America's Invisible Crisis | Nicholas Eberstadt

we have a situation in the United States of America today where prime age men basically or have a Great Depression scale work problems this is not being hyperbolic uh the latest jobs uh reports show that for every prime age man in America who doesn't have work and is looking for work there are over four guys who are neither working nor looking for work well if you're not counting them you're ignoring over four-fifths of the problem thank you my guest today is Nicholas ebastad he holds the Henry Wendt chair and political economy at the American Enterprise Institute where he researches and writes extensively on demographics and economic development in a range of different geographies his titles include the poverty of the poverty rate in 2008 Russia's peacetime demographic crisis 2010 and most recently in 2022 men without work America's invisible crisis updated uh post covert yeah Nicholas has a PHD in political economy and government and he holds a master of science from the London School of economics in 2012 he was awarded the prestigious Bradley prize in America and that award recognizes extraordinary talent and dedication to American exceptionalism and I think our conversation will reveal just how capable Nicholas's mind actually is Nicholas thanks so much for joining us and it's great to see you again for our listeners and viewers we recently dined together in Sydney and we're here to talk about your more recent work and talking of work can you kick us off by saying that we often complain about work we see it as more of a curse and a blessing in reality surely work is good for us and for men in particular given that we're going to be talking about an astonishing number of people men who are not working why is work good for us Don it's wonderful to see you again thank you for inviting me to share this discussion with you um well of course uh I'm not going to tell you that money doesn't matter because it does but there's so much more to work than just the paycheck important as that is money I mean work uh is a service to other people that helps complete yourself that helps uh one's own uh fulfillment one's own attainment uh one's own satisfaction uh it's perhaps it sounds hackneyed to say that there's a dignity to work but the reason it's a cliche is because cliches have so much truth in them if you want to get kind of uh into the metaphysics of this um there was that funny uh Greek guy Aristotle long ago who said that uh human beings are social creatures and we we suffer if we're not connected to society if we're not if we're men connected through work through family through our own communities through religion or faith there's a reason that being placed in solitary confinement in the penitentiary is considered by many to be a cruel and unusual punishment because we we can't flourish if we're not connected to our world and being connected to the work world is critically important well that's a great segue into talking more about the work that you've done and here's a magnificently interesting little Book Men Without work post-pandemic Edition that you put together now Nicholas despite and I find this quite bewildering in a way even having had years of involvement at the heart of economic policy making in in this country we're now at a situation across the west where despite the economic problems and so forth that countries face unemployment is at record low levels in your country and indeed in mine yet bosses everywhere are screaming for more work you can't get where we're Farmers we can't get Machinery attended to because they've got backlogs because they can't get texts you go to a restaurant in Sydney and we're closed on Thursday night we can't get enough staff to run our normal timetables and that's common to America as well I know that but while they're screaming for work you've got a staggering number of American men of prime age working age who are not making themselves available and you've written that in early 2022 more than seven million prime age men that's about the male Workforce of Australia by the way were neither working or looking for work more than 11 of the prime age male man pool power a pool uh are involved in this seven million men who can work simply not working what on Earth are they doing with their days well we have a good clue as to what they're doing with their time John because they tell us about what they're doing with their days there's a self-reporting survey called the American time use survey which our government uh mainly deploys to try to figure out when people are working and for uh commuting and things like that but all adults are a sample for this including this pool still over 7 million of our prime age men 25 to 54 years old I mean you know at the prime of life and at this critical period in the life cycle where they should be forming families and raising children oh of the seven plus million uh Workforce dropouts about ten percent little over ten percent are actually full-time students they're basically training to get back to work with uh with a better job and better wages and their time use does not look so uh so much different from employed men but when you look at what uh I guess in Britain is called neat n-e-e-t do you say that also in Australia neither employed nor in uh education or training when you look at that huge group of um well over 6 million uh prime age math uh the story they're telling about their lives is a really uh pretty devastating it's pretty distressing they report they basically don't do Civil Society there's almost no worship almost no volunteering almost no charitable work they've got a lot of time on their hands but they report doing strangely little help around the home or help with other people at home what they say that they're doing John is they say that they're watching screens these reports don't tell us what they're watching or what sorts of screens but about 2 000 hours a year sitting in front of screens watching uh two thousand hours a year is qualified would qualify as a pretty good full-time job and this is uh so to speak their uh full-time job um what makes this look even more uh distressing because every so often these surveys ask these uh mail uh Workforce dropouts uh about other questions one of the questions asked right before before the pandemic was on the eve of the pandemic uh was about medication pain medication almost half of these dropouts reported that they were taking pain medication every single day not necessarily opioids but pain medication every single day so we have this self uh self-painted Tableau uh not just of spending all day long playing World of Warcraft uh or Call of Duty but playing World of Warcraft or Call of Duty stoned well that's not the way that you get back into the workforce it may be the way that you uh prepare yourself for a death of Despair though now you chart out in this um something that's really quite staggering the the the those numbers of of men who are neither in the workforce nor looking for work uh is at historically higher levels even compared to what we know of the Great Depression years in America it's an astonishing thing John because if you if you take a look at what the number is actually reveal uh instead of listening to the Happy Talk that we hear from uh uh Washington or the our Federal Reserve our Central Bank or sometimes you you find out that uh we're mainly being given numbers that were created by an employment system designed to fight the last war and the last war of course was the Great Depression so we have a system that's very good at telling about how many jobs there are very very good at telling how many people are unemployed when our labor statistic system was put together I don't think it would have crossed anybody's mind that a uh a prime age man who didn't have a job wouldn't be looking for one but we've had this slow but really uh dramatic revolution in the post-war era in the U.S at any rate we're as we're speaking uh this month uh the latest jobs uh reports show that for every prime age man in America who doesn't have work and is looking for work the technical definition of unemployed there are over four guys who are neither working nor looking for work well if you're not counting them you're ignoring over four-fifths of the problem and unfortunately that's the way we've been proceeding If instead you just look at the work rate at the employment to population uh ratio you find out that the work rate for prime age men in America is lower than it was in 1940 when we started accurately measuring this stuff well back in 1940 we were talking about the tail end of the Great Depression in the USA and the national unemployment rate was almost 15 percent so we have a situation in the United States of America today where prime age men basically or have a Great Depression scale work problems this is not being hyperbolic if to be a little bit more technical if you look at all of the 21st century from year 2000 to the present the average proportion of men with no paid work is about a point and a half a percentage point and a half higher than it was in 1940 when we started measuring this so the 21st century has been kind of like a 1939 scale work problem for men in the USA that really is staggering and as so often the public perception is a vastly different thing to what's really happening in people's lives there has to be a major economic cost you allude to that and it shows up despite of what you call the happy numbers I think you know politicians everywhere bragging about the levels of employment and how strongly economy is how well it's going but we know in your country and indeed in Australia that's not the on-ground experience people feel that it's nowhere near as good as the politicians are telling us on the ground it doesn't feel well because what you're painting has to have a real economic cost it means the American economy it simply isn't performing as well as it should if those six seven million men of prime working age were actively engaged in the workplace so it has to be an economic cost just as there's a big social cost John there's a huge economic cost when part of the reason for the great discontent in my country today uh part of the reason for the plummeting trust in institutions has to do with economic performance now it is true that uh with the help of free money from our Central Bank and a few other little um additional uh bits of ingredients we've been able to generate an extraordinary amount of private wealth although we haven't done it nearly as evenly as you all have done in Australia if you look at the economic growth numbers in the U.S they have been um really troubling uh not just not just during the pandemic crisis not just uh in the wake of the Great Recession but for the entirety of the 21st Century in the U.S uh nowadays by nowadays I mean in 21st century America and we're now over 22 years into this the average per capita growth tempo for the country as a whole has been barely over one percent per year over this entire long uh span of time on the real existing growth tempo it will take 63 years for a doubling of per capita incomes uh in other words uh it wouldn't happen during one's own work life uh might happen during your kids work life it'll happen through your grandchildren's work life but this is a radical slowdown in economic uh productivity from the previous half century from 1950 to the year 2000 so The Retreat or a flight from work by man has only one of a number of different factors obviously but there's nothing good that comes out of this flight from work by man slower growth bigger income and wealth gaps more welfare dependence probably bigger public uh public deficits more pressure on fragile families less social Mobility less social capital less trust in our political institutions there's nothing good that comes out of it yeah you were kind about Australia but we have the same problem High immigration there's pumping GDP Apple has been with an interruption from covert to make the numbers look better than they really are so the on-ground feel is worse and buried in there of course is this real problem of the distribution of wealth young people can't get a start governments have been looking for inflation to devalue the debts they've built up which are now more horrendous than ever suddenly inflation's arrived and that's a whole story in itself how to deal with it and the pain that that will cause but the reality is that it's been there in asset prices so young people find it very hard to get a start and to start forming a family so we're on the same trajectory let me come to one thing you touched on there of course um you've had a sugar hit in the economy particularly out of covert and a massive amount of money pumped into the private sector out of the public sector the nightmare being of course that their borrowings against you could say our children but we might as well say now The Unborn we're not living within our means and covert possibly made it even worse so there are economic and massive social ramifications out of this I would have thought you know have we are we in danger of encouraging people not to work to stay at home to uh expect somehow that Society will support them I don't want to be too cruel here I just want to say is there a danger of sending very bad messages let me talk about the United States because I'm familiar with our situation here um we have four million fewer people in the workforce today than we would have expected on pre-covered traps at the same time that we have this unnatural peacetime labor shortage by a curious coincidence the jump in the number of unfilled jobs uh was about 4 million in comparison with uh pre-coveted times um the reason that our uh Workforce is down this much is below Trend by 4 million is not because of the catastrophe I mean covet was a catastrophe in the United States we lost over a million people in Kofa in the covid crisis most of those people the overwhelming majority of them uh were Beyond working age there are some people in the United States who are suffering long covid and who say that long covet is the reason they're not in our Workforce today and they're uh hundreds of thousands of them maybe four hundred thousand we're a big country I mean four hundred thousand is a lot of people but it's not four million people as I just mentioned most of the Gap uh that I've just described is due to the new face of the flight from work in America it's not just the prime age guys who aren't showing up in the workforce we have a lot of people over the age of 55 men and women alike who were in the workforce before the uh pandemic who aren't now we have prime age women as well who aren't showing up um and I think you can't understand what's happened with the slump in uh Manpower availability unless you look at the unintended consequences of our covid relief policies uh the government not unreasonably was afraid that the lockdown was going to bring a freeze up of the economic system maybe even a second Great Depression they uh opened up the uh they opened up all the stops in monetary and fiscal policy to try to prevent this from happening and in fact maybe they couldn't tell this ahead of time but they overshot the goal um through borrowed public money transferred to households through a variety of programs the U.S disposable income in 2020 and 2021 Rose above Trend Americans never had as much money to spend as they had in 2020 and 2021. it's the only National economic crisis I'm aware of where personal uh disposable income and purchasing power actually rubs Americans had so much money in their pockets during the covet emergency that they couldn't spend it all or they didn't care to spend at all our personal private savings rate more than double in 2020 and 2021. people banked these transfers and the nest egg just from the covet transfers alone apart from the wealth effects of zero interest rate policies with just the the transfer of Nest Egg was over 2 two and a half trillion US Dollars about uh 25 000 a household for uh for persons at the at the bottom of the bottom half of the income distribution of the wealth distribution uh that was a lot of money and I think this helps to explain why so many people in the United States have taken vacations from the workforce or maybe gone into a premature and perhaps unsustainable retirement so they really to put this really crudely future Americans are paying for current Americans not to work oh absolutely I mean that's I mean um yes public debt uh as long as the debt does not uh get defaulted upon and we haven't done that uh as long as as long as one assumes that the public debt is going to be paid eventually it's a future tax on future workers uh and in good measure on workers who haven't yet been born you and many others Warren Farrell David goodheart in the UK Victor Davis Hansen have highlighted the huge social impact of Shifting manufacturing industries from America it's always been a scene that by the rest of the world as a manufacturing Powerhouse particularly during the second world war and a lot of that's gone to Asia and to Mexico part of the American psych I think going right back to Benjamin Franklin and the idea that Americans ideally should be a nation of farmers and productive people this idea if you're involved in farming and Manufacturing motor cars and steel goods and those sorts of things shipyards had great sort of uh what would you call it Prestige as Central to The Narrative of who you were and who your country was do you think there's an element of the economy evolving in such a way that that there there's a a substrator of men who struggle to find meaning or purpose and a sense of vacation in the way job markets are emerging well not to be critical of what's happening is say is it having an impact though on people's perceptions of the worthwhileness of their work going back to the first talk first question of well another value there's there's a lot that's been written on that and um certainly uh one can make the argument that men uh may not be uh quite as Adept at the caring economy in uh Health uh in the health area in education as women are um there may be some truth to that but I'm a little more cautious than some other people are about that argument I mean uh we we if you want to put it that way we lost all our farm jobs before World War II practically at this point in the United States they're more uh dry cleaning establishments than farms in the U.S uh and we didn't have uh we didn't have a men without work problem with the transition from forms to manufacturing we've had a declining share of uh manufacturing jobs in the U.S economy more or less since uh the Korean War and other countries have as well we seem to be um we seem to have a larger share of our prime age men neither working nor looking for work than many other countries that have gone through the similar decline in manufacturing including Australia I mean for France or Canada or Sweden uh all have some of this problem but not so accentuated as in the United States and remember manufacturing isn't the only uh sector where you get to work with your hands in the United States I mean there's a whole um there's a whole huge segment of repair of Machinery in the United States all of the uh all of the stuff for homes and HVAC all of the construction industry no we're short hundreds and hundreds of thousands of positions in the construction industry alone and these are not all positions where you need to have a an engineering degree a lot of these have as a skills basis the skill of at least initially just showing up regularly on time not stoned at least at the moment this is what you see all across the U.S with this labor shortage so I think that we've got we've got something else going on in addition to whatever sort of you know kind of like historical um you know romantic idea we've had about farming and Manufacturing now to go to a slightly sensitive area and I should preface this by saying I know that we both believe in a helping hand for people in genuine need so compassion is important but yeah I think you've written um and we should always be prepared to you know look after those in genuine need but you've specifically mentioned the pernicious effect of disability insurance what we might call welfare safety nets uh more generally uh in in Australian pounds uh upon many who who may be uh relying on it perhaps more than they should encourage to think that um it's it doesn't bring some moral responsibility to us the hard questions do I need this this is is this fair to my fellow taxpayers and so forth now as I look at America the traditional view is that Europe has a very comprehensive perhaps overdone safety welfare networks um Australia's somewhere in the middle of America is quite lean on those things but in fact you actually have a monstrous a very big disability insurance set of arrangements and they do seem do you think they have played as you put yourself I think they're playing a role in contributing to unemployment by creating perverse incentives which in the end turn out of course not to be a compassionate thing to do to people well uh John I don't think that I or anybody else who plays with Statistics can prove that our our awful archipelago of broken disability insurance programs in the US has caused this problem what I can show pretty clearly and pretty incontestably is that our crazy quilt of disability programs is financing the now work um existence the no work lifestyle of millions and millions and millions of men in this uh in this group that we've been discussing um one of the reasons that it's hard for academics and policy uh types to wrap their heads around this in the U.S is because our many many different uh disability programs uh across the country don't play nice and talk to each other and share information with each other I think uh there's no place you can go in Washington DC there's no office you can uh walk into in Washington DC where somebody can tell you the total number of people in the United States who are receiving one or more disability benefit from our social security archipelago from our veterans administration from uh workman's compensation from the state level programs they don't they don't talk to each other when you put this together though try to put it together you find that well over half of the uh men who are neither working or looking for work are obtaining at least one of these benefits and about two-thirds or at least two-thirds are living in homes that obtain one or more of these benefits these benefits I do want to emphasize uh do not allow people to live a princely existence their three penurious but they do allow an alternative to being in the workforce it's as challenging getting that balance right I know only too well from to use in two decades in public life in Australia another really interesting thing that you uh you picked up on was that for as we've said for months during the pandemic governments around the world and I think Australia may have almost led the pack in terms of the relative amount of money that we pump back into the economy uh we we were directly paying people not to work because we essentially had shut our own economies down it's a very strange situation and you know there were reasons for it but it was very unusual very strange but you point out that in the American context and I'm quoting here Washington stumbled into a dress rehearsal for the universal basic income idea the Ubi the government the idea is that the government pays all citizens a minimum income regardless of work it's been a dream of many who fear that technology will make jobs very rare Commodities indeed I think we can draw some lessons though can't we out of the pandemic response that gives us into that it can give us a glimpse into the dangers of Ubi it seems that way to me John I mean yes it was stumbling it was very much fog of War uh people were very frightened and they didn't know uh what was going to happen from one week to the next in terms of the spread of the pandemic or the shutdown of jobs but one of the improvisations uh which is uh very familiar to the Americans was this uh 600 a week um pandemic unemployment insurance benefit uh which was very very broadly defined uh you didn't actually have to be unemployed to get the benefit you could be at work and also get the benefit the the income cut off for it uh wasn't until you got up to about a hundred thousand US dollars a year in annual income which even in a time of inflation is a pretty good income at the peak we had about two and a half times as many Americans obtaining the pandemic unemployment insurance benefit as we're actually unemployed so that's why I say it was a sort of address rehearsal or a kind of a test drive for a sort of a uh a Ubi in the United States now um there are people all over the world uh mainly uh in Academia and in development assistance uh operations uh in different countries were big enthusiasts of uh Ubi I think that it'll have many salutatory properties um if people in the United States we're using their free time to do volunteering or Community gardening or I don't know learn Mandarin or brush up on their schopenhauer maybe there'd be an argument for how uh paying people to have more free time would be a social good but remember we just talked about what the men without work were doing all day long is degrading it's degrading to them it's demoralizing to them would we really want to use taxpayer resources to buy more of that have understood um another quote from your recent Book Men Without work which I really really jumped out at me was this the growing incapacity of grown men to function as Breadwinners cannot help but undermine the American Family it casts those who nature design to be strong into the role of dependence on their wives or their girlfriends on their aging parents or on government welfare among those who should be most capable of shouldering the burdens of Civic responsibilities it encourages instead sloth idleness and vices perhaps even more Insidious and you're going to say that it's submersive to the American tradition of self-reliance to the National ethos arguably even of our civilization to to what extent Nicholas do you think that this crisis in employment is also feeding a crisis in what might be called modern masculinity I I run into young men who will openly say I just don't know what is expected of me as a Young Man anymore I'm confused as to who I should be and how I should behave um John again I don't know how things are in Australia but if you talk to young men in the United States not just young women as well but young men let's stick stick with them um I don't think there's ever been a time in the United States when guys have been as afraid as they are now they're afraid of uh starting families they're afraid of uh their own economic future they're afraid of having children they're afraid of making commitments they're afraid of failing uh and uh part of what we part of what we see I think with this crisis of work in uh the United States so they're also afraid of Daring to maybe fail of you know making the commitment uh you know making the effort to get out and get into the game I mean part of what has happened here in the U.S at least and I don't know how that is in other countries is that we have seen the death of the summer job in my lifetime uh when I was a kid summer jobs were a thing for boys and girls alike for teens and when you were 15 16 17 years old you know you'd earn some money you'd have some uh some change in your pocket you had a little bit more independence from your parents maybe it would help with school or with getting ready for college um but it was it was empowering in all sorts of ways including like learning about the battlefield of the you know the work a day world nowadays in the United States only a tiny fraction of teens uh ever have summer jobs they if they're well to do they go into enrichment programs or the other side they go into remedial summer programs and the net effect of this is that most young men in the United States don't have their first collision with paid work until they're well into their 20s it's an extended period of adolescence uh kind of a Peter Pan sort of existence for too many of our young men and no wonder uh no wonder in a way uh that this thing you've never had any contact with in your life this employment uh thing uh may seem so imposing and scary if uh if you haven't done it as a as a kid can I um can I pivot then to the fascinating work that you've been writing about population decline sure can you give us a bit of a picture of what's happening globally I think the un's still saying that popular global population will Peak at around 11 billion and they focus on Africa and the Middle East is still growing rapidly but we learn on the other hand that China's population is in free fall and there's a whole chunk of Western countries where population is starting to decline and will start to decline very rapidly uh over the next decade much faster than they are now uh in fact I think it may have been your term we're actually looking at a depopulation bomb may or may not have been your term can you give us a bit of a feel for what's happening well uh as best we can tell our total numbers in the world are going to be increasing for a while but what we have been seeing over the last three generations over the three post-war uh Generations is a Relentless March all across the world to childbearing patterns uh that will result in below replacement fertility which is to say not as many kids coming up to their parents generation as as necessary to replace that generation without immigration coming up or without some uh some sort of immigration compensation so uh across the world as a whole today something like three quarters of the of our planet's population lives in countries with below replacement fertility now we're used to thinking of rich countries as having below replacement fertility and virtue almost all of them do and almost all of them have for a while but since you know that the rich countries only account for a very small share of the world's population you couldn't get to three quarters of the world being below replacement unless mostly this is occurring in low-income countries and so-called third world countries and if you spin the globe you see that all of East Asia is below replacement at this point um most of Southeast Asia um in South Asia India is a below replacement uh population now Bangladesh is below replacement Nepal is below replacement at this point an awful lot of countries in the Middle East in the Uma uh are below replacement um turkey Iran Morocco places you wouldn't necessarily expect and then of course when you come to the New World um Mexico Brazil and a number of other Latin American countries are also below replacement societies as well as practically all of the Caribbean so this is the wave of the future and this has been a Relentless Trend there doesn't seem to be any uh uh end in sight demographers don't have any good theory for how low things go um what demographers do is they look in the rear view mirror they say oh we know it can go this low now we know that for example last year we know that in South Korea uh the population of South Korea could end up with uh on a tempo of just 0.8 births per woman per lifetime when you need almost three times that level for a society just to have stable population this of course is something we're only just beginning to come to grips with and it is going to profoundly reshape the world in a whole range of ways there are many who would say well that's a good thing you know I run into will many people everywhere who think there are simply too many of us um and that for the sake of the environment and our future living standards and for a whole lot of other things it would this is a very welcome trend there are some downsides which you've highlighted however there are reasons to be quite concerned about these demographic shifts well I wasn't one of the people who was uh alarmed by the population explosion of the 19 you know the late 20th century because even when I was a young student looking at this I realized what was really driving it was a health explosion and if you're going to have a population problem I'll take a health explosion any day you know just the Improvement in life expectancy reduction in disease uh all of the good things that come with increased human survival up I think that they're uh I think there's a lot of scope even in a shrinking and aging world for maintaining and improving Prosperity uh given the possibilities of improved Health given the possibilities of improved education of uh having a good business climate and an intelligent approach towards uh pragmatic uh free market economies and generating more knowledge oh but there definitely are um consequences to a population decline driven by sub-replacement fertility for one thing the what I was trained to think of as a population pyramid with lots of kids on the bottom and few elderly people on the top kind of flips over and uh unless you do some very um uh adroit things with social policy uh you have the risk of having a sort of a Ponzi scheme going where you have a chain letter that can never uh that can never do a pay as you go for supporting an elderly population for another thing unless you really make a lifelong learning a practice rather than a you know a slogan people occasionally spout it's going to be very difficult to train and skill a gray labor force but I think the really the most the most important phenomenon to bear in mind when you have a when you have Generations upon generations of sub-replacement fertility is that you have a revolution in the family where many many people um in Practical terms end up childless end up not married or never married and the human bonds that have been our social glue more or less forever start to become undone and this takes us into a kind of a terror incognita uh which uh gets us beyond the troubles that we can see with the head count gets us into kind of the basic glue of society and questions about meaning and human existence they uh my wife was pointing out to me the other day she'd read something that said that once the population goes into Free Fall the way it is say for example in China today it's a relatively short time span before most children do not have siblings and they don't have aunts and uncles to your point about social glue and and a sense of place in a in the smallest Community if you like a family so China is an especially acute case here because when they had this monstrous um government uh administered population control program from 1980 until 2015 the so-called one child program now which was a really the most ambitious totalitarian program that I think any dictatorship has ever tried to implement it when Lenin said we recognize nothing private but before uh dang Xiaoping none of the totalitarians have tried to invade the family unit and reconstruct it this way uh it looks like they kind of succeeded in not in ways that they expected to since the end of that program uh there has been a collapse in births and in marriages in China since they ended the program uh Earth's dropped proportionately by more in the last five years than they did during the terrible famine under Mao marriage is much more and I think we we are uh we are standing on a little Hill where we can see some of the future that's coming in China and we're going to we're going to see the atrophy uh call it the collapse but we're going to see the atrophy and the withering away of the extended family in China um and as you know the extended family has been the families the basic social unit everywhere but family has been absolutely indispensable in Chinese civilization because it's been the protection for the little people against the absolute government that's ruled them in for thousands of years and what happens next where is that protection going to come from I don't think that we can see you there are parallels in all societies are they not you know the family unit is a place where you can Retreat and deal with the problems of the world if it's functioning properly defend and love uh you know those who are bruised by their external experiences within the walls of the the family can find and all of that is breaking down to what you've highlighted you know the conundrum that we don't really understand what's driving this everywhere I mean there are all sorts of reasons why Chinese young Chinese people are not now you know they're laughing at it seems the you know the beijing's insistence that they go forth and multiply and there are you know they're they're just saying you're making it impossible we don't want to do it in so and so forth but in the West to what extent do you think this is a sort of social contagion that um that children are all very well but uh one thing they are not is convenient Have We Become somehow so self-obsessed so Keen to Define ourselves by our career that's an irony given that so many are opting out all together uh by uh standing with our peers by our wealth that somehow or other were losing sight of of what would you call the the the desirability of having children the richness that they bring that they're seen as a burden and an inconvenience and if you must have them there as a a commodity somehow rather than something higher well uh there is a great expert on all of these questions uh uh that I would defer to on any of those points uh um named Mary everstadt and unfortunately you don't have her you've got the consolation prize here so I'll try to stumble my way through some of this um just to make the point of course you can find Mary's uh thoughts on these things on this very Channel uh indeed like a couple of months ago indeed indeed so uh to the extent that social scientists have been able to come up with any good um predictors for fertility levels uh around the world the best that they have managed to do is to show that um the that a predictor that the best predictor for fertility in all countries that we've surveyed in all times that we've surveyed is how many children women say that they want so who would have thought you know that we're that human agency has anything to do with the number of kids that people have we'd know a lot more about uh the role of men as well but social scientists survey women on this question so let's stick with that um asking why the desired number of children changes radically uh is exactly what we have to do to explain this you know wholesale shift in Western countries to seemingly more or less permanent sub-replacement fertility and there were uh in the 1980s or two European uh demographers who came up with this idea that they called the second demographic transition it sounds very boring and very technical but at the heart of it they said the change in uh desired family size in Western Europe which is what they were focusing on there they were from uh Belgium and they were focusing on the Flemish at that time has to do with a new mindset and a new ideology they called it self-actualizing uh we might call it autonomy uh the idea that we didn't want the uh the burdens and obligations of family life to get in the way of our becoming me you know of a self of self-actualization um put it uh put it one way or another but that's pretty close to what you're seeing all through the West all through the West you're seeing a flight from family which is really a flight by the strong away from the week um unfortunately the life cycle is pretty unforgiving everybody starts out pretty helpless and vulnerable and pretty much everybody ends up pretty helpless and vulnerable on the other end so there's a pretty basic contradiction there that uh self-actualization Theory can't really help you with that's a very powerful set of insights isn't it it goes to the issue I suppose that Jordan Peterson talks a lot about of responsibility accepting taking on responsibility take on what you can and be as Noble as you can and step up and have a go but it's the opposite of self actualization in a sense because it involves being other person-centered part of this uh another component of this John is just what one sees in Rising Generations who are unfamiliar with family increasingly unfamiliar with babies in their own lives with children in their own lives it seems daunting and impossible to people who Come From Below replacement uh settings that they might be able to bear this responsibility for themselves it seems frightening there's we're the richest um were the richest Generations that the world has ever seen we're the most populous Generations that the world has ever seen and yet we also seem to be the most lonely never seen when there were fewer people in the world there's never uh so much loneliness as there is today and I don't think there was ever as much fear about being in families and being committed to them it's an extraordinary place to have reached can I then pull this together with two very broad questions where you may have some thoughts the first goes to what this might mean globally because the massive shifts as as broadly speaking I think it's true to say I think it's 92 of the world's countries are now in population Decline and you've listed some astonishing examples uh other parts of the world the population's rising very strongly that alone will lead to Great shifts the migration flows as Western countries bring people in from other parts of the world who have very different cultural perspectives for example the migrants to Australia on most social issues are far more socially conservative than their host citizenry tend to be uh that alone points the way to differences sometimes as France is seeing they import a lot of social problems so maybe a bit tough on France but I think that's a fair thing to say they've got areas of Paris where the police simply don't go that are made up of um uh very unsettled immigrant and ethnic populations um this will lead to a very different world a major realignment in particular we worry about Russia which is in grave danger of becoming just a middle power uh albeit equipped with what the world's largest nuclear arsenary that alone is is very worrying uh the Chinese must be very aware that they've probably peaked but they will be more determined than ever I suppose to assert their muscle uh any thoughts on what this might mean in terms of Shifting Global alignments and power patterns and influence there are there's an academic industry a small academic industry uh in international relations uh called uh geriatric peace and the idea behind these studies um briefly is that more elderly populations can be expected to be more risk-averse they won't have as they won't have military commitments the way they have now because everything's gonna be eaten up by uh the national pension commitments and health commitments um there may be something to that for some of the aging and shrinking affluent democracies I don't see any reason we should expect uh dictatorships or autocracies to become more Peaceable as their population's age and Shrink um actually if you're uh if you're in the business of running a dictatorship and you see that your prospects for extending power abroad may be diminishing a generation from now you might want to act more quickly you might want to be a little bit more aggressive more quickly so I can actually see I can see a good argument for the opposite that shrinking and aging Societies in uh in Realms where dictatorships rule may cause increasing instability in our world um more broadly speaking uh there's going to be there's going to be a big uh push or migration internationally I think from the areas where population is still going to be growing very rapidly that's mainly sub-sahara you can make the argument that there will be a big demand for caregivers and others and some of the rich shrinking societies the trick there is going to be how well the rich receiving countries are capable of assimilating the newcomers into being loyal and productive members of their society I mean the United States as you know we don't have an immigration policy we're in complete chaos we can't help but uh we can't help but attract motivated people to our Shores for some reason I know that Australia's Got a much more uh pragmatic and effective immigration policy and uh in Australia from what little I know it seems that you have the sort of the secret sauce which helps which helps make newcomers into loyal and productive citizens uh Continental Europe hasn't done nearly as well as your country or mine in bringing its newcomers into integrate integrate into society you see in many of these countries many of the Continental countries that uh work rates and labor force participation rates are actually lower for the newcomers than for the uh for the native born the idea that they were going to be bringing in newcomers to help them with their uh postpone the crisis of the welfare state worked exactly the wrong way around in some of those cases so I don't know what it is in Europe that is um preventing some of these countries from doing better with uh with making immigration a success but unfortunately there's almost nothing you can read about this uh to if you wanted to make things work better because the subject is so politically sensitive it is so incorrect that people don't write about it and they don't talk about it so they they can't even build any learning about this Let's uh concerning I have to say but to come right home then to a major issue for the globe today there's no other way of putting it and that's your country I remember when he was Prime Minister of Great Britain Tony Blair making the observation in a speech to our federal Parliament that sometimes our American cousins may seem a little unusual to us and even irritating but there is no problem in the world today that cannot be resolved without the involvement and engagement of the American people and I thought it was a very interesting observation to make we're very conscious of that in Australia today as we see the Arc of autocracy starting to look really quite threatening we we hope and we assume and we trust that the Americans will be there if something goes wrong that's a pretty common view around the world so if I can be so crude there are times when people love to hate the Americans until it goes wrong and then they expect you to be there I mean that is reality and sometimes I think people behave quite badly in not appreciating the Force for good that America has been since the second world war in insisting on a rules-based International order and being prepared to defend them but that brings you back to the American people and the division that you've touched on that the rest of the world talks about America seems you know absolutely divided as I look at it I have to say at least there are people putting up a fight for common sense and for thoughtfulness and for reason but the question more broadly is where do you think America might go you finish your piece on demographic decline with an interesting reflection on American history you you wrote Our amazingly resilient Society has been revitalized more than once before and not by governments spontaneous intellectually and spiritually disruptive ferment from within Civil Society might offer a home-grown American answer and you mentioned in this context America's history of great religious revivals or great Awakenings there have been the times when we've seen America or wake out of a great Slumber isolationism during the 1930s ironically the foundation stone for the American Embassy in Canberra was laid in a ceremony the night before Pearl Harbor okay there's a little reflection on the way through um America has at times almost probably even itself where this rise to Greatness whether it's turning around so as we watch all of this ferment is it too much to Hope that America can pull together again because surely there is no material or factual reason why America has to go into decline in terms of the intelligence and capability of its people its resources its system of government it boils down to we're individuals I think individual Americans choose to take their country and who wins in the culture War who loses well I'm I'm very optimistic about the American future I think we've got a I think we've got a formula that has worked extraordinarily well for almost a quarter of a millennium and I don't think there's anything that has invalidated that basic formula uh with respect to the Future we've lived through a very bad patch it's and it's quite ironic this bad patch began at the end of the Cold War when the United States became more powerful in relative and absolute terms than any Empire or any uh golden horde had ever been before on the you know the face of the planet and we've had I think we've had an unfortunate a measure of fecklessness during the sort of the sleepwalking time uh where many of us have taken a sort of a holiday from history um that's also been through in some of our domestic uh Politics as well but but that that will pass and I think that I think that we will see more familiar uh more familiar uh glimpses of of U.S Behavior as some of our uh some of our options uh Fall Away there I mean exactly the way you're saying that that you can uh count on Americans to do the right thing as Churchill said after they've exhausted all other options we may be exhausting some of those options right now and the history that you mentioned of religious uh Awakenings as we call it in our country I think is also quite relevant here um uh we're we're not going to be going on a linear Trend in this kind of uh trajectory of anime that we see at the moment this will come to an end and I think that uh I think that good things will lie ahead well thank you just as I was concerned you might confirm my my fear that a cornered Russia or a China perceiving that its peaked might be more dangerous than countries that have a stronger belief in their future I was concerned you might say that because I think I think frankly that is my own View but I am equally more in fact more so delighted that you you hold that optimism I'm a great admirer of the best of the American tradition and I guess I'd say the world does need a functioning and cohesive America as one of my guests once said there will be a global cop and you want the cop to be a good one so from from this Australian thank you for your time and your insights have been invaluable and I've enjoyed it immensely and here's to America finding great National unity and Global purpose again amen John it's a delight talking with you thank you for inviting me thank you [Music]

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 217,113

Keywords: John Anderson, John Anderson Conversation, Interview, John Anderson Interview, Policy debate, public policy, public debate, John Anderson Direct, Direct, Conversations

Id: QUGXh5g90X0

Length: 66min 12sec (3972 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2023