Wild Problems

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From the host of EconTalk, a guide to navigating life's most perplexing questionsTo be a modern person is to measure and optimize. You track your sleep, your diet, your moods, your mindfulness, your workouts. Algorithms crunch the data and tell you what route to take, what books to buy, what music to listen to, and who to date--often with great results. But what do you do when you face questions of life--who to marry, whether to have children, where to move, how to forge a life well-lived--that resist this approach? For these questions, the important things are hard to measure, and the measurable things are misleading.In Wild Problems, Russ Roberts walks readers through the process of decision-making when our usual tools can't help us. He shows how to reframe the scary questions to be less about finding the "right" answer and more about answering "who do I want to be?" He draws on stories of great artists, writers, and scientists of the past who found creative ways of answering that question. And he suggests strategies for reducing the fear and the loss of control that inevitably come when a wild problem asks us to take a leap in the dark.Ultimately, Roberts asks us to see ourselves and our lives less as a problem to be solved than a mystery to be experienced. We can't control the future, but we can control what kind of person we become. Working on ourselves and how we see ourselves might be a better way to face wild problems than trying to make perfect decisions in the face of uncertainty.Realizing that there is nothing measurable that can help can lead to despair. But it can also liberate us. There is no right decision waiting to be uncovered by an app. Reality is harder than that and perhaps, a little more interesting.