← Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Progressives Are Driving Themselves Into Extinction
00:54:17
What would make you want to have more children? This week on “Interesting Times,” Ross Douthat speaks with Dr. Alice Evans, a social scientist who is as concerned about the global decline in fertility as he is. The two discuss why this isn’t just a gender issue — it’s “a solitude issue” – and whether there’s a way to bring relationships back.
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- [00:02]
Ross Douthat
From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat and this is interesting times. Fifty years ago, the world feared a population bomb, an explosion of population growth that would yield famine, war and disaster. But for most of my career, I've been trying to persuade people that actually population decline is now the greater peril. And in the last few years, the world has finally caught up with my once eccentric anxieties. We're undeniably headed towards a period of global population collapse, one that threatens to maroon today's children, mine and yours, if you have them, which, by the way, you should in a world of emptying cities and slowing economies. Our guest today has literally traveled the world studying this issue, trying to answer the hardest question, not just why birth rates have declined, but why they've declined so far and so fast in so many different places. So, Alice Evans, welcome to interesting times indeed.
- [01:28]
Alice Evans
Thank you so much.
- [01:32]
Ross Douthat
So you're a sociologist at King's College London, is that correct?
- [01:36]
Alice Evans
Yes.
- [01:36]
Ross Douthat
And you write a lot about, and I think you're working on a book about the key social forces shaping the decline in fertility around the world. And those include in particular, the failure of men and women to relate to one another and pair off. And those issues are part of why I'm especially interested in talking to you. But before we dive into why population decline is happening, I'd like to try and sort of quantify the issue a little bit and maybe help sound the alarm for some of our listeners who, unlike myself, haven't been obsessed with this issue for years or decades and may still assume that we're living in a world where the biggest problem is likely to be overpopulation. So let's start out with, when we talk about declining fertility and population decline, what do we mean?
- [02:29]
Alice Evans
Okay, so fertility is collapsing everywhere all at once, perhaps with the exception of sub Saharan Africa, where rates are still very high. But across Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa, all those trends are going sharply downwards. And economically, this has catastrophic implications for middle income countries because as you have an aging population, then older people typically have lower rates of labor force participation. They're less economically productive. You know, it's the young people who are, you know, innovative, productive, starting up new companies. But as the entire economy ages, then it becomes more sluggish and those younger people, either through savings or taxes, need to pay for elderly healthcare or pension costs or provisions. And that then creates a massive fiscal squeeze because governments or individuals need to spend, you know, a higher amount of their money given those rising dependency rates. And if we are Concerned with things like, you know, climate change mitigation. The governments just won't have enough money to spend on extra cost if you're spending more on old people. And on top of this, if younger people are saving more as they are in China, then they're going to be spending less. So that has a knock on effect on the entire economy.
- [03:46]
Ross Douthat
And when did you become interested in the fertility crisis? You started out working on gender equality, the socioeconomic status of women in developing. How did this issue, which I should say it has long been the province of, you know, to be kind to ourselves, right wing cranks. Right. How did this issue become a big part of your focus?
- [04:07]
Alice Evans
So I think fertility and women's choices and men's choices about how many children they want. That's always come up in my interviews because I'm always interested, you know, what do you want to do for your life? So I've got so much data on this going back for the past 15 years. You know, when I was in Zambia, women would always encourage me to have another baby. Oh, you must have a baby, you must have a baby. That was so imperative for them.
- [04:26]
Ross Douthat
This is what I say to my colleagues too. So it's, you know, it's not just Zambia.
- [04:30]
Alice Evans
So I was constantly pestered. And then I think in East Asia, in South Korea, where I was looking at the data so intensely and I was having so many of my interviews and I just realized it was so omnipresent and then I looked at the data more broadly. So I think going to South Korea is really what fertility pilled me, so to speak.
- [04:49]
Ross Douthat
Right. And a country like South Korea has a fertility rate of 0.7. That means that over the course of two generations, the population goes from 50 million to what, 20 odd million, let's say 15 to 20 million. Does that sound right? I'm just trying to give people a sense that when we talk about, in these, with the numbers we have now, when we talk about the reason you use a term like population collapse is we aren't talking about a kind of gentle slide from above replacement fertility to slightly below replacement fertility, where you need to adjust the retirement age so that people stay in the workforce five years longer. You're talking about cities being empty, buildings standing empty, economies grinding to a halt, and just seeing a country that has gone furthest down this path.
- [05:38]
Alice Evans
And you see it in Italy too, for example, when you get off the train in Rome, you see the pet store rather than the kids store.
- [05:45]
Ross Douthat
No, it's glaring. We took our family to Rome and we're trying to find a children's store. And it turned out that there was an important children's chain that had closed a bunch of its. Of its places. But also, I mean, when I traveled around Italy, the hill towns are empty, right? The rural areas are aging and emptying. The big cities, people move there, and so they stay densely populated even if they're having fewer kids. And so this can actually end up being kind of invisible in an interesting way, because if you're in the big city, there are more people there than ever. Right. And so you think to yourself, well, how can there be a population?
- [06:23]
Alice Evans
Yeah, I mean, totally. I would say one more thing. I suppose one aspect of me as a sort of social scientist is I teach on international development, so I'm very interested in economic outcomes and how we can all become richer, the sort of abundance idea. But I also study culture. So it's the interconnection between all these economic consequences of our cultural choices.
- [06:42]
Ross Douthat
So, okay, why is this happening? And just before you tell us, I think it's safe to say everyone has a sort of particular pet theory, right? So if you talk to people on the political left for a long time, they would insist that it's just a problem of the provision of public services, right? And they would say, you know, the developed world just needs to become more like Scandinavia in terms of paid leave and parental support. People on the right, conservatives are more likely to talk about the decline of religion and a sense of moral obligation to the future. You have people who focus right now, especially in developed countries, on climate change and say, oh, you know, the young people don't want to have kids because they're afraid of the human future. And you'll have people who say, look, this is just about women's choices. This is just once you have a more egalitarian society, women understandably, are less likely to choose to have kids. And this is where we end up. And all of these arguments have problems. And as you know, it's hard to fit them all to the general trend. And especially since even places like Scandinavia have sort of headed towards the cliff in recent years, generous benefits and all. So what is your master theory of all of this?
- [07:57]
Alice Evans
So let me add on the Scandinavia point. You know, left wing progressives may say, oh, Scandinavia is so family friendly. You know, there's universal childcare, it's easier to be a working mother. But actually the US has higher fertility, right? So that signals to us that, you know, that theory isn't working. And as for the theory that it's all about women's choices and liberalism. How can that explain why fertility crashing in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Turkey, and in Tamil Nadu, which remain very conservative. So something is happening very recently, maybe in the past 15 years, everywhere, all at once, across vastly different economies, across vastly different governance and welfare systems, and across vastly different levels of liberalism versus religiosity. So those theories that you mentioned seem to do a poor job of the sort of comparative analysis. And the very recent global plummet. And going back to Sweden, for example, what there has been in the very recent years is a massive, massive rise in singles. Hugely, there are more, more, more people living in single occupier households. And this reflects a global trend.
- [09:10]
Ross Douthat
So this rise in singles, you frame it as a kind of crisis of coupling. Can you define that crisis for me and why it's, in your view, the leading explanation for the larger trends we've been talking about?
- [09:25]
Alice Evans
Absolutely. So if we look empirically at the data for a range of countries, we find that increasing number of people are staying single. That is, they are neither married nor cohabiting. So in the US over half the people between 18 and 34 are neither cohabiting nor married, so they're single. And that's the same case in much of Latin America, East Asia, Korea, in China, in South Korea. Those rates of every, you know, I chat to all my Chinese students, many single, no expectations, no. No plans, no desires to be married. So that's a massive, massive global friction. So if people are staying single, that is closely correlated. If we look at the data, the decline in people being married or coupled is actually almost one to one with the decline in children. It matches so closely in both the US and China. Everywhere, this is the strongest correlation, is more closely correlated than anywhere else. And across multiple countries, the data is so strong.
- [10:28]
Ross Douthat
So the coupling crisis writ large.
- [10:30]
Alice Evans
Yes.
- [10:31]
Ross Douthat
Seems to be linked somehow to technology, right?
- [10:34]
Alice Evans
Yes, that's what I think, certainly. So I think we can say, you know, there could be locally specific factors that go on in each place. Each place has its own cultural idiosyncrasies, and I don't want to ignore that. Yes, absolutely. The big shock that's occurred everywhere all at once is we've seen vast improvements in personal online entertainment. So we know, for example, in the.
- [10:54]
Ross Douthat
US podcasting, you know, I mean, everyone.
- [10:57]
Alice Evans
Everyone's just podcasters.
- [10:59]
Ross Douthat
That's right.
- [11:00]
Alice Evans
So people are spending more. No, but I think that's the thing. I. I mean, no offense, Ross, but I do blame charismatic people like you. You know, if people want socialize to listen.
- [11:08]
Ross Douthat
This is a new podcast. It. It's played no role at all yet.
- [11:11]
Alice Evans
Oh, okay.
- [11:12]
Ross Douthat
You are. You protest your education and distracting the young people of America.
- [11:16]
Alice Evans
Okay, okay. You totally innocent. Okay. But we do have this big increase in personal online entertainment, whether it's, you know, watching shows on Netflix, sports bets. You know, online gambling has become absolutely massive across Brazil and Latin America more broadly. You can, you know what, go on pornhub. You know, online connectivity enables people to stroll on Instagram, play Call of Duty, World of Warcraft. So we're all becoming. It's not just, you know, being single. We're all retreating into this digital solitude. And I think that's partly because technology makes it nicer and easier to stay at home. You can work from home. And it's so. And some of these apps are so hyper engaging that you sort of get distracted by the constant stream of dopamine hits as each app, as each technology company competes against others to keep its users hooked. And effectively the tech is out competing personal interactions. That's my fear.
- [12:10]
Ross Douthat
And that holds then as a global explanation, because even though there's tons of variation in Internet access and so on, smartphone penetration is a global phenomenon, Right? You know, you go to India and Africa and you find people with smartphones.
- [12:25]
Alice Evans
And there's the big difference that sub Saharan Africa has much, much lower rates of smartphone penetration, right?
- [12:32]
Ross Douthat
So as the iPhone moves across sub Saharan Africa, you would expect fertility rates to fall. But so how much of this. So you've just been talking about distraction entertainment, right? That it's easier to play a video game than go to a bar, it's easier to do sports gambling at home than meet a nice lady in a broad brimmed hat at the racetrack, as one does. But how much of it is distraction per se, in your view? And how much of it is a sort of, you might say, digital segregation of men and women, where men and women aren't just going online, but they're going online in sort of distinct ways and not interacting with each other.
- [13:16]
Alice Evans
I totally agree that in person you get when I think the male, female friendships are really important driver of gender equality. Because as you come to care about someone as a friend, as you listen to their stories, as you, as you hear about how their day was or the kind of things they don't like, and you. And they say, hey, you know, I was interviewing this guy in Catalonia in Spain, and he was telling me that, you know, they went to watch a football game at the bar and the women were saying that they didn't like it when guys were rowdy or aggressive or when one of his female friends was approached by a guy and she said no to him. He, he called her puta. He called her, you know, or something and she was saying to the, her friend that that was distressing. She didn't like that. And because he cared about her friend, his friend, he sort of understood that and he empathized that and he, he moderated his own behavior. And I think that building trust, rapport, understanding of what offends or, you know, not even just offense, but having a sense of what matters to the other person. Certain, I, I absolutely agree that retreating into these digital spaces of solitude, it harms our understanding and also our solidarity more broad, you know, whether we care about other people.
- [14:20]
Ross Douthat
Right, right. Well, no. And that's one of the distinctive features of current politics around the developed world certainly is some kind of polarization of the sexist. And it was, I think less extreme in the end, in the most recent US election than some people had anticipated. But I, I wonder too if there's sort of a feedback loop here, right, where the sexes don't interact and therefore are more likely to sort of like marriage and relationships are themselves a moderating influence.
- [14:53]
Alice Evans
I definitely believe that.
- [14:55]
Ross Douthat
And so people don't have that influence. And then they go online and like if you're on social media where people are always sort of performing their politics and you see a lot of liberal women or a lot of conservative men sort of performing their politics, and those aren't your politics. Right. And you have no relationship to those people, it just seems a lot easier to sort of create a kind of hostile generalization about right wing men or left wing feminists than if you're having any kind of interpersonal face to face interaction.
- [15:29]
Alice Evans
I think that's all true and I absolutely agree that intimate partnerships are a major important factor for building mutual understanding under, you know, common ground, etc. That said, I don't think this is just about men not understanding women are sort of men from Mars, women from Venus story. Because if you look at some modern trends, say for example, the, the discourse of secular monks, whereby a guy will spend, you know, a young American man will, you know, I'm going to eat these specific macros. I'll have 200 grams of protein, I'll spend, you know, two hours on the bike. That' a guy with no friends, that's a guy who's prioritizing, optimizing his physique and he's not strengthening and he's not Building friendships, he's not building rapport, he's, he's not becoming a funny, charismatic guy. So this isn't just the gender issue. It's a solitude issue of people losing their capacity, losing the social skill to charm and make friends. And if you don't have a network that is socially active, then even if you wanted to go out, no one is. And so it's all, it's all reinforcing. Right.
- [16:32]
Ross Douthat
And so what about economic forces besides the smartphone? So digital life has entered into a world where young men are falling behind. Young women in education. Men with lower levels of education are having, I think, a particularly hard time finding a mate or pairing off. If you look at trends, at least in the US for marriage rates, college educated women, marriage rate is down a bit. Women without a college degree, the marriage rate is way down.
- [16:59]
Alice Evans
Yes, totally.
- [17:00]
Ross Douthat
And so one way to look at this is that men are losing a certain kind of status. They care about status. When they lose status, they become more sexist, more hostile to women, become less attractive to women by virtue of being hostile. That's one way to look at it. Right.
- [17:17]
Alice Evans
I think we can think about this in two ways. So certainly as women increasingly enter the labor force and get higher skills, then they can be more economically independent and they can choose to be alone. So they would only marry if a guy is charming, you know, if they have fine love, but of course the phones may be hurting. That or if the guy offers a desirable package of goods, whether that's attractiveness, entertainingness, or money. Right. You know, money is impressive for many of us. So I think that the most disadvantaged guys certainly may struggle to offer an appealing package. And as you rightly say, the marriage rates are plummeting. Chiefly among the most disadvantaged men is the men who are earning lease, who are most likely to stay at home with their parents, to be single, who can't necessarily offer an attractive package of goods. I should just say that it's not entirely that young men are getting less educated, rather that the most disadvantaged men are struggling in education. So I certainly think that aspect is partly about economics.
- [18:20]
Ross Douthat
And what, what is a, what do you think a man is supposed to do in this kind of situation? Right. Because on the one hand, there clearly is a male reaction to this, this sort of economic landscape that's very toxic, you know, sort of anti female misogynist lashing out. At the same time, there's a cultural script that says it's really good for women to be independent. You don't need a man. Right. And women still like male status. Right. It's not just men who want status. Women like it. Like there's a lot of data on women. Like the idea of having a man who can potentially earn more than them, who can be a breadwinner, maybe not all the time. Right. But if you're going to have kids, it's nice to have a man around who can be the primary earner for a period of time. So it's not that women are really excited to enter into relationships with men who have less education than they do or who earn less than they do. Toasty. So those men are in a kind of trap that isn't just created by their own sort of sense of masculine identity. It's also created by women's preferences 100%.
- [19:31]
Alice Evans
And created by the broader economic situation. Now.
- [19:35]
Ross Douthat
Okay, let's take a break and when we come back, we'll talk about some of the other factors driving this decline. Open ended question, what can bring the sexes back together?
- [20:17]
Alice Evans
So I think that if it's the case that technology is the major friction, then we need to look at the political economy because each tech company to be successful, they want to distract us and hoover up our attention for as long as possible, for as much as possible. So the market mechanism is really against coupling. And my concern is that tech companies are just becoming so much more engaging, more affable, more charismatic, you know, more shocking. Enjoy. You know, Mr. Beast. Oh, what's he going to do now that's so engaging. Right. So my concern is what if tech outcompetes our social connections? And that already seems to be happening, not just in coupling, but, you know, the, the wider rise in solitude. And so I honestly don't know the answers, but here are a couple of things we should do. One is we could think about how do we regulate technology in some way. So Jonathan Haidt has, has really done fantastic work in encouraging phones free schools, for example, and that would be important in enabling young people to actually talk to each other, to, you know, play in the parks, to ch. Make jokes, to learn how to make jokes, to become less anxious. I think that's really important. But it's clearly not a sufficient solution because us as adults are also, you know, vulnerable to just getting sucked into all these things.
- [21:34]
Ross Douthat
Right. This is what, what strikes me about his ideas, right. Is that it's very easy in, I shouldn't say it's very easy, but it's relatively easy in a liberal individualist society to say, okay, we need to make a certain set of social changes that impose Restrictions on kids, because kids are the great exception that doesn't quite fit within liberal social. They're not really part of the social contract and so on. Right. And he's gotten a lot of traction. I think there will be, there already is. But there will increasingly be an attempt to sort of master the sort of lure of the virtual as it applies, especially to younger kids. It's harder for me to see that once you get further into adolescence where so much of the adult life you're trying to get kids to join is online. And then it's really hard for me to see how certainly any kind of sort of political restriction could, like adults are, just seem very, very unlikely to accept it. Now maybe there'll be cases where people say, ah, in the US this sports betting experiment that we've done, bit of a mistake. Right. Maybe it wasn't the best idea to put ads for sports gambling on every TV network that, you know, airs a baseball game or something. Maybe that gets walked back. But it does seem harder to see how you get any kind of social restrictions on adult distraction. What do you think?
- [23:03]
Alice Evans
Absolutely. And politically it's very difficult. So I think there are two tensions. One is both the demand and the supply that as humans become more hooked and dependent on these personal online entertainment, then we want to protect, protect those freedoms. And simultaneously all the various companies, from Netflix to sports gambling, will lobby different political parties to prevent any kind of restrictions and regulations. And then even if, say, for example, one was trying to have a church building program or a program to champion the church, the church is fighting against all those competing distractions. Or even if you're doing something secular like a community fair or community festival. Some people may well say, as they so often, hey, I'll rather just stay home in my pajamas and enjoy whatever on tv and you can choose exactly what you want on tv.
- [23:54]
Ross Douthat
Then what about culture, apart from politics? Because while it is the case that culture is determined to some degree by tech, the smartphone creates culture in its own way. It's also the case that the issue of declining birth rates is not one that much of elite Western culture has taken seriously. It's not something that's entered into sort of the mainstream cultural mind the way that, say, the threat of climate change has done. So you could imagine if it became a more important part of the cultural imaginary, some kind of self conscious attempt to treat this as an important issue. Right. So let's say right now people in Hollywood would feel bad if they were perceived to be not doing something to fight climate change. Or something. Hollywood used to make a lot of romantic comedies. Doesn't really anymore. There's still a few. Right. But, like, are there cultural scripts that could be written, whether in, you know, movies or TV or elsewhere, that you think could actually make a difference?
- [24:57]
Alice Evans
I think definitely, yes. And I think it would be wonderful if Hollywood promoted that and supported that. And in fact, as a joker, last year, I even wrote a comedy script about how Hollywood could support fertility and things like that. But let me add. So even though I'm totally on board with that, and I think that's very important, there are several frictions, because one, it's very difficult to do cultural engineering today because we have infinite options of entertainment at our fingertips on Netflix and everything. So if you're not that interested in a romantic comedy, you know, in China, a lot of the most popular films are about divorce. So that's another. It's difficult to do cultural engineering. On top of that, as long as people are hooked on their smartphones, they might not have the social skills to do it. I think another possible mechanism would be to use the tax system and to give massive tax incentives to people who have children, because that's a positive externality.
- [25:46]
Ross Douthat
Right. Well, let's talk about that for a minute. Right. Because that's sort of where people have naturally gone for a long time. People on the left, as I mentioned earlier, but also some people on the right. You have models in Eastern Europe, Poland and Hungary of sort of conservative or traditionalist governments trying to boost the birth rate or boost the marriage rate through incentives. Do those work?
- [26:09]
Alice Evans
So that's a good question. The present evidence suggests that pronatal incentives have not reversed the downward trend. So even when governments do give these goody bags, that doesn't seem to work. It's possible, however, that were financial incentives sufficiently large, that could change. So, for example, Hungary has recently suggested women who have two children will not have to pay taxes again. Now, that's a pretty big giveaway. But we also need to solve the coupling crisis. So I think that's one thing to explore. And governments, the Fed, et cetera, could explore the taxation system.
- [26:47]
Ross Douthat
But, yeah, I mean, my impression is, as you say, right. In part, it's these policies can work, but you have to spend incredibly large sums to do it, which gets harder when your country is experiencing economic decline caused by falling birth rates.
- [27:05]
Alice Evans
Right, yeah, yeah.
- [27:06]
Ross Douthat
And. And also your gains are like, they get swamped by larger effects. Right. So Hungary seemed to have some success pushing its birth rate, I think, from like 1.3 to 1.6. So you're making your investment is reaping marginal gains, which I think are worth it. It could mean hundreds of thousands of lives potentially, but it's not actually a fix. What about religion overall? It's the case that that religious people tend to have more kids than secular people do. Those differential birth rates mean that, for instance, eventually the secular Western world will just become more religious because only religious people will be having kids. Like what? What role does religion play?
- [27:47]
Alice Evans
Definitely, definitely. I think it's difficult empirically, descriptively to deny that. So for example, in Britain, Muslims have much higher fertility. So Britain will see a big increase in a larger Muslim, more politically active population. So that will have huge political consequen. And so if liberal secular people don't have kids, they will have less political influence. We see it in Israel too. The Hasidic Jews, the ultra conservative, I think they typically have six kids each. So again, that is changing the political bent of Israel's foreign policy. So every single country, these demographic implications are huge.
- [28:24]
Ross Douthat
But don't you need a certain kind of separatism to have big effects? Right. So the ultra orthodox in Israel are a fairly separate religious community. Right. And my reading of the literature for Muslims in the UK and in Europe is the more those communities integrate, the more their birth rates converge with the European norm. And the same goes in the U.S. i don't know. I tend to be skeptical of prophecies of massive religious revival. Although I will say that if birth rates are falling this fast, then suddenly the religious advantage looks more important. And then maybe at the, maybe the opposite end of the spectrum of possibilities from traditional religion. Right. You have reproductive technology offered as a kind of response. So there was a big pronatalism conference that was held recently in the US that attracted a lot of media attention because of course it was filled with a lot of very curious characters, you know, some of whom are my friends, some of whom are not. But what everyone who was there said is that it's this really weird mixture of sort of serious conservative religious people and Silicon Valley people who are convinced that there's going to be a technological solution. And maybe the solution is artificial wombs, maybe it's a cure for menopause that extends female reproductive life deeper into middle age or something. What effect has reproductive technology had so far? Has IVF mitigated the trend, do you think so?
- [29:55]
Alice Evans
That's a good question. I think in the vast majority of cases worldwide, a very small share of births are ivf. That said, were the technology to have greater success rates and to be more accessible and more affordable, we might see a greater uptake because it addresses a fundamental issue of expanding women's reproductive freedom. So, you know, if people want to spend their 20s finding themselves or focusing on greedy jobs, you know, becoming ultra, ultra demanding, you're climbing the career ladder. And in their 30s, they're still struggling to find someone, but maybe, you know, in their late 30s, they do. Right? So lots of data suggests that people do tend to couple up a bit later. They're coupling up a bit, bit later. So I can't predict that people are going to eventually couple up. But let's talk about that fraction of society who was single in their 20s, but finds the one at age 40. But then that's the real trouble, that at age 40, tick tock. And women's wombs are no longer at 100%. And so that's where, for that particular subgroup, that IVF could be really, really helpful in enhancing women's reproductive freedoms and enabling the couples that form later to have more choices, to have more freedoms and expend.
- [31:07]
Ross Douthat
Yeah, but IVF right now is very costly, difficult, and obviously does not deliver guarantees of success. Unreliable. And isn't there a danger? And I think you see this in some sort of professional class circles where, where it's seen as sort of a reason why it's safe to postpone marriage and fertility. You have the companies offering egg freezing services that are unreliable guarantors of fertility. So when I look at that landscape right now, I wonder if for every benefit to fertility you get from assisted reproduction, if there isn't a sort of cultural sense that, like, okay, I can put this off, that then ends in disappointment when it turns out that the tech is not all that people expect it to be.
- [31:58]
Alice Evans
Totally. I can understand that. Say, let's call it a moral hazard, right, that we. If you pipe up a fertility solution, then people might put off children. So that's theoretically possible. I don't want to dismiss it, but if we look at the Pew data, right, for Americans under 35, you've got half of them saying they're single. And, and of those singles, the vast majority say they feel no pressure to couple up, no pressure to be in a relationship, perfectly happy with the status quo. And I don't think those secular monks we were talking about say, oh, it's fine, I'll find a woman in 20 years and we'll do IVF. I don't think that from my interviews at least, I don't think IVF is entering into Those calculations, partly because of what you precisely say, many people see IVF as unreliable, costly, expensive. So if IVF was currently cheap and everyone thought it was great, but we were all deluded and the scientists were deluding us, and, and we were all overestimating its potential, then I think that explanation was have some credence. I think the hazard is possible, but I don't think it's going on right now.
- [32:59]
Ross Douthat
Right, but then by that logic, let's say you could extend, you could reliably extend female fertility by 10 years. That doesn't actually solve the coupling crisis. Right. If maybe it ends up, meaning you have more, at least some more women who don't pair off, don't partner up, but end up having maybe one child. But I mean, that's part of the reality here is that in fact it's just harder to raise children on your own. Right? So even people who want children outside of a coupled situation are going, even if they have a kid, they'll probably have fewer kids. And it just seems like you're still stuck in the same general trap, even if you can add a little bit to the reproductive life cycle.
- [33:44]
Alice Evans
So let me say that I think, given our recent discussion, each of these possible interventions has limited efficacy. Evidently, there is no magic bullet. And given the enormity of the fertility crisis, what I as a researcher would really like to see will be so many different initiatives and pilot initiatives. You know, how can we build community groups? You know, let's go back to religion. One thing that I think that religions have done so well historically is, is building your sense of community. So I spent a lot of time in small town Alabama and I went to a local Bible study and to the churches and I chatted to the community. And that's really, really important in you, in singing hymns together and praying together. That builds a sense of cohesion, those collective rituals, which also secular organizations could do. So we can organize, we can try a hundred different things, you know, let a hundred flowers bloom. So try all these little community events, perhaps. See how we can regulate technology in some ways, at some periods, in some ventures, and let's see how we can increase women's reproductive freedoms, and let's see what we can do with the tax system and fiscal incentives. So I don't think any one of these things will fix it unilaterally, but I would like to see everyone right and left focus on this issue, understand the real driving forces and try to target those. But at present we're not doing any of that.
- [35:03]
Ross Douthat
Right? But to the extent that you can tie all of that together. So you wrote a fascinating paper recently about the Islamic religious revival.
- [35:11]
Alice Evans
Oh, thank you.
- [35:12]
Ross Douthat
So this is the broad trend across the Muslim world towards increasing piety and religious practice that helped define the late 20th century and was not entirely expected. And so one of the arguments you make in the paper is that there is just an element of prestige at work here that a lot of Islamic schools and preachers and so on, and revivalists, if you will, did a really good job of making Islam seem prestigious, like it was something you wanted to be part of. Right. And so in a way, aren't we. We're talking about a similar problem here, right? In the end, you're trying to make both coupling and kids, I think those things together prestigious in a way that they aren't right now.
- [36:00]
Alice Evans
I agree, I agree.
- [36:01]
Ross Douthat
But can you do that?
- [36:03]
Alice Evans
As I said, cultural engineering is very difficult in a world of smartphones where everyone can curate their own echo chamber. So my total, totalitarian aspirations are limited in the 21st century, right.
- [36:15]
Ross Douthat
Do you have, I mean, do you have totalitarian aspirations?
- [36:17]
Alice Evans
No, that was a British joke. Sorry, Deadpool.
- [36:19]
Ross Douthat
No, I mean, this is. Well, but this is the, I guess this is one more interesting question, right, is that we're talking about this in the context of, primarily of liberal democracies, but all of the trends that you describe apply to places like the People's Republic of Chakra. China's birth rate is headed towards South Korean levels. But China is, I mean, you can argue about how totalitarian it is. It certainly is an authoritarian society with a state and a leadership class that thinks naturally in terms of five year plans and thinks naturally in terms of social engineering. And they are, I mean, they take the fertility crisis seriously. Do you imagine that China is going to sort of succeed in social engineering their way out of this?
- [37:09]
Alice Evans
No, not at all. Not at all. I don't think they seem to understand it at all. And actually, even though I totally agree that China has masterminded massive success with electric vehicles, for example, or innovation, they can't seem to encourage people to couple up and have babies. And let me give you two examples of the limits of their cultural engineering. So on Little Red Book, when I chat to my students, if you type in fertility in Little Red Book, which is their, their, their version of Instagram, right? So if you type infertility, and I'd encourage you to do this, download the app and do it, you will get all this antenatal propaganda. And I've previously blogged on this and it's really shocking. It'll be all these horrifying images about how your, you know, vagina gets destroyed and your body is destroyed, and it's the most painful experience of your life. It's like, really horrifying and gory. And all these girls are saying, oh, my God, this is horrific. I never want to do it. So despite all the censorship and the great fireball of China, all that exists. On top of that, young women will uplo video blogs celebrating their independent life. So look at my nice apartment. I'm going to, you know, cut this bit of food, and I'm living as an independent person, sort of glorifying and, you know, in many ways rewriting the script, challenging expectations of marriage, etc. And I don't know why this antenatal discourse is passing the censors, but, yeah, it is. And it's consistent with all my interviews with Chinese women.
- [38:30]
Ross Douthat
All right, let's take a break there, and when we come back, we'll try and figure out what could bring men and women back together. I want to stay on that idea of the pain of pregnancy and childbirth, because this is more speculative, right? But we've been talking about virtual life as a distraction from reality, from physical reality. A distraction from going out to a bar and meeting someone or just hanging out with friends and getting introduced to someone. But isn't there also a way in which. I mean, it is true that sex is dangerous, right? It's high risk. Pregnancy is dangerous. Having kids is obviously more dangerous for women than for men, for obvious reasons. Do you think there's a way in which virtual life makes physical, carnal, painful human life seem more dangerous than it would have just by virtue of, like, you're living in a phone, right? You're detached from. You're abstracted from your own body in a more profound way than usual? I just wonder if this kind of propaganda about what reproduction does and how dangerous it is fastens more easily in minds that are already a little bit detached from their own embodiment.
- [40:24]
Alice Evans
Let me say I think that's an interesting hypothesis, but I think you see young people still doing things that are painful. So whether it's young women, you know, trying to get an Instagram face and having fillers and Botox and painful things, or men spending, you know, painful times at the gym, being secular monks, people do painful stuff. I think the more direct causal link is people spending time on their phones and then feeling anxious about chatting to people at the bar.
- [40:49]
Ross Douthat
But maybe not pain, right? Okay, so maybe there it's more a kind of idealized fantasy of youth. Because, yes, people are willing to go through painful processes of calisthenic activity and facial surgery and so on, but both of those things for men and women are attempts to sort of retain a kind of eternal youth. Right. And in that sense, Sorry, I'm just trying to push us a tiny bit into the philosophical. Right. But like the act, you know, I mean, I had hair before I started having kids, Right. Like the entering into parenthood is inherently a confrontation with your own mortality, maybe.
- [41:31]
Alice Evans
I certainly think that people seem to be wanting to extend the freedoms and the lack of responsibility in their 20s. And let's add that, for example, in my interviews with Latin American men, many are saying to me that they don't necessarily want marriage and kids because it comes with those responsibilities, right? And I think this could be even more salient than the pain of pregnancy. Like, imagine if you're a guy in a pretty crappy labor market with, you know, lots of informal labor, lots of insecurity, lots of massive financial shocks and crises and inflationary pressures, and you're like, do I want to commit to a woman and say that we're going to raise two kids together and feel all that strain and response disability, or do I just want to chill out and play Call of Duty? So that, I think, is re. That's a really salient. I mean, I think that progressives have generally underestimated how much women benefit from, as you were saying earlier, making that commitment of monogamous, permanent devotion and support. I think that while feminists have historically championed freedoms and shared care work, which are of course, crucial to gender equality, the people that actually listen to those messages of freedoms, pleasure and shared care work are men who love, who are emotionally connected, and who value companionship with their wives. And now many men are saying, maybe I don't want those things, you know, maybe that's not everything I need. And that's a hugely important and undertold aspect of this global story, right?
- [43:07]
Ross Douthat
We've been talking about solutions and responses, but overall we're describing a problem to which there is not a single solution. There might be a large number of sort of small bore responses that make some kind of difference, but basically the low fertility future, the population crash, is going to happen in most places.
- [43:29]
Alice Evans
Yes.
- [43:30]
Ross Douthat
Almost certainly there is not going to be a worldwide pro fertility mobilization that suddenly reverses birth rates and takes these trends off the table. So I just want to speculate at the end, right? Like, what does that future look like? What do you think the world looks like in 2080 if these trends continue.
- [43:55]
Alice Evans
So I'm reluctant to make predictions.
- [43:58]
Ross Douthat
But these are not predictions. I want to be clear. These are imaginative speculation.
- [44:04]
Alice Evans
If fertility continues to decline and we are either ineffective or inactive, and simultaneously we do not have a large rise in immigration, which is super productive and super economically active, and simultaneously we do not see a massive boom in AI productivity. So if none of those countervailing forces occur, then we're all going to become, become much poorer. And perhaps politically also we might see some shifts with a rising, you know, support for more conservative groups.
- [44:37]
Ross Douthat
Just say a little more about the politics. What does it mean when you say more conservative?
- [44:41]
Alice Evans
Oh, so for example, in the US it's Republicans, as you know, who have more kids. Right. So we should predict that Republicans will win more elections just by virtue of fertility. In Europe, we will just all become much poorer. Our public services will continue to deteriorate and we will have less spending power. So Europe is just in an economic doom loop. And the US may be better because they'll get all the world's migrants. They'll get the most productive migrants, they'll get the most entrepreneurial migrants, but they should also become, if we're right, more conservative and more Republican.
- [45:15]
Ross Douthat
So there it's just sort of replacement. Conservatives have more kids, liberals have fewer, conservatives own the future.
- [45:22]
Alice Evans
Yes.
- [45:22]
Ross Douthat
I guess I'm wondering though, what like, surely there are also kind of political adaptations you can see in Europe already with some of the, kind of, some of the populist parties, right?
- [45:32]
Alice Evans
Yes.
- [45:32]
Ross Douthat
This sense of like we're trying to sort of protect the aging society and you know, we want to keep out immigrants because immigrants threaten a culture that is disappearing, but the culture is disappearing because we ourselves haven't had enough kids. I don't know, but it's. People worry about the authoritarianism of that kind of politics. And I think there is a pull towards authoritarianism, but it seems like in a weird way the opposite of like an aggressive, you know, 20th century fascism that wants to, you know, make Hungary or Germany or Austria great. It's more this kind of like cocooned authoritarianism. I don't know, it just seems like you will get novel forms of politics in this environment.
- [46:19]
Alice Evans
Well, I think certainly that if people grow up with a certain standard of living and a certain quality of public services and then those deteriorate as a result of population aging and lower rates of economic dynamism, then people should get fed up and frustrated simultaneously as people spend more time on their phones, hooked on these echo Chambers polarizing differently, not just by gender, but polarizing. Then the less time that we spend socializing with different other people, the less we develop understanding right across genders, right across political groups. And as we become more illiberal, I would predict that would fuel political authoritarianism because those guys are the bad guys and we'll do anything to stop them from winning and we'll support our strongman to stop those crazy people winning. So I would just expect lots of economic frustrations, lots of support for illiberalism, et cetera. It's a bad future, right?
- [47:12]
Ross Douthat
No, it seems like a very dark future. And this is sort of the problem of a low fertility trap, right. Is that once a society gets old enough and it's democracy, the older voters are just going to keep voting for benefits for older people.
- [47:25]
Alice Evans
Yes, exactly.
- [47:27]
Ross Douthat
It's still going to be difficult. It's going to be increasingly difficult. Difficult to get the government to spend money on the young people, even if you need the young people. Right.
- [47:34]
Alice Evans
So absolutely, yes. So you'll have this political lobby group of old people who are directly concerned with pensions and healthcare rather than economic dynamism and frictions. So then it becomes harder to be a young person. And so we go back to the disadvantaged man. It's harder to move upwards as a disadvantaged man and harder to get a wife if the entire, you know, voting system is rigged by these old people who don't care so much about you.
- [47:58]
Ross Douthat
Right. But then finally, just to keep being speculative, the world in this future will have a lot more empty spaces though, too. Right. Like China has spent 20 years building all of these huge cities. And if China's population falls by half, those cities will be empty. Like big regions, big rural regions of Latin America will be empty and so on. Yes. So sometimes when I'm trying to be optimistic, and I don't want to end on a super optimistic note, because the point of this show is that people should be alarmed and concerned by this. But there are ways in which, like, a young person could look at that world and say, okay, you know, the megacities of Western Europe and North America are actually bad places to be young, but there's a kind of reopened frontier in Uruguay or, or Eastern Europe or the hinterlands of China or something.
- [48:52]
Alice Evans
I don't think that's true because, I mean, in China, when you talk about those, those cities, those tower blocks, that's. China is currently dealing with massive local government debt because so much of the local governments, their assets are in buildings that no one is buying. So that's not a win. Those empty cities are no sense of win. There's no, you can't. You don't. No one is moving to those cities because there's no jobs, no demand, nothing. So I don't see.
- [49:16]
Ross Douthat
I guess I'm thinking more like, imagine that you wanted to be like a pirate. Like, imagine that you were like a 19th century would be desperado. I'm more imagining a world of groups with high intentionality. This new world is going to reward people who are unusually intentional about things like getting married and having kids, but also maybe about. About building a community and trying to sort of set yourself up in one of the spaces created by the retreat of the human race.
- [49:50]
Alice Evans
So let's say, you know, it would be amazing, and I'd love to see it, if some community group forged a space in the US and like, okay, that. How can we arrange this community space? Maybe it's 100 households. How can we arrange it in a pro. Coupling. Pro fertility way? That would be fascinating to explore, but just because there's a plot of vacant land, I wouldn't expect anything to follow.
- [50:12]
Ross Douthat
Yeah. You have kids?
- [50:15]
Alice Evans
No. No, I don't.
- [50:16]
Ross Douthat
No. Okay, so I have kids. And my kids are maybe tired of hearing their father mention to them just occasionally that global population is going to collapse over the course of their lifetime. Normal children of New York Times employees are worried about climate change. Change. My children are worried about the demographic cliff. I know I keep trying to prod you towards optimism, but what would you say to the children of this future? Because when I talk to my kids about it, I do try to frame it as an opportunity. It's like, yes, the world is going to grow old, but you will be young and you will have agency and you will have opportunities to shape a world in which there are fewer young people to compete with, and maybe your horizons will widen. So how do you think young people should think about this future, apart from, you know, they should probably have some kids?
- [51:16]
Alice Evans
Yeah. So two things on that. So I think, first of all, it's really important that the young people understand the economic implications so they take it as seriously as we do. Climate breakdown, first and foremost. And that's what I do in my lectures. And then I think that given my realization that so much of this is driven by the rise of syndrome, I actually would pivot to say, you know, so many young Americans are not happy. You know, one of the richest countries in the world, a lot of young people are deeply lonely and unhappy, and one of the most unique and wonderful things that we have as humans is to find people to love and care for and build emotional connections and devotion and support each other, understand each other. So going back to the, the writing the Hollywood script, I would go back for those romcoms and celebrate the romantic love. Because when people shift their focus from celebrating the freedoms or the, you know, secular monks of the twenties to thinking more about, okay, how can I build, you know, friendships and romantic love, then you get people finding love earlier, and then that should encourage a higher rate of coupling. So I think the romantic love would be my optimistic, positive focus that I think would, you know, restore both socializing friendships, mutual understanding, empathy, happiness, and down the line, fertility.
- [52:38]
Ross Douthat
Okay, so we're ending on an agreement of a massive government program to subsidize a new revival of Jane Austen adaptations for the 21st century.
- [52:49]
Alice Evans
Yes.
- [52:50]
Ross Douthat
On that note, Alice Evans, thank you so much for joining me.
- [52:54]
Alice Evans
Thank you.
- [53:19]
Ross Douthat
As always. Thank you so much for listening. And as a reminder, you can watch this as a video podcast on YouTube. You can find the channel under Interesting Times with Ross Douthat. Interesting Times is produced by Sofia Alvarez Boyd, Andrea Batanzos, Elisa Gutierrez and Catherine Sullivan. It's edited by Jordana Hochman. Our fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Marion, Margaret Locker and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Amin Sahota and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuluski. And our director of opinion audio is Annie Rose Strasser.