Balancing Meaning and Merit in Our Current Economy

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 00:22

(Please note these time stamps have not been adjusted for the intro we added and any edits we made to adjust the speed, so please keep that in mind if you reference the audio recording!)

director from its creation in: 1981

Fred Bergsten (: 01:29

It's great to be here. Thank you for the kind words.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 01:33

Well, thank you for your time. And there's an immense wealth of information that we can learn from you. To start us off, I'd love to just get to know you a little bit and hear a little bit about your story because clearly there's not enough time on this show to go through all the accolades that you have earned. You've reached the heights of your career. And I'm curious to hear a little bit about your journey. So if you don't mind sharing, sharing a little bit about it.

Fred Bergsten (: 01:59

Sure, that's fun.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 02:02

I'm economy economics seems to be a passion of yours. Would you say that that's correct?

Fred Bergsten (: 02:09

Well, certainly economics, but also international relations and the relations between countries and how the global economy tries to reconcile economic objectives with broader political and foreign policy goals. Both of those are kind of my livelihood.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 02:26

How did?

How did you get into it? Did you always know that you were interested in this?

Fred Bergsten (: 02:33

I was always interested in international affairs. My father, who was a minister, did a lot of ecumenical work. And in fact, I spent a summer in England when I was 10 years old. And I think from that point forward, was always really interested in world affairs, US foreign policy and the like. So I decided to go to graduate school in that area, in international relations. And when there, I specialized in international economics.

within international relations more broadly. And then I always pursued a career in international economics for a while inside the government and then for the bulk of my life, running that think tank that you mentioned.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 03:18

I know I've mentioned to you this show is about meaning and merit. And I've thought a lot about how people can integrate meaning in their lives, especially because as a clinical psychologist, I work so much with people trying to help them incorporate that. And one of the pushbacks that I get most often is that it's not so realistic. And especially in our current economy. And

the financial pressures that they feel, it makes it very difficult. And I definitely want to get into that, but I'm curious from your perspective, how do you even think of meaning? And how would you define it? And how might it fit into your concept of economics?

Fred Bergsten (: 04:04

Well, I would say meaning is enjoying your life and feeling that you're having a constructive and positive impact on others and the world around you. In my case, maybe I was just lucky. I never thought I had a job because I loved what I was doing so much, felt that it was not only enjoyable every day, but that I was making

a positive impact on others, on the world, carrying forward the kinds of economic objectives and broader foreign policy objectives that I believed in strongly and espoused. So maybe I was just lucky, but I always felt that my life was full of meaning and was enjoyable to boot. It wasn't just the work that was meaningful. I had a wonderful family.

big on sports, I love music and art. And so there were a lot of things going on, all of which certainly added meaning and provided meaning for my life.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 05:16

So you took time for these other activities as well. Sports, music, family.

Fred Bergsten (: 05:20

I definitely took time. I probably didn't spend enough time on family when I was early in my career working excessively, but I always tried to make time and certainly kept up activities on all those different fronts.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 05:41

Mm-hmm. Perhaps affording you some balance in life to some extent. Let me ask you, would it be fair to say that meaning is what you followed with your career, even so that it didn't feel like a job? And perhaps the merit followed, that rather than chasing merit and accolades, you were actually passionate and excited to get out of bed in the morning to do this. And it just so happened that

You were also exceptionally good at it. Is that fair to say?

Fred Bergsten (: 06:13

I'd say I worked in both directions. I suspect there was some merit in my persona as I was going through school and starting early career at all. So that merit propelled me forward. Certainly it was nothing else. I didn't have any riches. I didn't have any family connections. I didn't have any legacies like some people have. So my success, I would say was.

totally based on merit. Then as you say, the work itself, the rest of my life certainly produced additional merit and it was hopefully an upward spiraling interaction all the way through.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 06:59

I like that word interaction between the two. The state of the economy, they say, is different now than it was many decades ago. And I'm curious to hear from you about that and whether you think that there are unique challenges for young adults, families that are aspiring to do similar, have similar success in their careers, but in the current state of economic affairs.

Fred Bergsten (: 07:30

What you say is a correct perception in many quarters, but I find it puzzling because the US economy, at least, is in very good shape now, extremely good shape, and has done extremely well for the last decade. COVID obviously was a disruption, but the US economy right at the moment, as we speak, is in almost a Goldilocks situation with high employ.

rapid growth, low inflation. Now, there's been an adverse swing in income distribution over the last several decades. The rich have gotten richer. The poor have not gotten poorer, but relative to the richer, they're not as well off, and that may be a source of dissatisfaction. It's also true that the world is more and more competitive all the time. Part of that is

simply the increasing education premium. You've got to be well-trained and highly educated now to get high paying and highly satisfactory jobs. And that says globalization has of course provided international competition. So you're no longer just competing with your fellow Americans or fellow nationals, but rather with a global labor force and that's billions of people.

So it's a highly competitive world, and it does require a lot of hustle and initiative to take advantage of the opportunities, but they are certainly there. And I think the perception of somehow a decelerating set of economic opportunities or closing in of possibilities to advance.

if you have the merit to justify that is a bit misplaced.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 09:34

I hear this and read this in all the news reports and articles and everyone saying, what a puzzle about this social narrative because actually the economy is very strong. And yet this is what I hear in my conversations with people as well. So this is what I'm curious about. You know, you mentioned the hustle.

Fred Bergsten (: 09:48

So it's up to you psychologists to figure it out. Because it is a puzzle to us.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 10:00

that it requires quite a bit of hustle. And I'm curious whether perhaps the hustle is harder than it used to be, takes more of a toll, in part because of the life circumstances, the need for a two income household.

to be able to afford a mortgage in so many cities around the country, and I'm really thinking about the United States right now, makes that need makes everyday life so much more difficult. Who's there to manage the household? Who's there to help with the kids? And balancing all of that, I'm curious whether it's putting a toll on families that was not there before and then making the hustle that much harder and making it that much harder to actually make time for meaningful things because

once you know time is eaten up with that the rest really needs to go to the hustle. I'm curious what you think.

Fred Bergsten (: 10:57

Yeah, I think there's probably a lot of truth to that, despite what I said about the good circumstances of the economy right now. It's true that over the last several decades, average household income has stagnated. And you have not had the constant upgrading of individuals' incomes that we had historically in the United States, really for the previous century.

to: 1970

into the workforce over the last 50 years has been a historic event. But as you say, that makes living the broader aspects of life more difficult. And it does require a lot of hustling and a lot of juggling in order to bring those other elements of life into play. So I think there's reality to that. And it probably is more challenging, more difficult.

that it has been at least in times gone by.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 12:29

Right? One of the things that has stuck with me is I graduated from a top five college. I work at a top five university. And there is this perception among some high achieving families and students that getting there is going to set you on a path of increased financial success and security. And yet...

When I speak to my fellow alums and see other graduates from these universities and colleges, the main narrative I hear is one of struggle. I just went to my alumni event and with few exceptions, the number one conversation was about how difficult it was to afford.

to raise the kids, people needing to give up their work, to choose between giving up their work and getting some childcare, and that financial stress, perhaps driving them out of some major cities, but being there even when they weren't in the major cities. And it really struck me that there's this narrative, especially in the meritocracy, that the US aspires to be, and we can talk about that.

But there's this idea that the more merit you have, the more economically perhaps stable you will be. And I don't see that around me. And perhaps it is more so in the areas where I work in Silicon Valley, on the East Coast, the major cities. But again, I was speaking with many people who had moved to the middle of the country. And all I heard was, it's really difficult to pay the bills. Do you see this in the data?

Fred Bergsten (: 14:15

No. That is puzzling because you're talking about people from the top five schools, obviously are very qualified for their professional lives. And what the data show is that the high income people, you get the top 10%, the top 1%, the top one tenth of 1%, which I think is probably the people you're largely talking about.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 14:16

Hahaha

Fred Bergsten (: 14:45

those folks have done very, very well. In fact, one of the problems is that they've done so much better than the folks without those high deciles that income maldistribution is a real concern and a real problem for policy, as well as everybody's psychoses. But for people with really advanced education of the type you're discussing,

Data suggests that both in absolute terms and relative to the population as a whole, they're doing even better than they have in the past, which is pretty good. And that their margin of exceeding the rest is getting bigger all the time. So for that portion of the population, it's a real problem. Is it that they all just wanna live in the same...

block in San Francisco or that Silicon Valley is so hot in economic terms that the costs run ahead of the muteration. I don't know. But as I say, it does not really show up in the aggregate data.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 15:45

Thanks for watching!

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 16:04

Well, what is happening right now from what you see with the middle class? Because we hear a lot about the disappearing middle class, it's very strained. What do you see as the challenges at the moment?

Fred Bergsten (: 16:17

Well, it of course depends what we mean by middle class. To an economist, the middle class is the folks in the middle between about the 30th and 70th deciles. And that's always there. So you can't say the middle class is disappearing. It's always there, it's in the middle. I mean, what's left? Only high income and low income? No, still a very large percentage of population is in those 30th to 70th deciles. Call that the middle class.

So no, I don't think it's disappearing. The challenges that you talked about a minute ago probably are higher for that middle class. And maybe that's what some people mean about its disappearance. Because as I said, median family incomes have stagnated to a large extent over the last several decades. And that means the middle class to call it that.

rather than having advances in absolute terms, as it traditionally has, has been left to some extent spinning its wheels. So I wouldn't call it so much a disappearance of the middle class as a stagnation of standards of living, which may feel to people in it like they're dropping out of the middle class because they are not fulfilling the aspiration.

that they've had based on history and their expectations as they were growing up, going to school, getting trained, joining the meritocracy, and maybe it has not paid off for them in the manner that they had expected and countered them.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 18:05

Very well said. What is one to do with that given that situation? Do you have any advice? Hustle more. Right, right. And then I think it leads to this. Now I'm starting to understand from an economics perspective why people are turning to me and saying, what are you talking about meaning in my life? I don't have time for that. I need to hustle more. Right?

Fred Bergsten (: 18:13

Hustle more.

Fred Bergsten (: 18:29

Well, my own case may be unusual, as I say. I never felt that I was subtracting from the meaning of my life by working. You're implying that people are having to spend time on their jobs, that they would much rather be doing something else. And, you know, I'm sure you're familiar with the old saw.

Americans live to work and Europeans work to live, maybe that's not so true anymore. Maybe Americans have changed their wish lists and have a different mix of desires and objectives in life and define meaning of life differently, which is understandable. US several decades ago had reached such a high level.

economic well-being, that's fair enough. People say, well, okay, we're there. We've got all our basic needs met. We want to spend more time doing other things. And then if they get wrenched back into a more competitive race through technology change, globalization, just a more competitive rat race of business, then they may not want to step back into...

earlier mode that was typical of the United States. Now, of course, people who then worry about the US economy as a whole say, ah, that's terrible because then that means Americans don't care anymore about improving their status, upgrading their capabilities, being competitive on a world scale. That's why the Chinese are going to eat our lunch. So at one level, there's always a trade-off.

between the goals of the broader collective and the individual self-fulfillment. And as I say, once you get to high levels of economic success, which undeniably the US has done, you may then want a broader portfolio. You may want a broader menu of your activities and no longer want to hustle as much. So if that happens and it clashes with the need to hustle more,

Fred Bergsten (: 20:58

espousing, then you got problems, both at the individual level and also, the less not you focus, at the national level.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 21:08

Right. Well, I'm also thinking about the increased rates of mental health issues in the US, and a lot of attention often goes to teenagers, but certainly adults have it as well. And

certainly a lot of it has to do with COVID and the impact, but it was also there before. And so I just, I think about the interaction of that with that hustle and the increased competition and the increased difficulty when we talk about the stagnation. If the salaries.

are not increasing the way that you thought that they would when you were growing up and sort of imagining your life, and they're also not keeping up with rising costs so that you can afford the kind of life that you want, then I wonder if some of the meaning that you might get out of your life, if...

that weren't the case. If you were able to afford the house that you want and see a brighter future for your kids, if those things are not in place, perhaps automatically you're drawing a little bit less meaning, because all that hustle isn't actually leading to the rewards that you're looking for. And perhaps it's leading to more mental health problems, being drained, exhausted and so forth, but not actually having time to attend to it because you need to hustle more.

What do you think?

Fred Bergsten (: 22:35

Well, I think that's a fair analysis. If you ask me what's at the top of my worry list these days for the country, I would put deaths of despair right up at the top. The fact that so many of our people, particularly youth, have gone off in the direction of drugs and obesity and all sorts of non-conformist behavior.

coming conformist behavior, which are really deleterious, both to them as individuals and to the society as a whole. And sure, it's got to be a reflection of...

disappointment, disenchantment with the way things develop. It's a particular puzzle, I think, for teenagers and youth in their twenties and such, where apparently the inability to find satisfying life courses at that stage lead to lots of antisocial behavior.

including living with parents much, much longer, marrying later, deaths of despair and opioid use and all that. Yeah, that I think has been documented as really a very major ill of the society. And it really is, I think for you guys to figure out why it is that people even

when they've got talent, ability, capability, even in many cases where they've had decent parental background, although in many cases not, but in many cases with decent upbringing, still go off the rails in a traditional sense. And I don't say that to be unsympathetic to them because it's obviously a huge problem, but I don't think we yet.

Fred Bergsten (: 24:45

really have answers as to why it is. You've been looking with me understandably for economic answers. People just haven't got ahead, prices are too high, costs are excessive. And undoubtedly that's a part of the picture, but as an economist, maybe not wanting it all to fall on our shoulders, I just wonder if there are broader culprits.

a day here.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 25:16

Mm-hmm. Well, one of, I mean, certainly there are a number of factors, and it's an interaction. We talk about things like social media and the impact of that and technology and just being on the screens all the time and being more isolated. And that's just one of many. So certainly, it's a multifactorial answer. One thing that I'll come back to that I think a lot about is meritocracy.

I've mentioned this a number of times because the US aspires to be a meritocracy. In theory, it's one. I know it's hotly debated whether in practice it actually is one or not. But the idea that hard work and achievements, merits, will lead to social, political, and economic rewards is something that we need to be aware of.

is sort of a foundation of the US, I think that the American dream, right? And the land of opportunity. And certainly it has afforded so much opportunity to people through hard work and merit. And I am wondering, especially given the increased need for hustle to get that merit now and for it to pay off financially,

I'm wondering whether it's pulling our attention towards merit and achievement at the expense of meaning. And I'm wondering if there's a way to balance the two and whether you might have any thoughts on that.

Fred Bergsten (: 26:51

Well, it's a critical question, of course. I happen to be a strong believer that United States, at least traditionally, has been a fertile field for meritocracy. And I can give you example after example of people that I've worked for, worked with, who literally immigrated to the US with nothing in their pockets and became cabinet members.

Fred Bergsten (: 27:23

really major leaders in our society. So meritocracy clearly has been a major feature of American society. That's not to say there aren't some people who get ahead by virtue of their heritage, their contacts, their networks. And after a while, the two interrelate.

I stress that I succeeded through merit, but as I moved up the line, I obviously developed contacts and networks and things I could draw on for the next step in my own career. So I don't suggest that there wasn't some luck and some legacy stuff involved. But I do think that the great bulk of the American story, whether it's in business or in government,

other parts of the society have really been rewards to merit. And to go back to dry economic statistics, the education premium, meaning the payoff for more education, which is probably as good a proxy as any for developing merit, I mean that education proxy has just gone up and up and up.

over the years to the point where it's probably a problem now that it's so big because without it it's hard to get ahead. But it's a, I would say it's as good an indicator, I think it's perfect statistically, but it's probably as good an indicator as you can get for the payoff to merit proxy by levels of education, which I think is probably as good a single proxy as one could find.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 29:19

So to make sure I'm understanding, more people are being educated and to the point where if you're not, it really is a liability. But.

you're seeing economic shifts, at least at a national and perhaps international level, that result from increased education, and those people that are being educated are also getting more merits. And would you say that they are also getting, as a result, more economic, social, political rewards from that?

Fred Bergsten (: 29:56

Yes, I mean, the whole definition of the education premium is you have higher incomes. Again, that's not a perfect indicator of professional success, but it's a proxy that's probably better than any other. Now, go back to things you've said earlier, that doesn't necessarily mean satisfaction in life. You can make a lot of money and still be dissatisfied. And certainly, there are lots of examples of people in that category too.

The trick obviously is to look for professional success along lines that you enjoy and you feel is fulfilling and gives your life meaning as well as a big bank account. I mean, that's the trick.

I know a lot of people who've succeeded and made a lot of money, but really hated their jobs and were looking to retire as soon as they could. Neither I nor some of these folks I'm referring to in my life ever really wanted to retire. Say, well, why retire? I'm enjoying my life and I'm able to reconcile my professional life with the other things that are fulfilling. So that's the trick. Now...

Did everybody achieve that? No, probably not. That would be too fortuitous. But it goes back to not only hustling to get education, but being smart enough or maybe just lucky enough to find a career path that's compatible with a life path that will be meaningful and satisfying. And if you're both lucky and skillful.

Maybe you can find that. But not everybody will be. And so the disparity between what you regard as enjoyable and therefore meaningful with what you actually wind up doing may not, that disparity may be fairly great. So I think it's the eternal juggling act between liking what you're doing and being able.

Fred Bergsten (: 32:15

to succeed through it. A lot of people do things they wanna do, recognizing it's not gonna be very successful from a financial or purely economic standpoint, and that's fine. So you go off and be a forest ranger or a hiking instructor or a swimming coach or whatever it is, and you say, well, I'd prefer to do that rather than do something I don't want and make money. But...

That's a choice people have to make at some various points in their lives. Some people may not have a choice because their life circumstances requires them to support other people, family, et cetera. And they may not be able to pursue a course that they would really prefer. They may have to work. OK, so then that's going to lead to dissatisfaction. But I think that's the eternal conflict between competing objectives.

and trying to achieve them simultaneously is really the cardinal challenge that everybody faces.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 33:25

I am wondering, coming back to the education premium, whether it's a direct correlation. I think meritocracy, in its definition, there is an assumption of a correlation where the harder you work, the more merit you get. The more merit you get, the more rewards. The more there's a payoff. And I'm wondering if we see that.

sort of across the board as a direct relationship or whether it's really context dependent and perhaps For example in some certain economic Levels, whether it's a lower economic level I'm not sure whether they're at the payoff you do see and that at some point it may Stable off a bit and you just don't see the same kind of reward even though you're putting in more and more Effort and getting that merit. Do you think that's the case?

Fred Bergsten (: 34:19

Oh, certainly it's context dependent. Yes. The R square is not one. The correlation is not perfect, but I would say the R square is probably, I don't know, there probably are studies and I should know it, but I'd say it's 0.7, 0.6, two thirds positive relationship between the merit of the individual and the success.

Now, that's a pretty high correlation, and it would be a success for the society as a whole to have that high correlation, but it does leave a lot of people out. So if you've got 300 million Americans and correlation is only two thirds, it leaves 100 million unhappy people. So I would say in the aggregate, yes, but certainly with many, many exceptions and enough.

that societal problems of the type we've discussed result.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 35:20

Mm-hmm. It also makes me think about how college, first off, many people are starting to question whether college is a good investment. But also, we see that a college degree for many jobs is not enough now that they need a graduate degree. And as you're talking about it becoming more and more competitive, I'm wondering if people are feeling like they need to, you know, the.

the goal keeps moving forward. They keep needing to be doing more and more and more as opposed to sort of arriving in that place where they wanna end up. And then maybe that leads to both exhaustion and perhaps even a negative view of the economy because they're not seeing themselves reaping those rewards even though they keep putting in that effort. What do you think?

Fred Bergsten (: 36:09

Yeah, I think what you're positing is a path toward what you might call bipolarization or corner solution where professional success or economic success requires either really high education or not so much at all for plumbers and auto mechanics and even nurses and stuff like that.

So that I think that's probably what people mean when they talk about a hollowing out of the middle class that you've either got to go to really, or at least toward the top end of the spectrum in terms of education capability and all that, or maybe you don't need any of that at all. And if you get a bachelor's degree or you have a master's or even in some case a PhD.

you may have to still go drive a taxi. So then you're really dissatisfied. And of course we've seen that in a lot of countries around the world, you get India, where the highly educated portion of the population frequently cannot get jobs anywhere close to what they're capable of doing. That's improving now, India's doing better. For a long time, there was a huge disparity. And that...

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 37:09

Exactly.

Fred Bergsten (: 37:36

disparity is probably what we're seeing more of in the United States, where even with the best of hustle and effort, only a modest percentage of the population can really hope to get the most high level technology advanced.

high-income jobs and there's inevitably going to be a winnowing out even of the most trained people as they get further into their careers. And artificial intelligence may of course accelerate that tendency where a lot of what we've thought of as high-skilled and high-income jobs

may be displaced or at least substantially augmented by machines. So call it bipolarization, you probably have a better term for it, where the labor force, to think of it in economic terms, moves toward the two extremes of really highly trained meritocratic and

relatively low level.

where you have to explicitly give up some of the status and maybe income and purposes that you thought were out there for you in order to fit into to the evolving model of the economy as a whole.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 39:31

My guess is that what you just said has a lot to do with the conversations I was hearing at my alumni event and that I hear on an ongoing basis from graduate fellows, undergraduate students, even at these top schools, highly trained people, and yet I think that they are coming up against exactly what you're talking about. So.

What do we do? Do you have any advice? If you were starting over now and looking at this whole scene, not just at a national level, but even individually, do you have any advice for people?

Fred Bergsten (: 40:10

Well, it really implies, I don't know if that's so different from the past, but maybe it's more acute. You really have two choices. You really have to be willing and able to hustle harder, to really go out and hustle harder, and hope that you get some breaks along the way that enable you to employ the skills that you develop. No guarantees, but

You have to be willing to go out and hustle in the first instance to qualify yourself. The other alternative, of course, is to scale back your aspirations and just say explicitly, okay, I'm not going to get in that top 1% or even 10%, but there are other things I like to do and I'll give them more weight, more emphasis in my life and look to a more balanced kind of existence.

recognizing that it may not lead me to a better economic circumstance than my parents had. And I won't have a bigger house or a yacht or more foreign travel or whatever it is that you aspire to. Well, I may not have those things, but I've got a nice wife and I've got some kids and I like to go out and bowl with the gang and play poker.

ball games and do other stuff and explicitly conjure up a different lifestyle and do so explicitly at recognize. And I've certainly seen people like that, including incidentally in my own family, which after some turmoil and some anxieties as a result of it, can eventually produce a different kind of equilibrium.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 42:09

So some hard choices to make. I do go back to something you led with, which is if you can be so fortunate as to find work that doesn't feel like work, that's meaning driven, then perhaps that may offer a little bit of equilibrium because the hustle may not feel quite as much like hustle and you're excited to do it. And that may just be luck

people, their source of meaning is not financially rewarded, right? And like you said, if you want to lead hikers backpacking, that doesn't tend to be at the top of the, I don't know, financial spectrum.

Fred Bergsten (: 42:56

Luck is undoubtedly a big part of it. And one might also say there's rationalization. In some people, I won't exclude myself, may say, well, because I'm doing this or that.

I convinced myself that really is great.

gotta be enough payoff to make that credible. But some people are kind of optimistic and even Pollyannaish and say, well, okay, I make the best of my circumstances and induce myself to enjoy it. So there may always be an element of that which new psychologists can analyze to your heart's desire. But there's undoubtedly a lot of good fortune.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 43:40

That's up to us.

Fred Bergsten (: 43:46

if you are lucky enough to have professional path, career path, job path that you like, you're happy with, maybe not every day, but the bulk of the time you're satisfied with, feel you're contributing to society as well as enjoying it just in a personal sense. And as I said at the start,

That's probably the best of all worlds. And certainly not everybody's going to be so fortunate to have that mix. But my advice would be at least when you're starting out to look for that and hope that you could find something that was at least substantially down that road.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 44:38

And one last question, it may be exactly what you just said, maybe the answer. I was curious if you had any specific advice for teenagers. You mentioned how much they're struggling right now. And I think they have many doomsday scenarios they're looking at from climate change to, that's this narrative at least of economic stagnation and increased need for hustle and so forth. Any advice you have specifically for teenagers?

Fred Bergsten (: 45:06

Well, I think the main advice, following on what I just said, is to try to figure out what really turns you on.

Fred Bergsten (: 45:16

Many of the teenagers I talk to, including in my own extended family, when they're in high school or even going to college, say, well, what do you wanna do? And I have no idea. Well, for a while, obviously, that's a feature of most people's lives. But if you don't really have any idea of what you want to do, it's pretty hard to find something that's gonna be satisfying.

Now again, you may just be lucky. Somebody may come along exogenously and offer you a job or a hobby or something that all of a sudden turns you on. And a lot of young people, at least implicitly, are waiting for that. The problem is it may never happen. I've seen people where it did happen later in life, maybe not until you're 30 instead of when you're 20. But it's risky.

to sit around and wait for.

Fred Bergsten (: 46:19

gold dust to fall on you. So my big tip would be, try a lot of things and see what you really enjoy doing, what you feel satisfied in pursuing, what you feel may be rewarding in terms of how your activities may affect others, your loved ones, your friends.

even strangers you don't know, even a broader community, if you get into things that have a wide ranging effect, but try to figure out at some decently early time in life, what it is that you'd like to pursue and then go for it. Now, five years later, you may change, you may run across something that's much better. And you say, don't wanna be a lawyer after all, I gotta go back to med school. Okay, but if you're pursuing something,

that you believe is going to be.

enjoyable as well as rewarding. And you can lay out a course of activity to pursue that lifestyle. I guess that's about the best I could do in terms of advice.

Maria-Christina Stewart (: 47:38

That's wonderful. Thank you very much. Thank you for your time, for your wisdom and expertise. I was truly honored to have you here to ask all of these questions. Thank you.