GDP Was Never Going to Make You Happy

Summary

Optimist Economy Podcast

Episode: GDP Was Never Going to Make You Happy

Hosts: Kathryn Anne Edwards and Robin Rauzi
Date: August 19, 2025

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Overview

In this episode, Kathryn and Robin dive deep into the limitations of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of economic health and national well-being. They discuss the history and purpose of GDP, why it fails to capture important aspects like happiness and inequality, the origins of other key statistics (like the poverty line), and the possibilities for more nuanced economic metrics. Throughout, the hosts maintain their signature blend of humor, candor, and optimism, even while acknowledging the challenges of changing economic narratives and measurement tools.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Announcements & Listener Feedback

• The show accidentally aired some paid advertisements, earning exactly $7.25 — the U.S. minimum wage.
• Listeners are encouraged to share amusing ad experiences and economic worries via email.
• Notable listener review: "This show is a chaotic mess," which hosts found funny and fitting.

2. Setting the Stage: Happiness & Mental Health Trends

• Robin shares recent data: Mental health among young Americans, especially women, has markedly declined since a decade ago, per Gallup polling.
  • Only 15% of women aged 18–29 now report excellent mental health, down from 48% (02:11).
• The show contextualizes the social narrative about "boys and men in crisis," critiquing how various problems (like housing) are recast to center this demographic, sometimes to the detriment of real solutions.

Notable Quote

"It was a bit of an infuriating article… It does a disservice to that population to be like, oh, actually, it's housing, or like, actually, it's this. And it's just erasing the people who are actually suffering to pick your issue and give it to boys and men."
— Kathryn (03:43)

3. Terms & Etymology: ‘Armchair’ and ‘Eudaimonia’

• Kathryn and Robin discuss the etymology of "armchair" as a descriptor for amateur expertise and reflect on "eudaimonia" (human flourishing), which sets up the episode’s central theme: The limits of GDP in capturing well-being.
  • "Eudaimonia is often a synonym for happiness… a condition of human flourishing or well-being overall." — Robin (07:21)

Memorable Concept

"GDP is not going to do a good job of getting that [eudaimonia]."
— Kathryn (07:31)

4. GDP: What Is It, and Why Do We Use It?

The Formula and Its Context

• GDP Formula: C + G + I + Xₙ (Consumption + Government + Investment + Net Exports)
  • "It is the measure. Gross Domestic Product, AKA it’s not a straw man. Is not a straw man." — Kathryn (10:05)
• GDP's role as the "big measure" of an economy, despite many unaccounted dimensions (environmental degradation, unpaid work, quality of life).
  • Example: A living tree has no GDP value until cut and sold.

Historical Evolution

• Originated in response to the Great Depression; formalized by Simon Kuznets in the 1930s to help measure the economy and guide government spending, especially during WWII.
• Originally conceived as a retrospective tool for understanding economic growth, not as a normative measure for national welfare.

Notable Quote

"The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income."
— Kuznets (quoted by Kathryn, 20:59)

5. GDP’s Shortcomings and Policy Implications

• GDP emphasizes growth and consumption, incentivizing new purchases over longevity and sustainability.
• Fails to measure:
  • Inequality
  • Environmental costs
  • Non-market (unpaid) labor, such as childcare or home-cooked meals
• Policymakers and the media often focus on topline GDP growth, obscuring underlying issues like uneven distribution (e.g., K-shaped recoveries) and who benefits from consumption.

Notable Exchange

"It has a purpose. Like, it's very useful in saying things like the economy is slowing down..."
— Kathryn (24:16)
"But the top line number... tends to be what influences policymakers the most, is the top line number."
— Kathryn (28:33)

6. Numbers, Averages, and Individual Experience

• Statistical averages like unemployment or GDP often fail to reflect individual or subgroup experiences (e.g., Black women’s unemployment).
• Public mistrust in ‘big numbers’ fuels skepticism and alternate economic narratives (from social media 'hack economists', etc.).

Notable Quote

"Averages don't predict individual experiences and individual experiences don't negate the average. And that is one of the hardest concepts for people to understand."
— Kathryn (31:42)

7. Alternative Approaches: Happiness & the Poverty Line

Happiness Metrics

• The U.S. has slid in international happiness rankings, now at 24th (from 11th in 2012).
• Stark generational divides: Over-60s are in the global top ten for happiness; under-30s aren’t even in the top 60.
• Question raised: Can (or should) we prioritize alternative measures (well-being, health, life satisfaction) alongside GDP?

Origins of the U.S. Poverty Measure

• The official poverty line, designed in the 1960s, was based on a formula by Molly Orshansky: 3x the minimum food budget, using a 1955 survey.
• Supplementary Poverty Measure (SPM) was developed to reflect a fuller range of resources (cash, food stamps, cost of living, etc.), showing the U.S. is capable of evolving its statistics.

Notable Story

"We have the ability and have demonstrated previously in this country to understand that a statistic sucks... and to do something better."
— Kathryn (40:05)

8. Why Change is Hard (But Possible): Statistical Institutions

• Institutional inertia, funding challenges, and lack of political champions for statistical agencies (like BLS) make reform difficult.
• Recent political attacks on agencies may paradoxically spark new support, paving the way for a "renaissance of the statistical agencies."
  • "I've never seen so many things come together that could lead to big, beautiful bls. One big, beautiful statistical agency." — Kathryn (45:30)

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

• On GDP and Measurement:

  • "GDP is vitally important, but it's just, it's not everything." — Kathryn (21:17)
  • "This hold that GDP has on our economic well being… it's maybe gotten too big for its own britches. That's a technical economic term, listeners." — Kathryn (21:26)

• On Household Perspective:

  • "When you have money, there’s no recession, there’s no inflation spike. It just, it doesn’t touch you." — Kathryn (26:18)
  • "And that creates a K in our economy, and we have a K shaped recovery… my name starts with a K and I feel like it’s a pretty cool letter, but like it doesn’t actually have that many great things associated with it." — Kathryn (26:26)

• On Statistical Change:

  • "You can apply pressure. You can have this thing adopted, it's published alongside. And the supplemental poverty measure is very useful…" — Kathryn (39:40)
  • "For people who look at something like GDP and, and feel just like, God, this is just like grinding us down… we could come up with another measure of GDP or like alternative gdp. New Zealand's done this." — Kathryn (42:52)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Mental Health Data & Gender Gaps | 02:11–04:41
• Discussion on 'Armchair' & 'Eudaimonia' | 05:02–07:36
• GDP Formula & Its Flaws | 10:03–12:53
• History: Simon Kuznets and the Origin of GDP | 13:10–19:15
• Sectoral Analysis & GDP Use Today | 19:15–20:59
• GDP’s Lack of Well-being Data & Policy Effects | 21:17–29:10
• Happiness Rankings & Generational Data | 30:08–31:28
• Statistics, Trust & Misunderstandings | 31:42–33:27
• Poverty Line Origins & Supplementary Measure | 35:18–42:01
• Statistical Agency Modernization & Political Will | 42:52–46:06

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Final Sections: Lighthearted Closer

Executive Orders Segment (46:10+)

• Listener Jeff suggests: Anyone in Congress wanting to cut national park funding must hike the hardest trail in it before voting (46:27).
  • Immediate enthusiastic endorsement from Kathryn and Robin, sparking jokes about congressional fitness.
• Kathryn proposes sports stadium "mean section" for those who yell or boo, or perhaps a quiet section akin to an Amtrak quiet car (48:27).

Spiritual Sponsors (51:18+)

• Jeremy from Wisconsin is a new supporter, appreciating the show for making him reflect and pause.
• Robin names the LA Farmers’ Market as her spirit-lifting spiritual sponsor.
• Kathryn celebrates live oak trees near her new home in Houston.

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Tone & Style

The episode features the hosts' trademark warmth, wit, and deep expertise. Kathryn’s sharp economic insight is tempered with humor, while Robin offers relatable, audience-minded analogies and pithy comments. The conversational style swings between focused explanation, playful banter, and intimate asides, making complex topics engaging for listeners at any level of economic literacy.

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Conclusion

This episode of Optimist Economy goes far beyond the technicalities of GDP, offering a thoughtful critique of what we measure and why it matters. With historical storytelling, practical examples, and moments of levity, Robin and Kathryn challenge listeners to imagine a future where our economic metrics better reflect true well-being and flourishing — and where citizens care enough to demand it.

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Transcript

[Robin]

Foreign.

[Katherine]

Hello, and welcome to Optimist Economy. I'm Katherine.

[Robin]

And I'm Robin.

[Katherine]

On this show, we believe the US Economy can be better. And we talk about how to get there one problem and solution at a time.

[Robin]

At the top of the show, we like to do a few little announcements. First of all, hey, we've been messing around with paid advertising to see if that would work on our platform, and I accidentally turned it on. So if you got a. An ad for the Beef Council or zip recruiter, my bad.

[Katherine]

But if you got an ad for Starbucks, please let us know. Amazon, Starbucks, Amazon. The Bezos family. Like, if you got an ad that's actually funny, like, please write in and let us know. It was only on. It was at the back end.

[Robin]

At the very, very end.

[Katherine]

Very, very end. So it's also. This is a measure that you are truly a devoted listener. Cause it came on after we snap out Andy and Sophie. But the Beef Council. Great. I got ZipRecruiter.

[Robin]

Oh, and we found out that we earned $7.25. The minimum wage.

[Katherine]

Exactly the exact minimum wage is what we earned from accidentally putting on ads. I can't. Oh, seven. If it had been 726, it would have been worse. The fact it was 725 was just, ugh, Chef's kiss.

[Robin]

Perfect.

[Katherine]

Yeah, totally perfect. And then also the usual announcements about how we need money. It's either these awkward calls for money or ads from the Beef Council. Like, you tell us what you want, but we have a website, optimisteconomy.com. we will take your money in any way we can find ourselves capable of actually accepting it, which has been a struggle these many months. And we have an email, optimist.eacreymmail.com we love to hear from you. We also really, really love, really love your reviews. My favorite one from this past week was just, this show is a chaotic mess.

[Robin]

Really? You didn't like, your gays are listening.

[Katherine]

Oh, and your gays are listening. Yeah, the gays are listening. That I loved. But the chaotic mess, I was like.

[Robin]

Yeah, you don't know. You have no idea.

[Katherine]

All right, so retcon.

[Robin]

One of the things that I. Because of the topic that's coming up that I was looking into, I don't know, spoiler alert. We're going to talk about happiness. And some of the data that I was looking at suggests that actually, in terms of feeling like their mental health is good, women are actually suffering from this way worse than men right now. We'll talk a little bit more in detail about this, but 24% of 18 to 29 year olds report excellent mental health. And it's only 15% of women in that age group. And a decade ago, that was 48%. This is Gallup polling.

[Katherine]

Something I didn't say very clearly in the show is that there is a difference between a boy problem and a problem that boys are among the affected or amendment or disproportionately affected. There was an op ed that came out after we recorded the show from Rahm Emanuel in the Washington Post that said, like, the housing crisis is driving the boys and men crisis and how not being able to afford a home is something that hits young men particularly hard. And I.

[Robin]

But it was also, if we want to address the crisis that boys are facing, because that's so important, we need to fix the housing crisis. And I just like, who edited this?

[Katherine]

I think I was like, oh, okay. So like, to make any problem relevant, we're just going to like, throw boys and men on it.

[Robin]

Like, and you're going to mention Richard Reeves.

[Katherine]

Yeah. Like, here's Richard Reeves, here's the Boys and men Institute and triangulate with your problem. Yeah. Now housing is a boy's problem and now this. And it felt like, oh, God, it was infuriating. It was a bit of an infuriating article. But I think what his op ed in some ways solidified to me about this whole conversation is how much the actual problems of boys and men are going to be erased by the bandwagon of saying a problem is about boys and men. And it does a disservice to that population to be like, oh, actually it's housing, or like, actually it's this. And it's just. Just erasing the people who are actually suffering to pick your issue and give it to boys and men and say, oh, this is another boys and men issue. And I was like, yep, okay.

[Robin]

Yeah.

[Katherine]

Because if we fixed housing, labor force participation would turn around and, like, all these problems with disability would go away. Oh, yeah. And so would the, you know, difficulty in finding a job if you have a felony record. Like, as long as, you know, fentanyl.

[Robin]

Crisis would be gone.

[Katherine]

Yeah. As long as, you know that there's a house you could afford one day. The fact that you don't have a job to get you there. Like, it just, it was.

[Robin]

It's jump the shark as a conversation framing device.

[Katherine]

Well, that actually goes. Is pretty close to my term and condition.

[Robin]

Okay. Terms and conditions.

[Katherine]

Terms and conditions is our next pilcrow. And you're not gonna let that go, are you? The Pilcrow? I don't think so. I don't think so. You can ask my family if I ever let things go. And they'll let you know the first time I do hasn't happened yet. My sister's gonna write in and be like, you have no idea what I suffer. So I looked up a little unsuccessfully, because I don't have a room full of the OED in my house. But I tried to look up where armchair came from as a descriptor of someone who's not an expert talking as if they're an expert.

[Robin]

Oh, uh huh.

[Katherine]

And we use armchair quarterback. Yeah, there's armchair psychologists, the armchair experts. What the OED told me before the paywall came up was that it started in the early 1800s as an armchair traveler.

[Robin]

Oh.

[Katherine]

Of someone who spoke about other places but who had never been there, and they were just reading about it from the comfort of their armchair. And that was its first use. It's something that we all know, but I wanted to see if there was. Anyway, I didn't get to find anything out because I don't have a subscription to the oed. And free etymology is really. It's really shady. It's hard to know what to trust. Anyway, without more OED exposition, all I have is the first armchair was the armchair traveler. What did you look up?

[Robin]

So, first of all, I just need to tell you why I looked this up, which is I was on social media and I saw a post from a woman I know. I run this writing program and a lot of the people who've done it many times over the years were friends on social media. And so one who is a really interesting woman who's a poet and mathematician posted that she had almost made this word in Scrabble, but she was missing an M and the word was eudaimonia. And that's E U D E M O N I A. And she said, I would have been so happy to make the word eudaimonia if I'd had an M. And it's because eudaimonia is often a synonym for happiness, though it comes out of Aristotelian ethics, which is it's a condition of human flourishing or well being overall.

[Katherine]

Eudaimonia.

[Robin]

Eudaimonia, often also used as eudaimonic or eudaimonic.

[Katherine]

I love it. Eudaimonia, human flourishing.

[Robin]

Very, very Aristotelian.

[Katherine]

What an incredible concept. That GDP is not going to do a good job of getting that.

[Robin]

So for the middle of Our show.

[Katherine]

For the Middle Pilcrow, the biggest Pilcrow. These conversations tend to have a couple different kind of flavors of like, is it exposition? Or am I trying to pitch something to Robin? Is Robin trying to pitch something to me of, like, how do we talk about these things that we know about, but we don't know about? And today we wanted to talk about gross domestic product and happiness.

[Robin]

It's funny to me because when we discussed this last week, you were like, oh, yeah, we can do this next week. Like, you just seemed ready to go.

[Katherine]

Oh, I'm totally ready to go. Yeah, I'm ready right now. I was like, we gotta record today.

[Robin]

But this came up for a couple of reasons. One was somebody posted in our substack chat about just asking, what if instead of GDP or other traditional economic indicators, what if those are basically, what if those are the wrong approach? What if we looked at metrics that are tied to quality of life and that could be happiness? Well, being mental and physical health, access to nature. Then somebody who's actually a PhD economist replied and said that he agreed that our macro measures are all wrong in terms of telling us how society's doing, but also pointed out we pay attention to what we measure, and until we measure well being, our economy won't necessarily improve in any substantive way. I thought, well, if I've learned nothing else in talking to Catherine over the years is that we measure a lot. If you want to know something around the US economy, but just also US Population, we have a lot of measures. Part of me thought, well, maybe there's actually some combination of measures that are out there, but also whether GDP serves a particular purpose, because at least in developing countries, you can talk all you want about happiness, but at the end of the day, it tends to track with GDP per capita up to a point.

[Katherine]

Up to a point. So when Robin was like, should we do something about GDP being a bad measure? I was like, I'm ready.

[Robin]

Oh, I see. It wasn't the happiness angle. It was gdp.

[Katherine]

But happiness is one of many things that GDP doesn't have any account for. It doesn't measure environmental degradation. Yeah, any measure of quality of life, it doesn't get at happiness. It doesn't get at the fact that, like, some people do things inside their house that they don't sell and they're totally erased from gdp. It's almost as if they don't exist, including everyone who stays at home to raise children first.

[Robin]

Just as a table setting here, like, GDP does seem like the big measure, right?

[Katherine]

It Is the measure.

[Robin]

It is the measure.

[Katherine]

The measure. Gross domestic product, AKA it's not a straw man. Is not a straw man.

[Robin]

I mean, people really. Do they refer to GDP measures over time, like it's the most cited major.

[Katherine]

Economic indicator because it is a measure of the size of an economy. And gross domestic product, three words that mean almost nothing on their own and certainly mean nothing together, but it's really size. Like, how big is the US Economy? The answer is gdp.

[Robin]

Can you remind us what the formula is?

[Katherine]

I feel like you told me it's C +G +X. Sorry, I got so excited.

[Robin]

Oh, man.

[Katherine]

It's C +G +I +X SUB N which is the consumption of households, the consumption of governments, the consumption of business, and X sub N which is your net exports. C + G + I + Xsub N. Households, businesses, government, mutually exclusive and exhaustive agents in our economy. Add in what we send and get from other places and you have the size of the U.S. economy. And, and yeah, I mean, if this number falls, we are almost always in a recession. If this number grows, it means that we think the economy is strong and it's not just what it measures, but how people respond to its performance that influence so much about the economy. And it is truly not doing what it was meant to do. Right now, I think the two biggest complaints about GDP is that it doesn't have any type of indication of inequality and it doesn't have any type of indication of environmental degradation and the use of natural resources. So one way to think about it is a tree in my front yard that I'm looking at right now has no economic value. But if I were to cut it down, cut it down and sell it, it has economic value according to gdp, right? And so it puts a premium on the sale of things and not the existence of things, which for the environment, that's not good. And also, also, if I were to go into my front lawn and like, you know, take the tree and pour acid on it and murder the tree, it wouldn't have any economic consequences even though I've destroyed part of the earth. You know, maybe it only would if I like got someone to come clean it up. And then it'll look great because I've paid someone for a service to clean the tree that I've poisoned and kill and taken it off of my front lawn, right? So it's, it focuses on the end dollar amount. So I think a lot of people could listen to this and be like, well, yeah, so of course it's terrible. Why do we use it at all? Like, and, like, you get this, like, really angry liberal response of, like, because people who have all the money don't care about people at the bottom. And I. I think it's. It's worth going back in history.

[Robin]

What? Yeah.

[Katherine]

To talk about where this came from. Guess how far back we get to go.

[Robin]

Oh, GDP. Okay, okay. I'm gonna say 1885.

[Katherine]

That's actually a little early.

[Robin]

It was just a guess.

[Katherine]

Okay. But there were many panics around that time, which will be useful for this. Like the panic of 1873. So, like, yeah, we could start there. Or probably more importantly, we start in the Great Depression.

[Robin]

Okay. Okay.

[Katherine]

Yeah, Great Depression.

[Robin]

Great Depression.

[Katherine]

So in the 19 teens, at this point, the economics profession is in its infancy.

[Robin]

Right.

[Katherine]

We're barely a profession. The idea that we have economics degrees, it's only something that's like 20 to 30 years old. And we're still trying to make sense of this big thing we call the economy. And what a professor who I think is at Columbia puts forward is the idea that a capitalist economy has to exist in cycles. And he coins the term and develops the whole kind of framework for thinking of the business cycle, which is you grow, that's an expansion, you then contract, that's a recession. And then you recover. And you kind of go through this process of big expansion, short contraction, big expansion, short contraction. He was trying to make sense of what could predict this, what follows this. And for them, almost every contraction they saw was a depression. And this idea that the economy had some kind of like, almost like bloodletting every so often, this became a question of, how do we solve this?

[Robin]

And this is the 19 teens. We're not even.

[Katherine]

This is the 19 teens. And then, of course, in the 20s, everything's awesome, everything's great, everything's perfect. And then, obviously, it comes to a screeching halt. And the screeching halt is induced by lots of problems in the economy that come to the head. Things like speculation in the stock market, things like the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. And not the guy who came up with business cycles, but his student was essentially given the assignment from his mentor and former professor. You know, can we put a set of numbers on the economy to understand what's going on? Because now we're in the middle of the Great Depression, and it's not clear what's working. So in January 1934, this kid posits, and he presents to the Committee on Finance in Congress an account of national income from 1929 to 1932. So his opening line, they don't write reports like this for Congress anymore, is year in, year out, the people of this country, assisted by the stock of goods in their possession, render a vast volume of work toward the satisfaction, satisfaction of their wants. Apparently this Guy had a PhD in economics. I'm like, whoa, man, that was wasted on you. Turn a phrase. But his name is Simon Kuznets. He was born in Russia. He came to the US around the time that the Russian Civil War ended. And he was one of many Russians that flee the country, came to the US got a PhD at Columbia where he worked under Wesley Claire Mitchell, who was the founder of the National Bureau of Economic Research. And he was basically assigned with this idea of like, figure out how we measure the economy. And Kuznets interests have often been speculated about kind of in the years since of like, what was he really trying to do? Because the use of GDP evolved as he developed it. So he came up with the idea of using national income to describe and explain long term trends as well as measure what is going on in the economy as it's coming out of the Depression. And he's doing this kind of in the 30s. Well, he ends up becoming the chief statistician of the Wartime Production Board In World War II, where the question has morphed from, is the U.S. economy coming out of the Great Recession and how can we tell and how can we measure it? To how much money can the US government reasonably spend on wartime production? Like, is there an amount above which we will hurt the economy if we spend too much money?

[Robin]

Mm.

[Katherine]

And though the gdp, like measuring the size and measuring the size across every sector and measuring the size across every component, that became a way of both understanding what was going on in the Depression if we were coming out of it, and then answering questions like, so how much can we sink into World War II funds? Like how. How big can we go in US government spending go. At this point, it's a really like kind of fascinating evolution of what his first statistical proposals are used for. But in the background, what he is more interested in and when World War II is over, what he writes about is how countries continue to grow. So this requires going back to like the Middle Ages, but growth in the economy over millennia can be described as the hockey stick. So like, if you were to look like, here's the year 1000 and here's the year like 1850 and you're looking at nine centuries of human history, the economy is basically an absolute flat line.

[Robin]

Sure, yeah. Yeah.

[Katherine]

Okay. And then we have the industrial revolution.

[Robin]

Yeah.

[Katherine]

And it shoots up.

[Robin]

Sure.

[Katherine]

Now we can look back and say like, oh, it's a hockey stick. Right. The growth took off. Once you had the right things come together in Industrial Revolution, your growth accelerates and you break free from the world in which all of us are poor almost all of the time. But where they were, it felt much more precarious and there was, it felt.

[Robin]

Very much more recent. Yeah.

[Katherine]

And so after the war is done, Kuznets goes writes this like 10 part series on growth. And what he wants to understand is kind of the inter sectoral relationships between the growth of an economy and the growth of a sector. And he puts numbers to that. So he embarks on this project to basically come up with GDP that's comparable, that has all these separate components for countries all over the world as they're growing, as they're basically in the hockey stick. Because he's trying to understand how this growth occurs and if this growth is sustainable. And this is what he wins the Nobel Prize for. So his kind of like retrospective of thinking. Let's look at the basically inter sectoral shifts that happen in an economy as it is growing to understand where growth comes from and how growth can continue.

[Robin]

I'm sorry, can you explain a little bit more about the sectoral growth?

[Katherine]

Like is one industry too big? Is that become a risk to growth? Which is what's like this is what people have said about the health care sector in the US like it's way.

[Robin]

Too big, it's taking away too much of the economy.

[Katherine]

It is way too big. It's way too big of a part of the economy.

[Robin]

Right.

[Katherine]

That we have this like sector that's growing, that's not necessarily adding to productivity or growth or like national well being or anything like that. It's like you could come up with all kinds of reasons, economic and non economic, for being concerned of how much of the US economy rests on its healthcare sector. That was the type of thing he was interested in. If farming becomes more productive and you have all this labor that can be used for other things, like does that mean farming gets smaller? Is really kind of a fascinating look, but it's kind of interesting. To the extent that he was interested in history, he was looking backward, making sense of what had occurred. He wasn't necessarily looking forward. But of course that is exactly how GDP ends up being used.

[Robin]

Right.

[Katherine]

It ends up being used as a way to measure growth. He was coming up with a way.

[Robin]

To understand growth, understand the growth that had happened and it becomes a way of just measuring it going forward.

[Katherine]

Yeah. And so a lot of people will tell you the most pernicious aspect of using GDP as like the most important economic indicator is that you're in a growth chase and you always have to be growing and that economies and governments are basically always trying to chase what will make their economy bigger, because that's what GDP is measuring, getting bigger or smaller. But for the record, in his 1934 report, he said the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.

[Robin]

So that is how he saw this ever being used. I don't know that it is used. I think that the question is whether we so prioritize economic growth that we kind of our eye isn't on the, isn't on these other things that we need to be paying attention to in terms of national policy priorities.

[Katherine]

The priority has been growth for so long in the maintenance of GDP and coming up with a way of monitoring the strength of the US Economy that devalues this focus on growth. It's going to be tough. I mean, it's not to say we can't do it, but it's just, it's going to be tough. And this, this hold that GDP has on our economic well being, I think it's, I mean, I think GDP is vitally important, but it's just, it's not everything. And we talk so much on the show about how policies have trade offs. Well, measurements have trade offs too. And this is a trade off to focusing on gdp. It doesn't mean that it doesn't have a role. It just means it might have gotten maybe too big for its own britches. That's a technical economic term, listeners. And if that's confusing for you, you let me know.

[Robin]

Can you, you just said that American policy prioritizes GDP growth and economic growth. Can you talk about some ways that it does that? What policies do we see that in?

[Katherine]

Oh man, this is getting into macroeconomics, which is, I'm not going to say it's voodoo economics because somebody else used that line, but it's very much like taking like the broadest view of the economy where you're looking at like almost like centuries, but not people.

[Robin]

I mean, I certainly hear it like you people would defend it by saying it will lead to economic growth. I mean, we can agree or disagree about whether that's actually true, but it's an underlying assumption to all that that more economic growth is the goal is good, not just good. Like is the goal is the goal.

[Katherine]

Of we can grow the economy. And so, yeah, I mean, I think if you look at it through, like, eras of thinking about different times, like the US since 1934, when he first introduced the idea of a national income account. If you think of, like, the eras the US Economy has been since then, we had this era of, like, really high growth coming out of World War II, in which we generated a lot of income for the bottom, in which we produced a lot of things. And I think someone would point to, could say something like we seem to have in the US Almost like an obsession with the consumption of new goods, which could, in fact, spur economic growth. To always be consuming things where that's rewarded in the economy as opposed to, like, using things for, like, their most utility in, like, buying a product that you only have to buy once for, like, 50 years, that would be valued less in the economy. Now. It's not like policymakers are sitting down in Congress and are like, buy new things every year. That's the law.

[Robin]

But we've built into a lot to incentivize that.

[Katherine]

We've built into our assessment of economic strength that buying new things is better than using old things because you're chasing growth.

[Robin]

Right, Right.

[Katherine]

It has a purpose. Like, it's very useful in saying things like the economy is slowing down. Like, we just had two GDP reports that came out this year.

[Robin]

Yeah.

[Katherine]

And they were very confounding to a lot of people because the first one was negative and the second one was positive. And so we are worried about the effects that tariffs will have on the economy, but they haven't showed up in GDP growth yet. The first quarter's GDP was a little bit negative, and then the second quarter was positive. It was around 3%. And the average over those six months was just over 1% or 1 1/2 percent. And what something like the National Income Product Accounts and kind of what Kuznets conceived all those decades ago was that you can see what is contributing to this overall number to assess, is the economy actually weak or strong? And in a moment like now where we are worried about the effect of tariffs, GDP has been incredibly insightful because what we've seen is that the big swing in the headline number from negative to positive is being driven by inventories and swings in trade. But when you look at things like are consumers doing as well in terms of spending as much as they did last year? The answer is no. It's slowed down. Business spending has slowed down. Consumer spending has slowed down. And so we're able to Use these components of GDP to understand what's going on in the economy. Like that. I think he would be like, yeah, exactly. That. That's what you. This is what, this is why we have it.

[Robin]

You know, it's interesting because like, I read a lot of those stories when the latest report came out and a few of them were just like, GDP is up. And that's all they're going to say. But other ones would say the overall GDP figure is up. But that's because imports were down. And imports were down because businesses stocked up because they knew the tariffs were coming. So in other words, we're getting kind of a wash between the buying of everything you could and stopping importing because the tariffs are now into effect. My point is, I guess the economists see that, I don't know that the general public sees that, and then you.

[Katherine]

Can keep going from there. I mean, and so we have lower household consumption, right? This is showing a weakness in the economy. And you know, Heather Long from the Washington Post, she just wrote about how that consumption number, if you were to dig there and peel that back, we call this a K. The consumption spending in the US is being maintained by the richest households and they have been unaffected by almost anything that has happened in the economy over the last five years. Yeah, they have money. Like there is no pandemic. When you have money, there's no recession, there's no inflation spike. It just, it doesn't touch you. And there's a lot of them and their spending is fine. And so what she's pointing out is that if you were to drill in on this number, it is showing this overall weakness where you got a lot of households at the bottom kind of falling and then you have households at the top rising. And this creates a K in our economy and we have a K shaped recovery. We were worried about having a K shaped recession. I take like a little umbrage to this because my name starts with a K and I feel like it's a pretty cool letter, but like it doesn't actually have that many great things associated with it. So W, I think I just, every time it came close, it would come right back to W. I'm like, wait, what did you just say? Debya? Yeah, but like this data is helpful, like for what it reveals more than the number itself. And I think the problem that so many people have with GDP is that like you get that number that says 3% growth in the US economy in the second quarter and you don't get the same type of emphasis on Y', all, our economy is being held up by a small set of rich people who are spending like gangbusters and the rest of us are struggling, right? And that there's no measure for. How good is that number? Like, what is the quality of that number? And in the 34 report, he says, like, this is quantity, not quality. And he got criticized for not including any type of household production, which is what we would call people who were cleaning in your house, making your own food, or, you know, raising children at home. They don't enter GDP at all. And he's like, I know it's a problem, you know, and it was something that he could recognize as a shortcoming. But we don't lead with that shortcoming now. And it's a very, I don't know.

[Robin]

It'S, it's kind of a blunt instrument that serves a certain purpose.

[Katherine]

And maybe it's like the Swiss army knife that you've only ever used one tool. Let that sit, let that sit. Like, let that ping pong that one to see if you like it. Because there's a lot we can learn from GDP that's not just top line number. The top line number, but that tends to be what influences policymakers the most, is the top line number. And not everything that's not in the Swiss army knife of the, like, the hook.

[Robin]

I think about this with the tariffs, right? Like, tariffs are going to drive down imports and that is going to lead to GDP growth. But it's sort of a cooked books number way to do it.

[Katherine]

It's juicing it, for sure.

[Robin]

It's juicing it. Yeah.

[Katherine]

It's a big juice. So I would say that there's many numbers like GDP because it's like the big number. It's the most important one it makes sense to talk about. But there's a lot of numbers in the economy that have this type of problem. You know, it's not used necessarily in the way that it's intended. It's often misinterpreted. And this kind of goes back to my term and condition of armchair. Once people find the flaw in it, they're like, in the economics profession is a lie. I don't know.

[Robin]

Yeah, yeah.

[Katherine]

The number of times I've, I've been in a setting where someone has been like, you know, GDP doesn't measure quality of life. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I know. Yeah, I know. But like, it's almost like once you find out anything bad about an economic statistic, people will immediately disregard it, instead adopt it almost as like a conspiracy of how economists are trying to ruin the economy.

[Robin]

I did want to point out there's this state of happiness, the World Happiness Report. Are you familiar with this? So it's done by people at a couple of different institutes, but based a lot on surveys, global surveys done by Gallup. And what we could see really starkly is that in 2012 the US was number 11 on the list of happiest countries. And in 2025, we're number 24 on that list. And they kind of have a sort of a. Again, are you thriving? Right. 55% or more of Americans were thriving in this sort of 2015-19 period in our sort of post pandemic. Now it's down to 52.1%. These are self reported numbers based on surveys of about a thousand people. They're not perfect. But I think the other thing that was really striking to me and related a little bit to the boys episode and also our talk about poverty, if people over 60 in the US were their own country, they'd be number 10 in terms of happiness ranking in the world. If you are under 30, you're not even in the top 60. Young people are having sort of their own sort of midlife crisis in their 20s. And so when you hear the economy's great, the job, unemployment is low, that leads exactly to the disconnect that you're talking about, I think.

[Katherine]

Yeah.

[Robin]

And they aren't is loneliness and is mental health and all this. Are those related to the economy? Not necessarily, but people feel this tension. And if the economy gets better or if the economy is still good, it's not helping them.

[Katherine]

I wrote a piece about this a year or so ago where I point out that averages don't predict individual experiences and individual experiences don't negate the average. And that is one of the hardest concepts for people to understand that if we say the unemployment rate is 4.2%, we don't mean that the labor market is strong for everybody. We mean that on average the labor market is doing well, but then people don't have a job or they're having a hard time finding a job. And like now the unemployment rate has to be a lie.

[Robin]

What's happened with black women's unemployment in the calendar year so far is sort of staggering. And if you were a black woman and you knew a lot of black women, your perception of unemployment would be really at odds with what you're hearing in those unemployment numbers.

[Katherine]

Yeah, I mean, it's a confluence of a lot of things and you Know, the, like, siloing of American society into people that look and have. Look like you and have your same, like, class in income and education and the kind of distrust of a lot of voices in our economy and the rise of alternative voices, like hack economist on TikTok. But that people look for their own truth and that jeopardizes a lot. And it's funny, I find myself in the position of defending a statistic that I think, like, mostly it's like, fine at best. It's not like I'm sitting here with like a GDP tattoo of like, it's cgi. You know, I did. That's not how I feel. I'm kind of like, yeah. I mean, this is like, fine, maybe it was definitely more useful in earlier time periods. We put too much emphasis on it now. But like, you end up being in this position of, like, but that doesn't mean it's a lie.

[Robin]

Well, and I think that leads to me, to the. Also the question of, like, if we measured other things. And some of these things. We do. I'm sure we do. I don't know. We probably have health statistics, we have educational statistics, like, whatever. We think that could be other measures of human thriving. Of Eudaimonia. That's right. Used it in a sentence. That how those things become policy or how we alter policy. And especially because some of these are on timelines that are not quarterly, they're not annual. Like, how do we say investing in children is going to be good for our national happiness Dashboard figures? You just. You gotta wait a couple generations.

[Katherine]

Yeah. You have to. Children are like, God, such a loss. There's no return on them until, like, at least 35. They just eat money. I can't get my kid to eat breakfast, but I'm sure if I put a pile of cash in front of her, she'd figure out how to destroy it. So there. I think there's more. I think there's optimism there and that there's more salience for your skepticism of the big numbers then you probably realize.

[Robin]

Yeah.

[Katherine]

And that lots of people in power do not like the just, like, ironclad grip that GDP has on the US Economy in terms of performance. And we have lots of ways of measuring something more nuanced, but it doesn't necessarily, like, move on for that. But I do think I have an optimist story from this.

[Robin]

You do.

[Katherine]

Okay, so Kuznets from Russia comes up with GDP and after World War II, it gets adopted. And it's far beyond what he originally attended. And he Was never enthusiastic. He never said it was, like, as good as people said. And he had always warmed from the beginning, like, this is not like an Inigo. What is the. What is it? Is it Inigo Montoya? Like, you use the word all the time. I don't think you mean it means what you think it means. Oh, yeah.

[Robin]

Inconceivable.

[Katherine]

Yeah, Inconceivable. Yeah. I think he had that. A little bit of Inigo Montoya warning of, like, I don't know if you know what GDP really means or what it's measuring. Very similar story in relationship to poverty. So how do we measure poverty in the U.S. we said in our poverty episode, you just have cash that falls under a threshold under which we're poor. So where does that threshold come from? It actually comes from a researcher at the Census Bureau named Molly Orshansky. When you have Social Security benefits, they're automatically adjusted for inflation every year. We didn't always do it that way. We've only been doing that since the 70s when Social Security was started. You got a benefit based on your retirement, and you had to wait for Congress to say, we're going to increase every Social Security benefit by like, X percent this year. It took an act of Congress to increase Social Security benefits. Well, you could see why this might end up a disaster.

[Robin]

Yeah.

[Katherine]

So in the 1960s, there were members of Congress that were like, we have no idea if Social Security's benefits are good enough. Are like, are they high enough? Are they reasonable enough? So a researcher, you know, at the Census Bureau was asked, like, can you come up with a measure of what is enough?

[Robin]

What's enough to live on?

[Katherine]

Yeah, what's enough to live on? In 1955, there had been a survey on consumption of how much money people actually spend in various things of their. In various aspects of their life. And what she noticed was that it was a pretty consistent finding that about a third of all household budgets went to food. If people consistently spend a third of their money on food, the amount they need is three times food. She was like, all right, if we have this measure of, like, what is a minimum cost of food? And here's a food plan to help people who don't have that much money afford a reasonable amount of food, and we know that food is a third, we can come up with a measure of deprivation. So she does three times the food budget. She comes up with a dollar amount. She adjusts it based on the number of people in the household and how old and young they are because they consume different amounts of food. And then she comes up with a measure of, here's how many people fall above or below this, and this is the reasonable amount.

[Robin]

And is that. And is that what we call the poverty line or the poverty threshold?

[Katherine]

Yes, although it takes a while to get there. Then the war on poverty begins. She's not part of the brain trust of Johnson's war on poverty, but they need to come up with a poverty number, and they've read her report, so they pick it up and they use it.

[Robin]

Oh.

[Katherine]

And that is how the US poverty line was defined. It was a 1955 survey that found a third of budget went to food. It was put with 1952. It was adjusted for inflation every year since. And that is where our poverty measure comes from.

[Robin]

Huh?

[Katherine]

I mean, almost as soon as the poverty measure is adopted, it becomes problematic. The only reason why it's so entrenched is that it's eroded over time and it keeps, like, maybe fewer people eligible for public programs than there would be otherwise.

[Robin]

No, I mean, probably true, but, like, you know.

[Katherine]

Well, no one wants to say they were in charge of increasing poverty, but in the 90s, there was, like, this really groundswell of, like, you have to fix this like this. This measure is terrible. And she would be like, word.

[Robin]

Yeah.

[Katherine]

Clinton was kind of moving forward on coming up with a different measure of poverty. Bush, you know, did not move it forward at all, although he did do a lot for public programs. I think people don't know that he did. He championed snap. He oversaw the. The change of benefits so that you went from paper to an ATM debit card. But Obama kicked this back off and was like, get me a new poverty measure. And this is where the supplemental poverty measure comes from, where we actually have a government agency that publishes two poverty numbers right next to each other. One of them, the official measure, which is Orshansky's. So some people call the OPM the official poverty measure, but some people call it the Orshansky poverty measure, even though she wouldn't necessarily like it. The supplemental poverty measure is produced right alongside it. And this one is like, you know what we should do? We should take into account all the things that people actually spend money on today. And similarly, we should look at all of the resources going into the household.

[Robin]

Not just cash, because it includes things like food stamps, it includes things like housing assistance, maybe it includes the taxes.

[Katherine]

You pay, and it includes health spending. It's a very nuanced measure. I think. Think what makes like, that is the success, right? Like, you can apply Pressure. You can have this thing adopted, it's published alongside. And it. And the supplemental poverty measure is very useful because where we could see the 2021 expanded child tax credit take a lot of kids out of poverty because they didn't technically get cash income, they got a tax credit. So all of that is to say that, that we have the ability and have demonstrated previously in this country to understand that a statistic sucks. There's too much reliance on to do something better. Even the person who invented it was like, this is not great and we can come up with an alternative. I think in poverty's case, the wind out of the sails was that neither side felt vindicated by it. The people who were like, there's not actual poverty. The country is rich and if you took into account all the money you get from food stamps, you wouldn't have as much poverty. Well, that didn't turn out to be true. And then the people on the other side who were like, people are so poor, this measure is not counting correctly. You need to adjust for cost of living across cities. People are going to be really poor. It didn't show up that different. And the rates don't. They're not as far apart, I think, as either side wanted of the people who thought that it was a under measurement of poverty or people who thought it was an over measurement of poverty. We now have this official statistic metric that looks at every component of what makes life hard to afford and tracks it over time and can say, here is what moves people into poverty or here's what moves people out of poverty by this more nuanced measure. And policymaking has greatly benefited from it. So it's a mixed success. And so, yeah, you're going to read in September. So pretty soon we're going to have Poverty Day where the National Poverty estimate is going to be released and you're going to see that first number of the official poverty measure and that will be the headline. But what is going to.

[Robin]

That's going to be the Orshansky number.

[Katherine]

That's going to be the Orshansky number. But the report is going to include both and it's going to talk about both and it's going to show all the weaknesses that come from the other one.

[Robin]

So can we never let go of an old, an old number because we've been tracking it over time and therefore we just need to like have it in perpetuity.

[Katherine]

Well, we do like that. If you have a really long time series, you, it's like, this is a consistent measure which has its own usefulness, but it doesn't necessarily have to be so important. But like, no, okay, so someone could become president and say, like, all right, you guys, we like band Aids coming off. We've had both poverty measures for 10 years now or closer to 15. And like, we're not doing this anymore. The old one, it's now O for old. That is the old poverty measure. We're going with the new one. And what would it require is changing all the federal statutes that rely on the poverty measures. So it would shake up a ton of stuff.

[Robin]

So we have the statistic, but we're not using it.

[Katherine]

Well, there's also no groundswell of support to be like, we need to use this different poverty metric that speaks to all these things. It's also a lot more complicated to produce.

[Robin]

Complicated.

[Katherine]

But they know they can do it. But at the same time, like, for people who look at something like GDP and, and feel just like, God, this is just like grinding us down because there's no, there's no other measure. We could come up with another measure of GDP or like alternative gdp. New Zealand's done this. New Zealand came up with an alternative to gdp and they were like, oh, economy's not as great as we thought. So I, I think, think it would be the good thing to come out of all of the feeling of economic misunderstanding that people have that we were able to develop a better measure. And now some people might be thinking, thank God we just fired the head of the bls because instead of embracing the use of alternative statistics and better measures and more modern measures, Trump has in fact fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for political reasons. And it's part of really a multi fronted attack on all the statistical agencies. So I think your gut reaction would be maybe not now, yeah, we can do it, but we're not gonna. Because of this guy. But I would go back to, to me, this is ultimately an optimistic story because all of those agencies were in trouble. All of those agencies, the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic. All of them had been underfunded. All of them had been. And yeah, struggling to modernize, but didn't have the funds to do it. Like, you know what it takes to develop an alternative measure? Time and money, baby. Like, it's not that complicated. And they got neither. I was doing an interview about the Bureau of Labor Statistics and what it means, and I said, one of the biggest problems that all of the statistical agencies have had is that they've never had a champion like there is no one in Congress who's like, the BLS is. That's one's on me and I'm gonna make sure it's okay. They've never had, people have never cared. Like up until August 1st, did anybody care that the BLS had had 15 years of funding cuts in real terms that left it a shell of its former self and they were doing their best to maintain production under excruciating and intense circumstances. No. But then he fired her and it's like, how dare you. Which is great. Like your knowledge, your anger, your understanding of what's at stake. That's something the BLS has never had. And we have like this kind of confluence of things coming together of like the statistics don't describe my life now. You say they're a lie and you're firing people. Turns out these things were on life support anyway. Like, I've never seen so many things come together that could lead to big, beautiful bls. One big, one big, beautiful bls, one big beautiful statistical agency. Like if there was ever going to be a true like renaissance of the statistical agencies, it may come out of this period. It would be these things coming together of like dissatisfaction with these statistics and then feeling simultaneously the defense of agencies come under attack for just producing them. So there's interest for this. I think there's, I think there's a new. I think change is going to come.

[Robin]

All right, should we palate cleanse with some executive orders?

[Katherine]

Yes.

[Robin]

Okay.

[Katherine]

I got to talk so much about statistics. I won't lie. That's a palate cleanse on its own. I don't need a palate cleanse after like Kuznets and Orshansky and like statistical metrics and you know, getting to make a full throated defense of the bls. Like, what a day.

[Robin]

What a day. So happy we could be here for you and help make this happen. Okay, executive orders. So a guy named Jeff Martz became a paid subscriber on Substack, I think, anyway, he became a member for of the optimist community and sent in this executive order. Jeff says, as an Appalachian Trail maintainer in Pennsylvania, my executive order is that every member of Congress who wants to vote to cut funding to a national park must hike the most difficult trail in it. And they are only allowed to continue with their vote if they complete the trail without a change of heart. Otherwise their vote automatically goes to increasing funding for that particular park. Endorse?

[Katherine]

Yes. I cannot endorse this enough.

[Robin]

And relatedly, I wanted just to show you this. So we got a postcard from a listener who is actually hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, and she sent this from the halfway point, which is in Chester, California. I won't read the whole thing here. But anyway, they came in the same week. And I love the idea that she's out there hiking the trail listening to Optimist Economy.

[Katherine]

Oh, my goodness, Jeff, that is a great idea. Oh, can you imagine a bunch of, like, Mitch McConnell? That's definitely going to. It's like, quasi ageist. And I don't mind it. I don't mind it at all. Oh, man.

[Robin]

All right. And your executive order.

[Katherine]

My executive order is if you would like to boo or yell or say mean things at a sporting event, you have to be in your own section. And it's. It can be the mean. The mean supporters, the mean section. They just need their own space. Because I've thought about, like, I understand, like, you don't want to yuck someone's yum. But I hate being next to people who. At the sporting events who are yelling so cruelly and so constantly.

[Robin]

So are you specifically upset by the people who are. Who are criticizing the players? I just say this as someone who sits next to someone who likes to yell at the refs a lot.

[Katherine]

Yeah. Like, even refs. I don't know. I don't really like being next to people who are, like, screaming at full volume negative things. It makes it very hard for me to enjoy something because it's like that sense goes up of, like, I'm in danger. Is that right? Ralph that's surrounded by fire from the Simpsons, or he's like, I'm in danger. Like, I cannot relax and enjoy a sporting event. And also. And then there's that second part of, like, if you go with kids and you end up sitting next to someone who is, like, yelling profanities and screaming like, you. You either have to spend the entire game telling your kid, like, by the way, don't say that. Or, like, you leave the game.

[Robin]

Yeah.

[Katherine]

So I don't.

[Robin]

This is why I do love women's soccer games, because they do tend to have. Have fewer of this.

[Katherine]

Oh, sorry. This is a male sporting event thing. Women's sporting events. No, girl, you're not yelling. Like, I can't tell you how mad it makes me to watch a professional women's soccer game with the knowledge that I probably earn more money than everyone on the field. And I'm like, that is so not right. And then when someone's like, what are you doing? I'm like, you need to sit down.

[Robin]

That poor woman's weird.

[Katherine]

How dare you speak to her like, like that. Like, how dare you, ref, I would say, is a little bit more neutral territory. But my whole thing about yelling is just how uneducated people are when they're yelling at a soccer ref of, like, that's a foul. It's like, she's on the other side of the field. Like, how would you possibly know it's a foul? Most of the times when I'm going to a soccer game in particular, like, I'm very intensely watching. Like, I just love seeing, like, watch plays come together.

[Robin]

Yeah, yeah.

[Katherine]

Like, watch plays come together and, like, watch the movements. I'm a little bit of a mutterer where I'm like, oh, look at that pass. Look at that. God, that was a great combination. And, like, and, you know, just like, slowly sipping a beer and like, muttering of like, just like, good job again, God, you guys. It's great. And then when there's a bad call, I'm like, ah, no, sir. You know, I just. I don't like being around large groups of mad people. But, like, does that mean I don't get to enjoy sports in person? Or maybe there's a quiet section. This is. Okay, I think I've actually thought about this completely wrong. Maybe I need to go Amtrak style. And actually you just need a quiet section. Like, we don't encourage yelling. Yeah. Having more sections of stadiums akin to the quiet car and the loud car.

[Robin]

Oh, okay.

[Katherine]

Yeah, okay. Man, I don't really come with these things fully formed, do I?

[Robin]

Glad we could talk that out. Glad we could talk that out.

[Katherine]

Yeah. All right, that's our show on Katherine's In Person sports.

[Robin]

Okay, it's time for spiritual sponsors. Jeremy from Cross Plains, Wisconsin is a new spiritual sponsor on the show. Thank you, Jeremy. We really appreciate that. He sent us a message that said, more than any other podcast, Optimist Economy makes me hit the pause button and reflect on what's being discussed. For instance, seating charts in stadiums. My personal spiritual sponsor this week is the farmer's Market at Fairfax and third in Los Angeles. Angeles. I know it's a touristy kind of place, but really it's one of the great places in la. It's got a great history and people just love being there. And there's food everywhere and just tables where you can sit, and it's just. It's a spirit lifting place.

[Katherine]

My spiritual sponsor this week is the live Oak Tree. Now that I am back close to the Gulf where I belong live oak trees are all around Houston, and I happen to have two in my front yard. And they're massive, they're shaded. And I relish in knowing that the two in our front yard are 80 years old. So they're babies. They'll live for 400 more years.

[Robin]

We have live oaks in California. California live oaks. And there's a particular path in Griffith park that's just lined with them. And it's the best sort of shady trail. A lot of horseback riders take it on the north side of the park. It's just great.

[Katherine]

Yeah. Ours are covered in resurrection ferns, which is also fun. So it's. Yeah. Trees, trees.

[Robin]

Big trees.

[Katherine]

Everybody be quiet while I watch soccer and sit next to my tree.

[Robin]

I'm glad you not pouring acid on that tree. Okay. As always, thanks very much for listening to our show. We appreciate it. We appreciate the contributions you send, the reviews you leave for us, those of you who subscribe to our newsletter, and those of us, those of you who make us laugh. We also want to thank Andy and Sophie. Andy produces our video, and Sophie produces our audio.