Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Today's January 8, 2020, and my guest is economist, author and investor, Richard Rob.

He is CEO of Christopherson Rob and company, a New York and London-based fund management company

that invests in risk-sharing transactions with European banks.

He's also a professor of professional practice at Columbia School of International and Public Affairs.

He holds a PhD in economics as do I from the University of Chicago.

He's the author of Willful, How We Choose What To Do, which is the topic of today's conversation, Richard, welcome to Econ Talk.

Great to be here, Russ.

How do we choose what to do? Your book is a really beautiful, fascinating, deep dive into what motivates us, what explains our behavior,

and you contrast what you call purposeful behavior with behavior that's for itself. Talk about that distinction.

Yeah. Purposeful behavior is encompasses what we learned back at University of Chicago, what we believed,

and what we both believed in varying degrees still to this day.

And purposeful choice, as I define it, are the types of choices we make when we can compare one thing to another,

decide which we like more. We know enough about the world that maybe not have perfect certainty,

but we know enough to know which options we would rank higher than the others.

We have resources at our disposal, and then we seek to choose what's best we act with the purpose in that sense.

So life is a big project to try to satisfy our desires as best I can, the best we can with the information and resources at hand.

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