Todd Buchholz on Competition, Stress, and the Rat Race

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🗓️ 13 June 2011

⏱️ 60 minutes

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Summary

Todd Buchholz, author of Rush: Why You Need and Love the Rat Race, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in the book. Buchholz argues that competition and striving for excellence is part of our evolutionary inheritance. He criticizes attempts to remake human beings into gentle creatures who long to return to an Eden-like serenity. He argues that it is action, creativity, and planning for the future that makes us happy. The discussion includes the implications of our interest in the future for theater and story-telling.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	other information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you. Today is June 6, 2011, and my guest is Todd Buckholz. His latest
0:43.4	book is Rush. Why you need and love the rat race. Todd, welcome to Econ Talk. Good to be with
0:49.8	you, Russ. Todd, your book is a slap in the face to most self-help books, and it's a fascinating
0:58.6	read, very contrarian, could only have been written by an economist. And you start by attacking
1:04.9	the idea that many people hold as a utopia and ideal, which is we need to get back to the
1:12.1	Garden of Eden or something like it. What's wrong with Eden? Well, Eden was a great place
1:18.2	for what I've read thousands of years ago. Of course, it was lush, and Adam and Eve didn't
1:26.6	have to work, and the fruit was there for the pickings, if you're willing to take a chance.
1:32.9	But we can't go back there anymore. Humans have evolved since then. Our expectations have
1:38.7	evolved. Our brains, our psychological makeup has evolved. And while Eden and Paradise still
1:46.7	has this captivating aspect to it that attracts people throughout the world, throughout cultures,
1:53.5	they may not call it Eden, but the same idea of some Paradise. It's just not something we're going
1:57.9	to find in our lives. And the idea of changing public policy in order to create Eden, in order
2:06.0	to stomp out competition strikes me as a pretty reckless way to run one's life or to run
2:12.1	an economy. But it's a very commonly held view, particularly among many economists, that
2:19.6	competition's destructive inequality is harmful, and the ideal. We may not get there, like you say,
2:27.2	we may not literally be able to go back there, but that's what we ought to be striving for. And you
2:32.4	don't even agree with that. You know, there were simpler days, not all that long ago, we could go
	...

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