95% of Life is Love

 SOURCE: "Arthur Brooks on How to 'Love Your Enemies,'" By Example: A Leadership Podcast with Carly Fiorina, 12 March 2019. (Around 20:00)

KEYWORDS: happiness, love, change, transformation, 

Arthur Brooks shares an exchange with James Q. Wilson, the social scientist who articulated the "Broken Windows Theory" among other scholarship.  Brooks quotes Wilson as saying,

"You know, public policy at its best only affects people at about the 5% margin of their life."

Brooks asks Wilson, "So what is the other 95%?"

"Mostly love."  

Brooks concludes, "If you want to affect people's lives, if you want to solve social problems, you have to talk about the nuclear fuel rods that are happiness, and that is love. That's relationships. That's the faith that they have in God, and the relationship that they have with their kids, and the friendships that they are able to make.  It's the way they are able to serve each other, and whether or not they are lonely, and whether or not they are actually able to form functioning relationships in their environs around them."