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The Welfare System is Going to Collapse - No One is Prepared for the Consequences - Louise Perry
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- [00:00]
Louise Perry
The welfare system will barely last. A hundred will have, will have barely lasted 100 years. Whereas now we have this conception of the pension that you're supposed to spend 20, 30 years, even basically being supported by the state. Your choice is basically between competing with people from the third world who are willing to suffer really wretched conditions in work and also in housing, say sharing and NHMO with lots of other people, or go on welfare. But I think that most doctors haven't really cottoned onto the fact that their government are deliberately using third world trained doctors to undercut their wages. When you adopt a faster life history strategy, you will have more children, you'll start having sex younger, you'll be more risk tolerant. It means that in some sense we are experiencing an evolutionary mismatch. People having an average of two children is not like a magical number that we were always going to stop at in order to replace our population. There's no reason it wouldn't sink below, as indeed it has. It might sink still further. And I do think that actually a lot of the political tumult that we're experiencing right now comes back to the birth rates question.
- [01:14]
Nina Power
Hello and welcome to the New Culture Forum. My name is Nina Power and today I'm joined by Louise Perry. Louise Perry is a writer and she's the author of the very successful the Case against the Sexual Revolution. She is the host of Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast and she is a columnist at the Wall Street Journal's Free Expression newsletter. So welcome, Louise. Very lovely to see you to be here. So today we're going to be talking about several things. One of the main things is to do with perhaps a crisis in the relationship between men and women, particularly young men and women. And we're going to look at some of the reasons why things are difficult, particularly for young people in Britain. All of the different causes. We're going to be thinking about demography, which is something that you've written a lot about, and I know that you're working on a book about this question, which will be out next year, and you have some interesting things, theories about why there is a demographic crisis. What are the kind of causal factors and reasons why people all over the world, but particularly in richer countries, are having fewer and fewer children, and what this tells us about our future as a species. But yeah, just to begin with, Right, so today in Britain, a government review has found that nearly 1 million young people out of work are costing the country over 125 billion pounds a year. We also hear today that 27 non EU migrants are hired for every unemployed British youth. I think we both have a sense that there is a whole series of things holding young people back. I know you've also written for the Wall Street Journal about the exodus of young people as well. So I'm just wondering if you can talk a little bit about the current conditions, what it's like to be a younger person, let's say up to the age of 35 in Britain today.
- [03:24]
Louise Perry
Well, a big part of the story with unemployment rates is the welfare system and the fact that it is now possible for the first time in the history of the world, I would guess, for people to beyond long term disability payments for mental health conditions like anxiety, ADHD, autism, etc. It is clearly the case that people are able to play the system. Social media abounds with guidance on how exactly to play the system and the massive upsurge in people claiming mental health related disability payments since COVID I think is suggestive of the fact that people realized that the system was open to abuse as the furlough system had been. And I mean, I think this is like the main story as to what's gone on over the last decade, just specifically in terms of young people on welfare. I mean, I suspect what's going to happen for a multitude of reasons is that the welfare system will, will barely last a hundred, will have, will have barely lasted 100 years in terms of its. I think it will be regarded in retrospect as an experiment, a well meaning but basically quite foolish experiment.
- [04:52]
Nina Power
Right. I mean, we heard a couple of months ago that there's now more money going out into the welfare system than there is coming in from taxes.
- [05:02]
Louise Perry
So the income tax bill is now lower than the welfare bill.
- [05:06]
Nina Power
Right.
- [05:07]
Louise Perry
Obviously the government gets taxes from other places as well, but income tax is a very substantial source of government revenue. Those welfare payments are not just or even primarily going to unemployed working age people. It's mostly pensions. And then of course the NHS is a whole other area of expenditure which is enormous and which, I mean, people don't tend to think of either pensions or healthcare spending as welfare, but these are novel expenditures for governments. You know, historically the NNHS is what, 78 years old. The old age pension, when it first came in Deloitte, George, was very meager compared to what we have now and most people, because people of course had shorter life expectancies. And so the period of time that you'd expect to claim a pension was much shorter than it was now than it is now. So, so whereas now we have this conception of the pension that you're supposed to spend 20, 30 years even basically being supported by the state, like it just, it doesn't take. I don't think you have to be like a crazy right wing ideologue to think that this is clearly not sustainable. I mean, if it ever was. It's partly part of the problem, right, is to do with the fact that we've had below replacement birth rates in Britain since the 1970s. And there is just a mathematical problem where there aren't enough young working age people to support a growing number of pensioners. Certainly we can't be supporting, you know, loads of young people who are choosing to take disability payments rather than to work. That's all nuts. Of course, the government, or at least sections of government think that immigration is the solution to this problem.
- [06:57]
Nina Power
Right. But I mean, how can immigration be the solution to the problem when we were looking at the fact that young people aren't able to get jobs because their jobs are being taken by people that employers can pay much less money to, who are then sending home money remittances to their families or the countries that they come from. I mean, there's been lots of anecdotal reports of young people not being able to get work. I take your point about the kind of the anxiety and the mental health conditions and I'm sure that's being exacerbated by social media. I think we've also seen a collapse in shame as a kind of structuring social mechanism, like the idea that actually it would be shameful to claim benefits even if you were technically eligible. That seems to have disappeared by the wayside. It's simply a question of what you can get of other people's money. I mean, this sort of great socialist experiment, I mean, we're supposed to, in a way, I think, look back at the kind of Thatcherite idea of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and thinks, think, oh, this is cruel and unusual. But we've also got this kind of confluence of. Yeah, I mean, simply millions of people coming from elsewhere who can be paid less. Yeah. And if you were a young person today, you might think, well, what's the point? Right, what am I?
- [08:14]
Louise Perry
And indeed, yeah, so. So one strain of thought that's been popular within Conservatives, for instance, is that, you know, young native British people are lazy and feckless and we need to be bringing in kind of striving workers from overseas. There are a few problems with that strategy. One is that it's actually not true that unemployment Rates among white British people are actually relatively low compared with other ethnic groups. So that's one. So it's not even though there is. This phenomenon is absolutely real of those people claiming. Claiming welfare sort of more or less legitimately. It's by no means confined to just natives to. There's this question of undercutting of wages. Like if you have people, as I was just having a conversation recently with a woman, it's actually Eastern European. So she was of a previous wave of immigration from Romania. She and her husband are now thinking of going back. She works as a masseuse and part of the reason is because she was working at a massage clinic. And the boss realized that if he brought in loads of people from the Third World who were willing to live in horrible conditions like above the shop and work seven days a week, 10 hours a day, and, you know, just were willing to live basically wretched lives, then he could make more money from his business. And she said, well, I'm not willing to do that. Yeah, because Romanians in general are not willing to work those kind of conditions. She said, I'd rather go back to Romania. There's a lot to be said for living in Romania, by all accounts, or that I've been. But I'm told it's very nice. So this is obviously going to disincentivize people for if your choice is basically between competing with people from the Third World who are, who are willing to suffer really wretched conditions in work and also in housing, say sharing an NHMO with lots of other people or go on welfare, you'll most people would choose to go on offer. That makes perfect sense if those are your choices. But of course, these are choices that have been generated by government policy. These are political choices.
- [10:33]
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- [11:08]
Nina Power
Yeah, I mean, and I don't think this is what the people wanted. I mean, the formerly sensible parts of the left, if we want to call them that, were actually often very concerned about mass immigration in terms of labor because Precisely for the reasons that employers could undercut the wages.
- [11:24]
Louise Perry
Yes, it's a very strong left wing position.
- [11:26]
Nina Power
Absolutely. And you know, the idea of having to compete with people who are willing to live and earn so little money and all that money's going back anyway. I mean, I often think about, well, you've imported like largely vast numbers of young, young unmarried men. Right. Who are turning up in this country. And we know this even though we're not really being given official numbers. It's also visually obvious that this is happening. And the idea that then what are they supposed to do? Are they ever going to get married? Are they going to have a family? Are they just basically sort of like neo slaves from the future who just kind of do this? I mean, the whole thing is dystopian. Yeah, it's absolutely kind of bonkers. And we, we know that, that anytime the British public had a chance to vote on mass immigration, they voted for less immigration. Yeah. So we've had a successive succession of governments, both Tory and Labor, that have just disregarded that and not only not done what people voted for, they've done the opposite.
- [12:35]
Louise Perry
The challenge is gerontocracy. So what I think a lot of politicians have reasoned, maybe they were wrong, but I think this was their reasoning, is that, yes, people say that they don't want immigration and of course Brexit was a clear indication of this, but they do want particularly older voters because not only is there this demographic imbalance, but also older voters are more likely to turn out to vote, so they're a powerful political force. Older voters also want to have affordable care homes. They also want to have plentiful NHS services available to them. The only way, so governments have reasoned that we can provide, that is by bringing in workers from the Third World and undercutting natives. In effect. I'm always amazed that doctors aren't more. I mean, obviously junior doctors in particular have. There's been a lot of strike action and a lot of dissatisfaction, but I think that most doctors haven't really cottoned onto the fact that their government are deliberately using Third World trained doctors to undercut their wages. And indeed lots of, I mean, we have this crazy system in Britain. Bearing in mind, you know, Britain, this is the country that like invented vaccination, invented sanitation, perfected antibiotics, etc. Like, we have a very, very strong history of medical innovation and excellence. We cap the number of doctors who can be trained in British medical schools because the reasoning is that you then have to go on to train in the NHS because the Government in this country has a monopoly on health care. That's what the nature of the nhs. They. And there are a certain number of jobs in the nhs, and therefore they say, well, therefore we can only train a certain number of medics because they need jobs to go into. That's historically been the reasoning, which is why medical schools, I think it's typically like 10 applicants to a place is incredibly competitive. To get into medical school, you have to be really good and then you get through this whole process. And then the government will deliberately bring in people who have been trained in often very substandard medical schools overseas in the Third World, because they are cheaper, basically, because they don't have to pay their training, and also because they will accept worse pain conditions. And there are even cases now of doctors who. Of British people who trained in British medical schools and then gets into the training and there is actually no job waiting for them because the government is. And then you'll have. And then you'll have. You know, then you have the nerve sometimes from people to say, oh, well, you know, we just. We can't. We can't get enough good doctors here. What are you talking about?
- [15:11]
Nina Power
Yeah, I have heard this. I mean, this is absolutely disastrous. I mean, this is a betrayal of all of those. People have invested their time, energy and intellect and taken out huge, huge loans in order to provide a service which is towards people's betterment. I mean, you're being punished by a sort of, I don't know, cruel and sadistic market within the NHS itself.
- [15:35]
Louise Perry
Well, I mean, it's not a market, it's kind of a monopoly. Yeah, right. I mean, I'm not sure if the free market would solve this SS necessarily. But it does mean that when it comes to, say, NHS policy, it is entirely within the hands of government.
- [15:47]
Nina Power
Right.
- [15:48]
Louise Perry
And government has its own kind of
- [15:49]
Nina Power
corporatism, then, which is a feature of tyrannical and fascist states everywhere.
- [15:56]
Louise Perry
And then, of course, you have young doctors going, and nurses and everybody wanting to go overseas to places like Australia where they can be paid more.
- [16:04]
Nina Power
Yeah, well, I wanted to ask you about this, actually. So, I mean, we hear a lot now about particularly maybe young men leaving in their 20s. Let's say you're a young, ambitious, entrepreneurial man who wants to get ahead in the world, who wants to make good money. We've heard quite a lot of stories, I think, of people leaving to go to the UAE and going to Dubai and going to Australia and perhaps to America to some extent. And if you were that person, if you were a young person. I mean, you're not old at all, you're still very young. But if you were, let's say hypothetical, basically sort of 22, 23, you've just got a good degree from a good university, why wouldn't you leave Britain? Why would you stay in Britain if you're a young person today?
- [16:53]
Louise Perry
Yeah, I mean, one thing to say is that we don't really know how many people are leaving because we don't really know how many people are here. The British government has been very slack about recording immigration and immigration properly. I mean, until recently, maybe this is still the case. The key way in which we would monitor flows of people was literally having employees of the government go up to people in airport arrival halls and say like, what are you here for basically? And kind of collate the figures. But it wasn't like seriously counting people in and counting out, which I don't really know why. I mean, I. So I'm also, I'm a dual national, I'm also Australian and I recently asked the Australian government, in order to get citizenship for my children, I had to prove that I'd lived in Australia for a certain amount of time. And what you do is you send off to the Australian government to ask for your migration record and they send you this document which goes back to where it went back to my, my whole life. Right. So I was born in 92, but I think it goes back earlier still. And it will say exactly the date you arrived and on flight and the date that you left and this, you know, for 34 years plus they'll tell you. You know, I thought why don't, why don't the British government do this? I, I don't really know the answer. I mean, clearly the Australian government had the capacity, I mean, if the Australian government had the capacity to do this all these years, we should assume the Brits did as well. I guess it's just the will. But anyway, we don't really know how many people are coming and going or indeed how many people are emigrating or it's, or which age group. So I don't know if there's a sex skew with immigrants. I don't know if the government knows if there's a sex scube with immigrants. This also comes up when you're trying to work out whether there's an exodus of very wealthy people, which has been reported in the press. But the way that you have to try and work that out, like the Sunday Times rich list will basically just try and work out where people are now living by looking at things like their LinkedIn profiles where it says that they live. So we don't really know is the, is like the headline figure anecdotally. I mean there were. This may be less true now because of course the war in Iran, about a quarter of a million British people living in the UAE and another quarter of a million British people living in other parts of the Gulf. So that's half a million people. The, they're not going to take those countries are not going to take people who are like on pensioners or disabled people who, you know, otherwise dependent on the state, obviously like these, these states are very small in terms of what they offer people. Of course the trade off is then you don't have to pay income tax. So it's a completely different way of running a government. But, you know, so we should assume therefore that that's half a million people living in the Gulf who are probably net tax contributors or would be net tax contributors if they lived in Britain and who are skilled and young and eager to better themselves. Those are not half a million people that you want to be losing. Similarly, this exodus to Australia, which has been going on for a very long time, I mean, Britain has had net emigration to Australia for all of Australia's history.
- [20:19]
Nina Power
Sometimes some of it compelled at the beginning.
- [20:22]
Louise Perry
Right, right. Including some of my ancestors. Right. Obviously there were periods where those surges increased, including in the 1970s when of course, British economy was in dire straits. It would be amazing if that weren't happening now. But again, it's difficult to be clear on the numbers. But, but what people will say to you, I mean, if you are, you just ask people. I did just today actually. I asked a woman who's in her 20s and her boyfriend's an investment banker and we were just, we were just chatting and she was like, she just had her phone stolen recently on the street. She's very frustrated about that. Housing is incredibly expensive, even for a high earner. They're worried about crime. She didn't say it, but I got the impression that they were also worried about the negative effects of mass immigration. Like this is. I, I would say almost all of my British friends under the age of 40 ish have at least floated the idea. Yeah, at some point.
- [21:24]
Nina Power
I mean, this is very depressing.
- [21:26]
Louise Perry
Right.
- [21:27]
Nina Power
This is not a Britain which is encouraging people to look forward with hope to, to start families, to get married, to defend the country in many ways. I mean, we recently had the government. I mean, you're, you're quite Right. I think to say that we don't know the stats because people aren't. We don't know who's here. I mean, I get the strong feeling that at some point if someone comes along and says, oh, well, now we've got the tech to work out who's here, we just need to surveil everyone and do kind of, you know, social credit and so on, people will go for it because at least then we'll know who's here. You know, they've set up the precondition for a situation of which there is sort of potentially millions of unvetted people wandering around. We have no idea who they are. But recently we had the labor government sort of bragging that they'd managed to get net migration down. But as you say, if this turns out to be all of the good people leaving and lots of sort of very low skilled, potentially criminal people arriving, this is not a good thing, is it? Clearly.
- [22:28]
Louise Perry
I mean, even people who are, you know, like one of the reasons that we had this huge surge in immigration under Boris Johnson's government. Boris wave, the so called Boris wave, yeah. Is because of social care visa. So again, this is going back to the gerontocracy point. The government are worried, understandably about people, elderly or otherwise frail people, having access to affordable social care, particularly because it often ends up being responsibility of local authorities to pay for this care. And so they bring in the social care visa and have a surge. And this is primarily women who'll be coming from places like Zimbabwe was a popular source of people on this visa type who. I'm, you know, I'm sure these are overwhelmingly people who want, who, who, who want to do a good job, who want to better themselves and the lives of their families and are not criminal or any of this. Right. Like that. They are unobjectionable people, but they also don't earn very much money. I mean, that's kind of the whole point of, you know, of their arrival. They don't earn very much money, often bringing independence children or elderly parents or whatever. And you need to earn in order to be a net tax contributor, I. E. To take, to put in more than you take out of state coffers, you need to be earning at least in sort of the mid-40s, like 45,000ish kind of figure. I mean, it depends on how you calculate it because obviously it depends how long you live and, and all these kind of things. But anyone who's earning 25, 30, 35 kind of these figures that are for low, for low paid work or even less. There's no way that they're net, their net contributors. And you might say, okay, well the work needs to be done. So it's worth, you know, this nature of economy is that we, a nature of this kind of at least semi socialized, like quite significantly socialized economy is that we people need to do these jobs and we redistribute money to sort of make it happen. But you've just got to like, you've just got to do the math. You've got to think about it. Okay. If you've got one young tech worker going to Dubai and taking his tens of thousands a year in income tax contributions with him and then you've, he's being replaced by someone who's coming on a social care visa from Zimbabwe, that's not good for state finances. It's really bad for state finances. And I, there are people, I think in government who realize this. Yeah, but it's, it's.
- [25:00]
Nina Power
I mean, we can imagine a different situation, let's say like perhaps a slightly poorer Britain perhaps where there's been, you know, the return of various people who are not economically contributing or in fact taking money away from the British taxpayer and the British state. And we have perhaps a slightly smaller country that maybe is encouraged to kind of rebuild itself and to think about the future and to be optimistic and maybe everyone can kind of muck in and access this sort of spirit which maybe still remains. And yeah, to encourage people to think kind of collectively about their future. And I wanted to ask you about this question of demographics. Right. Because I know that you're working on this and you're thinking about this very seriously and we often hear very different explanations for why the birth rate has largely declined, particularly in richer countries. This would of course include the UK Sometimes people talk about technology, sometimes people talk feminism. Sometimes people will talk about, well, mass immigration having a sort of inhibiting effect on people's desires. Families, some people will invoke material and economic causes, the difficulty betting on the housing market. Other people will talk about perhaps new anxieties that have arisen among young people about their capacity or aptitude to form a family or to have these adult markers. Getting married to having a house and having children. Sometimes people will invoke religious ideas. Perhaps the death of God and, and the death of Christianity, the death of nationalism, the death of a, a sense of shared purpose is also contributing. So I really want to ask you, Louise, if you had to volley D, what is going on?
- [26:47]
Louise Perry
It's a very big question, Nina. Yes, I mean, in some senses, you know, you don't actually like. So my book is about falling fertility rates, but only about a quarter of it is about the cause. Sure, because the cause is important, but you don't actually have to. The thing that I'm actually more interested in is how this is going to change the world and politics and economics and everything. And in some sense you don't actually need to know the cause in order to track this because at this point a significant population decline is already baked in. So even if you were able to reverse it immediately, I mean, if it was something really simple, if it was just house prices and then the government could just, you know, flick a few switches and then house prices declined and then all of a sudden everyone started having families, then, you know, that would be useful information, right? It isn't. Okay. I mean, it's frustrating, right, because I, I obviously I, I'm a, I'm a great supporter of the nation's young people and I hate the Gerontocracy. I want to smash it to pieces. Right. Obviously a bit of me that would like it to be as simple as that. Like the people. The reason people aren't having children is because they can't afford to get on the housing ladder. And it would feel intuitively true that people have, you know, if only we had an extra bedroom, if only we could afford for the mum to stay at home or whatever it is, then we would have more children. The problem is that it doesn't seem to be true because there are other parts of the world. I mean, it is actually the case that Anglosphere house prices in particular have been crazy. Again, this goes back to Gerontocracy. It's because governments, I mean, Trump said this quite explicitly actually last year. He said, I don't want house prices to go down because that makes homeowners poorer.
- [28:28]
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- [28:56]
Louise Perry
yeah, older people are more likely to be owner occupiers and they have seen their house prices go up a lot since the 1990s. I mean, it's actually been stagnant for a while in real terms, but Certainly in the 90s and 2000s it went up a lot. And people are intending to basically cash these, cash these assets out and, and use them to pay for their, their social care and their private pensions. Whether or not they'll actually be able to, I don't know. Because it may, you know, we can't guarantee like who is going to buy these houses realistically is always the question you have to ask. But the reason the house prices have gone up is because governments have allowed this to happen. Because they have deregulated lenders, because they have limited building building. They've given way to NIMBYism because they've committed mass immigration. You know, these are all these policy choices that have been made, particularly in the Anglosphere. Because in the Anglosphere there's a particular cultural emphasis on owning your own home.
- [29:56]
Nina Power
Yeah.
- [29:56]
Louise Perry
Which you don't see, for instance in German speaking countries where people are more relaxed about renting long term. And that means that in German speaking countries house prices have been much less. Housing is more affordable. Even in some of the megacities or somewhere like Tokyo, house prices are relatively affordable compared with local wages. Partly because they do a lot of building and partly because Japanese have low levels of immigration. Germany, Austria and Japan all have very, very low fertility. Their fertility is actually a bit lower than ours. So if it were just housing. Right. I mean there have been various attempts to. I could go on about this forever. There have been various attempts to try and disentangle these factors because basically all the factors that you mention just track with modernity.
- [30:43]
Nina Power
Yeah.
- [30:43]
Louise Perry
It's kind of a bundle of things that happen at the same time when you modernize. And so trying to work out which one of those things is causing people to be not. Not be minded to have children is very difficult.
- [30:54]
Nina Power
Sure. I mean there's no reason why it would be one thing. I mean, well, I don't know.
- [30:59]
Louise Perry
People always say that like, oh well, it must be loads of things. Is it though? Because if you look at this is happening across every single country, pretty much. Fertility rates have fallen a lot and still falling. That includes parts of the world that are still very fertile. So Sub Saharan Africa, for instance, they're above replacement. But the fertility is still falling there and has fallen a fair bit. I think about half of countries now are below the replacement threshold. So if it were loads of things, why would you expect all of those things to happen? I feel like Ockham's razor is it's one thing.
- [31:34]
Nina Power
Yes. No, no. I mean, well, fair enough. I mean perhaps there's some mysterious, mysterious species wide thing. What the humanity senses that were reaching capacity in terms of occupation of the planet,
- [31:49]
Louise Perry
I find that quite an interesting idea. So I think, I think what's actually going on, I'm going to try and explain this clearly because it's a little bit technical. I wish it was house prices. Wouldn't that be, wouldn't that be nice? Or feminism or any of these things. The problem, I mean, the problem is with all of those, I should say all of those various explanations that are very popular is that they just don't, they can't explain this. If it's feminism, why is it happening in the Middle East? If it's. Or indeed in like North Korea is in massive force. If it. Liberalism, why is it happening in North Korea? If it's contraception, like then, I mean, I think contraception probably is a part of the story. I think people is now easier for people to not have children, basically. But fertility rates in a country like Britain, and we've fallen since 1800 and actually we fell below replacement briefly in the 1930s. So actually people can control their fertility surprisingly well without the use of hormonal contraception. So the problem is for all of these ideas, there's a counter example and people have a tendency to just want their own political hobby horse to be it. And so progressives will always say it's because childcare is unaffordable and men don't do enough housework, and conservatives say it's because people aren't once getting married young enough or whatever. And yeah, so I think it's probably a biological phenomenon actually as much as anything. So there's this idea in evolutionary science of a slow life history strategy versus a fast life history strategy and it varies between species. So an example of a very fast life history strategy species would be the mayfly. And an example of a very slow life history strategy species would be the blue whale. So the mayfly has, I don't know, thousands of eggs and lives for a day and it's very, very live fast, die young in its, in its strategy. Whereas a blue whale will calf every, I don't know, five or 10 years and put all the resources into the calf and live for 200 years. Etc. Humans are obviously further towards the blue whale end of the spectrum, but we are plastic, including biologically. So for instance, a girl who has been raised in more stressful conditions, including fatherless, in a fatherless, when you control for things like body weight and other factors which can affect this, will start her period younger. So she will adopt a faster life history strategy, not consciously, but her body will adopt A faster life history strategy because she lives in those conditions of stress than if she hadn't grown up in conditions of stress. So when you adopt a faster life history strategy, you will have more children, you'll start having sex younger, you'll be more risk tolerance because you, you, you have clocked from your environment that you're living in a dangerous setting where lots of your children are likely to die. You're quite likely to die. You need to get a wriggle on and kind of like live your life now. Whereas the slow life history strategy is better suited to conditions of peace and affluence and stability, where it makes more sense to put all of your resources into say, having one, two or three children and putting all of your resources
- [35:06]
Nina Power
because they're more likely to survive.
- [35:08]
Louise Perry
They're more likely to survive. And you have all the time in the world to concentrate on building your, building up your resources in various ways. So in the, in the modern world that would mean like going to university for a long time, focusing on your career before having children, when you have your children, putting a lot of resources into their education, things like that. These are all slow life history strategies which do make a lot of sense if you live in conditions of peace and stability and affluence.
- [35:37]
Nina Power
Well, and you know, the decline in mortality of children who are born and also mothers giving birth, I mean, that's been one of the major medical success stories.
- [35:46]
Louise Perry
When I was looking at this, when I was first looking at this question for this book, which I've been working for a couple of years, I did have a baby in the middle. So, you know, I was, I was thinking, what could it be like, what is the thing that has happened to everyone not quite the same time, but like roughly like between 1800 and now. And that would lead to such a uniform phenomenon worldwide. What is the one thing that's happened to us? One thing that's happened to us. There's this amazing graph that you can. That was constructed by some researchers who were trying to work out child mortality statistics across different times and places. So that's. So I think they define it as children dying before the age of 15. And they looked at pre modern societies across the world and also industrialized societies and so on. And basically the species norm is about 40% of children die before they're 15, which is a very shocking statistic which I think most people aren't really aware of. I think because it's so horrible, we've sort of blocked this out. I think that most people would be Very surprised to hear that until quite recently it was that high. It's also that high among a lot of other primates. So it seems to be maybe the species norm is around 40%. It will obviously go up in certain conditions, but it's just very high. And then what happens after the Industrial revolution is it does this like really, really fast downward trajectory. And now even in very poor parts of the world, child mortality is low. Like by historical. In relative historical terms, child mentality is really low. It means that in some sense we are experiencing an evolutionary mismatch. Like it's a good evolution. So an evolutionary mismatch is when you're. It doesn't have to be humans. A species is evolved for a certain set of environmental conditions and then those environmental conditions change. Right. So an example would be of evolutionary mismatch. Be. Obesity is caused by the fact that we now live in conditions where we have access to plentiful, cheap calories and our ancestors didn't. And so we can easily become obese in our environment because genetically we're primed to be greedy and hungry. Because that made sense. Right. In conditions of scarcity, I think that in terms of not just the child mortality, but also all sorts of other things about the comforts of modern life. The fact that we, we have food around us all the time, too much of anything. The fact that duvets. Yeah, right. Like we live very, very cushy lives as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. Yeah. And that is an evolutionary mismatch. And I think that what has happened is that it basically pushes us so far towards being slow life history strategies that we almost fall off the edge. Like we are so focused on investing everything into just having a small number of children and being. And delaying everything that clearly quite a lot of people just forget to have children or only have one. And here we are.
- [38:56]
Nina Power
I mean, I do wonder. I mean, my preferred explanation is the religious one and obviously it's not.
- [39:02]
Louise Perry
It's. There's not. Religion does have a role.
- [39:04]
Nina Power
Yes.
- [39:05]
Louise Perry
Yeah.
- [39:05]
Nina Power
Okay, well, look, because one of the counter examples is that the only groups of people, however small, who are above replacement birth rate are the extremely religious. Yeah, right. Whether it's Orthodox Jews, Mormons, Catholics. I mean, we personally know people who are very devout and different religions. I mean, I have a Jewish rabbi friend who has seven children. We have Catholic friends who have nine children. And this is not particularly unusual among very traditional, unorthodox versions of those religions. Right. Where every child is understood to be a gift from God. Suffering is built in to the religion. There are kind of, I don't know, spiritual mechanisms for coping with, let's say, the loss of a child. Everything has a higher meaning and a purpose. This is radically different from an understanding of the world that is just, I don't know, indifferent to, nihilistic about the future of life or life itself. You know, I mean, we have a government that has brought in lots of bills of like late stage abortion, like with the, the attempt to bring in the. The maid type, euthanasia, end of life stuff. I mean, this is like a, A culture that seems to not value life at all.
- [40:23]
Louise Perry
Yeah.
- [40:24]
Nina Power
And I. So I, I mean, I know these are small counter examples with.
- [40:28]
Louise Perry
No, they're telling counter examples. Right. Because you know that the, the one country which is sort of radically exempt from this general pattern is Israel.
- [40:37]
Nina Power
Right.
- [40:37]
Louise Perry
It's very interesting. So Israel, even secular Jews are slightly above replacement and obviously ultra Orthodox Jews are massively above replacement level. So maybe what's going on there is partly that Israel, Israelis feel a sense of existential threat. So even though, and, and are acutely aware of mortality, not least because of the Holocaust, being within living memory. And so it may be that despite being modern and high tech and comfortable in lots of ways and not having child mortality anything like 40% people are still sufficiently psychologically disturbed by the possibility of danger that they feel.
- [41:14]
Nina Power
Well, I mean, children.
- [41:16]
Louise Perry
Well, yes. I mean, they're not wrong. Right. Yeah. But also I think that that might. But the level of danger they're experiencing is sufficient, I think, to sort of counteract this effect. Ideology is absolutely a part of this. One way in which we are different from mayflies and blue whales is that we are ideological creatures and you can both. So you can hasten this effect. I should say, by the way, that the fact, this link between child mortality and fertility rates is, Is like settled science within demography. This isn't just me cooking this up as a journalist, you know, my Chini reckon the first demographic transition. So that's what happens immediately post industrialization, where you have a society's in a Malthusian equilibrium with very high levels of mortality and high levels of fertility. Suddenly the mortality drops because you have medical science improving, basically, and people's living conditions improving and then there's a lag where you see exponential population growth and then the fertility drops as well. So that's what happens in say the 19th century in Britain and then later in other parts of the world which industrialise later. All that I'm saying, and this has been long been known that child mortality is a very, very crucial indicator of whether that's going to happen. All I'm saying is that that's still happening now is that that process, which has been ongoing for 200 years, there was no reason why it needed to stop at two.
- [42:48]
Nina Power
Right.
- [42:49]
Louise Perry
People having an average of two children is not like a magical number that we were always going to stop at in order to replace our population. There's no reason it wouldn't sink below, as indeed it has. It might stink, it might sink still further. But this process can be made, this can be accelerated or decelerated depending on ideology. So there's very interesting data, for instance, looking at people in Brazil who got access to cable, American cable TV before other people in other parts of this country got access to it. The people that got access to American cable TV saw faster and further decline in fertility than the people who didn't. There's also been a lot of talk about smartphones in this regard, that smartphones seem to accelerate fertility decline in the Third World in particular. That makes sense if what's going on is that people are receiving ideological messaging from, say, watching Dynasty or something, which tells them that low fertility society, having a small family is high status and advisable. And conversely, you can get messaging from your subculture if, say, you are a traditional Catholic, that having lots of children is good and this will obviously influence. Fertility is mimetic in both directions. So that's obviously going on. It's just that that process of mimesis is kind of layered on top of a biological phenomenon that is also going on.
- [44:14]
Nina Power
Yeah, I mean, I think there is an awful lot of sinister propaganda that is being waged from above at different moments, depending on what people want.
- [44:22]
Louise Perry
I tend think. So what people will sometimes say is like, oh, of course, because we've all been. We get told motherhood is low status, we get told that having children is a waste of your time, etc. And I think. Okay, but who's telling it? Who's telling you that? I tend to think that these kind of cultural products are emergent from a society in which those things are not considered to be valuable, rather than the other way around. I mean, obviously, yes, sometimes you will have sort of elite tastemakers intertwined. Yeah.
- [44:51]
Nina Power
Background and forwards. Okay, let's finish up by. On a positive note. Let's finish on a positive note. So, Louise, if you're a young person today, male or female in Britain, what advice would you give?
- [45:07]
Louise Perry
I'm gonna do my Peter Hitchens line. Emigrate.
- [45:09]
Nina Power
No, no, not immigrate, let's say, to try and build a hopeful future. Britain, which may or may not have fewer people and maybe, you know, maybe we don't need so many people here. Maybe there are ways of living together and, and fixing the country and having a kind of hopeful attitude towards the future. I'm answering your question for you, but what would you. What would you say to someone in their, let's say, early 20s, has just finished a degree and is thinking about what to do with their life?
- [45:39]
Louise Perry
Was I thinking about the birth rates thing? I'm not, I'm not a catastrophist about this. So I think, I think low birth rates spells the end of the welfare state. But also the welfare state has existed for its tiny, tiny sliver of human history. Like, it's not. That's not existential. People find ways around this basically. Obviously, if we had infinity resources, but we don't. So anyway. So I don't think that we should be too terrified of a future where we transition to basically an older way of doing things in that regard, even though the transition will be very difficult and very, very politically tumultuous. And I do think that actually a lot of the political tumult that we're experiencing right now comes back to the birth rates question. Because everything that we've spoken about today, like Gerontocracy and immigration and whatever, like, they all to some extent have their origin in this phenomenon, which is not going away. We are going to see significant decrease in population. But then I think, okay, we're going through what evolutionary biologists call a bottleneck where certain traits are being selected for. Normally we've had a lot of bottlenecks through human history. Normally what's selected for is something. So the Black Death, for instance, which kills.
- [47:16]
Nina Power
That's selected for death, presumably.
- [47:18]
Louise Perry
Well, you know, that one of the things actually that, that one of. One thing that did emerge genetically from the Black Death is that the people who descended, which would probably include us, people who had descended from people who survived it, have stronger immune systems.
- [47:33]
Nina Power
Sure.
- [47:34]
Louise Perry
Which means that they're more prone to having autoimmune diseases where the immune system sort of turns on you. So that we see these, these relics of these selection events throughout, throughout human history. We're all descended from the people who got through them. That's happening now as well. So. But it's not disease or famine or war or any of these things which historically have caused bottlenecks. It's something much stranger. It's just people wanting to have children so South Korea, which has the lowest fertility rates in the world, they are currently on track. If their fertility rate stays steady for three generations, they're currently on track to have about six great grandchildren for every 100 South Koreans alive today. So a loss of 94 of the population, which is amazing, over like a century, like no disease has ever done that. That's really dramatic. And obviously that is going to change South Korea. I mean, I don't think that that will persist indefinitely. I mean, obviously if this did persist indefinitely, they would eventually go extinct. We would all eventually go extinct. I don't think that's likely to happen. I think it's much more likely that whatever traits the people who make up that 6% possess, those are traits which somehow make them resistant to this phenomenon. Like, why is it that, you know, people that we know who have six, seven, eight, nine children. Yes, it's partly ideological. It's because they belong to these subcultures. So you should expect those ideologies to survive and to prosper. And conversely, you should expect ideologies that discourage, you know, to die out. This was, this was important. In early America, Puritans had more children than Quakers.
- [49:17]
Nina Power
Yeah.
- [49:17]
Louise Perry
Because Puritans women tend to get married younger than Quaker women is that they had longer for childbearing. Shakers are remembered for their furniture and that's it.
- [49:26]
Nina Power
Right.
- [49:27]
Louise Perry
Like, they did not have this significant influence on American history because they advised against reproduction because it was an antenatal ideology. We should expect antenatal ideologies also to die out for the same reason eventually. There may also be traits that other traits that these people, that people who have lots of children or at least have some children, have good sense of humor maybe. I don't know. Yeah, like something, it's like some kind of psychological resilience. So what I say, I guess to the, to the 20 year olds or whoever who are, you know, is in a way, if you care about this, this is the. We are living in the crucible of history. You doing something as basic as just deciding to have children and, and therefore carrying on a part of yourself into the future is very historically consequential, actually. Like it's, it's. This is a very strange period of human history. And the good thing about this evolutionary bottleneck is it's bloodless. Like it's. Of all the bottlenecks to live through, this is by far the most pleasant. So, you know, so I really, I'm not a massive doomer about this at all. I think that it's tumultuous it's also interesting and I just think it's very important, which is why I think we should be talking about it.
- [50:48]
Nina Power
Thank you, Louise. So we're going to head over to the members section now. For everyone else, thank you very much for watching. We'll see you next week.
- [50:55]
Philip Kissley
Hello, I'm Philip Kissley, senior fellow here at newculture Forum and director of NCF Litfest. Yes, our literary festival is back. We had such a great time last year. Two days packed to the rafters with huge names, talks, conversations and panels and guess what? No one got cancelled. There's a novelty in this day and age. So we thought we'd do it again. Friday and Saturday, 5th and 6th of June. Put those dates in your diary because we have Telegraph columnist, novelist and all round hero, Alison Pearson, one of the great champions of our culture. We have Professor David Betts. He'll be talking about his world class research publications, the State of the nations and where we're headed. You'll have the opportunity to meet him, you can ask him questions. It's unmissable stuff. We have the wonderful Sue Cook and Professor Nigel Bigger and Dominic Frisby and Lord Frost. Returning this year, I'm delighted to say, is literary agent Matthew Hamilton. He's a fearless hero as well. So many more names, so many more surprises. But that's all you're going to get from me, at least for the moment. Click on the link below to get your tickets. Now, we've got some great discounts for NCF members, so here's a ticket tip from me. If you aren't already a member, click on the other link down there and become one before you buy. There are loads of benefits, loads of perks and you'll become one of the NCF family. That's important now more than ever. And this is an important event. It's the only genuinely alternative, high profile literary festival and we want you to be part of it. Join us please on the 5th and 6th of June. It's in Westminster. It's NCF lit fest 2026. See you.