Nature vs. Nurture (with Paul Bloom)

How much of our success or failure is written in our genes? How much is under our control? Is it nature or nurture or is that dichotomy too simplistic? Hear EconTalk's Russ Roberts and psychologist Paul Bloom discuss why the nature vs. nurture question is actually worth taking seriously and how by understanding it we can help ourselves and others.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to EconTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  Today's April 49, 2025, and my guest is psychologist Paul Bloom of the University of Toronto. His Substack is called Small Potatoes. This is Paul's seventh appearance on the program. He was last here in April of 2024, talking about seeking immortality. Paul, welcome back to Econ Talk.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  It's always great to talk to you, Russ.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  In a recent essay on your Substack, Small Potatoes, that will link to, you asked Claude, "What do you think of the question, is it nature or is it nurture?" And Claude responded, "The nature versus nurture question is one of those deceptively simple dichotomies that doesn't hold up well under scrutiny. It's like asking whether a rectangle's area is determined by its length or its width." And then Claude goes on to say, "It's all complicated. These two things are always both in play." And you responded, in your essay, not to Claude, "Claude has provided an accurate distillation of the consensus in my field. It probably assumed I would agree with this consensus. I don't."

• 1:41Speaker 00

  Before we get to why you don't, let's talk about the intellectual battle lines that are drawn in this debate, the nativists versus the empiricists. What are they about?

• 1:51Speaker 01

  So traditionally, there's been this great intellectual battle, and maybe the great intellectual battle in philosophy and psychology, between the nativists, starting with Plato, you know, continuing, I guess, most famously to Noam Chomsky in the modern time, who argue that a tremendous amount of what we are, how we think, what we desire, is constrained by our biological natures. We're born that way. And that's one side of the debate. That's the side of the debate. I went to graduate school at MIT. My advisors were Susan Carey and Steven Pinker, and I was very much steeped in that intellectual tradition. On the opposite side, the side which is actually, honestly, always been

• 2:34Speaker 01

  more popular, is the idea that human nature is infinitely malleable. You know, it continues the idea of the British empiricists like John Locke, David Hume, who would argue that all we have in our heads is the capacity to form associations, and there's nothing fixed about human nature. And this continues, it continues to BF Skinner in modern times. Many people who do neural network modeling believe the idea of human nature is a fiction. We are merely the sort of sum of the inputs we received. So that's the traditional debate. And I've always had one side of the debate. I've always been a nativist. I've argued that evolutionary theory, that developmental psychology, consideration of the world we

• 3:19Speaker 01

  live in, all support the idea of a human nature. But I've always thought that as a really good debate. I could be wrong, you know, which is a sign that you're in a good debate. More and more, I've been hearing people say, oh, no, no, no, no, no, that's a very simplistic way of thinking about it. Nature and nurture blur together. Everything's an interaction. And my desire to say, no, no, no, this is a good fight. This is a good, this is a good disagreement, motivated me to write the Substack posts, to argue. And no, actually, it's a damn good question. Is it nature is a nurture?

• 3:52Speaker 00

  So before we go on, I do want to tell my, it's one of my all time favorite jokes. I think I've told it once on the program, maybe to you, Paul. I apologize.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  I heard it from, at a talk by Joseph Toulisca, and it's, it goes like this. The kid in high school comes home with his report card. His dad's looking over his shoulder as he looks at his grades, and they're horrible. They're all Ds and Fs, and the kid looks back over his shoulder at his dad and says, "What do you think, Dad? Nature or nurture?"

• 4:23Speaker 01

  I didn't tell it to me. I like that.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  It's profound. It's a very, um, it's a serious joke.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  And all I will say is that to do the terrible thing and analyze a joke, the kid's asking a good question.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  The kid could just say, "Say, Dad, if I was raised in another family, you think I'd be this dumb? What if I was adopted? You think I'd be maybe, how do you pack me?" It's a really good question.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  My, uh, my colleague at the University of Rochester, Walter Roy, used to say, my former colleague, and he's gone. Uh, I'm no longer at Rochester and he's no longer with us, but Walter used to say, "The two most important choices you make in life are your spouse and your parents." And what he meant, of course, by that is you don't choose your parents, but they, who you get stuck with as your parents, for better or for worse, makes a huge difference. And, uh, so he was, in that sense, very much, at least in some sense of nature, guy, maybe he meant nurture also, right? How they raised you, and so it's hard to, it's hard to say.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  People in the behavioral genetics, uh, field say parents have this enormous influence on their kids. Unfortunately, most of it is in the moment of conception.

• 5:38Speaker 00

  And that's a, that's, you know, a very, very deep question. You know, I've had Brian Kaplan on the program. Who argues that our influence on our kids as parents, as opposed to passing on our, our genes, that our influence is very limited, uh, that there's not a lot of evidence that we make a difference. I disagree with him, but, uh, the basic thrust of that is healthy to consider because we so desperately want to believe that how we parent our kids makes all the difference. Uh, we probably overrate it.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  I think we do. I, I, I think that in some way, I would be in favor of a little bit of a backlash against the behavioral genetics, who's I would argue the Kaplan view a lot. And gradually, friends and family have pushed me away and, and pointed out ways in which parents do affect their kids. Maybe in ways that psychologists don't typically, uh, uh, study. A relative of mine is this, uh, uh, this girl is very into Italian sports cars. And her father's very into Italian sports cars. Well, I don't think that's conveyed by the genes. And I don't think it's, it's an accident. Um, you know, and then sometimes nature and nurture conspire together. Uh, so family, friend of mine is a butcher and his sons are butchers.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  I know more than one, uh, father, daughter combination where both are, are professional philosophers at Ivy League universities. You know?

• 6:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. Again, maybe a little of both, but, um, but the point is, is that

• 7:06Speaker 00

  you do, you think it's a legitimate question. You think this idea, this, this modern consensus that it all blurs together, uh, is the wrong way to think about it. Why?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  So here's a case where it's not a legitimate, uh, uh, question. And I want to sort of be clear about this and it's your joke case. It's the case we're talking about now, which is how do people differ from one another? And anybody who's thought of this deeply will say, look, um, there are very few cases where it's all nature. Um, eye color maybe is a case where it's just all nature, but there's not many cases like that. But things like, and there are very few cases where it's all nurture too. Um, so, you know, whether you win a lottery is random, but most things are just, you know, most things are a combination. And when we talk about intelligence or personality, or whether you become a criminal, whether you get divorced, whether you have a happy marriage.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Everybody who thinks about decisions, it's, it's going to be a combination of your genes. And it'll set you up, your temperament and so on, and your experience and what happens to you in your life. And all the data shows it's a mix. And then there's an enormous amount of debate, I think, good debate over, over what percentage is one, what percentage is the other? Can you think of it in terms of percentage? What, how do, do genes affect things and so on? So I'm not against that. If somebody said, well, no, the difference is it's going to be a mix. Hey, that's right. But I'm more interested in universals. And this comes up so often when you have conversations with people. When you talk about about about history, when you talk about politics. Sooner or later, somebody often you says, it's part of our nature, say, you might say something,

• 8:42Speaker 01

  part of our nature to be suspicious of people in other groups. It's part of our nature, you have said many times, to feel an affinity for those close to us, particularly our children. And I think you're right. And I think I don't think that that claim that you make, I'm getting you on my side by saying you, whether you know it or not, you're on my side here. I don't think those claims that you make are vacuous, are old fashioned, or are having superseded by our science. I think they're actually true. I think some things are our nature. And then some things plainly are not. Some things are products of culture or accident. And I think it's a wonderful, important project to try to pull those apart.

• 9:25Speaker 00

  So that's an intellectual exercise, not exercise, but that's an, I would call it a intellectual agenda for, for say, the field of psychology or behavioral evolutionary behavioral psychology, whatever flavor you're going to look at. I think the challenge here is that. And I, this is how I take your essay, and tell me if I'm right. We sort of assume it's 50 50. A mix, you know, just tell another one of my favorite jokes. It's, this was allegedly a true story. A group of football players are coming home on an airplane.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  And they're bored and one says, he circulates among his teammates, he says, everybody put a dollar, it probably was $20. Put $20 in this hat and write your name on it and I'll reach in and I'll pull out one of the $20 bills. And if it's the one with your name on it, you get all the money in that. 100 players, 2,000 bucks, it's possible winnings. And one of the players trying to decide whether to play says, well, well, what are the odds that I'm going to win? And the guy running the game says, well, they're 50 50, either win or you lose. And of course.

• 10:48Speaker 00

  They're not 50/50. They're one out of 100. But it's a mix. So there's, I think, a tendency when we say, "Well, they both matter." So it's 50/50. And I think that's what's wildly wrong. And in particular, when we think about the challenges we face as individuals, forget about parenting, forget about public policy, we'll come back to that. But when we think about our own shortcomings, and what we can overcome and what we can't overcome. You mentioned temperament. Some people, I think, I'd be curious whether you agree, seem to have a happy disposition.

• 11:30Speaker 00

  Sometimes it feels like in some children from birth. Now, it doesn't mean you can't be happier. It doesn't mean you can't make yourself happier at some point, or you can't make your less happy children happier. But temperament may be mostly genetic. I don't know.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  I don't know either, but it's at least partially genetic. And, you know, you and I could go over the papers together. But we don't need to. I mean, we see cheerful kids who are always cracking up and goofy and happy. And then grumpy kids, who are always like, or anxious kids, extroverted kids, introverted kids. And we see the same thing in adults. And you know what? Happy parents tend to give you happy kids. Now, again, we get it with the standard problem is that when you're not looking at cases of, say, adoption, you never know whether maybe the kid got happy because being with happy people makes you happy, or they modeled themselves after, or whether it's just the genes.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  But yeah, I think there's some things that are very hard to deny. And that temperament is in some way something you start off with, is clearly undeniable. Then there's an interesting discussion, if you are by nature a dour person, how happy can you get? And I think the answer is, it has to be part of the way. People can change. People can, introverts can become more sociable. Sad people can get more happy. But it's harder for them.

• 13:04Speaker 00

  So I think the question that psychology might help us with is asking...

• 13:10Speaker 00

  Maybe you can't. And maybe facing that reality is better than being deluded into thinking you can. So I think that's another place where this really matters. I think people desperately want to believe that they can change themselves. I know I do. I like to think that. And yet, maybe I'd be happier knowing this is who I am. You know?

• 13:38Speaker 01

  You know, students send me an email. I taught a freshman seminar on rationality. And a student sent me a wonderful email saying, he learned through the seminar that some things are affected by the genes in different ways. And his question for me was this. Suppose I'm by nature good at some things and bad at other things. Is the lesson of psychology, you should sort of say, focus on what you're good at, build up on those, and ignore your weaknesses? And that was a great question. But I thought about it. It can't be that simple, right? Like, if you're really, if you're going to university and you're really bad at, you know, studying, you should try to get better at studying. You're not going to get very far. If you're very bad at dealing with people, you've got to work on that.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  On the other hand, if I'm really bad at music, or I'm really unathletic, it's not obvious that I should put my energies in improving as opposed to focusing on the small areas I'm good at and trying to build on those. And I think this is a question which, by the way, psychologists have aptly no answer to. But what does one do with one's strengths and weaknesses? Does one work on one's strengths, one's weaknesses? I don't know. Probably should better to ask a coach and, you know, or figure out what to do.

• 14:50Speaker 00

  There's a very powerful Somerset Maupin short story called "The Alien Corn", which is about a young man who desperately wants to be a great pianist, a great musician. And...

• 15:06Speaker 00

  Finds out whether he is or not, and it's a, it's a pretty good story. I recommend it.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  I have, I have a joke for you, Russ.

• 15:16Speaker 00

  Please.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Guy goes, guy goes to a, to a tailor and he gets a suit put in and this is awful. It's, it's really too long on one arm and too short. I know you've heard this, too short on another arm.

• 15:27Speaker 00

  Of course I have.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  He said, this is terrible. And he says, no, no, no, no, no, no. Pull in your left arm like this. Nobody can see me doing it. Pull me left arm like this. Switch, turn your neck like this. Now it fits. So they leave the tailor shop and he's stumbling around with, in this funny posture. Somebody ran up to him, runs up to him and says, my God, what a beautiful suit. Who is your tailor? And the guy says, are you, you're impressed with the suit? And the guy says, he must be a genius to fit a cripple like you. And I feel I am the man in, in my own life advice is I am the man in the suit. Where really, I'm really bad at so many things and good at, at, at a small number of things. And I have successfully managed to tailor my life that my contorted shape fits in the contours of my life.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm a university professor and a writer, which are, which are capacities that, that you could be bad at all sorts of things and be good at those things. Anyway.

• 16:23Speaker 00

  If you live in a.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  If I had to give it. Sorry, go on.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  No, go ahead.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  If, if I had to give advice, that, that joke is my, is my advice, you know? Like nature has given you an ill-fitting suit. Maybe your best to kind of find a way to fit into it. I don't know.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  That's really quite beautiful.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  That's the right way to look at the metaphor.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  I was gonna say, you know, in different era, you'd be, you'd be starving to death probably, but um, fortunately you born in a time where your limited skills, I feel this way about myself all the time. Uh, so I, I, the, the metaphor really speaks to me. I, I just want to add. In the version I've heard of the joke, the guy walks out of the tailor shop and two friends across the street see him and say, you know, oh, my gosh, what happened to, what happened to Paul? Yeah, he looks terrible, but what a nice suit he's wearing. It's not, I like yours, too. They're both great.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  You know, my wife and I watch End of the World TV series, like zombie series, watching The Last of Us. And I often wonder what I would do in a post-apocalyptic world. And oh, I wish, to go back to your point, I would, you know, I'd be going to the small thing and say, well, I can't hunt, I can't build things like that. But do you need a research psychologist? Like, this is a small community with a benefit, not really experimental, but more theoretical, you know, and use some writing. I don't know, they would, they would like just send me back to be eaten by the zombies.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, that's, you know, an economist would say, well, in that time, you'd spend less time investing in psychology and research skills. But, but this brings me to my next point, where we cut up, continue to cut up, which is, you know, this, there's, there's not much, it's hard to argue there's a more nurturing viewpoint than the 10,000 hours hypothesis. Now, I'm not gonna, let's not debate whether this is what Malcolm Gladwell really wrote. And there's been lots of back and forth about it. But, but there are people who believe that if you set your mind to something, you can achieve greatness. You

• 18:34Speaker 00

  can make the Olympic team, you can, you know, obviously, there's certain limitations. I'm 5'6". I'm not going to make the Olympic basketball team. But music was a good example. Art is a good example. You can take art lessons and you can improve. And if you spent 10,000 hours, you'd improve a lot. Could you become a real, a successful artist? I don't think so. But, but many people do. And I think it's deeply comforting to believe that unlike your story of overcoming your limitations and crafting a way to wear the suit that,

• 19:15Speaker 00

  that gives it a decent appearance, a lot of people like the idea that they can, anything's possible.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, I bet it, I, I bet it depends on the domain.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Um, I'm, I'm not going to become, um, the world's, uh, the world champion heavyweight boxer, no matter how much I, I train. Um, but, but it also is true, it may be obvious that the more you work at something, the better you, you get. I actually read a recent post by Brian Kaplan, who, who talked about the non-effects of parenting. And Kaplan's is interesting, which is, maybe we don't work hard enough at it. What if you spend 10 hours a day with your kid, totally obsessed with focusing on some magic? Maybe we just give up too soon. Maybe sort of if you, if you spend all your time at something, you would get better at it. I guess the question is, is that a good?

• 20:05Speaker 00

  That's a ridiculous, that's a ridiculous idea. I love Brian, but the idea that, that more time would make me a better parent, I think, is a misreading of the thing, but go ahead. I'm sorry, I apologize for interrupting.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  I guess the question is, have the best, the best use of your time? Like, you know, so, so I, I, I like to work on my writing, because I think I, I try to be a good writer, and I would, I think time spent in that will make me a better writer. Will I ever, will I ever be a fantastic writer? Probably not, but I could, but I could get better and better.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  Agreed.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Then there's, then there's things like, um, program. I'm kind of a crap programmer. Whenever I try, it's just slow and I fall behind other people. If I spent all that time on it, an enormous amount of time, I will be like a so-so programmer, better than average program. So I think to some extent, you have to sort of patch up parts of you that need to be patched up, that, that are just essential to being an adult and so on. You know, I wouldn't, if somebody said to me, I don't want to put energy into being a good father, because I'm not so good to start with, it's a waste of time. I say, no, no, you have to be a good father. You have to put in the time to do that. Um, but if somebody said, I try playing musical instruments and I'm bored with it and I don't like it, I got, now I'm going to spend 10 hours a day doing it.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  I said, are you sure you want to do that? You're not going to be that good. And I think part of the problem is the whole with the whole 10,000 hours thing is that it is true that the people who are fantastic at something do spend enormous amount of time training. But I think people get the cons of it a bit mixed up. It's not that training is efficient. It's that it's that if you love something, it's then you really you enjoy doing it. And then the enjoy doing it makes you better, which makes you love it more and so on.

• 21:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think people with great gifts, it's not just enjoy it. The slope of the curve is steeper for for a lot of people. And I remember the first time I went to a gym as an adult, and I saw a lot of people that looked a lot like me, meaning flabby, soft, not sculpted. Wait, wait, I saw on the ad. And then and then I want to go up to him and say, how long have you been coming here? Because if it's a long time, that's data for me. And seriously, part of the reason I don't go to the gym every day is that for whatever

• 22:37Speaker 00

  reason, my slope of my curve is pretty flat. I'm not saying I can't get stronger and I can't improve. But my genetic gifts there are very limited. And I think it's relevant.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  And that's a great example. The people who spend a lot of time in the gym, probably there's a correlation to be very fit, because they enjoy it enough that everyone else drops out before. And so so there's there's sort of a virtuous cycle between doing something and being and being good at it. And then something really interesting happens where people, some special people just arise above the rest of us. And then just, you know, and it doesn't it could be something like, like music, or art, or bodybuilding. But it also be something like, well, you know, you're really good at interviewing, and synthesizing and talking about things, because you're a pudding in the hours. But it's not like you were assigned by a psychologist and experiment. You have to do a podcast for, you know, for

• 23:33Speaker 01

  20 years for

• 23:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, roughly.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  That'd be torture for many people. But you love it. So you're good at it. And because you're good at it, you do it more and so on and so on.

• 23:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, actually, the the truth is, is that I'm ashamed at how little time I spend trying to become a better interviewer. And everyone, every once in a while, no, every once in a while, I think, is there a more systematic way I could do this than just doing it a lot? But that's, it's not my full-time job. It's a side gig, so it's the way it is. Thanks.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  You know, in some way, university president, you think that's a, that that is a big deal and everything, but, you know, I don't know, 100 years from now, what if, what if, when I ask, you know, that our AI masters, you know, who is Russ Robertson? What did he do? Maybe university president will come second.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  No, they're gonna definitely get it wrong.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  They'll lose, they'll lose the name.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  He was a modest kayak competitor in the 2007-16 Olympics. You know, it'll be that kind of thing.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  They'll take our discussion and say, he was a serious gym buff, spent a lot of time in the gym. I have some memory of that.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  Exactly. So it'll, you know, we don't talk about that enough, by the way. The way that AI ignores, at least for now, probably struggles to deal with sarcasm and humor and takes it as factual. Haven't thought about that. It's a really interesting idea. I think we need to do more of this kind of conversation, Paul.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  And throw it off track.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, and cede my future reputation with, with false achievements. I want to, I want to ask a different question. Get a little serious for a minute, not too serious, but a little serious. And when I was reading your essay, the thing that came to mind was the seriousness of the conversation over time between scholars in this area. You know, the famous joke, which I think is kind of silly, but people love to make it, which is, Why are academics so petty? And the answer is because the stakes are so small. And I've never found that. I don't think it's particularly true. I don't think it's interesting.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  I don't even, I don't even, I don't even get it, actually. Doesn't even make sense.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Even, even the word academic is sometimes used as a synonym for useless of no one's. Oh, just academic.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  And I find it very offensive.

• 26:01Speaker 00

  Okay, I won't say it. I won't use that. But, but here's the case. This is not about the stakes being small. I would argue the stakes are quite large. And the intellectual debate over nature versus nurture strikes me as remarkably intense for its importance in almost any practical sense. And I'm curious, I have a hypothesis. I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are. Why do we care so much? Why do people, in, in your example, the nativists versus the empiricists, the people who think it's all nature versus all nurture?

• 26:41Speaker 00

  Why are they so passionate about this disagreement when in fact 99.9% of the time it's not really important and we all would go about our lives anyway?

• 26:56Speaker 01

  I think it's a good question. I think the answer is, in general, I think we all carry within ourselves a theory of human nature. And, and some of us do this for a living, but everyone carries within it. When somebody says to you sincerely that children have to learn to hate, you know, maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, but it's a theory, it's a theory of human nature. When somebody says there are no differences between groups and abilities, intellectual abilities, that's a horrible racist thing to say that, that's a theory of human nature. When somebody says different human groups have different capacities and potential, that's a theory of human nature. So that, if that's one part answer, but the bigger part answers that matters so much, it matters, it matters for politics, for instance.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  So, so if your theory is that we are infinitely malleable, then if you create the proper state, you could have a world without prejudice, without hatred, without, without sexism, without envy, without cruelty, and so on. All you have to do is have, set the right education in place. And, um, and if you, on the other hand, if you believe that we have innate constraints that are universal, then you fall into, I think, what Thomas Sowell called the tragic view, or the constrained view of human nature, which says that, um, that there's a limit to how much you could solve these problems. People are gonna hate, people are gonna feel envy, people are gonna feel jealousy, people are gonna be competitive, people are gonna

• 28:24Speaker 01

  feel more connected to those they love than to strangers. That there's, that's why old indoctrination in the world, they're still gonna love their children, maybe they're still gonna be religious. And that leads you to think about a different state, a different way of doing things. It tempers your utopian dreams, and, and, and it, it leads to a different set of policies you endorse. And I think this, which side is right matters, matters a lot.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  Well, that was my answer. I'm looking at my notes, and I've got Thomas Sowell's Conflict of Visions in the next paragraph, which is an extraordinary book, by the way, and I strongly recommend it. And exactly as you said, he has, he says, there's two visions of human nature, and they are extremely important for how you view the role of government and public policy. The, the utopian view that, that anything is possible versus the constrained view, I don't remember the terminology he uses, but the constrained view is, I think is the right word, phrase, that we're basically not malleable. He used that phrase, used malleable before, we're not malleable. So, so I think it does matter a lot. And I'm struck

• 29:31Speaker 00

  when you said, you know, children are taught to hate, or not taught to, children are taught to hate. They don't hate, uh, as part of their nature. Many people take one side or the other on that. Uh, they have no evidence on it.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  They, they hold that view overwhelmingly, well, excuse me, that isn't fair. Their evidence is casual, I would say. Their own experiences in life, either with their children, other children themselves, but the-

• 30:01Speaker 00

  The thing that's crazy is that they feel strongly about it. They have no formal evidence on it. And I think they take the view that they want to believe is true overwhelmingly. It's a form of comfort.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. It's that the way I'm framing it, which I think is the way it should be, is the facts should come first, the way the world really is, and the politics should then fit the contours of the facts. But this is myself, shows alarming ignorance of human nature if I think that people think this way. Rather, you have your political goals and you have your social goals, you have the way you want the world to be. And then you say, well, the facts must fit that.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. So if I can probe and perhaps you'll be uncomfortable with this, so you can.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 30:51Speaker 00

  We'll edit this out.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  We'll edit that out.

• 30:53Speaker 00

  You'll edit it out. This is really off limits, Paul, but I'm going to guess that on average you would describe yourself as left of center.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  I think you would call yourself a center-left person. Is that fair?

• 31:13Speaker 01

  Yes, that's fair.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  And I would describe myself as a center-right person. Sometimes I'm more classically liberal, classical liberal than conservative, but in this conversation about nature versus nurture, I would call myself on the right and I would call yourself on the left, recognizing that it's kind of a crude, crude simplification, of course, because there's no metric and I don't want to overstate. But that makes me, on average, in some dimension, a nature person and it makes you, on average, a nurture person. Is that fair? Would you describe yourself as a nurture person?

• 31:58Speaker 00

  Or is your view on this debate?

• 32:03Speaker 00

  Consistent with your own political views. That's what I'm asking, perhaps unfairly.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  No, that's not unfair at all.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  I'm very much of a human nature person. I, I, I agree with Chomsky and Plato before him that a lot of our natures have been, have been wired up that we are, that, that humans are not just a product or culture. We start off with certain things and some of them are very sweet and some of them aren't sweet at all. And that a proper politics will, uh, will, should respect that.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  I'm not sure to extent to which this clashes with my sort of left-leaning political views. And in some way, it may not be.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm not sure. So, so, so Noam Chomsky, who is extremely a man of the left, an anarchist, is also the foremost proponent of built-in innate structure. And he argued that, um, that, you know, a blank slate is a dictator's dream. And was very concerned with sort of the repressive governments of, of fascists. And you could just as well add communists to the list of people who tried to mold people into, into, into what they are not.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  I, I, I struggle with the question of how to mix, how to mesh my politics with my theory of human nature. I would worry, but I have to assess the possibility. My theory of human nature ends up kind of following the, the dictates of my politics rather than the other way around. But, but I think to some extent, here's one, here's one way in which I think makes me more sort of a Democrat than a Republican in my theory of human nature, which is I recognize that, that often the state has to have a role in kind of squashing or redirecting our worst instincts. So in my younger days, I was more of a libertarian. But I began being concerned with what you guys call externalities and, and, and the fact that, that

• 34:04Speaker 01

  people are actually imperfect and maybe at times you need other people to, to tamper them down. Kind of a rambly answer. How does it sound?

• 34:13Speaker 00

  No, I don't think so. And I, well, I think the, I'm going to try to.

• 34:20Speaker 00

  Adapted to my own situation and my own consistencies or inconsistencies. I think the danger is of this kind of... Obviously, there's a danger that you delude yourself and you think that your worldview of politics stems from facts, like you said, when in fact it's the other way around. But I think that the more challenging question is, the real dangerous delusion is to say, "Well, human nature is pretty fixed, and therefore, there's no role for government in making the world better." Yeah. Because it's always going to face the unintended consequences of what Adam Smith talked about when he wrote about the man of system. Smith says, "The man of system tries to..."

• 35:03Speaker 00

  And by that, he meant the utopian, the person who had a communist ideal or some other... He didn't have communism in his day, but he was worried about the overconfident leader who felt he could rearrange society. And the metaphor that Smith uses is that he would try to adjust the positions of the play... of the pieces on the chessboard without any regard to their motion that they are endowed with. And so, in Smith's metaphor... I didn't say that very well, and I apologize to my Smith buddies that I don't know it by heart, but I don't. And I'm not going to bother looking it up, but we'll put a link to the actual quote.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  It's a beautiful quote. Look it up. But in the Smith's vision, the reason that visionaries are dangerous is that it's not because they want to ignore human nature and the constraints of human nature. They actually lead to disaster. They lead to authoritarianism, to tyranny, to dystopia. So, the utopian ideal doesn't just fail, it leads to a dystopian result. And I think if you're a libertarian or a conservative of a certain kind, you're comforted by that.

• 36:30Speaker 00

  You say, "Well, we don't have to do anything because, well, it's just too hard, and it leads to counterproductive results." And I think that's cheating. I think a more honest...

• 36:43Speaker 00

  View is that there probably are things that government can do and sometimes governments do that make the world a better place and you just don't want to step off the rails too far into utopianism and into illusion, but that doesn't mean that you can't help people and make them better off and that might be a good idea. What do you think?

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like that. I mean, two things. One thing is, one of the many things we have in common is our love of Adam Smith. I mean, you've written a book on him, but I've, so I'm less enamored of him, but I often reread A Theory of Moral Sentiments and there's so much rich stuff there, this deep understanding of human nature, I think. And then the second thing is that you cannot believe that there's a human nature driving us in certain ways, but we also, there's a certain duality, and I don't mean this in a religious or spiritual sense, but just as a matter of fact, we're able to reflect on our natures. I think only humans could do this. We could reflect on our natures and say, you know, it's human

• 37:47Speaker 01

  nature for me to care so much more about maybe people who look like me and people who don't look like me. And that's just the way, you know, the way we're wired up, but it's wrong. It's wrong. And it's human nature for me to value my kids a million times more than I value your kids. But we shouldn't be a million. It should be a thousand, you know, and then, so then you have to, in some sense, fight back against human nature. And that's, I think, one of the purposes of societies, you know, you have laws, this is a crude way of putting it, but you have laws, you know, to, in recognition of the fact that people want to break them. And you don't just say, well, people want to break, people

• 38:29Speaker 01

  want to steal and torture and kill, might as well let them, that's their nature. You say, no, no, we don't want that. So we'll get men with guns, we'll stop you from doing that. And that's the beginning of government. And then, and this could apply on all sorts of levels. We don't normally care about the distant future because we're short sighted creatures. So let's have the government have advertisements and care more about climate change. Let's have climate taxes and so on. And for any of these, you could disagree, but the details, the government's pushing too far, the government's pushing too little. But I don't think there's anything incompatible. We're saying we have a strong human nature, but also in some ways we should fight against it.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  In fact, I'd argue that it, well, I think about this question a lot because of the economist's reliance on incentives. And we treat incentives the way nativists talk about human nature. You know, just set them right, and then you control them. Or, in the nativist example, can't, it's what they are. It's what it is. And so if I want it to be something different, I just change the incentives, and they'll behave differently. And many incentives, of course, do have an impact on our behavior. That's the essence of the economist's view

• 39:50Speaker 00

  of the world. But if that's your only view of the world, you've got a very narrow and, I think, tragic view, because a lot of life is about rejecting incentives that push you in one direction or another, toward various cases of negligence, malfeasance. So it's easy to comfort yourself, say, well, of course I did that. That's what the incentives told me to do. It's a terrible, terrible way to live. It may be the way many people do live under certain types of incentives. They are influenced by them. But I don't think we want to assume that our incentives are our destiny, the way you might assume our human nature is our destiny. It's depressing.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  I think the same point, but maybe put it in a different way. You asked before, what is a proper way? Does it matter that we have a proper understanding of human nature? And I think an understanding of incentives is one answer to that. There's a stereotype of economists, which I think is probably, you can tell me this is very unfair, that you guys tend to think that the big incentive is money, that, you know, we just throw money at people, and give them money for this, take away money for that, I'll do it. But if you think about how people work, and how you yourself respond in the world, and I assume economists know this, it's not just money. It's, we do things to be loved, to be respected, to make sure that the right thing is done, to make justice done. We do

• 41:18Speaker 01

  things to appease God, in our view. We do things because we want to be transcendent. We do things because we hate people, want them to suffer. You know, there's all sorts of incentives that go wired up into us because of our natures. And anybody who wants to to mull other people in the most benign way, everything, everybody from a president to a university president, to a friend, to a husband or wife, has to be sensitive, you know, you don't, you know, if if if a husband, if one partner tells another, I wish you'd clean up after cooking, they're not gonna say, if you clean up after

• 41:58Speaker 01

  cooking, I'd give you eighty dollars. So it's crazy. You'd say, you'd say, you gotta clean up after cooking because you're being a jerk. Well, I don't want to be a jerk. Nobody wants to be a jerk. Are you are you acting like you don't love me? I don't want, you know. And so so an appreciation of human nature, I think, is essential for dealing with people.

• 42:19Speaker 00

  That's funny you use those examples. I just, I recently gave a talk on just this question, whether, well, it's not just this question, the question is whether it's worth reading the theory of moral sentiments, and if you're in, say, in the world of commerce. And I said, well, if you're dealing with human beings, which you usually do in commerce, unless you're sitting in a room somewhere, developing an app that doesn't need to understand anything about how actual human beings behave, if you're doing anything in business, usually dealing with other people, and it's helpful to understand exactly what you just said, that not all incentives are monetary, people have a desperate urge, as Adam Smith himself pointed out, to be respected and loved, and

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Lovable, I think, was the term, right?

• 43:00Speaker 00

  No, loved, loved and lovely.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Just loved, okay. Lovely, lovely, that's right. Lovely, yes.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Now, just for the people with the Adam Smith drinking game, it's man naturally desires not only to be loved, but to be lovely. And I and that's, like you say, I think, if you don't understand that, and understand it doesn't mean hearing it and going, that sounds true to me, but understanding it by

• 43:23Speaker 00

  Engaging with that idea and how you interact with others, how you watch others interact with yourself and with others, you're missing part of the great panorama of life and you're not as good a friend, you're not as good a spouse, you're not as good at employ your employer or manager and so on.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  And it scales up. There's a paper I wrote, one of my favorite papers, and actually the first author is Christina Starman, who's now my wife. And it was about the claim that people want equality. And we argue that this is mistaken. We just got tons of evidence from developmental psychology research, from social studies. People don't want equality. What people want is fairness. So, so if, you know, if you get paid more than me, I'm not necessarily horrified at this. I'm not angry about this, so long as I believe that you did more work, you're more deserving and so on. And when you give people societies, you say, what do you think of this society? The equal society comes out at the bottom.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  What people want is this very, where, you know, often with a safety net, often with all sorts, I think it's complicated, but they want something which is fair. What I had this colleague at Yale, Tom Tyler, who studied what people want in a workplace. And again, they want to be paid nicely. That's true. But they also want to be respected and they want to, again, feel like they're being treated fairly. And so, and so I think this is really important stuff to know.

• 44:49Speaker 00

  It's an important distinction, by the way. I remember a friend of mine, I won't quote his name, but his first name's, well, I won't even say that. But anyway, a friend of mine, when he was a faculty member, had a student come in and complain about a grade. And he wanted a higher score, strangely enough. I've always noted that the desire for accuracy in exam grading tends to move in one direction only. There might be an exception too, but it's rare. Anyway, the student comes in and says, I, I think, I think I deserve a higher

• 45:29Speaker 00

  grade on this question. And my buddy said to him, well, what would you, what grade, you know, let's say the student got a, got a C and, and he was asking for a B minus or a B plus, or maybe even an A. And my colleague said to him, well, what grade would you like?

• 45:52Speaker 00

  And he said, uh, what do you mean? And he said, what, you want an A? Well, I, I want the grade I deserve. He said, well, that's a C. So if, if you want the grade you deserve, I think it's accurate. But if you'd like a higher grade, uh, because you wish you had a higher grade, I, I'll give it to you. And the student was incredibly uncomfortable. Of course, I don't know if I should say, of course, you could imagine saying, thank you, thank you, thank you. But he did recognize this was not fair. And he did now, he looked that gift horse in the mouth and, and refused it. And I think, um, much of, uh, political discourse hinges on this question of fairness.

• 46:34Speaker 00

  Uh, that, that there are some desserts that are undeserved and some, uh, people who don't get their just desserts. And that infuriates us way beyond many other things that are, that are larger in magnitude. But that unfairness, it's a very interesting phenomenon that we care so much.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  We do a lot of political issues, which you might think sort of in a utilitarian mode. Why, why does it matter so much? Um, on either side, issue of trans women in sports enrages people like this. Whatever you do is grossly. And, and then some people come in, we're talking about a tiny number of people, tiny number of cases. But it strikes people, there's none as unfair, and this matters tremendously to people.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would, I would say it a little differently because I think a lot of people do associate inaccurately fairness with equality. And for, for people, it's a question of justice and they want justice. They don't, they, that, that's what they want.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  And it's, it's, we don't want to be too utopian here. That the desire for justice sits alongside of a strong self-interest.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  Oh, fair enough.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  So very, very few people are enraged by the politician who wants to lavish them and they're, you know, I'm not going to get that upset if my, my local politician wants to give me money I don't really deserve. It doesn't buy, I don't, I'm not as attuned to that injustice. But that, but we do have, yeah.

• 48:01Speaker 00

  Now that brings us full circle, right? Because, uh, deep down, we feel there's a certain injustice sometimes because of somebody's nature. Not their own free will, but something that they were endowed with, whether it's a bad temper or whatever it is. And, uh, we want to cut people slack. For their flaws or vice versa. We want to attribute everything that happens to someone as a result of their own horrible choices and justice demands, they pay a terrible price. And I think both those views are shortsighted.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  I mean, I figure we're coming to the end of this and I don't want to get into long debates about determinism and so on, but there's a paradox at the core of this. Imagine the student came to your friend and said, I want a higher grade. And your friend said, this is the grade you deserve. It's a terrible paper. The student could have responded, it's a terrible paper because I don't work hard and I'm unintelligent. I didn't choose to be this way. Who would choose to be this way? It's not fair.

• 49:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  But we don't tend to take those arguments fully into it.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  That's nice. Yeah, this program has never dealt with issues of free will and determinism. So yeah, it's better to leave alone. I want to close with an example in another essay you wrote, which fascinated me and is related to this, obviously, which is the idea of embryo screening. So talk about what that is and why your instincts on the ethics of it was very different than some others' responses.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  So embryo screening is typically done in IVF where you have, you get multiple embryos and you have to decide which one to implant.

• 49:51Speaker 00

  IVF is in vitro fertilization.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Yes. And then typically, not inevitably, you look at the embryos, you do a quick genetic test for some chromosomal abnormalities that could lead to like cystic fibrosis. And those you don't use because you don't want a child with a terrible disease. And that I think is fairly uncontroversial.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  There is the promise of methods that could make some claims about whether your kid will turn out to be very intelligent, or tall, or of a sunny disposition. Now, I'm actually skeptical about whether these methods really work, not for sort of principle reason, I just don't think we're there yet and the evidence is very weak. But I wrote an article that I'm shocked at people, and here by bioethicists, and I do not want to mean to disparage an entire profession. I think there's some really sharp bioethicists, but there's a lot of really not sharp bioethicists who simply articulate some fuzzy prejudice and terror of methods.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  And so in this New York Times article, bioethicists are saying, oh, this is terrible, this is awful, one should never do it, it would give the wrong impression, it would lead to all sorts of problems. And I said, I don't quite see it. So suppose there's two cases. Me, I have my kid, and I choose the embryo to implant into the mother based on evidence that will lead to an intelligent kid. You, you take a kid, you don't do that, but you give the kid tutoring and classes with small, schools with small classes, and you read books to the kid. Suppose both these methods, as a matter of fact, boost the kid's intelligence. Why is mine evil and yours good?

• 51:40Speaker 01

  And then people could say, oh, mine only, only rich people could afford. But actually, yours only rich people could afford, these fancy schools and tutors and all the leisure time and all that. And the fact that people, that if I say to somebody, oh, I'm like spending a lot of time on my kid because I want my kid to do well in school and be really smart, so I'm reading books and, and, and, and I want my kid to have a sunny disposition, so I'm, I'm trying to modeling happiness and maybe mindfulness and stuff. Nobody's there, what a terrible person you are. They say, well, what a good father. And I think that, that we shouldn't respond any differently to the same things created through embryo selection. But I do know that's controversial.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  So why do you think, I, I think it is also, I think it's controversial, and I'm, I'm not sure where I stand on this, but.

• 52:30Speaker 00

  I do remember my sister coming home from biology class telling us that her teacher, imagining a future like this and being able to genetically design his own kid said, you know, if I could genetically design my kid, I'd make that kid the best damn golfer on the planet. And I was, you know, I was, I don't know, I wasn't very old. I was probably 18 or 19. And I thought, well, that's a very low aspiration for your child when you have that level of control. Nothing wrong with wanting your kid to be a good golfer, I guess, maybe, I

• 53:09Speaker 00

  don't know. But to aspire to that when you have the old menu open seemed a bit modest.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  But is that so different than the father who takes the two-year-old to the putting green and tries to say, and yeah, what do you do? I want to make this kid the next Tiger Woods, best damn golfer in the world.

• 53:27Speaker 00

  Well, yeah.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  We do the same, the same things.

• 53:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, fair enough.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  I think, you know, to be fair to people who disagree with me, there are issues of sort of, again, externalities that for the embryo selection, a very simple case of sex selection. So on the one hand, who am I to care whether parents want a boy or a girl and get what they want? There's a million reasons why you might want one and not the other. I have no problem with it. It's turned out that you have a society of millions of people and 90% of them want boys, then there's problems. Who do I care? What do I care if kids want a son who's tall? No, whatever. But if everybody is now six foot two, and then so if you're not six foot two, you're just, you're just very sure. And then there's

• 54:12Speaker 01

  sort of an arms race so that in five generations, every older men are 10 feet tall. That doesn't sound very good. So those sort of science fiction possibilities, they do worry me. And I think that they are a consideration. But otherwise, I don't quite see the fuss.

• 54:27Speaker 00

  Well, it's very much to me like the steroid debate in sports. It's okay to lift weights, but it's not okay to take the drug. Yes, there's an externality because taking the drug can have negative health effects. But by the way, lifting weights all day long maybe is also has externalities that, you know, it is complicated. But I think in this case, and see if you agree, there's something I think that makes people queasy that has nothing to do with rationality here. It's a playing God element here, I think, for some people. And I'm more of a believer than you are, and yet I don't understand why that's a problem.

• 55:11Speaker 00

  But I think that's what people have in mind. I think, in fact, most people would say, I don't know why it's wrong, but it's wrong. And I think underlying that view is that as we continue to step away from the natural rhythms, whether they're divine or biological, and we increasingly play God, whether you believe in a God or not, there's something that makes people uncomfortable.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  I think that's right. And I think here's where people now split. I think that's right. And then some people, like one of the great bioethicists, Leon Cass, would argue that this discomfort we feel captures a deep wisdom that we should listen to. Other people, like the obscure psychologist, me, think this discomfort is ridiculous. And, and, you know, when IVF, in vitro fertilization, first came in, and now everybody knows somebody who has had their children this way, and, and it has been the rescue of many couples who got their dreams and everything like that. When it first came out, they called them test tube babies. And like Time Magazine had a picture of a test tube and a little baby and stuff.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  And all the bioethicists went, ooh, this is playing God, this is scary and everything.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  And I think people should just sort of estimate, look at the costs and benefits, be an economist, look at the costs and benefits, look at the probabilities, be sensitive to extreme risks. But the problem with going near your gut and these feelings is it is not a reliable moral cue. You and I could go through a list of interracial marriage, life insurance, all sorts of things that people at their gut levels said there's something wrong about this. And they were wrong.

• 56:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, Leon's about six stories down here, is our dean of faculty here at Shalom College. Maybe I'll ask him. I don't know, by the way, there are probably some things Leon thinks are okay and others that aren't. I don't know where he draws the line. I'll try to find out.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  He wrote a very famous essay, as you know, called "The Wisdom of Repugnance." And again, I think it was a thoughtful, interesting one. It captured a very common view very powerfully, but I do not think it's correct.

• 57:30Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, there's a lot of repugnance that's misguided, as you were suggesting earlier. But I'm sure Leon has something thoughtful to say about it. Maybe we'll talk about it on the program. But I think this, the more I think about it, there are a lot of externalities on almost every one of these, right? If I have a so-so disposition, and virtually everyone is happy because my parents didn't select for that, that may make my life much harder than it otherwise would have been. But again, I don't think that's what most people have in mind.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  And one thing which bothers me is one of the uses of this screening is to, I'm curious what you think of this, is to do your best to ensure that your kids will not develop breast cancer, or schizophrenia, or some terrible disease later in life. Now again, we can be skeptical of whether these methods work, but in principle, I don't doubt there's some way in the future to screen embryos that would, that would maybe choose an embryo where a kid will not get breast cancer at age 40 and everything like that. And I hear this, what could be, who could object to that? That sounds wonderful.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  But one response I've heard is, well, only rich people or people of some degree can afford this procedure. So they should, nobody should have a right to use it. It's not fair. And I find, I, I find that appalling. I find it, the idea that, that, that we should let some kids grow to have terrible cancers and so on, because not everybody has the, the ability to use that procedure, seems to be a sort of perversion of morality.

• 59:17Speaker 00

  It's an interesting question. Um, in many cases like this, I'm on your side. I don't, um, know how I feel about this. It's, um,

• 59:30Speaker 00

  because it does have these weird societal things. It would, it would be strange if only poor people got cancer. And you could say, well, that is the world we live in because rich people can, can get more cures and they can live in places that don't have toxic waste dumps near them. And I, and I understand that. And I think very, very, very few people would argue, we shouldn't try to cure, cure cancer because it's quote, natural, or it's, it's divine, it's decreed by God. Most people would disagree with that. They would say, no, no, no. In fact, the whole human enterprise is about overcoming these kinds of challenges and making the world better.

• 1:00:11Speaker 00

  And I think what the other source of uneasiness, we talked about playing God, but the other source of uneasiness is this is the cheating way. We're supposed to solve these problems in a different way. And that is, that's a weird view, uh, but I, I can emotionally relate to it. I can't rationally relate to it, but I can emotionally relate to it.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  It is a weird view. It has come up in a very different realm where I've read some scientific papers arguing that people, and maybe people have this every day life, but people disapprove of those who lose weight through Ozempic.

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  Perfect example.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Because the way you're supposed to lose weight is through willpower.

• 1:00:47Speaker 00

  Suffering.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  Suffering, suffering. And again, I, I have a feeling that as these things become more common, the moral qualms tend to go away when people see the world has not come to an end. I think, I think gay marriage is another case where people were very, very panicked about it. And now we have it and everything is fine. So, but, but there is a sort of bias for the, the hard fought, the natural.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  Well, this comes back to a book a psychologist wrote. He's on my program right now, which was that there's a sweet spot. And, and that a little bit of suffering is part of what gives life its meaning. And I think underlying some of this unease

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  that we're alluding to here is that if everything can be a shortcut, if you don't need willpower, if you can just eat all you want. And let's, let's take this example. I, I have a sweet tooth. It's, I've got, I'm prediabetic, so I try to restrain myself. I could lose weight, so I try to restrain myself, but I really love ice cream. And do I want to live in a world where ice cream has no calories? Right? We have lots of products that have light versions. None of them are very good compared to the real thing. You can get used to Diet Coke, but in general, these kind of low calorie solutions

• 1:02:15Speaker 00

  are deeply dissatisfying to us in different ways. And I, it's a strange thing.

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  Comes back to this view, I, I think I was suggesting earlier that there's a certain way we want the world to be. And this brings in this idea of justice. It's not just if there's a free lunch. And, and we kind of like the idea that we have to pay a price if we want to achieve something. And shortcuts, you know, the idea that, I mean, AI is the same issue, right? I'm not going to learn how to write. I'm not going to learn how to read. I'll just use ChatGPT to do my reading for me and my writing. And I'll be fine because I've got that tool. Now, I would argue you won't get as smart, your brain won't work as well, but maybe, I'm wrong. Maybe you won't need it to be because you've got this fantastic buddy

• 1:03:08Speaker 00

  to answer all your questions, see everything. And so if I could just take, to take the silly science fiction example, if I could just put a chip or a, take a pill and become Einstein.

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  Would that be a good thing? And of course, the, I don't, actually, I don't even, I was gonna say, of course it is, but maybe it's not.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree that we give value to things we struggle for. And that a life of struggle is kind of a crappy life. Nothing will have, nothing's gonna have, if anything is easily attainable, nothing has value.

• 1:03:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  You know, value, value is partially calculated by the amount of work you put into it and the struggle. And when we talk about things like meaning and purpose, that's a large part of what we're talking about. You know, in my book, Sweet Spot, I talk about somebody I know who woke up one morning and says, I'm gonna run a marathon. And he was in great shape, so he ran a marathon, did great. Me, I had to train for like a year and I was a struggle, I was miserable, but it mattered a lot more to me than to him. And I'm not denying that the person who loses thirty pounds through careful dieting and exercise, as opposed to somebody who just takes a pill, an injection, whatever, that the person worked at it, it'll be more meaningful to them. No doubt about that.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  I guess I just think there's enough struggle in life, there's enough places where we could struggle and work and everything. That calorie-free ice cream sounds wonderful, like so fine, fine. My ice cream will not give me, my resisting ice cream is no longer a source of satisfaction. It was this other thing.

• 1:04:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's true, that's true. That's an excellent point. I just want to raise an example here for listeners to contemplate, and you can respond to it, Paul. I saw a story the other day about the side effects of Ozempic, okay?

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  I didn't, I don't take Ozempic, I'm not tempted to take it. It's not an issue I'm paying any attention to, so I didn't open the story. And I, maybe it's a really horrible thing and maybe it's irrelevant. There aren't any side effects, it's a wonderful free lunch. But I think you can learn something about yourself and your worldview on these issues. In how you react to that headline, do you say, "Dah, that's right"? Or do you say, "Oh, that's too bad"? Right? And I think we all have, we have an emotional reaction that is tied into all these urges and feelings of justice and feelings of nature versus nurture. They're all tied into all these, it's an example of all these issues coming together, I think.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  No, I think you're right. And I think that sort of connects the parts of our conversation where I've come a con sort of strong with a kind of utilitarian beauty thing. Like, if Ozempic works, wonderful. If calorie-free ice cream, wonderful. That is, if some people can have healthy kids, makes the world better. Who cares? Why should other people? It's the worst envy of all to worry about that. But we also began by talking about the human desire for fairness. And to some extent, I think this plays a part here. If so, it would be a case where I think we should reject our initial sort of feelings and sort of say, "Well, too much." But I think part of what happens, and you know, if I lose weight through hard work and

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  exercise, and you lose weight by injecting yourself, and it's so easy for you, I feel, that's not fair. Some student loan discourse has been that way, which is, and people have different reactions. But some people say, "I had to pay back my student loans. The American government's going to, you know, not this government, the last one, is going to just let people go away and they don't have to pay back." How could that be fair? And other people say, "Why? Because you suffered, other people have to suffer." And my answer is, "Yeah, sometimes."

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's complicated. My guest today has been Paul Bloom. Paul, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me. Always fun.

• 1:07:17Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.