The Self, the Crowd, and Social Contagion (with Luke Burgis)

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🗓️ 8 June 2026

⏱️ 71 minutes

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Summary

Finding community can be difficult. But author Luke Burgis thinks the real challenge begins once we've found it and we're subject to social pressures to conform. Listen as Burgis and EconTalk's Russ Roberts trace the tension between individuals and their tribes through the foundational frameworks, such as family and school, that help forge our identities. Burgis argues that the disappearance of traditional rites of passage bodes ill for major life commitments such as marriage, and recounts his personal journey from Wall Street through the Great Books in search of a strong, differentiated self. He also draws lessons for today's communities from Saint Benedict's 1,500-year-old guide for monastic life and describes the moving ritual he practiced with his father before he died.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org.
0:30.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.6	Today is April 28, 26.
0:39.3	And my guest is author Luke Burgess.
0:41.7	His latest book is The One and the 99, Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion.
0:48.4	And that is our subject for today.
0:50.3	Luke, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:52.5	Good to be with you.
0:53.2	Thanks for us.
0:53.8	Let's talk about the title. What is the one and the 99?
0:58.4	The one is the self, the I, the subject, you and I, as we exist as individuals.
1:07.1	And the 99, you could think of as the crowd, the many, everybody else, the group that we're a part of.
1:14.8	So this dichotomy between self and crowd has been something I've been thinking about for well over a decade.
1:22.3	The title comes most explicitly from the parable of the lost sheep in the Bible, where Jesus tells a story
1:30.0	that's familiar to many people. But he says, strangely, which of you having 100 sheep and losing one
1:38.1	would not go in search of the one, would not leave the 99 and go in search of the one?
1:46.7	And I've heard it for almost my whole life. It's always been something that has bothered me about it in some way. You know,
1:53.0	from an economic standpoint, you know, really we're going to put the 99% at risk to preserve
	...

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