behavioral economics, envy Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky and Richard Thaler, the field’s Nobel-garlanded founders? He didn’t deny it. We don’t envy billionaires and trillionaires, he explains; we envy people close to us and just ahead, and those three are the textbook case. Then the move that makes the book humane rather than cynical: meta-emotions. You’re not supposed to envy your friends, so when you inevitably do, you feel guilty about feeling envious — misery about misery. Understanding your own negative emotions, he argues, works like understanding another person: you forgive what you understand. And no, this is not a book about selfishness — sympathy, guilt and shame are some of the most social emotions we have. Nor are these first-world problems: the struggling farmer cares about self-esteem, guilt and loneliness as much as anyone.
• The Freud Inheritance. Loewenstein spent much of his career trying to escape his great-grandfather — he wouldn’t even mention the connection for years — and now finds himself reinventing him: his research on pain, hunger and sex is, he concedes, a study of what Freud would have called the conflict between id and superego. The family history is its own novel. His mother, Sophie Freud, was the daughter of Freud’s eldest son; when the family fled the Nazis, the main branch went to London while she and her mother escaped by bicycling through France. Edward Bernays — Freud’s nephew and the father of American public relations — paid for her college education when she arrived in the United States penniless. She later wrote Living in the Shadow of the Freud Family, about feeling rejected by the clan. And the glass-half-empty temperament? From both parents, he says, but more from his father. Andrew’s framing: a lifetime escaping Freud, only to end up desexualizing him for modern America.
• The Missing Motive. On Bentham and quantification, Loewenstein is cautious — psychologists can put numbers on feelings, but moving from an inchoate internal state to a figure is genuinely hard. His real hero is Adam Smith, not the Smith of The Wealth of Nations but of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, his first book and the last he revised, and in Loewenstein’s view a psychology book of striking modernity. (Andrew notes the Smith of Susan Neiman’s evil book last week is the same one; Loewenstein recommends Dennis Rasmussen’s book on Smith and Hume, and Rasmussen was on last week too.) His most provocative claim is about self-esteem: probably the single main motivator of human behavior, and yet almost absent from economics — one book and a handful of papers. Money buys happiness only up to a point. And his own experiment, instructing married couples to double their sexual frequency, found they did — and reported less happiness and less closeness. He doesn’t quite believe his own result.
• The Happiness Industry. Where the psychology meets the economics. Institutions built on attention — above all the internet companies selling advertising — “don’t give a fig about your well-being,” he says, and are amplifying human misery; Meta keeps losing lawsuits because jurors, like everyone else, simply dislike the company. Happiness sells the illusion that the next car, the next pill, the next accomplishment will do it, and advertising plays on a wiring we already have. On therapy he is careful: his friends and family include therapists, the research says therapy works (cognitive behavioral therapy especially), though the cultural focus on mental health may make people more inwardly focused. What strikes him in his students is how casually they mention their therapists, and how anxiety and depression, two separate conditions in his generation, have fused into one. On Trump, his verdict is short: a deeply insecure man driven by feelings of inadequacy. And the sign-off: a Nietzschean moustache, and a Nietzschean book. Andrew’s verdict: life, liberty and the pursuit of misery — a Loewensteinian redraft of the Declaration.
About the Guest
George Loewenstein is the Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Economics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the founding figures of ...
00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. A couple of weeks ago, we did a show with a sociologist who asked why we're so miserable. I think it was assumed that, we shouldn't be miserable, that we should be happier than we are. Of course, we live in the age of anxiety and inequality and anger and all the other stuff that everyone seems to write books about these days. But my guest today, I think, might have a different take on misery. George Loewenstein is a very distinguished behavioral economist. In fact, in some ways, he invented the field. He teaches at Carnegie Mellon. He's written a number of books. And his latest book, which was out last week, has a wonderful title, although I'm not sure how happy he is with the title. Maybe he's not a very happy fellow. The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us. And if I'm right, George Loewenstein is arguing that misery might be our natural condition rather than happiness. He's joining us from, Pittsburgh, in his office in Carnegie Mellon. Before we went live, I joked with George that, he might be miserable because he's in Pittsburgh, but he says it's a wonderful town. George, welcome to the show.
00:01:48 George Loewenstein: Andrew, nice to be on the show. And, let me say, Pittsburgh is rated one of, like, the 10 cities you should visit while you're alive. Like, it gets very high ratings.
00:02:02 Andrew Keen: 10 best cities in Pennsylvania, George.
00:02:04 George Loewenstein: Is that fair?
00:02:06 Andrew Keen: I don't know. Let's leave Pittsburgh out of it for the moment. So is that fair? Are you arguing in the opposite of happiness that misery rather than happiness is our natural condition and we've been misinformed about that condition?
00:02:26 George Loewenstein: I don't know the degree to which we've been misinformed, but, like, the shelves of bookstores are full of books on happiness and how to achieve it and so on. And probably some of the advice is good if you can follow it. I've always had a hard time following it myself. But in any case, I argue that misery or unhappiness is much more of a constant in human life than happiness.
00:02:56 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I couldn't agree more on those books. I try to avoid people with happiness books on the show. I'm not a particularly happy person, I think, myself. When you think of these books in the twentieth, late twentieth and early twenty-first century, which suggests we should all be happy, can we compare and contrast that with classic nineteenth century novels by characters like Flaubert and Tolstoy that seems to suggest that our natural condition is unhappiness? In other words, do the novelist get it as opposed to the people now who teach in business school?
00:03:33 George Loewenstein: Well, I read a lot of those novels, and I love them, and I get inspiration from them. My book is packed with quotes from the very authors that you just mentioned. Maybe it wasn't coincidental that you mentioned them. But I think if you re if you I think novelists are the best psychologists. They're better than psych you know, the academic psychologists for sure. And, most excellent novels are packed with a whole lot of misery, and there's a good reason for that. I mean, misery is I think misery is more interesting.
00:04:16 Andrew Keen: I couldn't agree more. And when you speak of psychology and most psychologists, you don't necessarily speak in a disinterested way. You're from the Freud family, Sigmund Freud, the father of certainly, of psychoanalysis and in some ways of modern psychology, is your great-grandfather. What would I know you have met him or you didn't. He's a bit older than all of us. What would he make of your theories about happiness and unhappiness, [unclear]?
00:04:48 George Loewenstein: Well, it's funny. I, spent a lot of my career trying to escape Freud, and, I would never I actually wouldn't even, mention the connection for a very long time. But it's kind of strange because as I as my career has, progressed, I find that I'm kind of reinventing some of, some of his ideas, more and more. A lot of my research is about kind of what I think Freud would have called conflicts between, like, id and superego. And, yeah, I'm very interested in topics like pain, hunger, sex, things like that.
00:05:38 Andrew Keen: Well, it's not surprising you're his great-grandson. But coming back to the issue of happiness, did Freud write about happiness or misery?
00:05:47 George Loewenstein: I'm not an expert on Freud, but I know that at the end of the at the end of his life and I shouldn't really be talking about Freud because I truly am not an expert, but I know that at the end of the light late in his career, he came upon this idea of thanatos or the kind of death instinct. And maybe that's very closely related to misery. But, you know, a lot of what he talked about, like, different, neuroses are kind those are sources of misery. And the defense mechanisms are people's attempts to defend themselves from misery.
00:06:29 Andrew Keen: One of the few ways I become happy, George, is by blaming French people, especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Can we go back to him for a modern theory of happiness? He seemed to argue in his work that it was civilization that made us unhappy. He argued at one of the beginnings of his books that we were born free, which is, I think, his way of saying we were born happy, and civilization ruins us. I guess there is a bridge between Rousseau and Freud in that sense.
00:06:59 George Loewenstein: Yeah. I mean, I would take exception to the idea that we were born happy. I mean, I think our genetic makeup is, makes us miserable. We evolved to be miserable. There are kind of four times as many words in the English language for negative emotions than for positive emotions for good reason. And the depths of misery we can sink to, are so are just incomparably deeper than the heights of happiness or joy that we can experience. So and this isn't our genetic makeup. I don't think that I don't think it's really the fault of society that we are so miserable. Although, I do think there's a lot of features of modern society that certainly do contribute to our misery. I mean, things like social media, for example.
00:08:01 Andrew Keen: Very few people seem to like social media.
00:08:05 George Loewenstein: That's right.
00:08:05 Andrew Keen: George—
00:08:06 George Loewenstein: I think the yeah. Yeah. Meta has been losing a lot of lawsuits because I think people, including jurors, really just hate that company.
00:08:19 Andrew Keen: I know you write in the book about something called a misery survey. It strikes me that there's maybe well, there's many kinds of misery, but maybe one way of distinguishing misery is people who are homeless or hungry or imprisoned. Well, there's physical reason to be unhappy. And then the rest of us who just seem to be miserable, whatever we do, I mean, now we you only have to go online to, read stories about how young people and, reporting highest levels of misery, which I found a piece in the Dallas Express for this show. They're anxious. They're lonely. They have too much. They don't have enough. So can we distinguish physical from mental misery?
00:09:12 George Loewenstein: Oh, absolutely. So my book is completely devoted to kind of what I would call psychic misery that's happening kind of in our head. It's not a result of poverty, sleeplessness, malnutrition, or being incarcerated, anything like that. It these are miseries that, happen purely in our head. I guess you could possibly, you could refer to them as kind of first world problems. But, there are plenty of those to write about.
00:09:46 Andrew Keen: So is your book in a way a response to what seems to be an epidemic of misery? Are you telling people that it's okay to be miserable? In fact, it's probably better to be miserable than happy?
00:10:01 George Loewenstein: Oh, absolute I'm not I'm absolutely not telling people that it's okay to be miserable. Like, I mean, misery or negative emotions exist. They evolve to get us to behave in certain ways that improve our evolutionary fitness, and that's exactly what we should be doing. We should be trying to avoid misery. But what my the point in the book is that, for that reason, misery is really unavoidable because we evolved all of these different, negative emotional states for a good reason. On the other hand, one of the concepts I talk about in the book is, what I call meta-emotions, and these are emotions about emotions. And so, like, I think the best example of a meta-emotion is you, you're not supposed to envy your friends. You're supposed to kind of rejoice in their try personal triumphs. But, of course but, inevitably, sometimes, we are going to envy our friends. But because we're not supposed to do that, we end up feeling, guilty about feeling envy. And that's a meta-emotion. And I do think that it's my book is absolutely not a self-help book. It's militantly not self-help. But I do think that kind of understanding misery better, understanding these negative emotions can, in the same way that kind of when you understand another person, you tend to, forgive their misbehavior. When you understand your own emotions, you tend to be more forgiving towards yourself.
00:11:48 Andrew Keen: But do we have to come to terms then with a fundamental selfishness or self absorption? You said that we tend to be envious of others. You're one of the fathers of behavioral economics, but you're not one of the most famous. Of course, Daniel Kahneman is particularly well known, won the Nobel Prize. His book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, is still a bestseller even though it's been out for many years. I'm not suggesting that you're envious of Kahneman or Tversky, but in your theory, would that be acceptable?
00:12:24 George Loewenstein: Well, my theory isn't really about what's acceptable or unacceptable.
00:12:28 Andrew Keen: Or re or real.
00:12:29 George Loewenstein: In my theory, I would say it's pretty inevitable. And we tend to be envious toward peep we, like, we don't envy the billionaires and the trillionaire. We tend to envy people who are pretty close to us. And so Kahneman, Tversky, Richard Thaler, these are the main founders of the field of behavioral economics. And I was kind of in this second shift. And so do I envy them? I don't know. But they are a prototype of the type of person who one would envy because they are in the same field as me. They, there's all sorts of and they're just a little bit more well, quite a bit more successful than me. But, they're kind of the kind of paradigm, for me of the kind of person who I should, expect to envy. I wanted to say, you mentioned earlier that, should we accept that we are selfish? That's certainly not a point of my book. A lot of the negative emotions that we experience are actually pretty altruistic, like, sympathy, for example, or guilt and shame. They're not aren't exactly altruistic, but we feel bad when we do think something that violates societal standards or our own standards. So it's not at all a book that either says that people are selfish or advocates for people being selfish.
00:14:15 Andrew Keen: Some of the things that you're describing sound to me, as my wife would put it, like first world problems. So should we care that a successful, academic like yourself who teaches at one of the top universities in the world might be a little envious of a Daniel Kahneman figure who won the Nobel Prize, but there's only one Daniel Kahneman. Should why should we care about any of this? Well, I think,
00:14:43 George Loewenstein: you know, every individual is important, and everyone has their own sources of misery. And we should certainly care about I mean, we naturally do care about our own well-being, but we should care about other people's well-being too. And a whole lot of misery that people experience is psychic. Even people in very difficult economic circumstances experiencing a lot of the emotions that I talk about in my book. I think it's kind of a stereotype to think that the, I don't know, the marginal farmer, the person who, is living at the edge is mostly miserable for kind of material reasons. In fact, they probably, care a lot about their self-esteem. They probably experience a lot of guilt and shame and envy and loneliness. So I think the emotions that I'm talking about are really kind of universal. And the when you mentioned the kind of the mental health crisis that is unfolding right now, and that's really a crisis of psychic misery.
00:16:11 Andrew Keen: You're talking to me from Pittsburgh. I'm on the West Coast in California, just north of Los Angeles, where a certain Walt Disney began his rise. Is there something unique about America when it comes to happiness when especially non-Americans think of happiness in America, they think of Disney and the manufacturing of happiness, or are all countries like America, especially these days, obsessed with this manufacturing of happiness and suggesting that we should be happier than maybe we are?
00:16:53 George Loewenstein: I mean, my guess is that it's a universal. And before we started alienating everybody in every other country in the world, a lot of people were streaming to our to Disney and the, United Artists, whatever. Like, I've never been to any of them, but, they seem to have an attract a kind a pretty universal attraction for people. I mean, personally, they have personally, Disney has no appeal to me, but to each his own.
00:17:31 Andrew Keen: It's a personal book, George, The Opposite of Happiness. You include quite a lot of material about your own life. Have you had a happy life?
00:17:43 George Loewenstein: I think I've had a very privileged, fortunate life, but I'm definitely a glass half empty person. So, I mean, I think my own personal central dilemma is I've got a I still have a few years to try to do this, but I've got to figure out how to turn all of this, privilege and good fortune into, more happiness. But, no, I'm not a particularly happy person. I think you mentioned that you aren't either.
00:18:20 Andrew Keen: No. But I think, actually, you've cheered me up. I think I'm happier than you, which may not be hard. How does unhappiness or misery manifest itself? Does it do so in terms of regret, silence, separation from others? How would you define misery?
00:18:41 George Loewenstein: Well, I think, before I was talking about the contrast between happiness and unhappiness, I mentioned that there are much greater depths of happiness than heights of happiness. And another interesting asymmetry, I think, between happiness and unhappiness is, like, happiness is a big mush. It's kind of a blah. And but unhappiness is kind of infinitely variegated. There's all sorts of different types of miseries in the second half of my book. I talk about 12 specific miseries, and they include things like regret, jealousy, envy, loneliness, anxiety, and so on. There's and each of these, specific miseries, they manifest in a different way. And people tend to be subject to specific miseries. So I conducted this misery survey with over 500 people where I asked them kind of what misery what particular misery are you especially prone to. And then they told me a story about that, and they gave me insights into it. But, I would guess that none of the people who answered my survey were subject to all of the different forms of misery. And I would guess also that none of, my observation from looking at the data is it doesn't seem like anybody who kind of volunteered to be part of my survey wasn't was subject to none of the different types of miseries. But the these miseries, they manifest very differently. They result in different facial expressions. And they result in different patterns of brain activity. And they lead to different patterns of behavior. And that's all for good reason because each of these different negative emotions evolved to, get us to do something or other that was good for our evolutionary fitness.
00:21:03 Andrew Keen: In terms of the misery you write about, do you think throughout human history, we've fashioned our institutions to somehow reflect it? It occurs to me. I mean, you did your misery survey where you got confessions from people, but the confessional, of course, was a central part of, the Roman Catholic faith for many hundreds of years, still is. Your great-grandfather invented the couch or at least the psychoanalytical couch. Therapy now is an increasingly central part of American culture. So is that how misery works, that it's part of a confessional, either a religious or secular one, and that's just the nature of human history?
00:21:55 George Loewenstein: Oh, it's funny. This goes back to your question about Rousseau and society's responsibility. I mean, my own view is that, religions are certainly as much a source of misery as they are a source of solace. So Well, you would say that
00:22:13 Andrew Keen: because your great-grandfather did as well.
00:22:17 George Loewenstein: Yeah. That's right. I mean, Catholicism, it's great that you have confessions, but, Catholics are also burdened with tend to be burdened with a lot of, guilt and shame. When it comes to kind of when it comes to institutions, I think, increasingly, our institutions are making us, miserable. And I'm talking, like, in the Internet age, you have all these, providers of, like, Internet services, and all they care about is grabbing your attention so they can show you ads and make money from, the ad from advertisements. And these institutions, like, don't give a fig about your well-being. And they, and I think that's a I think there's a lot of evolving institutions that, for economic reasons, because they're competing with one another over profits, which means attention, but they have absolutely no incentive to try to improve human happiness that these institutions, and particularly those connected with the Internet, are kind of really kind of exacerbating or amplifying, human misery. And probably that's a lot behind, the mental health crisis that you brought up earlier.
00:23:52 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I agree with you that advertising is so important also in terms of our misery. It certainly creates envy and a discomfort of one kind or another. Ironically enough, your great-grandfather was Sigmund Freud. Freud's—
00:24:10 George Loewenstein: You're not gonna give up on that, are you?
00:24:12 Andrew Keen: I'm not gonna give up on that because your family is so rich in anecdotal narrative. Freud's nephew was Edward Bernays, who, came to America, Austrian-American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, in some ways, invented advertising. So And he paid we can blame your family on both sides.
00:24:35 George Loewenstein: He paid for my mother. My mother was a refugee when she first arrived, penniless, and he paid for her college education.
00:24:46 Andrew Keen: Your mother was, of course, Sophie Freud.
00:24:49 George Loewenstein: That's right. And she actually wrote a book. She was kind of, she and her mother, her mother had been married to Freud's oldest son. They split up during the war. And they the main body of the Freud family, including Sigmund, Anna, and, actually, my mother's father and her brother, they all went to London, and her she and her mother went to ended up in the States, but via France. Then, anyway, they escaped the Nazis by bicycling through France. This is all to say she wrote a book titled, Living in the Shadow of the Freud Family, which is very much about her feeling of having been rejected by the Freud clan.
00:25:39 Andrew Keen: Was your mother unhappy then as well? Do you think she passed on her unhappiness to you?
00:25:48 George Loewenstein: I was I mean, I think I got it from both parents, but, even more from my father. My I mean, my father is seriously depressive.
00:25:57 Andrew Keen: What about this increasingly therapeutic culture, George? Do you have any kids of your own?
00:26:03 George Loewenstein: Two.
00:26:05 Andrew Keen: I have a couple of kids, and it strikes me. I'm not, I'm not gonna talk about specifically my own kids, but their generation seems to be increasingly treating therapy as if not just it's a normal, but it's essential.
00:26:20 George Loewenstein: Yeah. That's right.
00:26:21 Andrew Keen: Is this a consequence or a cause of your theory of misery?
00:26:29 George Loewenstein: Well, I mean, I think it has to do with modern times. But, of course, as a professor, I see a lot of, young people. And it is striking to me how they just, in my generation, when the people when people were in, psychotherapy, they didn't talk about it. But now they just very casually talk about my therapist. And so many of them seem to have their own personal therapist. And they also kind of, at the drop of the hat, talk about, anxiety and depression typically in one breath. Like, again, in my generation, anxiety and depression were two separate things. For young people today, it seems to be kind of this combination combined form of misery. And so many of them are also on kind of on antidepressants or ADHD drugs. So, yeah, it's just amazing how things have changed.
00:27:35 Andrew Keen: And do you think therapists and our therapeutic culture, does it normalize unhappiness, or does it compound the problem that you address in the book that we're supposed to feel as if we should be happy? And that if we're not, there's something wrong with us. Therefore, we have to go to the therapist to talk about why we're not happy.
00:27:58 George Loewenstein: Well, I have a lot of, therapists who are friends and family members, and I definitely want don't want to bad mouth, therapy. I get into a lot of trouble. And, I mean, all the research suggests that therapy is quite effective in, alleviating depression and other types of psychological conditions, particularly some variants of therapy, like cognitive behavioral therapy seems to be especially effective. So, I mean, I think that, it is possible that the focus on mental health might possibly exacerbate mental health by making people more inwardly focused. But on the other hand, I think that, given the mental health crisis, we have, it's good that when people are able to find professionals to help them mitigate their misery.
00:29:10 Andrew Keen: As I said, you're one of the founding figures in the science of behavioral economics, which push back, I think, on traditional economics in terms of quantifying our condition. The father of all that in some ways is, the great British philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, who believed that we could quantify pleasure or pain, and utilitarianism became one of the most powerful political movements, not just of the nineteenth century, but of the contemporary age. Can we quantify misery and happiness in the same way that Bentham believed we could quantify pleasure and pain? Are they the same things?
00:30:01 George Loewenstein: I mean, I think psychologists have tools for quantifying subjective feelings, but it is it's very difficult to quantify sensations because we're kind of moving from this somewhat inchoate internal, state into kind of put trying to put a number on it, and that's very difficult. I mean, let me say, I'm sure I talk about Bentham in the book, but I talk a whole lot about, Adam Smith because Adam Smith wrote he, wrote The Wealth of Nations, but he also, he the first book he wrote and the last book he revised is a psychology book, actually. It's The Theory of Moral Sentiments. And I draw very heavily on The Theory of Moral Sentiments in my book. I mean, Smith is so amazingly insightful. I mean, Bentham is as well. I mean, Bentham enumerated the different sources of happiness and the different sources of pain in his most important book, where he kind of laid out the utilitarian agenda. And, I think psychologists, but especially economists, have yet to kind of incorporate a lot of the different motivations that Bentham talked about that are, in fact, incredibly important drivers of human behavior. Like, one of the ingredients of utility that Bentham talked about was the pleasure of a good name, basically self-esteem or the esteem of other people. Psychologists have written a lot about that. But to me, self-esteem is probably the single main motivator of human behavior, and yet there's almost nothing in economics about self-esteem. There's probably, like, one book and three or four papers that even touch on self-esteem. And to me, that's very striking that, like, the single most important motive, in my view, driving human behavior isn't even part of economics.
00:32:24 Andrew Keen: Maybe we'll come to that later because maybe an extreme form of self-esteem is narcissism, which doesn't get very good press these days. You mentioned, Adam Smith. He actually came up in a conversation we had earlier this week with the moral philosopher Susan Neiman, who has a new book out on evil. She focuses her philosophical work on evil and stresses the fact that Smith is not the Viennese or the Hayekian Friedmanite economist that most people imagine. He actually recognized we're more complex. Is that the Smith, George, that you know rather than the imagined Smith of Reagan or Thatcher?
00:33:10 George Loewenstein: Well— yeah. People intellectuals have had a very difficult time putting together the two sides of Adam Smith. There's in fact, there's a name for it, the Adam Smith problem that and there are books and pay lots of papers of trying to reconcile what he wrote in The Wealth of Nations, which is very much an economic treatise, and what he wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. But in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he presents a perspective on human behavior that's just strikingly modern. Basically, he and his compatriot, David Hume, and they were kind of best friends They—
00:33:54 Andrew Keen: And, so
00:33:59 George Loewenstein: Yeah. There's an amazing, book titled The Professor and the Infidel [ed.: The Infidel and the Professor] by a guy named, Rasmussen about the relationship between the two of them. And you learn a lot about, their thought their writings and their thought, but, kind of in a enjoyable way because it's through the lens of their relationship. And as
00:34:22 Andrew Keen: it happens, I'm not name dropping all the time, George, but it's a small world. The Rasmussen that you mentioned, Dennis Rasmussen, was on the show last week. He has a new book out about Frederick Douglass. So everything always comes back to Adam Smith and David Hume.
00:34:38 George Loewenstein: And you have my coauthor, Nick Chater, on.
00:34:41 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Well, that's, your previous book about It's On You: How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists Have Convinced Us That We're to Blame for Society's Deepest Problems. Your coauthor Nick Chater was on the show last year. So in a way, you're arguing in that book, which I guess in a way is the first volume in this latest treatise on unhappiness, that, both corporations and behavioral scientists have something to blame for making us miserable.
00:35:14 George Loewenstein: Yeah. That's right. I mean, I already alluded to that, before that the corporations, all that what they care about is profit. They don't seem to care that the, world is getting hotter. They don't seem to care that, AI is likely to eliminate jobs and possibly end human civilization and so on. They what they care about is and the food industry doesn't care about the fact that they're making everybody unhealthy and obese and so on. And the social media industry doesn't care, that they are making, especially young people, especially young females, extremely miserable. And, so, yeah, this kind of connects the two books, together. Right. And you wrote an interesting piece,
00:36:13 Andrew Keen: defending all of us, suggesting that climate change and obesity aren't our fault. It's interesting you mentioned corporations. I found a piece on Wired about how AI can help us all lead happier lives, which as it happens, was sponsored by Hitachi, the Japanese, electronics company. So maybe it's in their interest for AI to make us happier. But in all seriousness
00:36:44 George Loewenstein: Or at least for us to believe that. Yes.
00:36:47 Andrew Keen: Right. But happiness is a commodity, and many companies sell it. I mean, you've only got to switch on advertisements on your television to see how cars can make us happy, or drugs can make us happy, or alcohol can make us happy. So happiness is a very you know, coming back maybe to Smith, and certainly to Bentham, happiness is a valuable commodity, isn't it?
00:37:16 George Loewenstein: Absolutely. Happiness, sells the illusion that if you get a fancy car, you're going to be happy, the illusion that if you take drugs, certain pharmaceuticals, you're going to be happy, and the illusion that if you read happiness books, you're going to be happy. The happiness regard to your therapist. That can make you less miserable. Happiness is a big seller. And particularly the we're always being kind of I think we naturally tend to believe, like, the next car, the next accomplishment, the next girlfriend, the next $100 or $100,000 or whatever. We are wired to believe because, that these attaining what we want will make us happy, but the advertising industry just kind of plays into that.
00:38:18 Andrew Keen: So we can blame your distant relative, Edward Bernays. But in all seriousness, I mean, you're a behavioral economist that you always find articles about, well, does money really make us happier? Or does being married really make us happier? What does the research tell us? How can we I mean, I take your point on Bentham and not fully quantifying happiness. But what does the research tell us in terms of how to make ourselves less or more happy? Is it connected with money?
00:38:54 George Loewenstein: Well, I mean, there's a huge amount of research looking at the relationship between money and happiness, and different researchers reach different conclusions. I would say if there's any kind of consensus, it's that money contributes to happiness up to a certain point. Probably, it reduces like, when you're really anxious about your finances, that's going to make you that will make you miserable. But beyond a certain point, I think most people agree that money doesn't bring you, very much more happiness. What does bring us happiness? Well, I mean, everyone, believes correctly, relationships are really important. There was a famous study, by, I think it was by, Clark and Oswald [ed.: Blanchflower and Oswald, 2004], and it looked at the relationship between how much sex people have and how happy they are. And it concluded that, having sex one more time per week was the equivalent of an extra £50,000 per year. And that was done a number of years ago when £50,000 meant a lot more than it does now. I was actually, at the end of their paper, they say it we don't know if it's causal. It's per it's possible that it's the happiness that's driving the sex, or it's possible that it's the third variable that's both making people happy and have more sex. I actually ran an experiment where I took married couples, and I randomly assigned half of them to double their sexual frequency. And the results really shocked and surprised and disappointed me. I was absolutely convinced that most married couples don't have enough sex and that they would get happier if they had more sex. But, alas, what I found was the couples who were instructed to have more sex, they did have more sex, but they reported, less happiness and even less relationship closeness. Although, I don't really at some level, I don't really kind of believe the results of my own study. I think what it really showed is if a researcher tells you to double your frequency of sex, that won't make you happy. But I think if couples found a natural way to do it would
00:41:36 Andrew Keen: Any difference between men and women on that front, or they're both as miserable as each other when you encourage them to have more sex?
00:41:42 George Loewenstein: Not in my study. I didn't I looked for that, but I didn't observe any differences. Yeah. And that I thought maybe that there would be a difference.
00:41:55 Andrew Keen: I'll have to talk to my wife about that one, George. You mentioned that there isn't enough work, quantifiable scientific, social scientific work on self-esteem. I don't always like to bring him up, but, of course, Donald Trump, the current American president, seems to be very full of himself. He's always boasting about himself. What's the difference between self-esteem and narcissism? Many psychologists of one kind or another, including, I think, his niece believe that he is a card carrying narcissist. But I think What does Trump tell us about happiness and misery? I've always suspected I'm not a therapist or psychiatrist myself, but I always suspected that he's not quite as cheerful and pleased with himself as he claims.
00:42:44 George Loewenstein: Oh, I mean, he's a deeply insecure person, and so much of what he does is driven by feelings of inadequacy, like needing to put his name up all over the place. I mean, yeah. I mean, he's a pathetic specimen of the human race.
00:43:07 Andrew Keen: Well, I don't wanna end with Trump. Let's end on someone a little bit more profound, Nietzsche. I'm not sure how much you write about him in the book, but is he, so to speak, the father of, if not the science, certainly the theory of both misery and happiness in the modern age?
00:43:29 George Loewenstein: I can't remember if I, if I, draw on him. And I'm I don't know a lot about, philosophy. So, but his name certainly, comes up.
00:43:42 Andrew Keen: Well, he was very contemptuous of the idea or the promise of modern happiness. I don't think he'd be the kind of fellow perhaps like you have similar moustaches. I don't think he'd be the kind of guy who would go to Disneyland or be on social media. I don't think he'd have a Facebook or TikTok account.
00:44:03 George Loewenstein: Yeah. I'd like to think that he would enjoy reading my book. So could we
00:44:07 Andrew Keen: make some general final generalization, George, that, if you're really happy, you don't have a mustache?
00:44:17 George Loewenstein: If you're really happy, you don't have a mustache. It's possible. Yeah. I think, the mustache, for a while, it was the only thing that remained dark, but now it's turning white too.
00:44:31 Andrew Keen: And for people who are just listening rather than watching, George Loewenstein has a delightful mustache, almost as delightful as Nietzsche's. Maybe we could call George your mustache a Nietzschean mustache.
00:44:46 George Loewenstein: Anyway, you can certainly to aspire to.
00:44:49 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Well, whether or not you have a Nietzschean mustache, you certainly have a Nietzschean new book, The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us. I'm not entirely sure whether you're celebrating that or not. Maybe a mix of the both. But George Loewenstein, real honor. Really fun, interesting conversation. Thank you so much, and congratulations on the new book.
00:45:12 George Loewenstein: Thank you. Great talking to you, Andrew.