real utopias

A few years ago, in a survey conducted by an accident prevention charity, 80% of respondents admitted to going through life on autopilot: arriving at the end of a car journey with no memory of driving there, buying the same item twice without realising, even turning up at the office on a day off. The other 20% must have been lying or deluded. (Or just answering the survey on autopilot, perhaps?) To an unnerving extent – made clearer by ongoing research – we're all creatures of habit, spending our days acting out ingrained behaviours and responses over which we exert no control. This has many advantages: if our brains weren't built to convert as many actions as possible into automatic routines, we would seize up trying to breathe or walk, let alone drive a car. But it's also frightening. Treading the well-worn paths of habit, we easily get mired in jobs, relationships or ways of thinking that make us miserable, in lives we'd never have consciously chosen. "Here you are, here we all are, semi-automated creatures in our tram-track worlds, running through the paths of least resistance," as Vincent Deary puts it, in one of two new books on how we get stuck – and on finding the will to forge new paths when life demands it.

Benjamin Radcliff is a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. His current research focuses on how public policy affects human happiness. His recent book, "The Political Economy of Human Happiness," argues that generous welfare states and strong labor market protections produce happier citizens than do more laissez-faire policies. We spoke on the phone Thursday afternoon; a lightly edited transcript follows.