Objective Prosperity: How Behavioral Economics Can Improve Outcomes for You, Your Business, and Your Nation

Preface by Roger Blackwell Ph.D.

If you have ever heard Economics called “The Dismal Science,” prepare to reset and propel your thinking about economics at quantum speed. Would you call it “dismal” to know how poor people of diverse racial, ethnic, and educational backgrounds escape poverty and become prosperous? Do you know how the ironic inequality paradox allows some people born in the bottom twenty percent to elevate themselves to the top twenty percent? Would you call it dismal or exciting to learn how, starting around age 45, to gradually become very prosperous with nothing more than what you have earned and learned working many years in a retail store?

Do you know how to grow up in one of the poorest nations in the world, called by some a “malaria-infested swampland” and see it become a nation more prosperous than the United States? Do you believe people in the Netherlands or Saudi Arabia are more prosperous? Do you know how the United States started equal in per capita income with the rest of the world to become one of the wealthiest nations in the world (but not the wealthiest)?

If you already know the answers to these questions, you probably don’t need to read this book other than, perhaps, to have facts that will help you explain to friends who may not know them. But if you choose to read the rest of the book, you will find these answers and more about how to increase your own prosperity as well as understand why nations are poor or prosperous. And, perhaps, you will conclude the study of Behavioral Economics is not dismal, maybe even delightful.

Behavioral Economics is considered a new field of study by some, but as you will see in Chapter Two, it has many of the attributes of traditional wedding attire, “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.” If you already know a lot about economics, you can skip Chapter One, but you may want to review it to be sure you understand two concepts essential to understanding how you prosper and contribute to national prosperity.

You may be tempted to go straight to the two most practical chapters in the book, “Why Some Nations are Rich and Other Nations Poor” and “How to Be Prosperous Instead of Poor.” (Chapters 5 and 6). If you want to read those chapters first, that is reasonable, maybe to apply those principles to your life immediately. But if you want to know who controls future prosperity, perhaps it will be profitable to read Chapters Three and Four which document who controls future prosperity for both nations and individuals like yourself. Spoiler alert! It is not the President of the United States or even the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Is inequality getting better or worse? You may find the discussion of that issue in Chapter Seven ironic and paradoxical. You will probably also find that Chapter Eight raises issues you may not have considered in the past but that are critical to your future. And please don’t read Chapter Nine until you have fully considered all the earlier chapters. Finally, when you arrive at the concluding chapter, the content of this book is summarized in Ten Rules that helped me survive and sometimes thrive in a life spanning many decades. They are not presented as suggested rules for you but perhaps as motivation to write down your own rules for the rest of your life.

After forty previous books, there was only one good reason for me to write another – to help you understand your own prosperity and typical income as well as wealth of people living in the nation. While this book is based on empirical research – the kind that helps people receive promotions as a professor and accumulate enough wealth to donate my career salary back to the university where I taught for forty years – it is also based on practical lessons growing up in the Missouri Ozarks, learning the only people who do not work on a farm are those who do not want to eat.

When I was in high school, at age 16, I began working at a local radio station as a janitor and progressed to higher positions, working full time while attending Northwest Missouri State before transferring to Missouri University to receive my bachelor’s and master’s degrees and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University, all without financing from parents or accumulating debt myself. You can read more details in the concluding chapter of this book, but from life and parents, I learned you do not have to have money to obtain a quality education. Where there is a will, there is a way for poor people to achieve a good education. This book describes how.

While reading this book, you will observe something different than most books: no footnotes. Decades ago, books included numerous citations at the bottom of pages, slowing reading substantially. To solve this problem, reader-oriented authors began putting citations at the end of chapters or the end of the book. Even with this improvement, printed citations were sometimes out of date or limited in scope.

I have taken a behavioral approach, omitting footnotes in this book. If there is a term such as a demand curve or an author such as Daniel Kahneman about which you would like to learn more, you are encouraged to use your favorite search engine to get a recent explanation with as much detail as you prefer.

At The Ohio State University, I had the incredible learning experience of teaching over 65,000 students, mainly in the business school but also courses in Thanatology and Health Care Economics for the Medical School. I was also a member of the Black Studies faculty for a few years, reflecting a life-long interest in cross-cultural research, civil and human rights, and upward mobility among under-served minority groups. My primary research area was behavioral aspects of marketing, co-authoring Consumer Behavior, a text translated into Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Korean, and other languages used in universities and organizations in many countries. The success of that and other texts was the catalyst for being invited to teach and do research in 39 countries on six continents, learning from personal observation what makes some people poor and some prosperous.

After retiring from Ohio State, my understanding of poverty and prosperity was enriched further while teaching General Educational Development (GED) classes for almost six years to inmates at the Federal Correctional Institution in Morgantown, West Virginia. There is nothing quite as educational about how people escape (or do not escape) from project housing in the hood and other dysfunctional backgrounds as the daily teaching of former drug dealers. The GED students were often members of gangs, cartels, and other diverse occupations (including a former Mafia hitman studying economics, math, government, grammar, and literature. In prison, when you teach math, explaining the metric conversion of grams to ounces, it is not unusual to be asked, “Is that with or without the bag?”

I taught students in prison how to obtain a GED and, when they left prison, how to get a job, but the GED students in prison taught me even more about the realities of poverty, crime, and injustice. Nelson Mandela was correct when he said no one understands a nation as well as people who spend time in its prisons. You can read additional details of my life, in both prosperity and prison, in You Are Not Alone and Other Lessons a Teacher Learned from Parents, Professors, and 65,000 Students.

While writing this book, I asked Dr. Roger Bailey for advice and help. His insights as a marketing professor at Ohio State and his strong background in Economics and Quantitative Methods were invaluable to improving and extending many areas of the book. I asked him to join me as co-author, which he graciously accepted. We might not agree on every detail in the book, but hopefully his addition will make it more useful to you.

Roger Blackwell, Ph.D.

Columbus, Ohio

July, 2022