← Conversations with Coleman
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Nicholas Wade. Nicholas was a staff writer and editor for Nature magazine, Science magazine, and a longtime writer at the science section of the New York Times. His new book is called the Origin of How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations. In this episode, we talk about the controversial territory of race and genetics. We talk about how the modern nation state stamped out tribalism. We talk about how, if at all, accepting the theory of evolution by natural selection should affect one's politics. We talk about whether there are fundamental genetic differences between right wingers and left wingers and much more. So without further ado, Nicholas Wad. Hi there. I want to tell you about a new breaking news app you won't want to miss. You can now stream Fox News Live on the Fox One app. I'm what you would call a news junkie, so having breaking news all in one place is really exciting. It means you can stay on top of breaking news and the biggest stories live as they happen. And all from FOX voices you love bringing you coverage you won't find anywhere else. You can hear from people like my friends Ricky Schlott or Winston Marshall who are regulars on Fox and whose takes you won't want to miss. Start your seven free trial today. Offers are subject to change. Go to Fox one for complete terms and conditions. Fox one we live for live streaming now. Okay. Nicholas Wade, thanks so much for coming on my show.
- [01:37]
B
Thanks for asking me.
- [01:39]
A
So I've been aware of you for a while. I think some listeners might, might know who you are. You've written many books and written many articles. But if listeners don't know who you are, can you give them a sense of what's your background? How did you get into the science of evolutionary psychology and all the related subjects you've written about over the years?
- [02:02]
B
Well, I'm a journalist. I worked on the New York times for about 40 years, many of them in the science section. And as a science reporter, I covered the human genome when it was first being sequenced. And that got me interested into evolutionary issues. So I've written four books now on various aspects of human evolution. One on the sort of general history of the last 50,000 years. And then I did one on religion, on the evolutionary basis of religion. And then I did one on the biological basis of race. Since religion and race are so uncontroversial, I thought they were good subjects to get into. And I've done one on the on the genetic basis of politics.
- [02:55]
A
So can you remind people what the human Human Genome Project was because it's. It's been a long time. And some. I think some of my listeners might even be too young to really fully appreciate what that was, how important it was, and what. What its implications were.
- [03:11]
B
Well, DNA itself was discovered in 1953, but it's. So. It's buried so deep in the cell, and it's just such a sort of deep molecular level. It was very hard for people to get access to it, even though it was clearly the basis of the genes. So people first realized it might be possible to sequence it in about the mid-90s, and in 2003, I think they actually succeeded in deciphering the full 3 million bases or nucleotide units that constitute the human genome. So this gave us an enormously important tool for understanding evolution because the genome is the sort of the basic coding of evolution. And we are still midway through the task of trying to understand what all these genes mean and what they do and what their function is.
- [04:16]
A
So I wrote a book recently called the End of Race Politics, and I have an appendix about the genetics of race. And I read your book called A Troublesome Inheritance that Might Be like a Decade Old now.
- [04:31]
B
That's right, yeah.
- [04:34]
A
I read, I think, the book. I think his name is David Reich, who we are and how we got here. And I try to synthesize for my readers what is true and what isn't true about the biology of race. Theories of genetic racial superiority have been used to horrible effect in the past. They've been used to justify atrocities, to justify conquest and sterilization, and all of these policies that we are rightly disgusted by today and violate human rights and so forth. And so people get extremely nervous when anyone even approaches the subject. Yet at the same time, there's an enormous amount of scientific research that's happened since the sequencing of the genome. Right. Because how I framed it in my book. And tell me if you think this framing is fair with any data set, you can ask the secondary question, does the data cluster? And there are mathematical ways of answering that question. Right. And political scientists do this all the time. All kinds of data scientists do this. Once you had the sequencing of the genome, you could then go out and get a random sample of genomes from all around the world and ask the purely mathematical question, does this data cluster? And when people did that, they found that, yes, it did cluster. And it clustered basically in the ways that accord with our lay concept of race. In other words, people. People with mostly African genetics like me, clustered more closely, and people with European genetics clustered. And then there's a second question you ask with any data set, which is, how strong is the clustering? Right. If the clustering is perfectly strong, then these data sets don't even overlap. Right. And the example I gave is, say you're getting data on height and weight, and your data set is kindergarteners and NFL football players. Right? Those two data sets are not going to cluster at all. They're going to be perfectly separated. But if you're looking at the population at large, that's going to come basically on a bell curve from the smallest and lightest to the heaviest. And so there won't be much clustering and everything in between. And when people look at my reading of the data, is that something in between those two things is true with human beings. In other words, there is clustering that roughly accords with the lay concept of race, Black, white, Caucasian, Asian, etc. But those clusters bleed into. Into each other to the point where people. There are, you know, hundreds of millions of people technically in one statistical cluster that would be closer genetically to certain people in another cluster and so forth. And there are no hard boundaries, in other words. So that's what I conveyed about the biology of race in my book. And then the final thing I'll say, and then I'll turn it over to you, is that the categories that we have that we make public policy decisions based off, such as Hispanic American or Asian American, these policies have absolutely flown the perch of any kind of scientific basis in the sense that they were formed because political advocacy groups lobbied on the basis of, really political interest. It wasn't that you had scientists actually looking at where humanity clustered and then coming up with categories as a result. So I think we can safely say that the categories we use when it comes to public policy in America are purely socially constructed, even though they're inspired by something real, which is the clustering of populations in a visible way as a result of migration patterns in the past.
- [08:39]
B
Well, I think you described the overall situation very well. It's absolutely true that races are not distinct. They are these groups, these sort of clusters, but they don't have precise boundaries. They are exactly what you would expect. If you take any given species which has a particular geographic origin, and if you spread it out over the whole world, then over time that population, homogeneous to start with, is going to differentiate into sort of local groups as each adapts to their local circumstances. So that is the sort of phenomenon that drives race in humans or anyone else. They're not hard and fast categories Our evolution is so recent that the degree of difference between the various human races one can identify is very small. And. And in biological terms, I think they're wholly insignificant. But they are, as you mentioned, culturally very important, because even these minute differences that someone from Mars would dismiss as totally insignificant are very important to us. As to our census categories, I agree they're in a mess because Hispanic is not a racial category. It's a linguistic category. I think the rest of them, though, have some sort of broad relevance to reality. I mean, the three main races one can usefully talk about are Caucasians, that sort of Europeans, people of the Indian subcontinent, East Asians and Africans. Now, you can sort of subdivide these as much as you want to the extent you may be interested in doing so, but I think those are sort of pragmatically useful ways to consider race. So those three categories, I would say, are valid to some extent. And I suppose the justification for asking about them in the census is that you want to be sure that everyone is being equally served, like in congressional seats and representation and many other aspects of life. So however uncomfortable we may feel about some aspects of race, there's still, I think, a useful and beneficial purpose in recognizing it.
- [11:27]
A
Yeah. And yet there are countries in Europe like France and Spain and I think several others where it's illegal to ask people their racial identity. It's illegal for the government, at minimum, and sometimes for private citizens to ask people their racial identity. And these are not societies with a history of diverse, racially different populations integrating to the same culture like America. But there is a question to be asked. How useful is it? Right. Because if we for some reason outlawed asking for race in America, presumably a majority black county in Georgia is still very likely to elect black representatives. It's not a certainty. Right. So it's not like we wouldn't have racial, like each race represented in Congress. Right. So what exactly is your argument there? That it's important to actually account for people's racial identities?
- [12:38]
B
Well, there are lots of ways in which it's very useful. I mean, start with medicine. You would like to know if all parts of your population are being equally well served. So you can't check on that unless you know who is white, black, or East Asian. So that's a beneficial purpose. And the purpose of the census is to make sure that in terms of political representation, things don't get too out of hand. I would think if used wisely, this is good information. But obviously, as you imply, if used badly, then it's extremely Dangerous.
- [13:20]
A
Yeah, I agree with that. What I would add though is that the temptation to use it for purposes that seem expedient at the time to some political faction but then are later viewed as terrible or even evil, that temptation is so strong that there's an argument that like speech, that it's like Tolkien's ring, it's too powerful and it shouldn't be used by anyone for any reason. That is racial categorization. Right. Because if you look at the history of America like the number of times politicians have used racial categories very wisely and with the gentle hand and with like a perfect scalpel, I think pale in comparison to the times where politicians have used racial categories to really deleterious effect. And so there's a certain argument to be made that strict scrutiny should apply to any really use of racial categories. That's my instinct at least.
- [14:32]
B
I guess I have no quarrel with that in principle. By and large we are a democracy with a robust system of laws and we outlaw discrimination and there's a sort of built in safeguard right there against any misuse of racial information. So I think I would favor a more relaxed view. It's not as bad as the One Ring with power that no man can wield. It's just information that we can handle in a serious and responsible way and we should use it to good effect. And I think by and large that is the case.
- [15:16]
A
Now, if I remember, your book, A Troublesome Inheritance received a lot of criticism in particular, if I'm recalling for some of the speculative later chapters. Now can you remind me of what that controversy was about and how you view it in retrospect?
- [15:37]
B
Well, I don't remember any specific criticism of the later chapters which as you say, I clearly marked as speculative. And I put them in there because I felt having, having given the reader all this information, I should then try and help readers with the so what questions. So that's what the second half of the book did, the first half about the biology of race. The main attack on it was a letter signed by 100 geneticists or whatever. But their letter was sort of full of sound and fury. They didn't cite a single thing, factual error in the book. They didn't cite a, a single racist statement apart from one that they made up themselves and is not in the book. So I was very happy that, that I'd done a good job with the book and fairly presented all this voluminous new information flowing out of the human genome. Something which I thought it was very important to do. For one thing, If I didn't do it in a fair, non racist way, then others might do it with more malign purpose. And second, I felt as a journalist, it's one's duty to tell the public what's going on. And here is this enormous amount of information, all of great fascination about the human past and the constitution of our present populations. And the academic community was too frightened to talk about it. And most of them went into a sort of self denying mode and said race has no biological basis, it's purely cultural, which is simply untrue. And to this day, my book, Even though it's 10 years old, is still the only way, the only place so far as I know, in which you can find a brief comprehensible summary of what the genome tells us about the differentiation of the human population into its various races.
- [17:45]
A
Okay, so let's talk about your new book, the Origin of Politics. What are you setting out to do in this book?
- [17:53]
B
My goal in this book is to point out how much of our social structure and the politics dependent thereon is shaped by the genome. And this is in contrast to a widely prevailing view that genetics plays no role in our social and political life because there is no such thing as human nature. So in this view, which I am attacking, the mind is a blank slate at birth and everything we know comes from our culture. And therefore we needn't worry about anything, any behaviors that evolution has sort of programmed into us. So I think this is a deeply mistaken view that evolution, which is very concerned with our survival, to which our behavior is particularly important, has indeed shaped our social behavior in many ways. And it has shaped us in a way that we are very rash to ignore. Because if there's a conflict between our political ideologies and the rules that evolution has set, then we're going to get into deep trouble. So the way that evolution has shaped our social behavior, I think is firstly in our family units, which are based on our behaviors, on a mother's love for her children, child, on the love of family members for each other. So the family is the basic unit of human society. Then there's the tribe, by bonds of kinship form into tribal units, even though these no longer exist, but have been replaced by the nation state. Then the different roles of the two sexes, which also are programmed by evolution. And then the behaviors that underlie our major social institutions such as warfare, trade, justice, these all depend on inherent human behaviors. So that's quite a lot. Quite a lot of our social existence is in fact invisibly shaped by evolutionary Shape behavior.
- [20:15]
A
So is one way of restating your thesis that there is a wide space of possible political systems? I could imagine as many as my imagination could come up with in principle. Yet most of them are incompatible with human nature. Some of them only some of them are compatible with human nature. And if we don't recognize that, we are in danger of experimenting with the wider space of possibilities that are not compatible with our nature. Is that one way of restating your thesis?
- [20:51]
B
Yes, I think so. Most of our political systems are by and large compatible with human nature, even though their framers didn't design them to be so. It's just that people always behave in a certain way and the politics adjusts itself. But there are some political systems that people have tried in the course of history that are incompatible with human nature. And I think one of the best examples I give is the formation of the kibbutzim in Israel. These collective farms whose founders abolished the family as a unit. They abolished the basic unit of human society. So the idea was to eliminate the power of the, of the patriarchy. They wanted the father to have no more authority over his wife and children. And they arranged that by having all goods in common, having the kibbutz provide everything, and having the kibbutz raise the children. So the parents only saw their children for an hour at the end of the day.
- [21:55]
A
And the children didn't sleep in the parents home, they slept communally somewhere else, right?
- [22:00]
B
That's correct. So this was a very bold experiment, but it ran so against the grain of human nature that it didn't last. I mean, it was amazing it lasted as long as it did. But in the sort of second generation of the kibbutz is after the sort of founders had died off, the people who'd grown up in the kibbutz, the women just wanted to have their children with them during the day. And eventually after, you know, quite violent arguments, the kibbutzim had to essentially rebuild all their accommodations so that families could live together and, and not have the.
- [22:41]
A
Children live by themselves communally is another example of this. The, the famous opening of, of markets in the 1970s in China, the famous Xiaogang Village experiments where China has had had a collectivized economy since Mao took over in 1949. And you'd had, you know, the, the large famine, the great leap, the great leap forward, but then you'd had basically smaller quasi famines throughout Mao's, throughout Mao's tenure and just general low output on farms. And then certain farms began experimenting with the radical idea of allowing Farmers to actually own their plot of land and everything that it produced and sell, sell surplus on the market. And then all of a sudden, the Xiaogang Village experiment, you know it, I don't know the exact number, but it may have doubled or tripled production. And that experiment expanded. And then the lesson of this, similar to the kibbutz, is that if you divorce my motivation to work from my reward, in other words, if, let's say I could work 10 hours today, or I could work three hours today, and what I get will not change, then what is my motivation to work 10 hours? And this is a classic tragedy of the commons, because if every individual faces that set of incentives, then every individual, most people will be lazy. And the net result for the whole town or for the whole country is that we don't have enough to eat. If only we could all coordinate and agree to be super hardworking, then we'd actually all be okay. But the truth is our nature doesn't allow us to be to transcend that self interest reliably, except in the cases of our family. Basically our family, or maybe a close network of kin and very close friends. Is that another good example?
- [24:56]
B
Yes, that's an excellent way of putting it. The fact is that the incentives of socialized agriculture, and I think one can say of Marxism in general, do not accord with the incentives in human nature. On principle they're fine, but in practice, people don't want to work for some abstract entity like the state. They work for their family, for themselves, for their own survival. And in particular, they don't like to see people who work less hard themselves being equally rewarded. So the principle of giving everyone equal pay, which again is great in principle, in practice, it sort of destroys the incentive simplicity in human nature. So it may be we are flawed beings and things shouldn't be this way, that our society should run like an ant colony. But in fact, the way we are engineered by evolution means that we work best when the incentive is something that will benefit our family. It's the invisible hand of Adam Smith by everyone following their own benefit, seeking their own advantage. Society as a whole is greatly benefited.
- [26:23]
A
Isn't it the case though as well, that the political systems you favor, that I favor, often push against certain instincts in human nature as well. So, for example, nepotism, we're talking about family ties here and how instinctual that is. But nepotism is not allowed in most corporations, in most settings. You're really not supposed to. In our society, that's, at least in theory, meritocratic. You're not supposed to just hire your son because he's your son or hire, you know, your cousin because he's your cousin. Give special benefits. What we call corruption in, in the west. And, and this is a point that Francis Fukuyama made in his book on Political order, which you quote quite a bit from in your book. What we call corruption in the west for most of human history and still in certain places is just a way of life. In other words, if I come into a lot of resources, I would be expected morally to share those resources with my tribe. Specifically in the west, that would be considered a paradigm case of corruption. Like you become the mayor and all of a sudden you're handing out favors to your family and to your friends. You're not supposed to do that. But, but that's actually, that's, that's, that's a hardwired instinct as well. So how can it be that the political systems that you say are compatible with human nature also so often suppress certain elements of human nature?
- [28:09]
B
Well, I'm not saying that human nature is something you cannot alter. You can certainly remold human nature and reshape it in various ways. And one of the most important ways we've done that is in the case of tribalism. So our societies used to be entirely tribal, and you would only work with a member of your tribe, and you would be hostile to any member outside the tribe. So this has been a test of the major civilizations, each of which, as Fukuyama describes, have found different, very creative ways to suppress the tribes and tribal organization. So our societies no longer work tribally. If you ask Americans what tribe they belong to, they wouldn't, they'd have no idea what you mean. Tribes have just vanished as an ongoing political concept in modern societies. But of course, you can't completely change human nature. And there's still very strong tide of nepotism and tendency to favor one's family. So I think all you can say is that, is that the instinct towards kinship are still there. It's just they're very heavily regulated by our culture and by our laws. And by and large, you can't get away with favoring your children if it's not in the public interest.
- [29:45]
A
Have we replaced classic old school tribalism with political tribalism? In other words, if you asked an American what tribe do you belong to, they might assume you're talking about Democrats versus Republicans. I agree with you. They, they probably might not know what you're talking about because we're not members of tribes or clans anymore. But they might actually assume. You mean you're asking about my politics? And not only that, there's a lot of good research on affective polarization, which shows that Democrats really tend to feel negative emotions about someone once they learn they're Republican. And Republicans tend to feel the same way about Democrats more than was the case 30 and 40 years ago. So has the instinct to form tribes, instead of being fully tamped down, has it simply been replaced by political tribes?
- [30:43]
B
Well, I think what has been placed by most obviously is by the nation state. So nation states are sort of everyone belongs to the same honorary tribe. So although the people are no longer held together by ties of direct kinship, which is the case with tribes, they're held together by lots of other markers of kinship, like a common language, common religion, usually a common ethnicity. But that said, people are still very groupish. And so people want to, you know, belong to a group. And when they do, they will feel hostile feelings, maybe to people in the opposing group. So that's the kind of group in which I think you get on a political level. In my mind, the tribe itself has disappeared as a political entity and to be replaced by the nation state. And when we say, when we talk about politics as tribal, we're using it more in a metaphorical sense.
- [31:51]
A
I wonder if we have gone too far in the direction of breaking apart kinship ties, because we often hear talk about the atomization of society, the fact that people feel isolated. People live in cities. They don't know who their neighbors are. They don't live near their parents when they have kids. Normally, the grandparents are nature's babysitters, but the grandparents may live a thousand miles away. And arguably this has something to do with why people don't want to have kids anymore. Especially among liberals and liberal women, you see astonishing rates of mental illness and depression and a lot of worrisome trends. Is there a case to be made that we've gone too far? Our modern political culture has gone too far in poo poohing the idea of family ties?
- [33:00]
B
Yes, I think that's definitely right. I mean, evolution has designed us to live in small family groups that are closely connected to each other, that don't move geographically and, in a word, for a completely different way of life. So our modern societies are far more productive and they're far freer, and they're better in many definable ways. But it's just that there are severe downsides, such as the ones you describe. Now, whether or not this is connected with our declining fertility rates, I'm not sure. I think that. I think the breakup of the family and the declining rates of marriage probably have a lot to do with this. Plus the fact that women have been sort of liberated from their evolutionary traditional task of looking after children and have gone into the workplace in large numbers. So all that is great. It's just that it puts stresses on the system as it was designed to operate.
- [34:15]
C
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- [36:03]
A
Hi listeners. I want to tell you about the Free Press's latest new podcast, Old School with Shiloh Brooks. When we met Shiloh, he was one of the most popular professors at Princeton and he was making reading great books cool again.
- [36:17]
B
Now.
- [36:17]
A
Now he's hosting this show to help all of us, and young men in particular, get back into reading for pleasure. The show features intimate conversations with fascinating men from fitness Gurus to philosophers about books that shape their lives. They cover books like the Old man in the Sea, Middlemarch, and Down and out in Paris and London to bring you a truly old school education. New episodes out every Thursday. In fact, I am one of his first guests. So go to Old School with Shiloh Brooks on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. So if I accept your thesis that human nature constrains the space of functional political systems in an American context, should that push me more to the left or to the right? Or is that the wrong way to think about it?
- [37:10]
B
No, that's a perfect question. So when you're looking at things from an evolutionary perspective, lots of findings will seem to be to lean to the conservative side. But that's simply because evolution can only look backward. And so it's built on what worked in the past. And so it inevitably overlaps with conservatism, which also favors retaining past values. But the other side of that is that society cannot stay the same. It has to innovate as its environment changes. So you need to have. Every society needs to have both kinds of politics. Conservative politics that favors staying the same and being cautious when that is appropriate and liberal or innovative politics that favors changing or adapting to new circumstances or exploration of new territory. And I think we do have both those tendencies built into our genome because surprisingly, political tendencies have a genetic component. About 40% of the variation in political attitudes has a genetic basis, which is very hard to figure out why that should be so, given that in the environment in which we evolved, there are obviously no political parties. I think the best explanation is that societies to survive needed to have inherent in them both these tendencies, the tendency to conserve and the tendency to innovate.
- [38:51]
A
What traits define a conservative and what traits define a liberal in terms of genetics?
- [39:02]
B
Well, at a genetic level, it probably doesn't work that way. And we don't know exactly how it does work. I mean, there's certainly no gene that says you shall be a conservative. There will be a whole large cluster of genes that nudge various behaviors in different directions. For example, one person could have a higher sort of fear response, a fear of strangers, say, than another. And this might incline them just a little to be more anti immigration and therefore more conservative. So if you had a whole lot of these little nudges, then that sort of makes up a sort of constellation of a political attitude. That is probably how it works, but we don't know in detail because we haven't defined the relevant genes.
- [39:54]
A
In Israel, we've seen that it's one of the few modern democracies where the birth rate is above replacement. But within Israeli society there is a huge divide between the ultra Orthodox who tend to have many, many kids, sometimes five or six kids, a family and much more than two on average for a couple, and the rest of Israeli society, which is more secular and has maybe two or three kids on average. And as a result of this, you've seen that since the birth of Israel. Now to the present, the ultra Orthodox population has grown. It was basically non existent, negligible political force in the 1940s and 50s. Now it's something like a third of Israelis under the age of 18 are ultra orthodox. It's a massive political force that's moved their politics to the right in some way. Is the rest of the western world. Is Israel the canary in the coal mine for the rest of the world? Because you know, in America the Amish have very high birth rates. Obviously the ultra Orthodox communities here too, we have certain pockets of, of our American population that have lots of kids and they're people that the rest of Americans don't think about very often. Is there a plausible long run future where those populations form like a massive, maybe even a majority of the societies in these countries.
- [41:38]
B
Of the fast breeding populations? You mean, will the Amish take over America?
- [41:42]
A
Yes.
- [41:44]
B
I think no one knows the answer to this very severe problem we have of declining fertility rates. So I don't think it's going to help us that the Amish produced a lot of children. It's not going to help us that we have a much higher volume of immigration than other countries. The overall numbers are just so bad that we have to look at things deep in the structure of our society if we hope to change this. So I think, and the problem begins with women because they after all, are the ones who bear children. So you can ask, well, if a society is in peril, men are expected to give up their lives in defense of it. So if a society is imperiled for this unusual region of infertility, should we expect women to shoulder the responsibility and step up and have more children even though they don't want them? And I don't know the answer to that question. I also, I think in a way it's wrongly framed because the problem is not women in themselves, it's families. So families are the things that generate children. So somehow or other we need to have more. We have, need to have a higher rate of marriage because married couples have more children. We need to somehow do Something about the structure of women's careers and that many women, for obvious understandable reasons, postpone having children so as to get a start in their careers. And yet the longer you postpone having children, the less fertile you are. So we need to sort of set up some system. I don't know how it would work that would encourage women a, to get married more, even though it's increasingly hard for women who are now more educated in general than men, to find an educated man to get married more, to have to have children younger or do something to privilege children more over their careers. But you only have to sort of state. State that as the problem to see how severe it is. I mean, how do you persuade women that, no, they can't go out into the exciting wide world for which they have been so well educated, they have to stay at home and change diapers. No country has succeeded in constructing a set of incentives that change that calculus. And South Korea has been trying for decades to combat its falling birth rate with longer parental leave, bonuses for extra children. Anything you can think of, they've done, and it hasn't worked. So we need some kind of revolution in our thinking that goes profoundly to the nature of the family and to the nature of men and women's roles and their respective careers if we are to get out of this hole that we're digging for ourselves.
- [44:53]
A
So let me tell you my theory of why birth rates are declining, and you tell me if, if you disagree. As you said, the birth rate is declining all over the world. In America, in Eastern Europe, in Western Europe, in, in parts of Asia, in society so different that it's implausible to ascribe it to any specific policy or any country specific or region specific set of circumstances. It's a global phenomenon everywhere, basically, except Africa. And, and so I think what this tells us is that whatever's driving it is something fundamentally driving the, the modern world. And my assumption is that, I don't know if you've heard of, I think it's called the B Balmal effect, but this was explained in a, in an economics book that I read where it starts with the question, why is it so expensive to, to purchase like, a string quartet for, for two hours, right? Because in theory, capitalism leads to declining prices over time, right? A microwave starts costing $5,000 and now it costs 100 or whatever. Why doesn't this happen for certain things, like, like a string quartet or certain services? And the reason is because the opportunity cost required to get that violin player at Juilliard to not Be a coder, you know, as living standards rise, the violin player demands more in order to call him away from the opportunities that the world is creating. And so my assumption is just that with human progress, the baseline amount of fun and enjoyment and pleasure and everything you can get being a human just goes up and up every year. What it was like to be a single 30 year old guy in my great grandfather's generation was just like there was not that much to do, you know, Whereas for me it's like the world becomes a playground as, as GDP increases, basically. Yet similar to a string quartet, the experience of having a family and raising children is not that different than it was a hundred years ago. At the end of the day, it's you with your three year old, playing with a toy, connecting like that. And it's not actually like with technological change and economic growth, it doesn't change that much. And so in relative terms, the appeal of having a family and being a father or a mother has gone down relative to how much fun you can be having as an unattached single person. So basically that's my theory of why the birth rate is down because of economic growth. And the only thing capable of combating that force, that tidal wave of progress, is a situation like Israel, where you have a very strong, tight knit culture that has specific values around having lots of kids. In Israel, it's very important to have lots of kids, whether you're secular or not, because that society was forged in a crucible of everyone around the world seems to want to kill us. We're not going to let ourselves dwindle because we're too lazy to have kids. And we have a duty to our ancestors that survived all of these persecutions. So that's a very particular, unique culture which is able to use those cultural norms to fight the tide, but the rest of the world just basically isn't. So we're screwed.
- [48:32]
B
Well, I think that's a very good theory. And a further point in that effect is that the one European country that has sparked the trend of declining fertility is the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, which is quite religious. And they have a patriarch called Ilya II who announced that for every married family that had a third child, he would personally baptize it and be its godfather. And as soon as he made that announcement, the Georgian birth rate took off like a rocket. Everyone was having a third and fourth and fifth children. So this shows you the power of religion, which after all is a great pronatalist for force in influencing people's decisions. And obviously that is at work, as you say, among the Hasid and among the Amish. So one of our problems is that I think a major problem in the infertility question is the declining force of religion. Americans used to be much more religious than the Europeans, but now religion is declining as a cultural force. So we have all the incentive that religion gives you to have more children has disappeared from American life. Hedonism, as you suggest, I think is very important. I mean, for a young woman. Now she can get a very interesting, well paid job all by herself. She doesn't need the bother of coping with a difficult man, nor the bother of diapers and children. It's a great big chore to have children. So it's something she thinks twice about in a way that no previous generation would have done. So it just, I think, from every side, disincentives to a family and having children are present. And it's very hard to see how you can roll them back in one fell swoop unless you are a religious country like Georgia, which we are not.
- [50:45]
A
Okay, so if I accept your thesis once again, that human nature constrains the possible functional political systems that we can have, should that change any of my beliefs about foreign policy? Should that nudge me in the direction of a more isolationist foreign policy or a more hawkish foreign policy? Or is it irrelevant to foreign policy?
- [51:11]
B
Well, the way I see it is that one should not despair of the ability of culture to shift and modulate and restrain human nature. As for example, the fact that most societies used to be polygamous. So the powerful guys in any society, especially early societies, would have a lot more wives than anyone else. And polygamy essentially has been the standard throughout history in most human societies. Polygamy has now almost entirely disappeared from the western world because of cultural and legal restraints. So when it comes to foreign policy, I think one needs to recognize that humans, human societies are inherently warlike and bellicose and will do anything to protect their own survival, which includes attacking one's neighbor. If it seems one's neighbor is getting too strong, it always seems better to make a preemptive strike than wait until the comparative disadvantage increases. So any system of states is going to go to war eventually unless there is some agreed upon system for preserving the peace. So in history we've had various systems that do that. The best known example is the Westphalian system that established peace in medieval Europe after enormous, enormous blood setting, religiously based of the 40 Years War. So under the Westphalian system, the Europeans agreed to Stop fighting wars of religion that whatever religion the prince in a country had, everyone else would have it have it too. And that system was succeeded by the Congress of Vienna that brought peace to Europe after Napoleon had stirred everything up and was followed by the Pax Britannica, where the British essentially could keep peace in Europe because of their more powerful fleet and could intervene anywhere. And that was succeeded by the period of American hegenomy which we are now in, where essentially America supports the international order, which loosely means countries have agreed rules not to invade each other like Putin did with Ukraine, and to settle their agreements peacefully and under legal rules. So if you accept that as a basic description of the current situation, then you don't want to be an isolationist because without some restraining system to keep the inherent human hostility in check, we're going to go back to the law of the jungle. So you do need to be an interventionist. You should wish some leading power for which at present America is the only candidate, to be the sort of policeman of this system and to try and keep everyone on track. Because if you don't, the result will be warfare. Given that this is the default state.
- [54:49]
A
Of humankind, can't we all just get along?
- [54:54]
B
Well, sure, but clearly we don't.
- [54:58]
A
Okay, one more question before I let you go. To what extent is hereditary monarchy a, a functional system compatible with human nature? Because obviously in America we love our democracy and we evangelize our democracy and we hope the world follows our lead. But if you take a hard nosed look at the Middle east for instance, all the places I would be comfortable spending 10, 15 years in a row in confident that there would probably be no civil wars or the state wouldn't become a failed state. They're pretty much all monarchies. It's the monarchies, it's Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, UAE, Qatar, etc. So and all, and all the places where if I was dropped in the middle and I would, I would worry about civil war breaking out in the next 10 years and ending up a casualty. Many of them are places that have tried democracy or Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, et cetera. And sometimes the democracies last for five, 10 years without a civil war, but you'd be hard pressed to find one that has lasted more than 12 years. And so if I'm taking my pro democracy American hat on and just putting my scientist had on, I would say hereditary democracy is clearly the, the best system for any, any culture that is predominantly Arab or Muslim or Arab and Muslim I should say. And that's just looking at looking at the data. So, on the other hand, when we look in Europe, look back on the history of hereditary monarchy, I guess a lot of us think of it as barbaric and quite violent and certainly not an improvement over the democracies that we have or the purely symbolic monarchies that we have today. So what is your view on hereditary monarchy as a political system?
- [57:10]
B
Well, I think I would class it just more generally as an autocracy, where you have one guy calling the shots. So autocracy has been the default political organization for most of our history, and it's very successful and very effective, despite all the disadvantages you allude to. If you want to go to the alternative, you need to do a lot of institution building. So you need to build up a lot of institutions that take on the role of governing in many important aspects, and it's very hard to build up those institutions. So we have learned at great pain and cost that we cannot export American institutions to the Middle east, to Iraq or other places because they need to grow organic. You simply cannot impose them on other people. They're our institutions, and we built them through our history in our own way. So for the Arab countries you mention, they are setting on their political history from a much more recent basis than we are. Since until the end of First World War, they were, most of them, under Turkish domination. So it takes a long time to build institutions, and they have not yet, in my view, had time to build institutions that would successfully carry them away from autocracy.
- [58:50]
A
Is another way of thinking about it that societies that haven't solved the tribalism problem can't then convert to democracies? In other words, in your book, you talk about how China was among the first civilizations to solve the tribalism problem, which is you can't have a coherent state if people are still fundamentally more loyal to their tribe than they are to the state. And if you look at all the societies where America has successfully done state building after destroying those societies in war, for instance, Germany or Japan, those are both societies that had already, before we ever arrived, basically solved the primordial tribalism problem. And so is that one way of thinking about when state building works and when it doesn't?
- [59:49]
B
Yes, I think it is indeed. And most of the Arab countries to which you refer are still largely tribal, apart from their urban populations. They still haven't gone through that wrenching process of detribalization that the Europeans and the Chinese have done. And I think that's one of the difficulties in building alternative institutions, because these institutions need to be non tribal, otherwise you haven't made your escape. You need to trust that an institution will look after you and your family, at least as well as the tribe on which you've relied for so many centuries.
- [60:31]
A
Right. Okay. Nicholas Wade, thank you for your time. The book is called the Origin of Politics. I assume it's out now and available. It's everywhere. And if my listeners want to follow more of your work, do you have a Twitter handle or a website that they can look at?
- [60:47]
B
No, I don't, but my books are very old school. They're available on Amazon.
- [60:52]
A
Okay, thank you, Nicholas.
- [60:53]
B
Thanks so much.