Nov. 25, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:31
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| Hello everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| I have Chris on the line with me. | |
| Chris Boyce, I got the name right, did I? Yes. | |
| Excellent, okay. And is it Dr. | |
| Boyce, or are you on the ABD verge of dissertation land? | |
| I'm not quite Dr. | |
| yet. Hopefully by December that will all be confirmed. | |
| Okay, so we'll call you Dr. | |
| but with a K, just so everybody understands that it's not quite. | |
| Pre-Dr., but thank you. | |
| And thank you so much for taking the time to have a chat with us. | |
| As people who've listened to my show over the last couple of years know that I'm a very, very strong proponent of psychological therapy, because I believe that philosophy has as its core self-knowledge as a value and as a virtue, and I think self-knowledge is very hard to achieve without external input whether that comes from a family and friends or in the absence of that for a lot of people comes from a trained professional I just think it's absolutely essential we can't achieve anything great in this life without a coach and I think to achieve anything great or even good in terms of self-knowledge requires a competent professional in many situations and so of course I'm always eager to find information which supports The theory that the pursuit of self-knowledge leads to greater happiness than the pursuit of material gain or professional success or looks or whatever. | |
| And so I was very interested when I saw this information from you, Chris, about a dataset that you'd worked with and some conclusions that were really quite remarkable. | |
| And I was wondering if you could tell us a little about that. | |
| Yeah, sure. Great pleasure in telling you a little bit more about it. | |
| So basically what we do is we're basically trying to highlight how ineffective money is increasing well-being. | |
| So we're not necessarily saying psychological therapy is really great, which it is, but we're just trying to highlight that money is relatively ineffective. | |
| So we chose psychological therapy because we've got kind of good data on that that we can kind of compare to the figures that we've got for money's effect on well-being. | |
| And your approach was, I think, quite interesting that you had thousands of data sets that, I guess, had a wide variety of financial rewards and incentives that occurred just semi-randomly within that population. | |
| And you compared the self-reporting of happiness of these people over time. | |
| And some of those people, was it right, had gone through about an average of four months of therapy, about 800 British pounds worth of therapy, and some of them had achieved significant financial increases. | |
| And if I understood the numbers right, You found that the balancing point between these two advantages of personal therapy versus monetary gain was that you had to receive a raise Of £25,000 a year in order to achieve the same level of happiness as a four-month or £800 course of therapy. | |
| Is that right? Yeah, that's right. | |
| That's what we basically calculated the effects of therapy to be equivalent in terms of income. | |
| But just to go back one step actually is to kind of get things clear is that we didn't actually conduct any analysis in and of itself. | |
| But what we're actually doing is actually kind of bringing together kind of very disjoint pieces of research. | |
| So for example, economists are quite into kind of evaluating the effects of income on well-being. | |
| So what we do is we took from their studies and we're basically trying to join that up with various psychological research, various research within law and also medical research. | |
| We're kind of bringing that all together. | |
| And my most specific I'm specifically quite unique because of my kind of very cross-disciplinary approach, which enables me to kind of bring all this research together. | |
| So we haven't actually conducted new analysis, but we're just bringing it, drawing it all together. | |
| Because, I mean, you're working, if I remember rightly, in the fields of economics and psychology, which I think is just a fascinating cross-disciplinary approach. | |
| Yeah, definitely. There's so much going on in that area at the moment. | |
| It's amazing. Because, I mean, economics needs psychology, so, so much psychology and economics. | |
| And I think it's often put to one side, which is a shame because it's kind of essential if you ask me. | |
| Well, I certainly would agree with that. | |
| And so the data sets that you had, there were people who had taken therapy and had not taken therapy. | |
| And you sort of tried to find the commonalities between financial gains in terms of self-reported happiness and psychological gains in terms of happiness from therapy. | |
| Is that right? | |
| So what we did is we looked across some medical research. | |
| We kind of looked at the change in well-being that generally would take place with a course of psychological therapy. | |
| And then what we did is we compared that with another study that looked at various lottery wins, how much effect that had on well-being. | |
| And we basically conducted a kind of cost comparison across those two studies. | |
| We found that you could raise well-being Psychological therapy by quite a significant amount and to achieve that equivalent amount using money alone would be in excess of £25,000, which is quite a large sum. | |
| 20% or 50% or even 100% more, but 32 times the amount of money that you would need to gain an equivalent amount from an investment in therapy. | |
| I mean, if you were to put that out as a sort of business prospectus, if you were buying happiness, which is to some degree a commodity, if you were buying happiness, nobody would ever look for a lottery or any kind of financial gain that was pure money because you would get 32 times the effectiveness from investing in therapy. | |
| The strange thing is I think if you put that proposition to someone, how about 25,000 power pay rise or a course of psychological therapy? | |
| I mean, most people would choose the 25,000 pay rise because I think money's got such a high value in society and people genuinely do feel that it's going to raise their well-being and their happiness by such an extent. | |
| And they often undervalue other ways in which they might think about raising their well-being. | |
| Right, and just for the listeners who wanted to hang out, certainly before the end, Chris and I will be breaking into a rousing rendition of Can't Buy Me Love, which we've been practicing all day. | |
| Or another way of putting it is to say that the disincentive of therapy is so high... | |
| That you have to pay somebody 32 times the amount of money to not go to therapy because I guess people have this perception that it's, you know, a grueling, horrible process where you lie in a fetal position sucking your thumb and weeping about your mother or something. | |
| So they view the disincentive of therapy so high that they'd rather have, in a sense, much less money relative to the happiness that they buy. | |
| Which again, I think has to do with people not really understanding the process of therapy, but that's perhaps a conversation for another time. | |
| Yeah, I do think that is the case, but I think there's more to it. | |
| I think that, firstly, there is a kind of stigma attached to going to therapy and people are like, well, no, I'm not mentally ill, I'm okay, I can't get any benefit from this. | |
| And then there's also the fact that people find it very difficult to quantify their mental health in the same way that you can with money. | |
| So I think people don't often think how much that could really benefit their lives because it's not quantifiable in the same way. | |
| I think that's true, and I went to therapy for a number of years and found it to be just the most amazing and positive thing. | |
| And one of the things that I found from therapy, which is probably quite different from money, is having lots of money can make you very popular with those around you, whereas having lots of self-knowledge and insight can make you a bit troublesome to those around you sometimes, and I think that probably has something to do with it as well. | |
| Yes, I might agree with that, making you troublesome. | |
| In that good Socratic way, I hope, but sometimes it can be annoying for people. | |
| I was also really fascinated when you were quoted in an article where you were saying that over the last 50 years developed countries, of course, have seen enormous increases in material wealth, but not corresponding increases in happiness, which certainly would conform with the thesis that you have put forward. | |
| And you said also mental health on the other hand appears to be deteriorating worldwide and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that because I found that a very sort of teasing thing that was on the side but I think very very important. | |
| I mean there's kind of two parts to the research that we're conducting. | |
| So firstly this is a kind of cross comparison and showing that you know psychological therapy would be the equivalent of 25,000 pay rise but then we kind of extend that and say okay from the individual's perspective that's really important but what about socially? | |
| Basically, we draw on two bits of other evidence. | |
| So this is why it's so very cross-disciplinary. | |
| It's great. So we draw on two bits of evidence. | |
| And one is a fairly striking finding that over the last, say, 50 years, we've had huge amounts of economic growth, yet happiness levels have remained flat. | |
| So then when you turn to the kind of mental health, now you actually find that that seems to be deteriorating. | |
| So I think in 1999, unipolar depression was estimated to be the fifth most burdensome disease worldwide. | |
| And the estimate is that by 2020, that's expected to be the second most. | |
| So basically, the argument there is that, well, we've got mental health deteriorating, and we've got economic growth, which doesn't really seem to be providing the kind of well-being effects that we'd like. | |
| So would it make more sense to channel resources It's providing better mental health care than being so kind of so focused on the pursuit of economic gains Right yeah because I mean obviously I think even an economist would say that the purpose of life is not to accumulate material goods but to satisfy one's needs and of course the greatest need at least in the Aristotelian sense the greatest need that we always want is happiness because it's the one thing that we pursue not for the sake of Of something else. | |
| And that's something that is really skewed in our society in a pretty tragic way. | |
| And it's really sad to think that if you look sort of back 50 years, we're talking still about sort of the post Second World War reconstruction, that with all this wealth and peace, relative peace, We're still not happier than people who were rebuilding the shattered remnants of Western civilization after the Second World War. | |
| You could almost say that that's a decline that's not been flat, but after the tragedies of the first half of the 20th century, the First World War, the Depression, the Second World War, we're only still as happy as those people who were sort of crawling out of that wreckage that seems almost like a fallback rather than a flat. | |
| But, of course, that's impossible to quantify, I would say, mathematically. | |
| Yeah, I mean, that's one way of looking at things. | |
| I mean, I think there's... | |
| Economic growth is important for well-being up to a point. | |
| And when it comes to getting you kind of basic necessities and the things you need, of course that's going to increase your well-being. | |
| And there is this link with increase to your gross domestic product and happiness or just general well-being, which I don't think is there anymore. | |
| It's not, the link isn't there anymore, basically. | |
| Whereas in the past, you know, beyond 50 years ago, there probably was that link. | |
| And economists kind of think, you know, more goods, more money, I can buy more goods, greater utility. | |
| But that link isn't really seem to be that true. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I think it's the law of diminishing returns when it comes to material wealth, that obviously food and shelter, it's really tough to be happy without those. | |
| But, you know, upgrading your iPod probably isn't going to double your happiness in the way that getting food and shelter is. | |
| I think there is that law of diminishing returns, which people sort of don't see. | |
| They're chasing this thing, thinking that the next thing will make them that much happier. | |
| Some of the earlier things which we've achieved, I guess, as a culture, did make us a lot happier. | |
| And so we think that if we just keep redoubling our efforts that way, then we will continue to gain happiness. | |
| But there definitely is a law of diminishing returns, I think. | |
| Definitely. And people do have a tendency to kind of obituate or basically adapt to their new surroundings so it doesn't have the same kind of positive well-being effect. | |
| And that's why I think some people do overvalue the effect that money can have on their well-being. | |
| It's because, I mean, we've had... | |
| A lot of us have excess money and we can spend that and we can get a lot of temporary positive benefits, but that's not really sustainable. | |
| If it's a new piece of clothing or something, within a couple of weeks, that new piece of clothing is no longer new. | |
| It's not making any difference to your life, just like the new iPod or anything like that. | |
| There's also been doing quite a lot of research on the fact that people actually spend a lot of time comparing to other people. | |
| It's more kind of comparison to your neighbors. | |
| So if your neighbor gets a better car, you kind of feel like you need a better car. | |
| But once you get the better car, no one's really kind of moved anywhere. | |
| But you've both got better cars. | |
| But it's not better than your neighbors, so you're not really kind of getting any positive effects from that. | |
| Right. It's like everyone's getting taller, so nobody's getting taller. | |
| Yeah, it's the old classic. | |
| It's better if we all sat down when we were in a stadium, but people tend to stand up. | |
| And if everyone's standing up, it makes sense to stand up yourself. | |
| So you're kind of all wasting a little bit of effort just to get the same view you could have sitting there. | |
| And I think one of the great benefits of self-actualization is that when we become as much as we can who we genuinely are, we don't sort of bow to... | |
| To cliche or culture or pressure that is false or outside of ourselves, we do lose the desire to compare ourselves with others because we have become who we are and therefore comparisons become much less relevant or much less important. | |
| It's sort of that false self thing where we have to have that shiny exterior that we end up comparing. | |
| But I know we're getting a long way from your thesis. | |
| I just wanted to... Yeah, well, I mean, it's all very interesting, very interesting stuff. | |
| I mean, the idea of comparison. | |
| I mean, we can't help but compare in a natural day-to-day life, but I think To a certain extent, you have to come away from that and be aware that you do compare, but not let that kind of drag you down so much and make you work much more than you probably want to, I think, to keep up with everyone else. | |
| Right. Now, I didn't see any of this in the article, though I may have missed it, and I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about this. | |
| My gut sense would be, and of course we all know how scientific that is, right, but my gut sense would be to say that At least in my experiences, I mean, I was a software entrepreneur in the boom-bust cycle, and I certainly had my roller coaster when it came to wealth. | |
| I found that the benefits that came out of therapy were permanent, and in fact, I would say sort of ever-increasing in terms of happiness, whereas the benefits that came from taking baths in gold coins Did tend to diminish over time and I don't know, I didn't see that reference in your article. | |
| Did you see any data that way or is that something that you have a thought about? | |
| So the more permanent effects of therapy and the less, the more... | |
| Yeah, like even if you got £50,000 versus spending £800 in therapies, you got 64 times the amount of money and you were even happier than if you'd just gotten therapy. | |
| Again, like five years later, obviously the £50,000 is spent and gone or something like that. | |
| Are you then back to lower happiness? | |
| Even if you get more, are you then back to lower happiness than someone who pursued therapy? | |
| Well, we couldn't find the data on that. | |
| I mean, I'd like to have shown that, and I think that possibly is the case. | |
| I think gains to money is certainly a lot more transitory. | |
| But we couldn't find the data that would support that claim. | |
| So I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to say on that. | |
| Right. And was it because there wasn't the longevity of data or the data itself that was there that was sort of measuring a long enough period of time didn't support that idea? | |
| It wasn't. We literally just couldn't find the data on it. | |
| So I don't think the data was long enough where it wasn't specifically looking at that question. | |
| So it was looking at people who were in psychological distress and what would happen if they underwent therapy. | |
| It was looking at individuals that had psychological distress through the loss of a loved one, for instance, and how much that reduced their well-being. | |
| So it didn't really look about the after effects. | |
| I don't think that was a long enough time there. | |
| Right. | |
| Okay. | |
| So it's not that there was data that disproved that idea, but you couldn't find data to support or disprove. | |
| Yeah, exactly. Okay. | |
| Well, that's good. I mean, of course, that would be a huge study, but it would be really fascinating if you could take it even further and say that the effects of therapy are long-lasting, if not permanent, whereas the effects of money, even if greater temporarily than the effects of therapy, prove to be a sort of a bell curve. | |
| That would be very interesting. | |
| Definitely. And I've spent a fair amount of time in my show on occasion trying to help people to quantify the monetary effects of good mental health because, you know, it can be tough to say, you know, do this difficult and expensive thing called therapy because things will just be better afterwards. | |
| I mean, sometimes people do like something a little bit more concrete. | |
| And another interesting thing, and again, I didn't see it in the paper, but I was just wondering if you could share your thoughts about this. | |
| It was my experience that therapy really did help me in terms of confidence and negotiations and so on. | |
| And so I ended up actually having a greater income after therapy than beforehand and having a lot more confidence in my business dealings and so on. | |
| And so it did have, I mean, if I were to look at the investment and payoff, The ROI in terms of therapy was about four months of increased income. | |
| The amount of money that I spent in therapy I then got in perpetuity and of course in an ever-increasing way with raises over time after about four months in terms of my therapeutic investment. | |
| Have you found any way to find out whether there's a correlation between therapy and income or is that something that showed up in the data at all? | |
| No, we haven't looked for that or it hasn't come up. | |
| But I mean, I say it's not unlikely for that to be the case. | |
| I mean, I think people can often overvalue the effects that money have on well-being because they look around the world and they see, okay, this person's got lots of money and they're happy and they associate their happiness because of the income. | |
| But quite often, it's the other way around. | |
| So the higher well-being can then lead To the higher income, if you see what I mean. | |
| Yeah, so they sort of reverse the cause and effect. | |
| If I had this money, I would then be this happy, as opposed to if I were more happy, I would end up with this money, but the money won't buy me the happiness. | |
| Yeah, so I think, I mean, from a personal perspective, for me it's all about having the mental health and the happiness, and that's always been my key guide anyway, from a personal perspective. | |
| I think I definitely recommend that to be a way forward, a way of looking at things. | |
| And I appreciate your time. | |
| I was just wondering if I could pepper you with one or two more questions. | |
| I'm quite curious about how it is that you ended up in this very interesting and I think very fertile cross-pollination of disciplines. | |
| You said you started out as an economist. | |
| Can you tell me a little bit about what drew you towards building that bridge towards mental health and self-knowledge? | |
| Ultimately, I think it's just passion and following what I really enjoyed, I think. | |
| But at the time, it was just complete disillusionment with economics. | |
| Things didn't seem to kind of marry up in my head. | |
| It just didn't seem to make complete sense. | |
| Learning to kind of mathematical, technical models, which, you know, I was looking at the outside world, not really seeing them kind of matching. | |
| So, I mean, there's times when I've had... | |
| I say had money, but had more money than I have now. | |
| And seeing that money just spent and living to my means and not really adding much substance to my life. | |
| So it's kind of always been at the back of the mind, this kind of link with money and well-being. | |
| And I think I just kind of literally just followed what I'm interested in. | |
| It seems to have worked out, really. | |
| That's great. Sorry, go ahead. | |
| So I originally did... | |
| I got an economics degree and took that to master's and then changed to psychology. | |
| But with the background as an economist, it's kind of enabled me to kind of bring a lot of psychological concepts and ideas to economics. | |
| So that's where I am at the moment. | |
| And I was wondering whether you want to give away trade secrets of your future or not, I don't know. | |
| But I was wondering if you could just tell me a little bit about where you might be heading next in terms of the work that you're doing? | |
| In terms of the work that I'm doing, well at the moment I'm trying to get the work that I've done through my PhD thesis out and published. | |
| So I'm halfway through getting that published now. | |
| So once I've done that, I'm not sure at the moment. | |
| I've got to basically create a job for myself somewhere. | |
| So I'm not too sure where I'm going to go, but at the moment it's just getting my thesis work published. | |
| Well, that's fantastic. And is there anything else that you'd like to add? | |
| Oh, sorry, the last question I had was, how did this end up getting out into the media, which I think is, you know, sometimes in academia can be a bit of a high hurl to get information out into the general public. | |
| How did that happen in this case? | |
| Well, I put press release out, basically. | |
| I mean, to me, I mean, this is a really important idea. | |
| It's probably one of the most important chapters of my thesis in terms of this idea. | |
| And actually, you know, this is... | |
| The way that, you know, you could really have a kind of real impact. | |
| So since we started writing this one, it's always been right at the back of my mind that eventually you want to get this out to the media. | |
| So it was a case of literally getting a press release out, making sure the press release was just right, and sending that out to as many people as possible. | |
| And it seems to have done quite well. | |
| So people have been contacting me, and people are interested in the work, and that's ultimately what I wanted. | |
| So I mean, that's the thing, if you want to push your work, and my work being around kind of well-being and happiness is always going to have that kind of That interesting factor. | |
| So you've got to push it, but that's how I got into the media. | |
| All right. Well, I really do appreciate your time and I certainly don't want to keep you from doing all the good work that you're doing, but I mean, thank you. | |
| I mean, I know I don't need to thank you, but I really do appreciate the work that you've done in terms of getting these statistical correlations out. | |
| You know, the more facts that we have to promote the pursuit of self-knowledge in a therapeutic environment, the better. | |
| And of course, anything that we can do to add to the happiness of the world is a life well lived. | |
| And I think that by making the case In a very explicit and numerical fashion, I think you've done a lot of good, and I really do appreciate that. | |
| Okay, thank you very much for having me on, Stefan. | |
| Thanks very much. Best of luck with your dissertation. | |
| Thank you. Bye-bye. |
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