The Pursuit of Life Well-Being

Episode 30 with behavioral finance expert Meir Statman

How does our understanding of money shape our pursuit of happiness? Wes Brown and Sonya Lutter are joined by renowned behavioral finance expert Meir Statman to learn how our financial decisions impact our life satisfaction and explore the intersection of money and psychology through Meir’s extensive research and experiences.

Meir shares insights from his book ‘A Wealth of Well-Being,’ discussing the critical role of empathy, resilience, and personal values in financial planning. You’ll also learn practical strategies for integrating financial stability with life’s other domains, tackling gender dynamics in finance, and the transformative power of giving back. 

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• Transcript

  Wes Brown 0:01

  Okay, all right, we're in good shape. Meir, you know, I wanted to tell you before we kind of jumped in, that your name has been on my radar for quite some time. Mutual friend of ours, Alex Potts, yeah, you know, said Wes you got to meet mayor. He said this to me about a year and a half ago. Yeah. Ago, and I think before your book came out, and of course, your book came out that we'll talk about here today, after that. But I just wanted to let, I wanted to go ahead and make that connection. He's

  Meir Statman 0:32

  a fantastic guy, he is, and a dear friend of many years. Yeah,

  Wes Brown 0:38

  he said he was a student of yours, and boy, he really thinks really highly of you, and

  Meir Statman 0:45

  worked with him for many years. I was a consultant to a company, not now it is the part of Buckingham, but that was our WB since 1995 no longer consult with him, but, and he's a sort of emeritus himself,

  Wes Brown 1:06

  so he is, that's right, yeah, yeah, I

  Meir Statman 1:09

  think that that only, only professors in never die. They don't even fade away.

  Wes Brown 1:19

  That's too funny. That's too funny. Well, hey, I know you're I know you're busy and and your schedule is your calendars, I'm sure fuller than mine is, but we really sincerely appreciate you making making time for this discussion today. And I want to point out also, we're across three different time zones. I'm up in up in New Hampshire at the moment. Sonya is in the middle of the country, and you're on the west coast. So exciting, kind of amazing, what we can do? Yeah, yeah. I've done a couple of these. I did one of these from Hawaii at about 3am because, of course, they were East Coast time at that you know, at that time, I

  Sonya Lutter 1:56

  don't think that you can complain when you're in Hawaii.

  Wes Brown 2:01

  No, there's no complaints. No, definitely not, definitely not. Well, what would that Mayor again? Thank you. And you know, Sonia and I enjoy having conversations with with folks from all different backgrounds. The central theme, of course, is the intersection of money and life and well being, and so you're you're a shoo in for someone to talk to, given your the title of your latest book and so on. But before we jump into that, I wondered if, if you might just start out by giving us kind of an overview of of your background and kind of what led you to where you are today, because I know you had a fairly storied career.

  Meir Statman 2:47

  Well, you know, starting from the beginning. I was born in 1927 in a refugee camp in Germany to Holocaust survivors, and we came to Israel in 1949 and this is where I grew up. And they studied at the Hebrew University, where I met Nava, my future wife, and we are still married, many years later, and I when I graduated from the Hebrew University, I got a job as a financial analyst, and it was interesting for a few months, and then it was not and even though I promised myself never to see the inside of the university again, I came to the United States to get a PhD, not knowing that I will, in fact, go into academia, and I found that that is just right for me. And so that is a what I did. I got a job at the at Santa Clara University. There I met the her chefron, who introduced me to the work of Kahneman and verskin. He was working with Richard Thaler at the time, and so we found that those topics work for both of us. This was really quite a revelation to me, because I was always interested in human behavior, and I found a finance as it was taught then in the late 60s, pretty dry and unrealistic. And so we started our work and and continued. You know, of course, it is many years. This is more than 40 years. And he has moved on to write about other things, about behavioral finance in the context of corporations, I am more interested in the investment. Side, and I'm interested in human behavior, and that really led me to where I am today. And so I continue, I continue from this work in the book about wealth and well being to speak about other things, like, like a socially responsible investing and generally, what is it that that make people take what enhances their financial and life well being, and I hope that I get to help people beyond the students that I teach in my classroom.

  Sonya Lutter 5:50

  I love that. I don't know how many other professors listen to the podcast, but I am a professor, and I am blown away Mayor by you talking so casually about Tversky and Kahneman and Thaler like it was like no big deal. And those are legends in this area, and studying in the 1970s must have been so amazing and really neat to reflect upon though.

  Meir Statman 6:17

  Well, let me, let me tell you a related story. So I was studying economics and statistics for my undergraduate in Jerusalem, and the building that housed the economics and other social sciences was right next to the building that housed the psychology faculty, and Kahneman and Tversky were working in that building right next to mine, and not only did I never know them, I didn't know their names, I had no idea who they are, and I would step into That building because they solicited students for those experiments, and I got some pocket money this way, which just tells you how far those disciplines were at time and a you know, I talked to them years later. It turned out to the experiments that I remember, none of them were theirs. You can see, you can see how fortunate I am in having gotten to their work, and also fortunate in in finance, because the first paper that Hirsch and I wrote about dividends, and why it is that people like dividends was really quite a contrary to standard finance, and we were quite concerned about it when we sent it to a top journal, The Journal of financial economics, but we were really fortunate in that Fisher Black, Black Scholes pricing was the referee, and he wrote a brief review. I will not quote his opening sentence, because it is embarrassing. But at the end, he said, please spell my name right? We we spelled it with official without speech.

  Sonya Lutter 8:35

  I'm surprised you didn't get rejected right away.

  Meir Statman 8:38

  It No, the editor wrote, after non, after considerable soul searching, I guess I agree, and the paper got published, and it was quite, quite a brouhaha. It is just just a just tells you whatever talent you have, you better have good luck to come.

  Sonya Lutter 9:09

  Yes, isn't that true? Yeah. Well, we do want to talk about your book, Mayor, and it's a wealth of well being. And in the start of the book, you talk about the different types of well being and how financial well being is different than other types of well being, largely because we need money, and we need money to survive. We need it for our health and even to express our core beliefs, which is really pretty profound when you think about the magnitude of the importance of something that has little meaning outside of what it buys. So in other words, money seems to be more an expression of our opinions, and I wonder if you can talk a little bit about financial well being in the context of other types of well being.

  Meir Statman 9:59

  So. When you ask people what is important in life, they usually say family. They might say work. They might say health, religion for many but they rarely actually mention money, because it sounds kind of crass, but crass as it is, it is necessary for all of those things. You cannot have a family without being able to sustain it. And for sustaining it, you need money. You need money from work, to get education for work, and then, of course, work generates income that supports you and family, and whatever you do, health and so on, you need money for health. And so the point I'm making is that financial well being is crucial for life well being, because it underlies all of those other domains, whether it is family or education or health, but well being is more than financial well Being, and so you need to build on that wealth. And I say wealth, I'm not talking about being millionaires. I'm talking about having enough such that you do not worry that one missing paycheck is going to reduce you into poverty so you need money, but you need more than that, and you need to have that a those domains are satisfied. I think, I think of life well being really, as a portfolio. And I think that to those of us who are familiar with finance, it is really a concept that we understand, that is in every life, there are bumps, there are domains that are not with exhilarating returns. It might be a disabled child, but it could be other things. It might be a career that goes nowhere and yet you're reluctant to switch. It might be things large and small, as small as you know, for somebody who applies to colleges and has his or her dream a university, and they are rejected. So to them, it seems like the end of the world. Of course, you know, if they spoke to me or to you, are going to say, Hey, buddy, it's not the end of the world. You're just the beginning of being an adult. You'll find out that you will find good education in in many universities. But that's the point that that we have always exhilarating returns and some of our investments and some disappointing returns. And as we tell investors, look at the portfolio as a whole, I say, look at life well being as a whole. And kind of move well being from where you have a surplus to where you have a deficit. I

  Sonya Lutter 13:41

  love that so much, and how you brought in those words of life well being. And that has nothing to do with money, per se, but we do need money to achieve some of these elements of life well being. And the absolute favorite part of the book for me was your preface and how you talked about the vast magnitude of experiences that you've had from raising a child with mental health struggles and being born in a displaced persons camp and living in multiple countries. And I tend to agree that these hard moments are the things that build resiliency and help a person appreciate life well being at a new level, and I continuously struggle with can a person who doesn't have these moments to where they Have they're forced to either build resiliency or stay stuck in a really dark place. Can they ever achieve life well, being without those hard moments?

  Meir Statman 14:52

  Well, you know, my hard moments may be harder than some, but that note is hard i. Is a my parents. You know, once my dad said to me, kind of a bit sarcastically, when I was in high school, he said, Oh yeah, I too, had summer vacation in Siberia, and I said, you know that I'm competing with people who are like me, not like you, people who did not survive the Holocaust. I'm competing with classmates. I am competing with boys who would like girls to like them more. And so when we talk about now, of course, now I see how ridiculous it is to compare my minor problems to my dad's. But at that time, these problems were big in my own mind because they were about my life and so and so. You know, if you've been to middle school and high school, you know that that the anguish that people have because they were excluded from some, you know, top a group. Because they were rejected by their favorite university, because they were in a relationship that did not work very well. That is this, you know, you don't have to have big things to make you miserable. That is in every life, there are those knots. There are those domains, whether it is work that is not satisfying, whether it is a relationship that is not perfect, and so on, and learning resilience from that, of course, is is important and it is difficult. It's not as if this is something that you just learn. There's a lot of anguish that is involved. And then, of course, when you are 77 as I am. You can look back and you can smile, and you can say that was really minor, but it was not, you know that was, it was not minor for me to leave Israel with a wife and a baby, starting a PhD program in a new country, wondering whether I'm going to make it through the PhD program, not everyone does, whether I'm going to get a professor position, whether my research is going to amount to anything that is worth tenure and all of that. So life is just like that, and once you get to know someone beyond casual and they talk to you about their issues, you find that your life is not perfect, and neither is there is, in fact, it's really a very good idea to break that barrier, personal barrier. So I was speaking to to a colleague, and I was speaking about my daughter. He told me that that his younger daughter had a terrible car accident some years before, and his brain damaged, and now their life centers around the daughter and we comforted each other, empathized and gained well being, gained life well being, just knowing that there is someone we can share our experiences with, and we turn from from colleague into into friends, these are things. Are ways to enhance our well being. Just be being a bit more open with one another. And you know, speaking about about advisors that really is important for advisors as well. Not all advisors are comfortable sharing their own personal stories, their own pains, but of course, being able to share your pains invites clients to share theirs, and those pains have financial implications. You know, it's not just idle curiosity. That is, if there's a disabled child there, you have to think about trust. You have to think about what happens when you're gone. And so. On whether it is issues of work, switching careers, whether it is issues of health, it just, you know, as they say, Man plans and God laughs, and so, yeah, you build resilience. But it's kind of sounds easy, but boy, it is hard and it is painful.

  Wes Brown 20:25

  I have a I have a quick question, or maybe it's the it's a comparison, I guess, as you reflect back on your childhood, the circumstances, what I'm hearing you say is, you know the difficulty of your circumstances were subjective. It's what you knew. And so the challenges that you faced were the challenges that you faced. And it seems as though, irrespective of the challenges your parents faced, you weren't comparing yourself looking at your situation and comparing those struggles to theirs. You were comparing them to what you knew. And I think about, I guess I have two questions. I guess one is from your, from your standpoint, if we fast forward to 2024, and I have the, I have three teenagers and satisfaction, so to speak, life satisfaction is really hard for them to achieve, but it's largely because there's so much comparison, right? So when I listen to your story, I hear sort of an intrinsic desire to make your situation better, to compete and to grow beyond where you were, irrespective of what the struggles were that your parents faced? What I what I noticed by comparison today, is that there's a dissatisfaction amongst, I would say society, generally, young people, especially, but, but it's not because they are they have an innate desire to better their situation. It's because they see what someone else has, and by comparison, they're dissatisfied with what they have. Can you speak at all to that and how that challenges achieving well being, because it's it's completely different, and what I what we're seeing instead, and, and I know this is a little bit of a rabbit hole to go down, but what we're seeing instead is a significant uptick in mental health issues, and then, you know, prescription drug use for those reasons and things like that. None of which point to well being. You know, this idea that we're there achieving well being. So can you Does that make sense? Could you speak to that? It

  Meir Statman 22:39

  does make a lot of sense. You know, there is this well known finding of of the U curve of well being, so so well being kind of declines from a early adulthood to middle age, and then begins to go up, and I'm on the other side of middle age, and so I can testify that that is true, at least in my case. Now, what is really happening, if I think about it, is really the gap between where we are in our aspirations to where we want to be. And so when we are young, we aspire to more than we have now. That is your kids, at some point are going to wonder, what kind of profession are they going to choose, who are they going to marry and what, what kind of work there are they going to have? And so they have aspirations that are higher than where they are, and they strive to achieve them. Now, why you strive, you suffer. You know that is it reduces well being if you just say that's fine. You know, I'm at the bottom of the class. No boy or girl likes me. Everything is fine. Well, of course, we are not. And so those aspirations called that ambition, are very useful because, yes, they make you miserable now, but they also get you to achieve, to get your situation closer to your aspirations, and it makes for higher well being later on. That is, if I did not strive in years past, I would not get a PhD, I would not get tenure and and so on. Now, the problem with that is that, as long as we just compare ourselves. Say our classmates, it is, it is one thing. And yeah, we know that that Joe's parents are wealthier than mine, and he has some goodies that I don't have. And you know that that makes me sad and so on. But now that you have a social media and people essentially lie on social media describing what kind of wonderful trip they had and and so on. Of course, skipping that miserable day at the airport and so on. You kind of say, Gee, I know. How come I don't have this kind of beautiful life, and so it is really important for parents to to get kids to understand that they should not compare their insides to other people's outsides, as they say, to know that people exaggerate, that people in fact, have points of pain that they are not going to be disclosing, and as much as possible, calm them down and tell them stories about your struggles. Tell them stories about how you thought that it's the end of the world because you didn't get something, and it turns out nothing. You know, I can, I can tell you more than one, one story that will take too much time, but, but we all kind of look at it, you know, I'm, I'm, in hindsight, I'm really happy that I got to study at Columbia. I didn't even know at the time what Ivy League means so, but I knew that UCLA is in Los Angeles, and I had an aunt in Los Angeles, and I thought that going to UCLA is going to be wonderful, because I'll have a place to have relatives are going to ease my way into it. And now I think, you know, it was actually wonderful to live in New York, the study at Columbia. And in everything, everything turns now I was speaking recently infected two kids who were not accepted at UCLA, and I told them my story, and I said, Listen, here is my UCLA story. You can compare it to yours, and look at me. I've made it, and you will make it.

  Sonya Lutter 27:35

  You have no idea how happy you have made. Wes Mayor with your comment about social media, he's usually the first one to bring it up and the negative impact. So how great that you yes today,

  Wes Brown 27:47

  wonderful. Yes. I feel a kinship now with you that I you know, I didn't have before.

  Sonya Lutter 27:55

  Well, it's, I mean, you're so right that social media allows us to be this other person, and we can play a different role. And it's the same with financial well being in general, and this is my issue with it as well, because with financial health, you can pretend that you are in a way better position than you can with physical health, I can look at you and ascertain pretty quickly what your physical health is and you can't do that with financial health quite as well, because people can hide it with the debt that they're accumulating and whatever other means that they're using. And it's interesting to think about the research that you talk about in your book about everyone has heard it at some point in the life, in their life, that happiness decreases after this magical $75,000 income, and you talk a little bit about that in your book, and how some of the other research has maybe negated that finding. So just tell us more about the relationship between income and happiness.

  Meir Statman 29:01

  So when we talk about life, well being, that kind of three elements to it. One is experience well being, that is well being. At the moment, are you happy now? Are you sad? Are you angry? Are you frustrated? And then you have evaluated well being, if you think about your life as a whole, and I ask you to put yourself on a step in a ladder that goes from zero, which is the worst life you can imagine, to 10, which is the best life. Where do you stand? You know, is it a six, seven or eight? You can see that it's different from experience well being, because now you have to think about your life as a whole. You have to compare your life to that of people in the comparison group. You have to compare your life to your life 10 years from in the past. Ah, and that is kind of a different way of thinking. This requires cognitive reflection. And of course, you have meaning well being. You know? What do you answer to the question, Does your life have meaning? Do you know why you are on this earth to teach people to be kind to people to find happiness in the work that you're doing, and so on. So there's a famous finding by Kahneman and Deaton that evaluated well being increases without limit as you get wealthier, as your income goes up, but experience well being ceases to increase once your income reaches 75,000 and you can that that was published more than 10 years ago, and so you can adjust it for inflation and say that that's whatever 100,000 or 110,000 Well, there is a more recent finding by Killingworth, and what he did was, instead of measuring experienced well being, By asking people to recall how they felt yesterday. He actually asked them by iPhone or other phone now tell me, you know, stop and tell me how do you feel right now? And what he found that is that experience, well being, in fact, does not cease at any level. It continues to increase, but both experienced and evaluated well being increase at a lower marginal rate. In other words, having your income increase from 20,000 to 60,000 adds to your well being, as much as an increase from 60 to 180 which is three times that. And so there comes a time I suppose, that when we have a billion dollars, that the next billion as to our well being, a bit less than the first well being, the first billion. And I must disclose that I am a few million short of a billion.

  Wes Brown 32:39

  I'm curious, Mayor, and this is a bit of a tangent, but it's related to earnings. Can you talk a little bit about the impact that our work has on our well being? And in particular, there's, you know, I'm curious about the finding that people who work longer live longer. Can you know, we've often, you know, as a financial planner, I've observed this with people who retire and, you know, think that they're going to have, you know, all this free time every day is a Saturday, so to speak, but they find themselves busier in retirement than they were when they were working. And obviously they're doing things that they want to do. They have the freedom of choice is greater than, I think, least it's perceived to be, but it's almost like they find activity as a matter of necessity. I think subconsciously, they look for things to do because it's good for us. And but then there's also this idea that people who work longer live longer as well, and so I just be curious if you could kind of speak to that a little bit, and and how it plays into well being. So

  Meir Statman 33:44

  one big part of course of well being is that meaning and for people who are fortunate enough to have jobs and careers that become a vocation, that is a big part of of high well being. I am in that fortunate position, and I am way beyond usual retirement age. But I have no plan for retirement. I love what I do, and so to me, if I think about what is authentic, you know, I am a husband, I am a father, I'm a professor. That is really a very important part of who I am. Now, in my case, that vocation pays a regular monthly salary, but it does not have to pay for it to be meaningful. My wife, for example, does not work in a job that pays. She is a volunteer for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Nami. Okay. She is involved. She is involved in a programs like family to family, where families gather and speak to one another about their issues and what they learn. What it is that we know about mental illness from scientific findings and so on, she is on the warm line. The warm line is not a hotline, but it is where people can call in and ask a question or describe problems they have now with with a kid, and there are questions about a Social Security, you know, some, some of the other things. And so she has helped countless people families, and that gives her as much satisfaction as I derive from my work, and she finds a great meaning in this work. And so it really is a matter of of finding something that occupies your day, where, where you can say, this is a big part of who I am, and it does not have to deal with anything that you earn money. Of course, those of us who have enough money such that we can afford to spend our time doing volunteer work. Are very fortunate. Again. Money underlies many things in life and and we contribute money to Nami in addition to that volunteer work that that Nava is doing, but that really is important to be able to say, What am I doing with my day? And for me, it is doing research. It is writing, it is teaching. It is learning about things that might or might not eventually find their way into my research. I'm very interested in what goes on in our society. I'm as puzzled as everyone as to what is going on now with the coming election, and why it is that some people would like to have this country reserved to white Christians. I'm white, but no Christian so and so I feel excluded from that. This is not to my taste, but, but, you know, I'm I'm not immediately worried, but, but it surely is a concern of mine, and I'm trying to to understand what it is in the minds of people. And I think that, you know, it's coming back to those comparisons. I think that that people who find themselves below their aspirations are really losing well being and trying to get even. They get to be pretty angry. It propels them to improve their situation, but meanwhile, it makes them pretty angry. And I think, well, one of the interesting finding is that people who voted for Brexit and the people who voted for Trump are distinguished not so much by their level of education, but by their level of life well being. The well being of the people who voted for Brexit and Trump is lower than that of the others.

  Sonya Lutter 38:58

  I'm really struggling over here, Mayor, because you said something that was just like a light bulb moment for me with I told you in when I was prepping for this podcast, that my career well being is probably one that struggles a bit, and that's not because I don't like my job, but it's because I have this other job that goes unseen with being The mom of three children who are home all summer with me as I continue to work my job. And I don't know that the two of you can really relate to this, and I'm being a little bit unfair here, but it is different for moms than it is for dads, I think, and this idea of those three areas of well being, and that's the missing link that I've been struggling with. Experienced is fantastic. Evaluative is fantastic. It's that meaning to where it's I have two meanings, almost. And how do you balance all of that when there's a finite amount of time? So. If you want to provide some solutions to me, that's great.

  Meir Statman 40:06

  Yeah, solutions is beyond me, but I can surely empathize, and I would say that it is really odd in our society where we proclaim that men and women are the same in terms of their ability to contribute to family life and so on. How, at the same time, we cling on to traditional marriage and roles of husband and wife in that in that marriage. You know, I say this, this tradition in the United States where a man proposes to a woman on one knee with a diamond ring. I say, if I had to go through that, I would still be single. But if men and women are equal, why is it not the case that women get on one knee and present some kind of offering to the men they want to marry? So we still cling to those, to those roles, and that is what makes it, that is one reason that makes it more more difficult. You know it is when years ago, it was really very important to me that my wife and I have kind of equal burdens, and that, you know, if I do the work and earn more money, she should do more of, say, the housework. It is ridiculous. You know, now that I think about it, ridiculous now I'm the one who does the laundry. Why? Because, for me, it is break from, from kind of the intellectual work that I'm doing, and because I'm less likely to leave wet laundry in the washing machine for it to mold before it is put in the dryer. So and so it is just easier for me, but it takes a while. It takes a while for people to become so relaxed about the division of labor and so on, so did I provide a solution? I've done a

  Sonya Lutter 42:57

  fair bit of research in this area, and it is fascinating that even today, we hold on to those general expectations. And there's one study I did to where we looked at income of husbands and wives, and then household contributions, and when women make more than their husbands, they actually do more household work than what they do it when they make the same or less. And I think that's on us as women, that we we are holding on to those expectations too, that somehow we're responsible, and putting in that in quotes for household production, yes, yeah, completely weakness.

  Meir Statman 43:36

  Yeah, yeah. It's that old commercial I bring home the bacon, I put it in a pan. You know, the woman who does, who does everything, and and so there really is, is a need to to do what all the people do, which is to come to terms with who we are and when where we are. And so I'm happy to be at Santa Clara. If I'm abroad in Singapore, and I say that I teach at Santa Clara, they say where Santa Clara, they will not say that if I said that I teach at Harvard or Columbia or Yale, does it annoy me? Not anymore, because I can see now that, in fact, if I were at one of the more prestigious places, I would not have been able to do that kind of work that I did, because it was so much out of the mainstream when I did it that my colleagues and my professors, you know, fellow professors, are going to say, This is crazy. I'm not going to get tenure based on that. And. And so on. And at Santa Clara that just said, Look, if you have an audience for it, if it makes a contribution to Fellow Scholars, to professionals, to students, to the general public, it is great, whereas in other places they might say, here are the three journals that matter, and if you publish in other journals, well, you know that's kind of like, like golfing in your free time, but it does not count towards towards tenure, and we still get letters of that kind when we ask people at better universities for their evaluations of our faculty. But you know, I'm a very fortunate man that I ended up at Santa Clara, where I do work that is contributing to the larger community and is appreciated within the university.

  Sonya Lutter 46:05

  Normally Wes is the one who takes us way off script, so I'm glad to provide that role today, but I can talk forever about this mayor, and I've worked at two state universities, and I love it for that exact reason that you're talking about, that you can be perfectly authentic, and you don't have to fit into a box, because Wes knows how much I do not like boxes.

  Unknown Speaker 46:27

  Yeah? She does not, yeah,

  Meir Statman 46:30

  yeah. I I hear you, yeah. And I'm very fortunate in that, in that I don't have to have some some luxury car to tell people that I have money. In fact, you know, if I might brag on my side, Nava and I established a an endowment of several million dollars at Santa Clara to support the work of my colleagues in the Department of Finance. So this is in some way, how I show my social status, rather than having another house or or a fancy car or whatever, that is. So I'm sensitive to social status as well. That is if somebody says that that he or she does not care about what other people say, you know that they are lying. People care. It is just that many times and for good reason, we tell ourselves, stop it. You know, don't let those voices disturb you. Just go on doing the right things for you. But it is not easy because, because that ambition, that striving that need to compare ourselves to others is inside us, probably by evolution, but we have to pause, just as with emotions, you know, as As your mom said, when angry, count till 10 before you open your mouth. Same thing here, that is, you feel that that your colleague is ahead of you in wealth or publications or whatever it is, and then you have to feel that. And then you have to count till 10 and say you're doing just fine. You're doing just fine.

  Wes Brown 48:50

  It seems like, again, going back to what we talked about earlier, is, is, you know, comparison is, really, is really the one of the biggest challenges, right? And then a lot of our measures of success or wealth or what have you should come back to. There's some objective ones, obviously. And as you said earlier, well being does increase to a point, but seems like they should be subjective, right? Is that what I'm hearing you say like, you know, largely or relative, you know, because I think it's relative to your circumstances, not somebody else's.

  Meir Statman 49:29

  Well, yes, so so early in life you should be miserable by comparison.

  Wes Brown 49:38

  You just have to tell my kids that. Just want to remind them,

  Meir Statman 49:45

  you know, the standard interview question, in five years, what do you see yourself? And if you are just a recent college graduate, you might say, by in five years, I would like to be the team leader rather than a. Member of the team. But if you say it's a large company, if you say, in five years, I would like to be the CEO of this company, then then they know you're not really serious. You don't really you never gave it any thought about what, where you're going. Same here that is set expectations, set aspirations such that, say five or 10% of people accomplish them, but don't set them so high that you are sure to fail. And so yes, it is going to to make you miserable now, but it's going to make you happier, higher, well being later, when you accomplish more. But there comes a point as you age where you say, you know, instead of of shooting at a target and aiming to hit it just right, you just draw a target around where you shot, and you say, I've, you know, I've gotten where, where I want to be, whether it is a professor, an advisor, a lawyer, a Just a husband, a father and and that really is, is the part that this really is the reward that you get for for your aspirations, for your ambitions in the past,

  Wes Brown 51:33

  I love that. I love that Mayor. I want to circle back quickly to something you said earlier, as you're talking about Nava and the the joy and purpose that she gets from fulfillment that she gets from the work that she's doing, even though a lot of it's volunteer, perhaps, or most of its volunteer, you also, you also made a comment, though about towards the end of that that, that the two of you give to the organization she's involved with, and that you derive a lot of joy from that. Can you speak to, you know, the idea that generosity declines as wealth increases, and in maybe why that is, and put some context around that. Well, there

  Meir Statman 52:23

  really is, yeah, I know that there's this general finding that generosity declines as income increases. Now this is in terms of percentage of income rather than in terms of dollars, but there's really a very wide range within any person, any group of people with equal income, some wealthy people really are still intent on accumulating more and not sharing and charity is is not something that enters their mind. In fact, they are even short changing their children, saying, Let them have whatever is left for me from me when I am done living and I say, you know, getting a few million dollars when your parents die at 95 and you are 65 surely you're not going to reject those millions. But, boy, you would have preferred a fraction of debt in the 20s to pay off your college loan and get down payment on a house. And my parents gave me with a warm hand, rather than with a cold one. And I did that for my children. And I came to see early on and now that I get joy from sharing with others. Here's a quick story some years ago, as really in the early days of covid, I was sitting with my younger daughter at home outside on a terrorist. And I was wearing a mask that said, Doctors Without Borders. It had the emblem, the logo of Doctors Without Borders. And she asked whether you get that? And I said, Well, we contribute each year, $500 to Doctors Without Borders. And so this is why I got that. And she said, I contribute the same amount. It turned out that she and her husband contribute some $6,000 each year to charity. Years and get matching contributions from their employers. And I was thinking, wow, I must have taught something good to my daughter, because in the very early days when she was little, she would contribute to say to Nami with money that we gave her, okay? And then she stopped using our money to contribute, and she contributed hers. And so that really warms daddy's heart, that really, that really is the thing. So, you know, I reduce my wealth, of course, when I contribute money, but I surely increase my well being by more than I reduce my financial well being. This

  Sonya Lutter 55:58

  has been highly entertaining and informative, Mayor, and we always end the show with two questions, and I prompted you with them before we started. And I'm going to let you get by without answering the question about how you build moments of authenticity into your life. But the reality is, you've already answered that question, and I will give a really quick story myself, and I swear you must have read my commencement speech that I gave multiple years ago at Kansas State University, because we're using the exact same language. And I talked about, sometimes I'm Dr Luter and sometimes I'm mom, and sometimes I'm wife, but I'm always just Sonia, and you said those exact words, and from your language as well, that you are a husband, a father and a professor, and you do what's right for you. And that's also a phrase I used in my speech, and I think right there is the epitome of living authentically, that you are being yourself in all of these various scenarios. So we'll skip that question, but I still want to know what book you're reading right now.

  Meir Statman 57:11

  So I mentioned quickly two books that I've read recently. One is called the streets of gold, and it is by two academic researchers who followed using a census reports immigrants from a century ago and more. And what they found was that the story of a people who come very poor and then get to be very wealthy is really rare. The first generation are people who make it you know, that is who if they were manual laborers, they they might be moving up a bit, but not a whole lot. But their children, their children, are doing much better than children of natives who have the same income or family of parents, and so the concern about about today's immigration are are exaggerated. There. They are not going to be professors, but their kids are likely to be professors and physicians and lawyers and military people in whatever other avenues of life they are going but I also know from from research that those opposition to immigration has always been part of the United States. That is what caused the the immigration laws of the 1920s that established quotas by countries that were really designed to exclude Jews and Catholics from from the United States, and you see this animosity towards immigrants today. And the other book is called we've got you covered. It's also by two academics, and it really takes a very innovative approach to medicine. You know, it's not medical insurance, it's about medicine. And what they're saying is that you have to have a system whereby basic medical services are covered from payroll. Taxes. And then people can buy additional things by whatever income they have. And, you know, for an economist, and they are economists, some of the those things are kind of surprising. You know that they, for example, co pays. You know, co pays reduce visits to to physicians, because I still have to pay $20 when I go. But they say, you know, with all the bureaucracy that is involved here, it may no makes no sense. Why don't we get rid of those co pays and let people just go? Yeah, they're going to go to their physician more than with co pays. But so what? I love them and and I love this notion of basic medical needs in Israel, for example, are familiar with there is a basket of medicines that are covered, but not everything is covered. And so they do kind of a cost benefit analysis. They say this medicine does not add that much relative to what we had for much less money, so we are going to exclude that people can buy it, but not as part of that insurance program. This makes a lot more sense than than the system where we have in the United States, where if the FDA approved it, then Medicare must provide it, even if it costs millions and extends life, on average by by two weeks or something like that. And so these are kind of innovative approaches that really informed me, and in many ways, it touched me.

  Wes Brown 1:02:07

  I love it, Mayor, thank you so much. You're, you know, in addition, like, like your book, a wealth of well being, your wealth of knowledge and kind of an amazing resource on a number of fronts, thanks again for your time today. Really enjoyed the conversation.

  Meir Statman 1:02:23

  So did I good? Be with you. It's Sonia, and Wes

  Wes Brown 1:02:29

  you as well. Talk to you soon. Bye.