돈의 심리학_모건 하우절
출처 : 조승연의 탐구생활 Youtube
We need a lot of sense of balance to break through the capitalist society of the 21st century.
There are so many temptations in the world.
Others are all living in a fancy way, but they have a sense of inferiority that seems to be the only thing they can't do.
* inferiority(열등함↔superiority 우월함)
There are temptations that make me consume more than I need.
* temptation(유혹)
And others seem to have made a lot of money with real estate or Bitcoin, but they have a sense of insecurity that seems to be the only thing they can't do.
* insecurity(불안감)
There are a lot of temptations that make you take your hand out of a dangerous investment.
I'm going to introduce you to a book that's like a antidote to that temptation.
* antidote(해독제, 해결책)
It's a book called The Psychology of Money written by Morgan Housel.
Most of the books about the economy are about people who have succeeded in investing or in business.
But until that person succeeds, the success is made by combining the characteristics of that person's tendency, situation, era, and specific market.
It's almost impossible to apply it to my life because I know how that person succeeded.
But Morgan Housel approaches it in a very different way.
Like the title of this book, I wrote the book from the perspective that money will soon move by human psychology.
The economy is a choice made by a society or a country.
Should I buy a house or not? Should I get a loan or not?
Should I change jobs? Should I get a job? Should I start a business?
Because these things happen together, In order to understand the economy, we need to know humans, the components of the economy.
If you make a wrong investment or make a wrong economic choice, the main thing that makes the choice, that is, me, and the driving force that moves me, that is, you have to understand your emotions and ideas to make a better choice.
Money is not just about economic science, but also about the economy, psychology, and humanities.
There was a lot of very fresh content.
This book is a book written by an American writer based on American society.
In other words, it is a book based on observing the wrong views and habits of the economy that many Americans have and analyzing the social psychological factors that are based on them.
What surprised me while reading this book was how much of it was applied to Koreans.
Morgan Houser said that people who like to compare with others or who are jealous of others, or only pay attention to those who are very successful, slowly, carefully, those who have succeeded are buried in social phenomena.
I thought these things were the same as in the United States or Korea.
We published a Korean article about human psychology that makes us make wrong economic choices, and we decided to connect to Morgan Houser directly through a Zoom call and ask him what he thinks.
You quote Charlie Munger, who said, economy is not actually driven by greed, but by jealousy.
Yeah, it's driven by envy. I think that's really true.
It was really interesting for me to see an American write this because Koreans think that we have a monopoly on social envy.
Is that true? Yes. Like we obsess about how social competition, status competition in Korea is really extreme.
We imagine because we have a collectivist culture, we care a lot about how we look in the eyes of other people.
Whereas we imagine because Americans are more individualistic, they probably won't care so much how other people look at them.
Oh, that's so fascinating. I had no idea that that was the case. That's all news to me, but that's fascinating to hear.
There was even an article on CNBC in the beginning of last year that this was published in January 13th of 2023.
The investment bank estimated South Korean total spending on personal luxury goods grew 24 in 2022 to $16.8 billion, or about $325 per capita.
That's far more than $55 and $280 per capita spent by Chinese and American nationals, respectively, according to Morgan Stanley estimates.
Thank you for sharing that. I really had no idea about.
I think it's possible that if you quantified envy, however you would do that, that maybe Americans are lower than other countries.
I don't know that to be true, but maybe that is the case.
But I see it everywhere. as someone who was born and raised in America, you see it everywhere.
And maybe we just do it differently. Maybe in other cultures, it's luxury goods, handbags and clothes and whatnot.
In America, it's my house needs to be bigger than yours. I need to earn a higher salary than yours.
Maybe it's just a different way to get across your envy.
But I think whether it is Korea or United States, it's a human thing to be envious of others.
Life in many senses is a competition for resources.
And what matters is not how many resources do I have?
What matters is, do I have more resources than you?
Envy from an evolutionary perspective makes a lot of sense.
And I think you see it in virtually every culture, maybe to different degrees,
but it's Why did you say.
The social competition really intensified in the US in the 1950s and 60s, whereas the wealth gap was much larger in the Gilded Age(대호황 시대) or in the 1920s Jazz Age, as we see in the.
Well, I think what really happened in the 1950s is for a very brief period(단기) of time after the end of World War II, wealth inequality in the United States and across a lot of the Western world got very small.
And so that created this kind of shared mentality in the United States that like we all grow together and some people are going to do better than others, but when the economy does well, everybody does well.
And that created a belief that like, if you, my neighbor, if you're sending your kids to a good college, I deserve that too, because you're not working harder than I am.
And so if you, my neighbor, if you have a big house, I deserve one too.
I'm generalizing, but I think that was a collective sense that permeated through society.
* permeate(침투하다, 스며들다) ~ with
And then as wealth inequality started to grow in the 1970s, and more so in the 1980s, now you might be in a situation where your neighbor is earning a lot more money than you.
But if your belief is, well, if his kids can go to private colleges My should be able to as well.
What that created was the people who are not earning as much money filled that gap with debt is really what they did.
They had this idea that like, if you can buy a big house, I deserve a big house too.
You can probably afford it because you earn a lot of money.
I don't. That means I just have to go into debt to chase what you have.
I think it culminated in many ways in 2008 with the financial crisis.
* culminate(끝이 나다) ~be with(절정에 달하다)
That was the culmination of 30 years of debt fueled consumption in the United States and all over the world.
I think the core of that debt-fueled consumption came from people trying to keep up with another segment of society who was doing much better than them and anchoring their expectations and their aspirations to them.
* keep up with(유행을 따르다), anchoring(정착[줄], 고정개념)
Some people who are buying expensive cars or expensive jewelry or clothing, they would say that I'm not actually doing it out of jealousy.
They would say that this gives me access to a network of people who are better off than I am.
And I can use the information or the opportunities that this creates to actually even make bigger money later.
One thing I would say is like, I would make a difference between practical utility and social utility.
Practical utility, I would say is like something that provides, like makes your life better.
It's like a comfortable bed, comfortable clothes, dry rain boots.
Like there's like practical utility to them. It's very easy to measure.
It's easy to understand what you get out of it. Social utility is real. but it's very hard to measure.
It's very hard to understand what you're getting.
It's easy to overestimate the benefits, maybe easy to underestimate the benefits some of the time.
It's just much harder to put your finger on what it is.
So I think a lot of people get fooled by social utility, even if it has a very practical value.
The other thing I might add is you're going to get the most social utility out of groups and friends who don't care how you're dressing.
If your social group will only let you into that group, if you dress a certain way, that's probably not a group that's going to like actually propel your career.
Maybe I'm overstating that there are cases where it would be, but I think you're actually going to get the most leverage out of people who value you for your ideas and your intelligence and your wisdom and whatnot.
* overstate(과장하다), whatnot(무엇인가 뭔가~모르는 무언가를 가르킴)
I mean, if you had a choice between, let's say you have cancer and you need surgery and you have a young doctor who just graduated from college, but he dresses very well and or an older doctor who's been doing this surgery for 30 years, but he's overweight and kind of a slob and he has like grease stains on his jacket, who would you pick?
* slob(지저분한 게으름뱅이), grease stains(기름때)
It would be obvious for me. I would be like, I just want a good doctor.
* obvious(분명한, 명백한=clear)
I don't care what you're wearing. I could not care less. And I think that applies to a lot of things.
Like if you are only being judged off of your appearance, that's probably not where you're going to get the most leverage in your career.
And I guess that's why, like you're saying, when you're 22 and you really don't have experience to chauffeur, that's when you're most obsessed with luxury goods and flashy cars, because that's the only thing that you have to be judged by.
* chauffeur([부자나 중요 인문의 차를 모는]기사), obsess(사로잡다, 생각만하게 하다, 강박감을 갖다)
I so agree with that. It's so, so true. When I was young, at least, I didn't know anything.
I was an idiot. I didn't have any intelligence. I didn't have any wisdom. I didn't have any humor.
I had nothing to offer except I could try to say, hey, aren't these jeans cool?
Hey, I have Dolce Gabbana sunglasses. Isn't that awesome? Because I had nothing else to offer.
But then I think as you get older and then you're like, hey, at least to my friends and also to my wisdom, philosophy, humor, love, caring, support, empathy.
Maybe I can offer those. And therefore my need to show you my Dolce Gabbana sunglasses is much lower than it was when I was 22.
Now who you are comparing yourself to is probably a fake multimillionaire, not even like a real multimillionaire, a fake multimillionaire.
who lives in, I don't know, one of those tax havens like Dubai or Monaco, flying private jets to different events and have Bugatti in every color imaginable.
That's who you're comparing yourself to.
Because their expectation has gotten so high, a lot of the younger people feel that in order to attain their goals, only people that it's worth to benchmark are the likes of Elon Musk.
If their goal is to be a billionaire, they need to benchmark people who made it really, really big.
And what was really surprising in your book was that benchmarking billionaires is one of the worst financial decisions that you can make.
These are not people that you want to copy.
Yes. And you made, I think, a more important point where a lot of the people who you're benchmarking to on social media are fake.
There's this thing, I read this many years ago, that there is a thriving market to rent a private jet on the tarmac by the minute.
And so you literally, the plane never leaves the ground, but you can go to a private jet, go in the cabin, sit in the seat and take a picture of yourself.
Because what those people do is that they then take those pictures and upload them onto Instagram and say, look at me in my private jet.
But they actually just paid $50 to take a picture of it on the tarmac.
* tarmac([도로]타맥으로 포장하다)
I think that actually does real poisonous damage to society.
I think you should not benchmark yourself into anyone that you don't know on a deep personal level.
If you're benchmarking yourself to strangers or even people who you know, but only at a superficial level, you're not getting the full picture of who that person is Take Elon Musk, for example.
I don't know if you're getting some of these numbers wrong, but I think when he left PayPal, I don't know. he made like, I think it was a hundred million dollars.
And I think he put like 60 million into SpaceX and 30 million into Tesla, something like that.
He just took everything that he had just made, a dynastic amount of money that he could have lived like a king for the rest of his life.
He took all of it and put it on these two companies that seemed like ridiculous, crazy ideas at the time.
* ridiculous(터무니없는=absurd, ludicrous)
I would not do that.
If I sold a company for $100 million, I would buy a mansion and probably a private jet and no one would ever hear from me ever again.
But he's not going to do that. He's going to be like, I'm going to Mars and I'm going to build electric cars.
And I think most people would be closer to me.
And so those people who achieve that level of success have a risk tolerance and a drive that is completely not normal relative to the rest of us.
I want to have the ambition of Elon Musk.
Almost certainly, you don't.
It's not something you can pick.
It's just he's wired differently than you are.
There was a Korean community post that went viral.
According to that post, one of the cultural characteristics that makes Koreans suffer the most is the average high school grade.
* suffer(고통받다, 시달리다, 악화되다)
For example, if you're going to Seoul from Korea, even if you're already in the top 15 or 20 of Korean education, When I came to Seoul, I thought I had an average of studying, etc.
It means that people have a very high understanding of the average compared to the actual average.
That's why most people think they can't live as much as the average.
I remember that a lot of people sympathized with the article that said that there are many cases where people get upset because of this psychology.
* sympathize(동정하다, 지지하다)
Even if we try to adapt the philosophy of shooting for moderate amount of research for extended period of time, people are very bad at judging what moderate means.
There was a newspaper article about a year and a half ago in Korea where a journalist went out and asked a bunch of Korean people what a median Korean looks like.
* bunch(묶음, 많음, 단단해지다)
They said, a medium Korean, and therefore the class that I have to stay in to at least be an average Korean person, has a four-year college degree from a university in the city of Seoul, works for a midsized or large company with a stable salary, own their own apartment, and have enough savings for marriage, children's education, and retirement.
That's what they were shooting for.
You know, on the surface, that seems like a pretty reasonable set of goals.
But what this newspaper found out was when you compare that to actual statistics of what an average Korean person has, these are a much higher goal than people think they are.
So for example, only 25 of Koreans Korean people buy their own home before they are 40. Only 11 of Koreans went to a four-year university in the city of Seoul.
Only 27 of Koreans have corporate or government jobs. And in 2023, median monthly income in Korea was $2.65 million, which translates to about $2 ,100.
I think we see this in the United States too, a slightly different statistic. If you interview people who are in the top 10%, even in the top 1 of the income distribution, many of them will consider themselves middle-class. If you earn more than 99 of society, that person will say, I'm middle-class. So that's almost in the other direction of like, people just don't know where they sit on the spectrum. I think it's very common in many societies to think that people have it easier than you.
Part of that is because people advertise what they're good at and hide their flaws.
And therefore, when you're looking at other people, it looks like their life is better than it is.
They look happier than you.
Because you are very cognizant of your own stress and your own anxiety that you keep inside of your head, but you're blind to everybody else's.
I think that's probably where a lot of this comes.
And it leaves you with this idea that everyone is doing better than I am.
And you could probably extrapolate that to, I'm sure everyone's making more money than I am.
I'm sure everyone is smarter than I am.
So I think everyone, I think what that is showing is just like a natural sense of imposter syndrome.
That like, even if people are doing well, it's the idea of like, yeah, but everyone else is probably doing better. Everyone else is probably smarter than me.
For example, if you see a friend who just bought an enormous house. You don't know how much his mortgage payments are or how much is extended his mortgage over the years or whether it's falling behind the payment. You don't see that. You just see a billion.
House. I remember when I was in college, I worked at a hotel. There's a guy at the hotel who I was kind of friends with, and he was a security guard. Now, a security guard at a hotel probably makes $8 an hour. Not a lot of money. He was a great guy, but not a lot of money. And he came into work one time in a brand new Chrysler 300 that had four TVs in the back of the headrest, 22-inch rims, like a completely ridiculous decked out car. And I remember I was asking him and I was like, how did you pay for this? And he goes, man, I took out so much.
He was like, the debt that I took out of this, he was like, I don't know how I'm ever going to make these monthly payments, but like, I'm going to try.
Nobody would know unless you were friends with them that he was making $8 an hour and stood no chance of making the loan payment on this car.
But yes, I think the general idea of when you see somebody driving a nice car, the only thing you know about them is that they have less money than they did before they bought that car.
You have no idea how much money they earn.
You have no idea what their net worth is. And that goes in both directions.
If you see someone driving a cheap car, that might be a multimillionaire.
You have no idea. You judge other people's wealth by their house, their car, their clothes. And that is a very imperfect way to measure wealth.
I love the quote from your book where you say, wealth is money you didn't spend.
In Korea, the philosophy of value investors such as Warren Buffett and Graham was popular 5 years or 10 years ago.
The most certain way for the middle class to become rich is to spend less money than you earn and invest the rest of the money in a stable index and wait for 20 to 30 years.
It is very difficult to actually practice Warren Buffett's philosophy.
So, I asked Morgan Housel why people who know all the answers are difficult to make rational decisions when they actually have their own money, and they get swept up in the wrong sales and sales timing.
You said that if there's one book on investment, it should be called Shut Up and Wait.
And I also love your Napoleon quote.
Great general is the man who can do the average thing when all those around him are going crazy.
What I'm wondering is that Warren Buffett and his acolytes have become big in any middle class investment circle.
I think in Korea as well, people know that if you can average, you know, five, 6 over 20 years, you are going to become a rich man indeed.
So why is it that they've read Warren Buffett, they've read Graham, they know that time in the market is better than timing the market, like they know all this in their head, but when the stock price goes down, why do they panic?
And why do they feel like this time it's going to be the real generational recession?
If I were to ask you, how would you feel if the stock market fell 30 By and large, you imagine a world in which everything is the same as it is today, except stock prices are 30 cheaper.
And in that world, most people would be like, oh, that'd be an opportunity. Everything is the same, except prices are 30 lower. That'd be great.
But then if I said, how would you feel if stocks fell 30 Because there was a new virus called COVID that might kill you and your family, has shut down your children's school.
has shut down your workplace and all the experts are saying it's going to get much worse from here.
Now, how do you feel? In that context, a lot of people will be like, oh, I don't know if I'd view that as an opportunity.
And that's the more realistic thing.
So, I myself was like this, March of 2020, which was like peak COVID panic and meltdown.
I myself, I remember talking to the smartest investing friends that I have, people who I have so much respect for. very bad.
This is the second great depression.
And even if it didn't turn out like that, I think they were right to say that.
And so I was not buying hand over fist in March of 2020. I was really scared.
By the way, you know what actually happened during this period?
In February of 2020, Warren Buffett went on CNBC. And this was like the very early days of COVID.
We knew that, oh, there's a new respiratory virus, but no one's really panicked about it yet.
And someone asked Warren Buffett, they said like, hey, the market's kind of getting wobbly, what are you gonna be doing? He said to paraphrase, and this wasn't exactly what he said, but he said, I don't know what I'm gonna be doing next, but I guarantee you I will not be selling. He said those words, I guarantee you I will not be selling.
Two weeks later, he sold all of his airline stocks, all of them. I don't think that was hypocritical.
I just think once you take in all of the information of what's happening in the world, your risk tolerance changes considerably.
And so even for Buffett himself, started this conversation of like, why can't we do it more like him? There are situations where he does the same thing himself.
And I think that's completely fine. Because we're human. We're all human, of course, but also the world changes.
And I think that was what it was for Buffett.
If I have to imagine, I don't know this to be the case, but I imagine that during that period, Buffett was looking at the airline industry and be like, they're going to shut down forever. And also the US government might need to bail them out. And it's not going to look good if Warren Buffett is the largest shareholder of an airline that the US government needs to bail out. So I need to sell because of that. But what's important is that the facts changed. What he said in February no longer applied, not because he was being a hypocrite, but because the world changed around him.
So I understand that in the US, you guys had a meme stock debacle involving a company called GameSpot? Yes, we know about that here.
It was a weird thing to watch, yeah.
And in Korea, about two years ago, we had something very similar. There was a pharmaceutical company called Shinpung Pharma whose stock price went from 6 ,000 won to 200 ,000 won over about a four month period. And now it's trading back at 8 ,000, 9 ,000. So a lot of people lost their shirts in that trade. And when you look at the people who are making these decisions, they're not like crazy gamblers, they are like level-headed people who are working hard in their daily jobs, but they make these terrible decisions. Well, I think they're.
Could be a couple of things going on. One is there's nothing more appealing in life than easy money.
That is such a drug that is hard to ignore for everyone, particularly if they don't like their job or they feel like they're falling behind. They feel like they don't have enough money.
If they get some sniff of like, oh, there's easy money being made over here. That's very appealing to the people.
I think the other thing is like, if you don't have a keen sense of financial history, you might actually think that this company can keep going up forever. Now, if you know financial history, you know that it's just by and large, it just doesn't exist.
The other thing that I think is true and overlooked is that a lot of people that get swept up in bubbles genuinely think that they will get out before other people.
So it's not that they think that this is going to go up forever.
They know this is going to end, but the feeling is, yes, this is going to end, but I'm going to sell before that.
And everybody thinks that. And by definition, of course, they can't all be right.
It's just like a giant game of a hundred people playing, but there's only 20 chairs and everyone thinks they're going to get one of those chairs when the music stops.
There was a very telling quote from a guy named Chuck Prince, who was the CEO of Citibank in 2007.
Citibank, the 2008 financial crisis came very close to going out of business.
It was a disaster. And in 2008, during the mortgage bubble, the housing bubble, Chuck Prince, who was CEO of Citigroup said, as long as the music is playing, you have to get up and keep dancing.
And he was mentioning in the context of like, yes, the housing market is a bubble, but the music's still playing.
So we got to keep dancing. We have to keep playing the housing bubble.
And I think a lot of people do that in meme stocks too.
They're like, look, it's still going up.
So I'm not selling yet. When it stops going up, I'll sell.
But then everyone has that feeling and all hell breaks loose from there. Yeah.
Korea has been known as the country with the highest old-age poverty rate for 12 consecutive years since 2009, when the OECD began to collect old-age poverty statistics. According to a recent newspaper article, one of the major reasons for the high old-age poverty rate was that there was a talk about private education spending. Korean parents give about 3.6 billion won to one child until the child is 18 years old. This is said to be an overwhelming number in the OECD. Because if you raise two children, you spend about 700 million won on children's education. In fact, there is no money left to pay for their age. You can see that the money invested in children and the money they earn from going to college is very rare. Nevertheless, I asked Morgan Houser why we can't stop spending on private education.
In some ways I can really empathize with as a parent myself, my entire goal in life, I don't think that's an exaggeration, is to raise good kids and have happy kids, in some sense successful kids.
That's why I want that more than anything. How much of my net worth would I be willing to spend to give my kids a better life?
The answer is all of it. Because the alternative is I die with money in the bank and kids who could have had a better life.
That to me is like the definition of hell. I don't want that at all. So I totally empathize with that.
And you combine that in a system where, at least in the United States, tuition just explodes higher every single year. Like the inflation and tuition is completely ridiculous.
for a limited number of spots in the best universities, in a world in which you are told at least, not always the case, that the only ticket to a successful career is a college degree.
Again, not usually the case. At least some element of truth to that for most people.
In that situation, when you combine all of those, you're going to have people who are people that are making choices that at least in hindsight look very poor.
This gets back to maybe where we started this conversation of like, money is not numbers and data and charts, it's emotions.
And to many people, including myself, there's nothing more emotional than the wellbeing of your children. Nothing is more important than that.
you, the elderly parent are in poverty because you put your kids through school that like the payoff was so nebulous to begin with.
Part of me shakes my head and says, yeah, that was a bad decision. Part of me says, I totally get it. And I might do the same thing in that situation.
And so I think there are some problems like that, that like need a much more structural fix. It's not just like, how can we teach people to not do this?
No, they're going to do that. Like people are wired to take, to move mountains and make massive sacrifices to themselves to take care of their kids.
The title of the new book written by Morgan Housel is same as ever.
The more you study the history of economics, there are ups and downs in the world, and various indicators go up and down, but the main factors that move the economy, that is, the psychology of humans, the driving force in that deep place has not changed much.
So, the human body After understanding the nature of money, it is very important to understand how you should live in it.
What kind of life should I live to be happy? How should I design my economy to live that life? You have to think like this.
The way of thinking that everything will be solved if you make a lot of money is a way to make your life rich and happy through money.
What are some of the ways in which money can actually improve your human prosperity and happiness and flowering?
I think the biggest way that it can for most people is giving you a sense of independence and just freedom and control over your time.
The clothes that I like might be different than you.
The cars that I like might be different from somebody else. Independence is very universal as a source of happiness.
And so if you can use your savings, your unspent money to give yourself freedom and autonomy, that I think is like, that's off to the races.
And it's almost like in a selfish way because spending money on clothes is like to show off for other people.
Like you're doing it for other people. Spending money on freedom and autonomy is like, it's just for you.
It's not for anyone else.
No one else even knows about it. It's just for you and your family.
And so that's what I've tried to do for myself.
My wife and I live a good life. We live in a nice house and drive a nice car and wear decent clothes.
But most of what we spend money on, our biggest expense, so to speak, is saving to make us independent.
Charlie Munger said this himself.
He said, I never intended to become rich. I just wanted to become independent.
I view that as that's what I spend money on.
And what I mean by that is I save and I build money, invest, but I view that as spending money on autonomy and independence.
And that to me has a higher payoff, has a higher ROI than any material good that I could spend money on.
In the case of money psychology, I think it's okay to just look at it from the side.
If the content of this book is in my head, I feel like I have a nagging father who only speaks the right way.
So, especially when I feel like I'm going to make a wrong economic choice because I'm stressed or pressured, I think it would be helpful to review the content of this book once in a while, so I introduced it today.
That's it for today. I'll see you next time with a more interesting history of culture. Goodbye.