Who We Are: Psychology, Behavior, and Society

Summary

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City Journal Audio

Episode: "Who We Are: Psychology, Behavior, and Society"

Date: January 28, 2026
Host: Rafael Mangual
Guests: Tony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple), Rob Henderson

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Overview

This episode of City Journal Audio brings together Rafael Mangual, Tony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple), and Rob Henderson for a candid discussion on the interplay between psychology, behavior, social policy, and the roots of social dysfunction. The conversation challenges many widely held beliefs on crime, inequality, poverty, family stability, and personal agency, probing the limits of what public policy can — and cannot — achieve.

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Key Themes & Discussion Points

1. Psychology’s Role in Policy Debates

• The hosts tackle the controversy in attributing negative life outcomes (e.g., crime, poverty) to individual agency versus societal forces.
• Rob Henderson: Psychology’s research is “unhelpful at best and actively detrimental at worst,” but highlights “childhood instability” (not poverty) as a significant predictor for future antisocial behavior.

  “Researchers consistently find little to no relationship between childhood poverty...and detrimental life outcomes...But researchers find a consistent link between childhood instability and those outcomes later in life.” (01:58)

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2. Agency, Responsibility, and the Appeal of Victim Narratives

• Theodore Dalrymple (Tony Daniels) provides insights from his psychiatric work in prisons, rejecting the notion that bad childhoods fully excuse criminal behavior:

  “Most criminals were actually resistant to the idea of themselves as...just vectors of forces...He expected me to say that [his childhood] was the cause, and he was surprised when I said, ‘No...you’re lazy and you want things which you’re not prepared to work for.’” (05:13)

• The discussion highlights the pervasive use of passivity in offender narratives (“The knife went in”) and warns against stripping offenders of agency and responsibility.

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3. Disconnect Between Policy Elites and Real-World Behavior

• Henderson makes the case that those who shape policy discussions are far removed from the environments they theorize about:

  “They have a rosy view...of human nature because most...people they’ve spent their life around have been very good people.” (09:38)

• Henderson’s distinction: left-wing views of human nature are idealistic, whereas right-wing views tend to be more hard-headed.

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4. The Enjoyment of Crime & The Ideological Lens

• Both Mangual and Daniels discuss the thrill or ‘glee’ many offenders get from their actions, a fact often omitted in polite discussions:

  “A lot of them actually experience a lot of glee and excitement at committing and exploiting other people and evading law enforcement.” – Rob Henderson (11:58)

• Dalrymple warns that even those with experience in the criminal world can be blinded by ideology, likening some academic frameworks to the “billiard ball theory” of human behavior. (13:03)

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5. Root Causes: Instability, Trauma, and Family Structure

• The trio explores the narrative around “root causes” and whether deep-seated issues like childhood trauma or family disruption underpin adult criminality.
  • Both guests agree that childhood trauma has explanatory power, but warn that this knowledge can become justification for misbehavior rather than explanation alone. (22:17)
  • Dalrymple: “In the environment in which most of my patients grew up...there was a radical absence of love or affection.” (23:30)
  • The stability of the family is identified as a major protective factor, but not a panacea.

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6. Two-Parent Families, ‘Luxury Beliefs,’ and Social Divergence

• Henderson introduces “luxury beliefs”:

  “Ideas and opinions that confer status on the credentialed and the affluent while inflicting costs on the less fortunate.” (28:35)

• Examines the divergence in family structures across class lines:

  “For upper and upper middle class families...95% [of children] in 1960, 85% by 2005. For poor and working class, it dropped from 95%...to 30% by 2005.” (30:36)

• Arguments that stable two-parent families confer social advantages not explained by economics alone; affectionate, stable parenting outstrips “redistributive” solutions in impact.

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7. Crime Concentration, Prolific Offenders, and Policy

• Discussion of crime being driven by a minority of prolific offenders:
  • “One percent of the Swedish population was responsible for something like 63% of all violent crime.” (36:53)
  • In New York: “300 some odd shoplifters had generated something like 6,000 arrests for shoplifting.” (37:18)
• The burden of crime falls disproportionately on the poor, not the affluent.

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8. Limits of Policy, Utopian Thinking, and Cultural Influence

• The group agrees social policy has limits: neither marriage promotion nor welfare transfers offer silver bullets.
• Dalrymple: “We should not expect marriage to solve all the problems because all the problems will never be solved. And so that’s what we must always remember. We mustn’t be utopian about [it].” (46:14)
• Mangual challenges utopian thinking in criminal justice:

  “The idea that we could solve that...can be found in a...small classroom...at UC Berkeley just struck me as the height of hubris.” (47:51)

• Emphasis on the role of culture, norms, and elite influence—“the age of the influencer”—as possible levers for positive change.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Tony Daniels:

  “He [the serial burglar] said, ‘Do you think, doctor, I burgled because of my childhood?’ and I said, ‘No... you’re lazy, and you want things you’re not prepared to work for.’” (05:13)

• Rob Henderson:

  “A core feature of a luxury belief is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief.” (28:35) “If you have a sufficiently strong ideological lens, it can distort any amount of actual experience.” (13:03)

• Rafael Mangual:

  “What sort of characterizes human dignity is our ability to make choices and exercise agency.” (07:08)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Role of Psychology in Crime, Poverty, and Policy:
  01:58 – 04:10
• Dalrymple’s Prison Insight; Agency vs. Victimhood:
  05:13 – 07:08
• The Rosy vs. Grim View of Human Nature:
  09:38 – 11:58
• Enjoyment & Glee in Offending:
  11:58 – 13:03
• Ideology’s Distortions, Not Just Lack of Experience:
  13:03 – 14:18
• Luxury Beliefs and Class Stratification:
  28:35 – 33:44
• Crime Concentration and Victim Impact:
  36:53 – 37:18
• Policy Limits and a Call for Humility:
  46:14 – 47:51
• Conclusions on Policy and the Enduring Nature of Social Problems:
  50:04 – 54:57

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Conclusion

The episode weaves together empirical research, lived experience, and cultural critique to challenge prevailing orthodoxies around crime, poverty, and family policy. The hosts assert the enduring reality of personal agency and the futility of purely materialistic or structural explanations for complex social phenomena. Though they deliver a sobering verdict on the limits of policy, the discussion ends with a call for humility, honesty, and perhaps a cultural shift led not by policy prescriptions, but by the lived example and influence of those in positions of respect and authority.

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Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the City Journal podcast. My name is Rafael Mangual and I am your host. And I'm so happy to be joined by two wonderful colleagues. We have Tony Daniels, AKA Theodore Dalrymple, which is the name I think you all probably know him best by, and of course, Rob Henderson. I want to thank you both for joining me for what I expect is going to be a fantastic discussion about all sorts of things, including the role of psychology and the insights it has to offer for public policy debates. And I kind of want to start there because it seems to me like one of the biggest hurdles in policy debates, especially here in the United States, but certainly in the uk Tony is settling on an explanation of the circumstances in which the least fortunate among us find themselves. And it's almost like you're sticking your tongue onto the third rail if you start to contemplate an explanation for life outcomes like poverty or socioeconomic inequality that hinge on the individual level decisions that people make that hinge on the exercise of individual agency. And I think in many ways this is kind of what demarcates the line between left and right in policy debates. It's essentially a line between people who believe that individuals are by and large responsible and authors of their own lives and people who believe that society, society is largely to blame. And I think these are kind of the questions that I want to explore in our talk today. And I want to start the conversation by asking kind of a broad, high level question. We'll start with you, Rob, which is, what do you think are kind of the most important insights that psychology has to offer us in policy debates, especially when we're talking about things like crime and antisocial behavior.

[A]

Well, I think most of the suggestions put forth by psychologists and criminologists and other social scientists are unhelpful at best and actively detrimental at worst. But there are useful bits of research and interesting findings from various studies where you can glean some helpful information. Much of it reflects common sense, but one that I've pointed out in various essays and in my first book is this distinction between childhood poverty and childhood instability. And researchers consistently find little to no relationship between childhood poverty. So how much money your family had growing up and then detrimental life outcomes like substance abuse, reckless behavior, drunk driving, criminality, very little relationship between childhood poverty and those outcomes. But researchers find a consistent link between childhood instability and those outcomes later in life. And instability is measured by how frequently you relocated growing up as a child, how many different romantic partners your primary caregiver had growing up. So this would be, you know, if you were raised by a single mom, if you're raised by mother, had many different boyfriends and partners throughout your childhood, that seems to have some effect on your life outcomes and just how much day to day disorder and uncertainty there is in your life. And when researchers control for family income, they still find a link between instability and detrimental outcomes later in life. And I think this helps to illuminate some of the discussions around, well, what is responsible for how people turn out and when they choose to make, you know, bad decisions later in life. Is it poverty? Is it something else? Well, instability has some correlation with poverty, but there are two separate things. And, and it really is the instability piece more so than the poverty piece. But poverty, you know, people feel like they can do something about poverty. Instability, it feels, you know, you can't really get your hands around it. It's harder to solve something like that with policy.

[B]

Yeah, it seems like people are sort of confusing the, the direction causation. Right. I'm now often hear it said that, you know, well, obviously poverty causes crime because most criminals are poor. And the people who make that argument never seem to contemplate the possibility that the same kind of dispositions that, you know, lead someone to think about knocking over a liquor store at gunpoint are also not very conducive to economic success in, you know, Western society. And so poverty is an outcome of the same kind of social phenomenon. But Tony, I mean, I wonder if that rings true to you because, I mean, you are someone who has spent a career as a psychiatrist working with criminal offenders and people who were experiencing a lot of the sort of social problems that often characterize the lower social classes in Western society. And it would seem to me that those experiences might have something to say about the truth of what Robert just, just laid out.

[C]

Yes, I mean, one has to be careful that you don't give people who had an unstable childhood a get out of jail free card. There's always that danger once you've got an explanation like that. But in fact, what I found was that most criminals were actually certainly at one level, resistant to the idea of themselves as, as feathers on the wind of circumstance or as just vectors of forces. So one day a repeat burglar came to me. It's very difficult to get into prison for a burglary in England. You have to want to be caught by the police. But anyway, he said, do you think, doctor, I burgled because of my childhood? And I said, no, I've Got absolute pathopathy, let's do that. And he was very surprised by this because he expected me to say that it was. And he said, well, why do I do it? And I said, well, you're lazy and you want things which you're not prepared to work for. And once you got over that, actually it was perfectly possible to talk in an honest way about his childhood, which was likely actually to have been a very bad one. But there's something between having a bad. Something happens between having a bad childhood and breaking into a house.

[B]

Right, right. I mean, the bad childhood might, you know, explain a little bit about how you got to where you are, but it doesn't excuse the decisions you made between the choices in front of me.

[C]

No. And in a way, he doesn't want that to be the case because if he believes that, if he truly believes that it's the case, he's saying of himself, I am not truly a human being like you.

[B]

Right, right. Because, I mean, yeah, I mean, that's, that's what sort of characterizes human dignity. Right, Is, is our ability to make choices and exercise agency. And it reminds me, Tony, of. Of one of your greatest essays, which is one of the first pieces I ever read in City Journal. And I've told this story on the podcast before and certainly in others, but in 2006, I was in a first year Sociology class and made to take in a presentation delivered by an ex convict who had done a significant amount of prison time after being convicted of serious drug offenses here in New York. And he went on about how the criminal justice system and society at large was racist and rigged against him, and explained the entirety of all the bad things that happened to him in life. And viscerally, I pulled back from what he was saying, but I didn't really have a vocabulary with which to push back on those ideas. And I went home and I logged onto the search engine of choice back then, which was Ask Jeeves. So I'm kind of updating myself a little bit and I started just throwing some search terms in there. And I came across your essay in City Journal entitled the Knife Went In. And the way that you described how common it was for offenders to use the passive ways to sort of create distance between themselves and the crimes that they had committed just spoke to me. And that was kind of my first introduction into the idea that there was actually, actually something deeper going on that explained crime much more and much clearly, much more clearly than, you know, some very common socioeconomic phenomenon like poverty. You both have had A great deal of exposure to antisocial behavior in different ways. I mean, Tony, you know, through your profession, you have talked to, I think it's fair to say, tens of thousands or certainly over 10,000, you know, criminal offenders. And, and Rob, I mean, your book Troubled. I mean, you talk about your own personal experiences in terms of your own exposure to, to antisocial behavior in a, in, in a very, I think, visceral way. I mean, do you, do you think that that's, that's part of, of what's going on here in terms of the disconnect in, in some of these policy debates about, you know, populations that are experiencing some of these life outcomes like criminality, poverty, some kind of social deprivation?

[A]

Yeah, I think a lot of people who work in policy and contribute to the discourse around inequality and criminality and so on, they are very far removed from those people, from those communities, from social dysfunction. And they have spent most of their life around, you know, generally pretty well meaning, responsible, polite people. And in their reality, the only reason why anyone would do anything, you know, transgress against another person is because there must be some kind of explicable and understandable reason for it. And so they, they, you know, based on their own self experience and the people around them, they extrapolate and think, well, everyone must be that way. The only reason why anyone would do something, there must be a reason of poverty or, you know, mistreatment, depression by society. They have a kind of a rosy view, I think, of human nature because most of the people they've spent their life around has been very good people. I sometimes make this, this, this joke that the left wing view of human nature is very rosy and idealistic and left wing art is very grim and ugly. And right wingers, it's exactly the reverse where right wingers have a very grim and ugly view of human nature. But right wing art is generally kind of inspiring and uplifting and, and, and idealistic and you know, anyway, I, I think that, yeah, people, people who spend a lot of time around material affluence and comfort and predictability and around highly educated, responsible adults, they, you know, create these kind of fantasies detached from reality for what would lead someone to behave badly. And you know, this is, it just doesn't, doesn't really reflect what I saw growing up. And a lot of what you actually read about in a lot of the research and literature and accounts of criminals, you know, a lot of them actually experience a lot of glee and excite sense at committing and getting, exploiting other people. And evading law enforcement.

[B]

And that's exactly right. I mean, I don't think people fully appreciate. And, Tony, I'm interested to hear what some of the offenders that you've interacted with have had to say about this. But, I mean, in my experience, I mean, I've had both friends and family members who have, you know, were serious criminals who, you know, did time both in jail and prison. And I think people would be surprised about the joy that is derived from offending. I mean, there's kind of an adrenaline rush, I think, that is chased by some offenders. But, I mean, in a lot of ways, certain crimes are fun for individuals. And, you know, there's a sense of kind of laughter that is infused throughout the criminal act. I mean, you know, I've been in street fights, for example, where after the fight there's this kind of, you know, bonding experience where we all laugh and tell funny stories about what happened during the melee. And I think it actually is a motivating factor for a lot of people to participate in some of these offenses.

[C]

Yeah, well, I would like. I mean, there are two things I like. The first is that actually, although it is true that many people haven't had any contact with this world, if you have a sufficiently strong ideological lens, it can distort any amount of actual experience. So that I met people who had had lots of experience, lots of psychiatrists, for example, who had had lots of experience, but nevertheless saw. Saw people through what one might call the billiard ball theory of human behavior. Someone is struck by a billiard ball and that the other billiard ball goes off in a certain direction, and that's all there is to it. So I think it's important that people should have experience, but it's probably not enough. And there was something else that I was going to say, but I've forgotten what it is, actually.

[B]

But.

[C]

Yeah, I've forgotten what I was going to say.

[A]

Well, this helps me to maybe understand, you know, that's actually helpful for me, that if you have. The ideology can sort of cloud empirical observation. And one thing that I've been perplexed by is why people would, for example, like vulnerable people who would. Who. Who would be easy targets for criminals, would support politicians who would increase the number of criminals on the streets, or who say they would like to close prisons or loosen some of the policies around crime in those people's minds, despite themselves maybe being vulnerable, they would support someone like that because they have this ideology of, um. Again, I think this. This goes back to what I said earlier that in their mind, the only reason they would behave that way is if they were treated unfairly or if they were living in poverty. And so many of those same politicians who take a very relaxed stance towards criminals also have these ideas around economic equality and, and, you know, providing for everyone. And I mean, this goes back to Marx who claimed that, you know, once, once we reach a certain level of material abundance, then, then crime would disappear. Right. Who wants to commit crime if all of your needs are met? But, but of course, many of those same people who believe that poverty inevitably gives rise to crime will readily acknowledge that you can be a billionaire or a CEO or some kind of rich, high status, successful person and, and still be a criminal. And in fact, you know, those are the real criminals anyway.

[B]

Right?

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And so which is it? Is it not having money makes you a criminal or is having too much money? That's what, what, what turns you to crime?

[B]

That's right. That's right. No, I, I mean, I, I wonder if there is a kind of protective factor here to that belief system, Tony. I mean, if I believe that crime and antisocial behavior in general is just a function of some broader societal failure that we can fix, then that gives me hope. Whereas if I believe that crime and antisocial behavior is generally out of my hands to influence, then I might be victimized.

[C]

I think it's very important for us to try and get across the view that if you actually say people are agents and not just victims, and of course, there are people who are few victims, pure victims. There are. And we have to acknowledge that some people have a very easy passage through life and other people have a very difficult passage through life. We must acknowledge that. I think that people think that if you actually refer to the agents of people who have behaved badly, you're actually saying to them, depart my sight, I'm not going to do anything for you. I detest you, I hate you. I think there's no hope for you, and so on and so forth. And that possibly is a sign of a loss of religious understanding of sin. I'm not religious myself, but the idea that one should hate the sin but not the sinner is almost completely gone. And so if you actually, if you confront, shall we say, a drug addict with the lies he's telling himself, you're actually being unkind to him. That's what the official doctrine really is. He is just evicted and he is supposed to come to me and I will cure him. I will sort everything out for him. Now this is a false Bill of goods. And I think it actually maintains people in their pathological behavior. So I would say on the whole, I mean, I don't know whether Rob would agree with this, that the overall effect of criminology, sociology, psychology, and certainly psychiatry, as it has turned out, has been socially disastrous because the ideas that people are just vectors of forces has actually affected people at the lowest level of society.

[B]

What do you make of that?

[A]

It's hard to object to that. I think there are good researchers within each of those disciplines and useful findings. But, you know, taken collectively, to some extent, it probably has stripped people of their agency, or at least the reception is that people no longer have agency. And it's. Let's look for the. The root causes, abstract forces, systemic contributing factors, and not what is that person doing? Why did they decide to do that? And how can we prevent them from making that decision?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I want to talk a little bit about root causes because that is, I think, a major sort of part of the broader debates about everything from drug policy to crime policy. There are people who think that, you know, in order to live virtuously as a policy professional, you have to address yourself to the root causes of some kind of social phenomenon that, you know, constitutes a problem. So if it's criminality, what are the root causes of crime? And this is, of course, something that I have projected in part because my worldview essentially reflects the position that you don't need to address the root causes to control crime. You can just control crime itself, you know, by controlling criminals and incapacitating them through arrest and prosecution and incarceration. And I think that's. That's a perfectly viable social program, and it's not immoral simply because it doesn't address itself to what might be at the root of that behavior. But when I make those arguments, I am consistently confronted with the question of, well, what do you think is at the root of crime? And I've spent the last year or so kind of thinking more deeply about that question. And I think that among criminals and Tony, I'd be curious to see if this is your experience, what you see in criminal populations is an overrepresentation of the kind of cluster B personality disorders, things like antisocial personality disorder, substance use disorders, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder. And if you look at the research on those psychological disorders which, you know, I'm getting from you, both may or may not be very useful. It seems like the predictors of the development of those social antisocial dispositions are Rooted in early childhood trauma. You know, adverse childhood experiences tend to correlate strongly with the later development of antisocial dispositions. If that's the case, which, you know, may or may not be true, and I'd be curious to what you both make of that, then is that a useful frame to think about root causes, meaning, you know, is part of what's driving outcomes like criminality and drug addiction explainable in whole or in part by what these individuals experienced in childhood that led them on a path where they were still exercising agency in adulthood, but that agency was being exercised against a backdrop of, you know, traumatic experiences that led them, or at least, you know, facilitated them going down a certain path.

[A]

So my answer is, is yes, but like that, that is probably a contributing factor to the development of personality disorders and then propensity for crime. But the problem is that if you focus only on that to the exclusion of everything else, and instead of using it as an explanation, people can use it as justification. And people who don't necessarily have those disorders, or maybe if they do, then they still have some agency over their decisions over their lives. Once it becomes widely known, it becomes received wisdom that, oh well, childhood trauma leads to crime, then they can use that as an excuse for their behavior. And so, and I think that's, that's always the tension in social scientific explanations of explanation versus justification.

[B]

Right.

[A]

The other thing to point out here is that you can have two siblings in the same family who experience the same amount of stress, trauma, adversity, and one will go on to be a perfectly law abiding person and the other will become a criminal. And I think that's hard to explain with childhood factors alone.

[C]

Yeah, no generalization about humans is ever going to be 100% what I came to the conclusion. I mean, this might sound corny a bit, but one of the things I noticed in the environment in which most of my patients grew up and in which most of the prisoners grew up was a radical absence of love or affection. And one cannot one, of course, there's no final explanation when you say root causes, how do you know when you've got to the root and there's no further route or no deeper root? But one thing I noticed was that they had no affection in their lives. And one can ask why did they have no affections in their lives? And possibly this was related to the structure of family life and the relations between men and women. And the fact is that things have been, our relations have been, since the 1950s at least, been totally smashed up, usually for ideological reasons. And if you suggest what seems to me fairly commonsensical view that a stable home background with people who don't actually detest one another and so on, and where you don't have a kaleidoscopic cast of people in your home that is better than the opposite. And of course people will come and say, well, what about case A or case B, where people have had terrible circumstances but have turned out very well. So there are always those circumstances. But if you had to bet on it, the kind of social relationship, especially between the sexes, which we have created has been, in my view, disastrous. And for example, one of the things I noticed was that, I mean, there was an incredible degree of interpersonal violence, usually man against woman, but sometimes woman against man. And by far the greatest provocation of that was jealousy. Now you ask where does that jealousy come from? And there you start talk, then you start talking about the structural relations of families, or I should say family is a strong word for the relations they had.

[A]

Yeah, well, the elite solution to this is to eliminate jealousy.

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

No more romantic jealousy. We can have a free society where anyone can love anyone at any moment and have a throuple, a polycule, multiple people in a relationship, you know, casual, open. But that doesn't seem to, you know. Well, in reality, it doesn't work.

[B]

Well, of course it doesn't work. I mean. And you know, Tony, it sounds like what you're getting at, you know, is what I think a lot of conservatives have been banging the drum about for, you know, decades, which is the importance of stable two parent families. I mean, you can go back to Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the early 1960s writing about, you know, the plight of the black family, which at the time, I think about 24% of black kids were being born out of wedlock.

[A]

Today, the number is higher for white in the U.S. so when Moynihan wrote that report in the 60s, yeah, something like 24, 25% of black children were born out of wedlock. Today, about 30% of white children are born out of wedlock in the US.

[B]

And almost 70% of black children are born out of wedlock in the US and you know, conservatives are often castigated for making this observation, saying, well, with just being fuddy duddies and imposing our Victorian morality on the masses. But when you mentioned the word elite, it just triggered a big part of the work that you do, which is talking about the disconnect between what the elite say and how they live. And one of the Reasons that we know single parent households don't work as well as two married parent households is that single parent households are not the norm. So we can can sort of juxtapose the outcomes of people who are raised in one circumstance versus another. And what you see is that even in elite circles, particularly in elite circles, because that's where I think most of the single parent households, most of the two parent married households are, you don't see people living this way. And so talk a little bit about that aspect of your work because you've kind of coined a term that has gone viral in so many of the best ways that describes this phenomenon that I think just more people need to engage with.

[A]

Right, so you're referring to luxury pleasures, which I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the credentialed and the affluent while inflicting costs on the less fortunate members of society. And a core feature of a luxury belief is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief. And so one intuitive example that I will bring up is the beef on the police movement. So there were many surveys conducted in 2020 and 2021. And when you break down the results by income, the highest income Americans were always the most in favor of defunding the police. And the lowest income Americans were always the least in favor. But if you read, you know, mainstream media outlets, glossy magazines, prestigious newspapers, it was positioned as a sort of a grassroots bottom of these over policed communities don't want the cops anymore. But that was never the case. And then even when you just look at political orientation, it was always white progressives were the most enthusiastic about defunding the police. And then black and Hispanic Democrats were not in favor of it, not nearly to the same extent. But then with the two parent family piece, you know, if you go back to 1960 in the US, regardless of social class across the socio economic spectrum, 95% of children in the US were raised by two married parents, their biological parents, and then by 2005 for upper and upper middle class families, so this is roughly the top 20% of income in those families, it dropped from 95% in 1960 to 85% by 2005. So a slight decline, but still the overwhelming majority of the kids in these families raised in intact homes. But for poor and working class families, so this is the bottom 30%.

[C]

It.

[A]

Dropped from 95% in 1960 to 30% by 2005. So now there's this massive divergence. And the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam famously gave this speech, it was a Senate hearing and he claimed, you know, accurately, that, that rich kids and poor kids now grow up in two different Americas. Not necessarily in terms of economics, although that was part of it, but mostly in terms of family structure. So if you go into poor and working class neighborhoods now and you see children around, there's a very strong chance they are raised in some kind of non intact family. And I think this is related to the earlier point that you made about childhood trauma and so on, where I think the nurture can interact with nature. Where if you have a child who is predisposed toward criminality or antisocial behavior, but they're in a safe neighborhood that is predictable, with good role models and structure and you know, an absence of social disorder, then that underlying desire to act out, it'll be limited or it can be channeled in a productive way or at least away from destructive ends. But if you take that same child and put them in an environment with lack of oversight, you know, no, no, you know, parental neglect, gang infested neighborhood with drugs and, and then a broader culture that tells you that whatever you do isn't your fault anyway, then, you know, is, is anyone going to be surprised when this kid makes, you know, different decisions? And this is not due to economic factors alone. I, I think the focus on, you know, people will say, oh, the problem with single parents is not that they lack a spouse or partner, it's that they don't have money.

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

But I think this too like kind of gets at this kind of what a very limited and narrow view of, of, of the phenomenological, subjective human experience. And the example I'll give is there was a study probably about a decade ago now which attempted to calculate the amount of money you would have to redistribute to single parents to equalize educational and occupational outcomes for their children to match those of married parents. And the figure, and this is, I recently looked this up and adjusted for inflation, it would be something like a $60,000 a year transfer to single parent homes to equalize the outcomes of those children with, with married parents, which is. Okay, interesting, I suppose, probably not realistic that we're ever going to give $60,000 to every family like this. But as I was reading this paper, I thought, you know, you could imagine a child raised happily by his mother and father. And then we say, well, hey little Johnny, we're going to take your dad away, but we're going to give you $60,000 a year. Yeah, you know, I, I don't think, yeah, I don't think that the child would be particularly excited at this exchange, which implies that parents do something other than provide money.

[B]

Right. Which I, you know, I mean, it's, there's a lot to unpack there, which is interesting to me. I mean, you know, one is this, you know, idea of luxury beliefs. And you know, in the crime debate, I mean, it's always been interesting to me that some of the loudest apologists for criminal behavior come from people who are not related and who are not at all proximate to the offenders themselves. Whereas within the neighborhoods where crime concentrates and within even the families of criminals, what you hear often is a lot of anger and resentment toward the offender and will wish that they would be corrected by some outside force. And I wonder if that was your experience too, Tony.

[C]

Yes, I mean it's letting me. One luxury, I suppose you'd call it as a luxury belief or a kind of luxury emotion if you like, is that quite well off people tend to think of crime as a kind of informal Social Security for poor people and that actually what they're doing is restitution rather than, rather than crime. And I always found it extremely difficult to get across to middle class people the following very simple considerations. I used to talk to the criminals in the prison and I would say to them, tell me what you've really done, not what you've been charged with doing, but what you've actually done. And because I wasn't part of the criminal justice system or I wasn't going to tell anybody, they would tell me what they'd done. And they'd all done 10, up to 20 times as much as they'd ever been charged with. And the statistics England bear this out. And so. The number of crimes committed by a criminal is very, very high. Some of them had committed. I mean, even to get into prison in Britain you had to have committed about 20 crimes before you actually got into prisoning. And I found it very difficult. And I pointed out to my middle class friends, actually the main victims of crime are the poor. They're not the boys. I've not been, I mean, only to a very minor extent have I ever been a victim of crime. But crime dominated the lives of, of the people who lived in very poor, poor areas. So it seemed to me obvious that since the number of victims was very much greater than the number of perpetrators, one possible thing to do would be to incapacitate the perpetrators. So that even though there are more perpetrators now than there have ever been, nevertheless they are A minority of the population, even in the worst areas.

[B]

There's a famous study that out of Sweden that found, I think it was 1% of the Swedish population was responsible for something like 63% of all of the violent crime.

[C]

Yes, I think that it wouldn't be quite as high as that in England, but nevertheless it would be very high. And this seems to me so elementary a consideration that I just didn't understand how people didn't understand it at once.

[A]

Yeah. Was there not a similar stat in New York about something like a very small percentage of the criminal offenders were responsible offenders shoplifting?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, it was something like 300. Some odd shoplifters had generated something like 6,000 arrests for shoplifting, you know, on their own, which is, you know, crime is a Pareto distributed phenomenon. I mean, we see it, you know, geographically concentrated. Demograph geographically concentrated. Concentrated among small social networks of very prolific offenders, which is something I don't think people fully appreciate. But I want to get back to the discussion about marriage because whether or not conservatives are right about the role of two parent households in driving some of these outcomes may be less relevant if there is a sort of policy prescription that can help bring this about or if there isn't. And you know, there's one finding about two parent households that always fascinated me, which is, yes, generally speaking, two parent households are better than one. Married parents are better than unmarried parents. But if one of the parents is antisocial in their disposition, that. That can completely negate the benefits that are generally associated with, with marriage. And you know, we do see a lot of intergenerational transmission of antisocial behavior. You have kids who are antisocial, it turns out their parents, or at least one of their parents is antisocial. That. So in one way, like marriage on its own doesn't seem to be a solution. Right. Because it's. You still need. If you. There's a part in my. My book that came out in 2022 where I talked a little bit about this and I gave the following example. I said, you know, there was a line in a rap song by an artist named J. Cole that I really liked. And it begins very poignantly with first things first, Rest in peace, Uncle Phil. Uncle Phil is a character on a popular sitcom from the 90s called the Fresh Prince of Bel Air featuring Will Smith. And he was the surrogate stepfather or adoptive father that he never had. He's a sort of underprivileged youth that gets sent to live with his rich aunt and uncle and you know, I said, had you replaced Uncle Phil with say, Tony Soprano, the outcomes of the children in that household would not have been nearly as good, despite the fact that both parents would have been married and had money. And you know, but having, you know, a pro social disposition is not something that public policy can produce on its own. So how do we get around that problem?

[A]

Or do we, the problem of like disintegrating families or, or just, you know.

[B]

The fact that, I mean, you could in some weird world force people to get married or you know, incentivize them to get married, but if you can't do anything about their underlying social disposition. So is marriage really a solution or is it just a symptom of pro social disposition? In which case.

[A]

Yeah, well, it can't just be that because marriage rates used to be much higher than they are now. You know, marriage rates used to be pretty flat or, you know, similar across the socioeconomic spectrum. Fertility rates were similar for women across the ladder. And so I probably, I mean this.

[C]

Is.

[A]

Roughly phrased perhaps, but the freer and more permissive a society, the more those individual traits will come into play. And so if you live in a society where there are very, very little stigma for any kind of behavior, people can behave how they want, then you will see those marriage will select for people who are particularly conscientious and inclined toward long term commitment and you know, marriage and so on. But if you have a society that's sort of more rigid in terms of the expectations for your life script and how you should behave and what kinds of relationships are applauded versus vilified, then regardless of whatever your innate individual attributes tend to be, you'll still sort of follow that, that sequence. Most people still will. I don't know how we get back there though. You know, I, I, there's, there's the, the book, the Two Parent Privilege. Yes, A Carnia Kennedy, she has some very interesting ideas in there. You know, she's an economist, so she recommends, you know, financial support for families. I'm not necessarily opposed to it. I think it will be met with very limited success. But you know, there's one option, the other one I think that she talks about, which I think would probably have more, you know, be more effective would be if people who are married would speak more publicly about it. And, and to say that marriage is generally a pretty good thing. And you know, there, there are people who, who share this kinds of research showing that people who are married are people who are unmarried and, but those lies, it has they have more sex, better sex lives. They also have married people with children are happier than people who are married without children. So it's like, you know, the whole thing.

[B]

You know, I will say as someone who's married with two kids, I am happier than I've ever been.

[A]

There you go.

[B]

It's amazing.

[A]

But we need everyone to say that. But we're actually in some ways getting the opposite. I've told this story before, but I had this conversation with a magazine editor, well known magazine a while back, and he told me that they had recently run this story written by a woman who divorced her husband and started OnlyFans. And how.

[B]

2020.

[A]

Yeah, this is probably 2023 or 2024 when this happened. But now OnlyFans for the listener is, you know, essentially you can put pornographic images of your selling for paid subscribers. And so they ran this story. Oh, this woman, she left her husband, started OnlyFans. And the whole essay is how happy she was with her decision and how she feels empowered or whatever. I asked this editor, would you run the opposite story? Would you run a story of a woman who, you know, shut her OnlyFans account, met someone, got married and now she's happy with her decision? And he said, we would never run that story. And so this shows you, you know, what, where the incentives are, what are the, the social pressures and then, you know, what, what kind of lives cultural elites are, you know, promoting right now?

[B]

I mean, I think that's interesting. And you talked about Melissa Kearney's book and you know, she and I both spoke at a conference together last year and we had a chance to interact a little bit. But one of the things about her book that stood out to me was that she sort of explains the dichotomy in, in terms of marriage rates. Right. So, you know, the upper class college educated people tend to be more likely to get married than non college educated people. And you know, part of the explanation, she says, for why marriage has become less common among the lower classes is that men are less marriageable. They are less attractive to mates because they're less financially secure. They don't have the same economic prospects that they, you know, that someone in that class might have had. And the question that really bugs me about that explanation is, but then why don't you see as steep a drop off in childbearing within those populations?

[A]

Oh, you do.

[B]

As steep.

[A]

Oh, is it, is it not as steep? I mean, well, I mean, we still.

[B]

Have a massive amount of kids being born to single parents. Most of those kids are being born to single parents in the lower socioeconomic stratagem being, you know, we, we know that it's financially detrimental.

[A]

Well, so, so the, the overall fertility rate is declining. Yes, that. And, and that is that. That decline is actually more concentrated among lower income women than college educated women. So it's. So it's declined for everyone, but it's particularly steep for lower income.

[B]

I guess the question would be why would a, a socioeconomic concern drive the decision not to marry, but not drive the decision not to have children?

[C]

I would say that, of course, a child is an existential purpose in life, you know, so that for those people, having a child is extremely important and one can't disregard that. And although they're of course very bad, often very bad at bringing up their children. Their children, once a child reaches the age of three or four, he's horrible, as the patients would say. So they would try again and have another child. The triumph of hope over experience. But I think for lots of women, having a trial is the main purpose of their existence. So I don't. And it doesn't really take very much for them to get a child. So I think that's probably the explanation. I think what we're seeing actually is a kind of change in society from a class society into a caste society. And I think that's something I find very worrying, that they're the kind of dichotomy in the population and there's not much contact between them. But however, another thing that we must always remember is that there will never, we will never defeat antisocial behavior or crime. And in fact, Durkheim said that crime actually, the existence of crime, he didn't say how much crime, but existence of crime actually unites society against the criminal. That used to be the case. I'm not sure now. But anyway, we should not expect marriage to solve all the problems because all the problems will never be solved. And so that's what we must always remember. We mustn't be utopian about the.

[B]

Well, this actually reminds me of a conversation Rob and I were just having offline before the show started, which is. So I was participating in a debate series at UC Berkeley a couple of years ago alongside our colleague Heather McDonald, whose work is obviously fantastic. And I was on a panel with some police abolitionists and we were debating the merits and demerits of police abolition. And, you know, the entire argument of the abolitionists was that crime was just purely a function of socioeconomic deprivation. And all we had to do was eliminate poverty, which we can do if we just stop spending so much money on the criminal justice system. And when it was my turn to speak, I mean, I got up and I said to the audience, I said, I think all of you need to take a step back and really thoroughly appreciate the degree to which my opponent's argument is driven by hubris. Because there's never existed a society without crime or predation or poverty or socioeconomic inequality. The idea that we could solve that and that the solution to that kind of dynamic can be found in a, you know, a small classroom on the UC Berkeley campus just struck me as the height of hubris. Right. I mean, what makes you think that you are going to solve a problem that has proven intractable, that has existed in every society that's ever, you know, don the face of the earth at any point in human history? And I think the part of what, you know, sort of explains the most important divides in our policy debates is exactly that, you know, level of humility. Right on the right you tend to have. And I was just rereading Ed Banfield's the Unheavenly City, and, you know, throughout that book, I was just shocked by the humility that you don't often see among leftist academics, for sure. Which is that, I mean, he would consistently say, I don't think that there is a public policy answer to a lot of the problems that sort of describe the lower classes. And I want to end with your takes on that. I mean, what is the capacity of social policy to improve some of these outcomes?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

How confident should we be that we can legislate our way to, if not utopia, something close to it, as you.

[A]

Were describing your debate opponents at Berkeley. And if they attribute everything to poverty, I wonder what their response would be to why crime is so low in a place like North Korea, where the GDP per capita is something like $3,000 a year and, you know, very, very little crime there. But, yeah, the limits of social policy. I mean, I agree with Tony that there, you know, there is always going to be some amount of crime and disorder, but the question is, how much? And, you know, you're both aware, and probably many of the listeners of the dramatic increase in violent crime in the 1960s. And that was after the introduction of generous state benefits and welfare and cash transfers and all these things. I remember seeing some shocking figures from the Scandinavian countries that in the 1960s, I mean, they have a very generous system, but that wasn't implemented until the 1960s. And it was after those benefits were implemented that suddenly theft and Burglary and shoplifting skyrocketed after the introduction of those benefits. So, you know, I don't think that economic policy can solve crime, but I think social norms and culture and role models and what the elites, the people who have some kind of influence, cultural trailblazers and leaders, have some effect on the kinds of lives that people aspire to and what they consider to be valuable and valorized. So, yeah, I think policy is very limited in some ways. I think policy can kind of increase the amount of disorder and crime. We don't know how much it can decrease. So I think.

[C]

I mean, the criminal justice system could play some kind of part.

[A]

Sure, yeah.

[B]

I mean, we can absolutely incapacitate the.

[C]

But I think it's very important, I mean, to bang on in a way and try and hammer it into the public's mind, because you won't do anything until you've got the public on your side that. For example, take a country like New Zealand. In New Zealand, in 1950, there were 200 violent crimes known to the police. And when the. In 2000, by which time the population had doubled, there were 70,000. Now, it would be ridiculous to say that this was because of an increase in Bondon or in England. If you take England in 1938, there were 8,500 prisoners in Great Britain. And last year, I think it was, there were 87,500. But that isn't all. For each prisoner, there were six times as many indictable crimes as there had been in 1938. So, I mean, this is a very crude measure, but this suggests that there has been a vast increase in criminality. It cannot possibly be the result of increased poverty or increased inequality, because inequality was much greater in 1938 than it is now. So something else must be the explanation. And I think it's very important to get this across to a general population, which is rather lazily, I suppose, it accepts the notions that especially the intellectual part of the population, that sociologists, criminologists, psychologists, psychiatrists feed them.

[B]

I think that's right. I mean, I really do. And I mean, Rob, you mentioned culture. It seems to me that that absolutely needs to be part of the solution. I don't know how we change culture through policy, but it sounds like you're kind of making a case for change through influence. And so maybe it's a good thing that we're living through the age of the influencer.

[A]

Well, assuming those influencers are saying the.

[B]

Right saying, which is. That's. That's a whole other question. But But I do think it's important for us to be humble about, you know, what it what questions we actually had the answers to, how much human behavior we can change and direct. And we're not marionettes.

[C]

That can just be one important step is to admit the phenomena. And I think large parts of the intellectual class, if you call the intellectuals in class, have not accepted the existence of these phenomena.

[B]

Well, I think that's exactly right. And on that bit of wisdom, I think we will call it a show. I want to thank you both, especially you, Tony, for joining us from jolly old England, which I think is what, six hours ahead. So we really appreciate you taking the time to you all watching and listening. We really appreciate you as our audience members. As always, please do not forget to hit that like and subscribe button. Leave us a comment Ask us a question. We've been loving all the interaction and we look forward to bringing you another great episode of the City Journal podcast next week. Until then, we will see you soon.