Alice Evans
Appearances
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
I think we can think about this in two ways. So certainly, as women increasingly enter the labour force and get higher skills, then they can be more economically independent and they can choose to be alone. So they would only marry if a guy is charming, you know, if they have fine love. But of course, the phones may be hurting that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Or if the guy offers a desirable package of goods, whether that's attractiveness, entertainingness or money, right? You know, money is impressive for many of us. So I think that the most disadvantaged guys certainly may struggle to offer an appealing package. And as you rightly say, the marriage rates are plummeting chiefly among the most disadvantaged men.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
It's the men who are earning least who are most likely to stay at home with their parents to be single, who can't necessarily offer an attractive package of goods. I should just say that it's not entirely that young men are getting less educated, rather that the most disadvantaged men are struggling in education. So I certainly think that aspect is partly about economics.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
100% and created by the broader economic situation now.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So I think that if it's the case that technology is the major friction, then we need to look at the political economy because each tech company, to be successful, they want to distract us and hoover up our attention for as long as possible, for as much as possible. So the market mechanism is really against coupling.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And my concern is that tech companies are just becoming so much more engaging, more affable, more charismatic, more shocking. Mr. Beast, oh, what's he going to do now? That's so engaging, right? So my concern is, what if tech outcompetes our social connections? And that already seems to be happening, not just in coupling, but the wider rise in solitude.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And so I honestly don't know the answers, but here are a couple of things we could do. One is we could think about how do we regulate technology in some way. So Jonathan Haidt has really done fantastic work in encouraging phones-free schools, for example. And that would be important in enabling young people to actually talk to each other.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
To play in the parks, to chat, to make jokes, to learn how to make jokes, to become less anxious. I think that's really important. But it's clearly not a sufficient solution because us as adults are also vulnerable to just getting sucked into all these things.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Absolutely. And politically, it's very difficult. So I think there are two tensions. One is both the demand and the supply. As humans become more hooked and dependent on these personal online entertainment, then we want to protect those freedoms. And simultaneously, all the various companies from Netflix to sports gambling will lobby different political parties simultaneously.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
to prevent any kind of restrictions and regulations. And then even if, say, for example, one was trying to have a church building program or a program to champion the church, the church is fighting against all those competing distractions.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Or even if you're doing something secular, like a community fair or community festival, some people may well say, as they so often do, hey, I'll rather just stay home in my pajamas and enjoy what's ever on TV. And you can choose exactly what you want on TV.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Okay, so fertility is collapsing everywhere all at once, perhaps with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa, where rates are still very high. But across Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa, all those trends are going sharply downwards. And
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
I think definitely yes. And I think it would be wonderful if Hollywood promoted that and supported that. And in fact, as a joker last year, I even wrote a comedy script about how Hollywood could support fertility and things like that. But let me add, so even though I'm totally on board with that, and I think that's very important, there are several frictions because...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
One, it's very difficult to do cultural engineering today because we have infinite options of entertainment at our fingertips on Netflix and everything. So if you're not that interested in a romantic comedy, you know, in China, a lot of the most popular films are about divorce. So that's another. It's difficult to do cultural engineering.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
On top of that, as long as people are hooked on their smartphones, they might not have the social skills to do it. I think another possible mechanism would be to use the tax system and to give massive tax incentives to to people who have children, because that's a positive externality.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So that's a good question. The present evidence suggests that pronatal incentives have not reversed the downward trend. So even when governments do give these goodie bags, that doesn't seem to work. It's possible, however, that were financial incentives sufficiently large, that could change.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So, for example, Hungary has recently suggested to women who have two children will not have to pay taxes again. Now, you know, that's a pretty big giveaway. But, you know, we also need to solve the coupling crisis. So I think, you know, that's one thing to explore. And governments, you know, the Fed, etc., could explore the taxation system.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And economically, this has catastrophic implications for middle income countries, because as you have an aging population, then older people typically have lower rates of labor force participation. They're less economically productive. You know, it's the young people who are. you know, innovative, productive, starting up new companies.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Definitely, definitely. I think it's difficult empirically, descriptively to deny that. So, for example, in Britain, Muslims have much higher fertility. So Britain will see a big increase in a larger Muslim, more politically active population. So that will have huge political consequences. And so if liberal, secular people don't have kids, they will have less political influence.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
We see it in Israel, too. The Hasidic Jews, the ultra-conservative, I think they typically have six kids each. So again, that is changing the political bent of Israel's foreign policy. So every single country, these demographic implications are huge.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So that's a good question. I think in the vast majority of cases worldwide, a very small share of births are IVF. That said, were the technology to have greater success rates and to be more accessible and more affordable, we might see a greater uptake because it addresses a fundamental issue of expanding women's reproductive freedom. So
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
You know, if people want to spend their 20s finding themselves or focusing on greedy jobs, you know, becoming ultra, ultra demanding, you're climbing the career ladder. And in their 30s, they're still struggling to find someone. But maybe, you know, in their late 30s, they do. Right. So lots of data suggests that people do tend to couple up a bit later. They're coupling up a bit, bit later.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So I can't predict that people are going to eventually couple up. But let's talk about that fraction of society who was single in their 20s, but finds the one at age 40. Right. But then that's the real trouble that at age 40, tick tock and women's wombs are no longer at 100%.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
But as the entire economy ages, then it becomes more sluggish. And those younger people, either through savings or taxes, need to pay for elderly health care or pension costs or provisions. And that then creates a massive fiscal squeeze because governments or individuals need to spend a higher amount of their money given those rising dependency rates.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And so that's where for that particular subgroup that IVF could be really, really helpful in enhancing women's reproductive freedoms and enabling the couples that form later to have more choices, to have more freedoms and expand. Yeah.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Totally. I can understand that. Say, let's call it a moral hazard, right? If you pipe up a fertility solution, then people might put off children. So that's theoretically possible. I don't want to dismiss it. But if we look at the Pew data, right, for Americans under 35, you've got half of them saying they're single. And of those singles, the vast majority say they feel no pressure to couple up.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
No pressure to be in a relationship and perfectly happy with the status quo. And I don't think those secular monks we were talking about say, oh, it's fine. I'll find a woman in 20 years and we'll do IVF. I don't think that from my interviews, at least, I don't think IVF is entering into those calculations, partly because of what you precisely say.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Many people see IVF as unreliable, costly, expensive. So if IVF was currently cheap and everyone thought it was great, but we were all deluded and the scientists were deluding us and we were all overestimating its potential, then I think that explanation must have some credence. I think the hazard is possible. I don't think it's going on right now.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So let me say that I think, given our recent discussion, each of these possible interventions has limited efficacy. Evidently, there is no magic bullet. And given the enormity of the fertility crisis, what I as a researcher would really like to see will be so many different initiatives and pilot initiatives. You know, how can we build community groups? You know, let's go back to religion.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
One thing that I think that religions have done so well historically is building a sense of community. So I spent a lot of time in small town Alabama, and I went to local Bible study, and I went to the churches, and I chatted to the community. And that's really, really important in singing hymns together and praying together.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And if we're concerned with things like climate change mitigation, the governments just won't have enough money to spend on extra costs if you're spending more on old people. And on top of this, if younger people are saving more, as they are in China, then they're going to be spending less. So that has a knock-on effect on the entire economy.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
That builds a sense of cohesion, those collective rituals, which also secular organizations could do. So we can organize, we can try a hundred different things. Let a hundred flowers bloom. So try all these little community events, Perhaps see how we can regulate technology in some ways at some periods in some ventures. And let's see how we can increase women's reproductive freedoms.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And let's see what we can do with the tax system and fiscal incentives. So I don't think any one of these things will fix it unilaterally. But I would like to see everyone, right and left, focus on this issue, understand the real driving forces and try to target those. But at present, we're not doing any of that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
As I said, cultural engineering is very difficult in a world of smartphones where everyone can curate their own echo chamber. So my totalitarian aspirations are limited in the 21st century.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
That was a British joke. Sorry.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
No, not at all. Not at all. I don't think they seem to understand it at all. And actually, even though I totally agree that China has masterminded massive success with electric vehicles, for example, or innovation, they can't seem to encourage people to couple up and have babies. And let me give you two examples of the limits of their cultural engineering.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So on Little Red Book, when I chat to my students, if you type in fertility in Little Red Book, which is their version of Instagram, right? So if you type infertility, and I'd encourage you to do this, download the app and do it, you will get all this antenatal propaganda. And I've previously blogged on this and it's really shocking.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
It'll be all these horrifying images about how your vagina gets destroyed and your body is destroyed and it's the most painful experience of your life. It's like really horrifying and gory. And all these girls are saying, oh my God, this is horrific. I never want to do it. So Despite all the censorship and the Great Firewall of China, all that exists.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
On top of that, young women will upload video blogs celebrating their independent life. So look at my nice apartment. I'm going to, you know, cut this bit of food and I'm living as an independent person, sort of glorifying and, you know, in many ways, rewriting the script, challenging expectations of marriage, etc. And I don't know why this antenatal discourse is passing the censors.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
But yeah, it is. And it's consistent with all my interviews with Chinese women.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Let me say, I think that's an interesting hypothesis. But I think you see young people still doing things that are painful. So whether it's young women, you know, trying to get an Instagram face and having fillers and Botox and painful things or men spending painful times at the gym being secular monks, people do painful stuff.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
I think the more direct causal link is people spending time on their phones and then feeling anxious about chatting to people at the bar.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So I think fertility and women's choices and men's choices about how many children they want, that's always come up in my interviews because I'm always interested, you know, what do you want to do for your life? So I've got so much data on this going back for the past 15 years. You know, when I was in Zambia, women would always encourage me to have another baby. Oh, you must have a baby.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
I certainly think that people seem to be wanting to extend the freedoms and the lack of responsibility in their 20s. And let's add that, for example, in my interviews with Latin American men, many are saying to me that they don't necessarily want marriage and kids because it comes with those responsibilities. Right. And I think this could be even more salient than the pain of pregnancy.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Imagine if you're a guy in a pretty crappy labor market with lots of informal labor, lots of insecurity, lots of massive financial shocks and crises and inflationary pressures. And you're like, do I want to commit to a woman and say that we're going to raise two kids together and feel all that strain and responsibility? Or do I just want to chill out and play Call of Duty?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So that I think is, that's a really salient. I mean, I think that... progressives have generally underestimated how much women benefit from, as you were saying earlier, making that commitment of monogamous, permanent devotion and support. I think that while feminists have historically championed freedoms and shared care work, which are, of course, crucial to gender equality,
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
The people that actually listen to those messages of freedoms, pleasure and shared care work are men who love, who are emotionally connected and who value companionship with their wives. And now many men are saying, maybe I don't want those things. You know, maybe that's not everything I need. And that's a hugely important and undertold aspect of this global story. Yeah.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
You must have a baby. That was so imperative for them.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So I'm reluctant to make predictions, but... These are not predictions.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
if fertility continues to decline and we are either ineffective or inactive, and simultaneously we do not have a large rise in immigration, which is super productive and super economically active, and simultaneously we do not see a massive boom in AI productivity. So if none of those countervailing forces occur, then we're all going to become
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
much poorer and perhaps politically also we might see some shifts with a rising, you know, support for more conservative groups.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
For example, in the US, it's Republicans, as you know, who have more kids, right? So we should predict that Republicans will win more elections just by virtue of fertility. In Europe, we will just all become much poorer. Our public services will continue to deteriorate and we will have less spending power. So Europe is just in an economic doom loop.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So I was constantly pestered. And then I think in East Asia, in South Korea, where I was looking at the data so intensely and I was having so many of my interviews and I just realized it was so omnipresent. And then I looked at the data more broadly. So I think going to South Korea is really what fertility pilled me, so to speak.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And the US may be better because they'll get all the world's migrants. They'll get the most productive migrants. They'll get the most entrepreneurial migrants. But they should also become, if we're right, more conservative and more Republican.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Well, I think certainly that if people grow up with a certain standard of living and a certain quality of public services, and then those deteriorate as a result of population aging and lower rates of economic dynamism, then people should get fed up and frustrated.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Simultaneously, as people spend more time on their phones hooked on these echo chambers, polarizing differently, not just by gender, but polarizing. Right. then the less time that we spend socializing with different other people, the less we develop understanding right across genders, right across political groups.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And as we become more illiberal, I would predict that would fuel political authoritarianism because those guys are the bad guys and we'll do anything to stop them from winning and we'll support our strongman to stop those crazy people winning. So I would just expect lots of economic frustrations, lots of support for illiberalism, etc. It's a bad future, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Absolutely. Yes. So you'll have this political lobby group of old people who are directly concerned with pensions and health care rather than economic dynamism and frictions. So then it becomes harder to be a young person. And so we go back to the disadvantaged man.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
It's harder to move upwards as a disadvantaged man and harder to get a wife if the entire voting system is rigged by these old people who don't care so much about you.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
I don't think that's true because, I mean, in China, when you talk about those cities, those tower blocks, China is currently dealing with massive local government debt because so much of the local governments, their assets are in buildings that no one is buying. So that's not a win. Those empty cities are no sense of win.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
No one is moving to those cities because there's no jobs, no demand, nothing there.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So let's say, you know, it would be amazing and I'd love to see it if some community group forged a space in the US and like, OK, how can we arrange this community space? Maybe it's 100 households. How can we arrange it in a pro-coupling, pro-fertility way? That would be fascinating to explore. But just because there's a plot of vacant land, I wouldn't expect anything to follow.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Yeah. So two things on that. So I think, first of all, it's really important that the young people understand the economic implications. So they take it as seriously as we do climate breakdown, first and foremost. And that's what I do in my lectures. And then I think that given my realization that so much of this is driven by the rise of singles, I actually would pivot to say,
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
You know, so many young Americans are not happy. You know, one of the richest countries in the world, a lot of young people are deeply lonely and unhappy. And one of the most unique and wonderful things that we have as humans is to find people to love and care for and build emotional connections and devotion and support each other and understand each other.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So going back to the writing the Hollywood script, I would go back for those rom-coms and celebrate the romantic love because when people shift their focus from celebrating the freedoms or the secular monks of the 20s to thinking more about, okay, how can I build friendships and romantic love? Then you get people finding love earlier and And then that should encourage a higher rate of coupling.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So I think the romantic love would be my optimistic, positive focus that I think would, you know, restore both socialising, friendships, mutual understanding, empathy, happiness and down the line fertility.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And you see it in Italy, too. For example, when you get off the train in Rome, you see the pet store rather than the kids store.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Yeah, I mean, I would say one more thing. I suppose one aspect of me as a sort of social scientist is I teach on international development. So I'm very interested in economic outcomes and how we can all become richer, the sort of abundance idea. But I also study culture. So it's the interconnection between all these economic consequences of our cultural choices.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So let me add on the Scandinavia point, you know, left-wing progressives may say, oh, Scandinavia is so family friendly. You know, there's universal childcare. It's easier to be a working mother. But actually, the U.S. has higher fertility, right? So that signals to us that that theory isn't working.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And as for the theory that it's all about women's choices and liberalism, how can that explain why fertility is crashing in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Turkey, and in Tamil Nadu, which remain very conservative? So something is happening very recently, maybe in the past 15 years, everywhere all at once, across vastly different economies, across vastly different governance and welfare systems,
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
and across vastly different levels of liberalism versus religiosity. So those theories that you mentioned seem to do a poor job of the sort of comparative analysis in the very recent global plummet. And going back to Sweden, for example, what there has been in the very recent years is a massive, massive rise in singles, hugely.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
There are more and more people living in single-occupier households, and this reflects a global trend.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Absolutely. So if we look empirically at the data for a range of countries, we find that increasing number of people are staying single. That is, they are neither married nor cohabiting. So in the US, over half the people between 18 and 34 are neither cohabiting nor married. So they're single. That's the same case in much of Latin America, East Asia, Korea, in China, in South Korea.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
I chat to all my Chinese students. Many are single, no expectations, no plans, no desires to be married. So that's a massive, massive global friction. So if people are staying single, that is closely correlated. If we look at the data, the decline in people being married or couple is almost one to one with the decline in children. It matches so closely in both the US and China, everywhere.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
This is the strongest correlation. It's more closely correlated than anywhere else and across multiple countries. The data is so strong.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Yes, that's what I think, certainly. So I think we can say, you know, there could be locally specific factors that go on in each place. Each place has its own cultural idiosyncrasies, and I don't want to ignore that. But yes, absolutely. The big shock that's occurred everywhere all at once is we've seen vast improvements in personal online entertainment. So we know, for example, in the U.S.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
So people are spending more. No, but I think that's the thing. I mean, no offense, Ross, but I do blame charismatic people like you. You know, if people want to socialize, to listen.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Okay, okay. You're totally innocent. Okay. But we do have this big increase in personal online entertainment, whether it's, you know, watching shows on Netflix, sports bets, you know, online gambling has become absolutely massive across Brazil and Latin America more broadly. You can, you know, go on Pornhub.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
online connectivity enables people to stroll on Instagram, play Call of Duty, World of Warcraft. So we're all becoming, it's not just being single, we're all retreating into this digital solitude. And I think that's partly because technology makes it nicer and easier to stay at home. You can work from home.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And some of these apps are so hyper engaging that you sort of get distracted by the constant stream of Dopamine hits as each app, as each technology company competes against others to keep its users hooked. And effectively, the tech is out-competing personal interactions. That's my fear.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And there's the big difference that sub-Saharan Africa has much, much lower rates of smartphone penetration.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
I totally agree that in person you get when I think the male female friendships are really important driver of gender equality, because as you come to care about someone as a friend, as you listen to their stories, as you as you hear about how their day was or the kind of things they don't like.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And they say, hey, you know, I was interviewing this guy in Catalonia or in Spain and he was telling me that, you know. they went to watch a football game at the bar and the women were saying that they didn't like it when guys were rowdy or aggressive. Or when one of his female friends was approached by a guy and she said no to him, he called her a puta, he called her a whore or something.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
And she was saying to her friend that that was distressing. She didn't like that. And because he cared about her friend, his friend, he sort of understood that and he empathized that and he moderated his own behavior. And I think that building trust, rapport, understanding of what offends or, you know, not even just a fence, but having a sense of what matters to the other person. So that's it.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
I absolutely agree that retreating into these digital spaces of solitude harms our understanding and also our solidarity more broadly, you know, whether we care about other people, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
Indeed, thank you so much.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
I definitely believe that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
I think that's all true. And I absolutely agree that intimate partnerships are a major important factor for building mutual understanding, common ground, etc. That said, I don't think this is just about men not understanding women, a sort of men from Mars, women from Venus story, because
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
If you look at some modern trends, say, for example, the discourse of secular monks, whereby a young American man will say, I'm going to eat these specific macros, I'll have 200 grams of protein, I'll spend two hours on the bike. That's a guy with no friends. That's a guy who's prioritizing, optimizing his physique and he's not strengthening and he's not building friendships.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart
He's not building rapport. He's not becoming a funny, charismatic guy. So this isn't just the gender issue. It's a solitude issue of people losing the capacity, losing the social skill to charm and make friends. And if you don't have a network that is socially active, then even if you wanted to go out, no one is. And so it's all reinforcing, right?
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
So compatibility increasingly depends on love, whether people really enjoy each other's company. But of course, there are lots of frictions. You know, people might be manipulative, deceitful, unfaithful. And if there are lots of frictions, they may call it quits.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
So that might be one aspect of it, economic convergence between men and women's earnings and cultural liberalization making singledom more permissible. On top of that, on top of those shifts, I think the big change that we see all across the world, all at very different levels of income, is the massive improvement in hyper-engaging online entertainment. In that TikTok, video games, Call of Duty,
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
World of Warcraft, Bridgerton, Netflix. You can browse Blackpink's live stream. Let's go! or go on Pornhub. I'm going to skip this one. Anything you like. All these technological advances enable instant access to world's most charismatic, charming content. Or maybe you prefer to do sports bets and gambling.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
And so why venture out when everything is at your fingertips, from Netflix to Zoom meetings? And so we see, tracing the data over time, that there is growing isolation. Young people are spending much more time alone. So in recent surveys, 65% of young American men say, no one knows me well. 28% of Gen Z didn't socialize with anyone they didn't live with in the past week.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
So we just see this global trend and it is absolutely global. So, for example, last year I was in Mexico and lots of different Mexican little towns. And mothers would say the biggest problem here is that our teenage sons are spending all their times in their bedroom.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
And I'll hear the same stories in little Indian villages, in Bangladeshi villages, all these people being hooked on hyper engaging media. Are there any countries that buck the trend? Well, yes, actually. So, for example, I was in Uzbekistan for a month last year and there there's been an increase in fertility.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
When I'm in Uzbekistan, people typically ask me four questions and the answer should always be yes. Do you like Uzbekistan? Do you like Uzbek food? Are you married? Do you have children? And that tells you a lot about people's priorities, a national pride and also this strong onus that women should be married and have children. So that's one option.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
You just pump up the status of marriage and fertility. In Georgia, their Orthodox patriarch similarly did the same of bumping up the status of children and fertility. In Hungary, they tried to give people cheaper mortgages if they promised to be married and have children.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
But what I'm saying, the Alice Evans theory of the collapsing fertility, is that these pronatal incentives of saying $2,000, $5,000 to have an extra child... They're simply too small if the prior constraint is that most people are increasingly single. I think that most governments are putting the cart before the horse by focusing on couples rather than realizing this prior constraint.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
And I think that if I'm right, that the problem is technology, this hyper engaging media distracting us from us and driving this digital solitude, which ultimately prevents people from forming couples. then we need to think, well, you know, we have various options. Could we regulate technology in some way? Could we introduce further restrictions?
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
Or what can we do in schools to ensure that we're fostering social skills? Because just as we see declining maths and English reading skills across the OECD, simultaneously, my interviews suggest that if people aren't spending time socialising, then they're not necessarily developing the capacity to bond and charm and woo people
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
You know, if you're not mixing and mingling, then you get a little bit anxious if you go out into a crowd of unknown strangers.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
So my message for the world, based on my globally comparative research, is let's focus on the core problem. And that's the rise of singles. Now, how can we address that?
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
First and foremost, we need to understand and tackle the problem. Let's have a range of pilot initiatives to build community groups, to build local clubs and societies, to support communities so that people can mix and mingle and fall in love. I'm a great advocate for romantic love, for sharing our life stories, for empathizing and understanding with each other.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
That's quintessentially what makes us human. So if we put that problem front and center and start working on that tricky conundrum, then maybe we can, you know, address the loneliness and boost up the fertility.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
You have the option of going out with your friends, getting dressed, coordinating. Or you can just relax, chill out on the sofa and watch a film or play a video game. And maybe that's a bit easier, a bit more relaxing when you've had a hard day, you just crash out and relax.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
Italy has the highest share of people over 65 years old among all EU member states.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
From Mexican villages to the Atlas Mountains to Uzbek towns to Korean universities. And by talking, learning from young men, older men and women across the world, I've started to think about, OK, well, why is fertility collapsing? What's going on? And my interviews have really helped me understand this massive global problem.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
So I guess there's the right wing, the left wing, and then there's the Alice Evans take. Okay. I think the conservative right in the US will blame childless cat ladies, right? So they'll say that women are overeducated, they're living with their cats, and they're very, very selfish. Correct. But... Here's the thing.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
That theory has two major omissions, because the collapse in fertility is happening at vastly different political economies. I mean, in Tunisia and Turkey, female labour force participation is very low, around 30%, and yet their fertility is only 1.5%. So even in places where women aren't even getting jobs, they're not having kids. You know, in India, extremely patriarchal casteist society.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
But in Tamil Nadu in the south, it's got exactly the same fertility rate as England and Wales. That's 1.4%. So it's not just about these overeducated women pursuing their careers. Also, there's also a class-based variation. So the US right tends to blame these overeducated women. In Sweden and in Finland, the rate of childlessness is actually amongst the most disadvantaged people.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
Absolutely. So many people across the world experience economic difficulties. And so these could be like very high house prices in New York, making it much more expensive to have an apartment with an extra room or the very expensive cost of childcare. You know, when I was in San Francisco, people would say, oh, it might be 30,000, super, super expensive.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
And that's prohibitively difficult for many families. Now, those difficulties are real, and governments should take those economic concerns seriously, and I'm all here supporting cheaper housing, more affordable housing, greater access to safer, accessible childcare.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
However, I don't think that explanation is a full story, because it won't explain why it's happening everywhere all at once, even at very, very different levels of income. And so that brings us to the Alice Evans theory. Yes, exactly. So what has happened everywhere all at once is that we see a rise of singles.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
And the rise in singles, that is, I mean, people neither being married or cohabiting, and it precisely correlates with the decline in fertility. Now, previously, late from the 1960s, American couples had fewer children. But now what's happening is they're not even forming those couples. So in America, for example...
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
Over half of 18 to 34 year olds are neither in a steady relationship nor living with a partner. Furthermore, just out from Pew, most single Americans don't feel much pressure to find a partner. Half say they're not even looking.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
Oh, that's a great point. But that's actually going down too now. In America, it's been the least educated who are less likely to marry. And that's where there's been the steepest decline in fertility.
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
So, here's the thing. I think historically people would have married for one of three reasons. Very crudely, love, money, or respect. You know, in conservative societies where singledom is totally stigmatized, then you have to marry for respectability. You know, in India, where it's so important, lots of aunties and uncles might be pestering people, you know, when are you getting married?
Today, Explained
No kids on the block
When are you getting married? You know, for my grandparents, it was just the done thing to get married. But now as society liberalises, you know, Miley Cyrus championing flowers, I can buy myself some flowers. There's more permissibility, so that's one thing. There's also economic convergence. So as women earn their own incomes, they can increasingly be more independent.