← Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Modern World Is Changing America’s Personality For the Worse
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- [00:02]
Derek Thompson
As the 21st century was getting underway, Hollywood released a series of films that were daring, entertaining, and absolutely unmissable. Films like 25th Hour, Bring It On, Zodiac, and no country for Old Men. They arrived during the George W. Bush era, a chaotic time in America. Think 9, 11, Katrina, the mortgage crisis. After the Bush years, the country would never be the same, and neither would Hollywood. I'm Brian Raft, and in my new limited series, Mission Accomplished, we're gonna dive into some of the biggest movies of the Bush years and look at what they said about the state of the nation. We'll go behind the scenes with filmmakers and experts and relive some of your favorite movies from the early 2000s, from Donnie Darko to Michael Clayton, from Anchorman to Iron Man. So slip on your sketchers, dig out your old Nokia, and join me for mission accomplished starting Aug. 12 on the big Picture Feat. This episode was brought to you by ServiceNow. We're for people doing the fulfilling work they actually want to do. That's why this was written and read by a real person and not AI. You know what people don't want to do? Boring, busy work. Now, with AI agents built into the ServiceNow platform, you can automate millions of repetitive tasks in every corner of your business, it, HR and more. So your people can focus on the work that they want to do. That's putting AI agents to work for people. It's your turn. Tap the banner to get started or visit servicenow.com AI Agents this episode is brought to you by Zendesk, introducing the next generation of AI agents built to deliver resolutions for everyone with an easy setup that can be completed in minutes, not months, Zendesk AI agents resolve 30% of interactions instantly, quickly giving your customers what they need. Loved by over 10,000 companies, Zendesk AI makes service teams more efficient, businesses run better, and your customers happier. That's the Zendesk AI effect. Find out more@zendesk.com Today, America's personality shift Every few decades, it seems the Western world seems to experience a social crisis in the face of new technology. 120 years ago, as I wrote in a recent substack essay, a nervous disorder first diagnosed in the US gradually made its way across the Atlantic. The Dr. George Miller beard called it neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion. Europeans at the time in the 1900s sometimes referred to it as American nervousness or even New Yorkitis. According to Beard, the affliction was most common among the indoor classes of civilized civilizations. That is to say, the illness mostly affected white collar Workers operating at the frontier of technology, handling new fast machines. And at the time, there were plenty of things in America that were fast and new. In 1875, there were no skyscrapers, no electric lighting, no Coca Cola or basketball, few bicycles, no aspirin, no cars or sneakers, no cardboard boxes, no hamburgers or Kodak cameras or recorded music players. By 1905, just 30 years later, everything I just named, from the skyscrapers to the Kodak cameras, was invented. In one 30 year swoop of history, the modern world was conjured into being. And throughout the west, people lost their minds. In Germany, the number of patients in mental hospitals rose from 40,000 in 1870 to 220,000 by 1910. Many of them suffered from this nervous disorder that contemporary doctors blamed on a world of vertiginous speed and nerve shattering newness. As Virginia Woolf famously wrote at the time, on or around December 1910, human character changed. The modern world changed our personality. 115 years later, it's changing us again. According to new analysis by the Financial Times writer John Byrne Murdoch, something extraordinary has happened to America's personalities in just the last decade. According to longitudinal tests that he'll describe, in just a moment, we have collectively become meaningfully less extroverted, less agreeable and more neurotic. But the most important thing Bern Murdoch found is that measures of conscientiousness among young Americans appear to be in a kind of freefall. Today's guest is John Byrne Murdoch. We talk about the value of conscientiousness, what it is, what kind of behavior it predicts, and how the modern world might be scrambling our personalities by making us less interested in other people and more consumed with our own neurotic interiority. I'm Derek Thompson, this is plain English. John Byrne Murdoch, welcome back to the show.
- [05:53]
John Byrne Murdoch
Great to be here.
- [05:54]
Derek Thompson
You reported that in the last decade there's been an important change in Americans personalities. Tell us what you found.
- [06:03]
John Byrne Murdoch
Right, so this one, I should say out of the gate that this is something I've been wanting to look into for ages. I'm fascinated by how the world changes. I'm also fascinated by how we within the world change in response to that. And one of the things I often come up against is how few studies actually track the same people or any people across time in terms of who we are. So what I wanted to look at here was some of your listeners, I'm sure, are familiar with the concept of personality traits. Some people are more extroverted, introverted, that's the most common one people grasp. But There are all these other traits and I wanted to see how people's levels, prevalence of these traits have changed over time. I landed on this survey which has been tracking Americans for just over a decade now. And what I found was that across the population, but especially true of younger adults, so people in their 20s and their 30s, what we've seen is this, this decline in some of the most positive valued traits that we would all consider to be good aspects of a character. So that someone being conscientious, disciplined, committed, extraversion, chatty, agreeableness, that kind of thing. These have declined especially significantly among younger adults. While neuroticism, and that can feel like a loaded term, but what we mean by that is the extent to which people feel emotions particularly strongly, especially negative emotions, that has been significantly rising among those same age groups.
- [07:39]
Derek Thompson
So falling conscientiousness, rising neuroticism, falling agreeableness, and falling extroversion. Those were the big four of the big five findings that I saw in your paper. Before we dive into some of the details here, including the methodology, I want to scope up at a high level. How unusual is it for a population's personality to change this suddenly? It was sort of my understanding, not being an expert in this field at all, that a population had a certain stable personality genotype, if you will, that there was a certain amount of agreeableness and extroversion and it didn't change much over time. And in fact, people don't change that much over time. That's part of why the Big 5 personality test seems to be so respected, is it captures something quite profound and unchanging about people. So how unusual is a change of this magnitude and this suddenness?
- [08:35]
John Byrne Murdoch
Yeah, it's a fascinating one because again, we can get into this down the line in terms of what we really mean when we talk about someone's personality. But the way these traits are typically measured is there's a large battery of agree disagree statements that people are given which describe the type of person, the type of behavior someone might have. So it's things like I am outgoing and talkative, or I am often distracted, I'm often careless, or I'm really someone who always makes plans and follows through with those plans. These are the sort of ingredients, as it were, that go into the scores that define someone as being more or less conscientious, neurotic, etc. And so loads and loads and loads of people have studied this across all sorts of countries and over many, many decades. But it's relatively rare that someone has or that A study has tracked this repeated in the same among the same people, same place over time. Now, what we do know, as you say, is that where there have been repeated studies, whether that's same place in time or different place in time, they are pretty consistent with one another. So regardless of which culture, Western, East Asian, South Asian, you tend to get these distinct groups or distinct traits showing up in the data. They tend to have similar shapes of prevalence, by which I mean things like younger people tend to be historically more extroverted than older people. Conscientiousness, which we're going to talk a lot about, has tended to be lower among teenagers builds into adulthood. So there are these pretty consistent patterns. And then where people have tried to study the same people over time, they've tended to get pretty similar scores on those traits over time. And as I say, that's been one of the reasons that this has been accepted as a really valid instrument. If someone scores as pretty conscientious in one survey and then not conscientious at all in the next, that would mean what are we even doing here? But historically, across space and time, these things stand out pretty well.
- [10:38]
Derek Thompson
So the fact that personality seems stable makes it all the more remarkable. I think that your analysis showed this level of change among young people in the last few years. Let's talk about that change. You told me that people today are meaningfully less conscientious. What does that mean, and what kind of behavior does it predict? Like, if you take my test scores and you tell me, Derek, you are the kind of person who has low conscientiousness, what kind of behavior would that predict in me?
- [11:07]
John Byrne Murdoch
Sure. So this is a good question, because I think people often think that this is to do with someone's conscience and, you know, how sort of considerate and kind they are and everything. And that's an element of this. But I think of it more and it helps to actually look at the survey questions that go into making up this trait. So it's things like people are asked whether they strongly agree, strongly disagree, et cetera, about whether they are someone who does a thorough job, whether they're someone who is reliable, whether they're someone who tends to be organized, are they easily distracted, are they someone who makes plans regularly and follows through with those plans. Are they someone who's goal oriented, high agency, that kind of thing? Do they persevere? So, yeah, it's about, are you someone who goes out and gets things done? Do you come up with goals in the first place and then do you make sure that you pursue those goals. Do you? Your friends, your co workers, can they rely on you to deliver?
- [12:05]
Derek Thompson
Essentially, when I reached out to Lisa Damore, a childhood psychologist, she pointed me to a 2013 essay that she wrote for the New York Times that I want to quote from here because it's so relevant. Quote. When we look at the research on childhood precursors of adult well being, the traits we see in children who go on to become happy adults, we find that the driving factor is childhood conscientiousness, not childhood happiness. Children who are industrious, orderly, and have good self control are more likely than their careless or undisciplined peers to grow into happy adults, end quote. John, you just walked through some of the sub traits of conscientiousness where people are answering questions like, do you make plans and follow through? Do you persevere until finished? Are you easily distracted or careless? These are all questions that someone could lie about. I mean, someone could just say, yeah, I love making plans. I'm incredible at following through. My focus is impeccable when underneath that they actually make no plans and are easily distracted all the time. How confident are we that we're getting a good read of people's conscientiousness or a good read of their personality, period, when there's all sorts of reasons for folks to misrepresent who they actually are to some anonymous pollster, for sure.
- [13:28]
John Byrne Murdoch
So it's a great question. And there's not, again, annoyingly for me, there's not a completely watertight answer. The way I would talk about this is a couple of things. So one, if we're saying that what we think is happening here is that people have simply started being more down on their conscientiousness, as it were, maybe they've become more strict evaluators of their own traits. I think you had to come up with an explanation for why that suddenly started happening and why it's specifically happening among younger adults. That's quite hypothetical. So let me give you a more direct answer, which is one of the reasons Lisa d' Amore said what she said is that we have decades of research showing that people who are more conscientiousness, as evaluated by their responses to these questions, have better life outcomes, right? They earn more, they live longer, it's less likely that their romantic relationships end in separation. So this is something that has real sort of external validity in terms of what it seems to be associated with. And one of the things I did as part of my analysis here was to check exactly that so the same survey that's been running for 11 years also captures income. And what it shows is that A, conscientiousness is still positively associated with income, but B, that has only become more true. So if conscientiousness as measured by these surveys was actually more fuzzy, and it wasn't clear exactly whether it was the most conscientious people in reality were giving the most conscientious replies, as it were, then we wouldn't have seen that pattern. So again, ultimately, this is a survey like any survey. We can't know how sort of really true to someone their answer is. We also can't really know how that's changed over time. But all of the sort of related data, both within the same survey and outside it, would suggest that there's no reason to doubt this, the these responses, these personality measurements, any more today than we did 15 years ago.
- [15:34]
Derek Thompson
One of your other pieces that I absolutely adore is about the possibility that we've passed human peak brain power. You found that data across several countries, especially industrialized countries that I was looking at, show that adults and young people are struggling to concentrate, that there's declining verbal scores and numerical reasoning scores. How might that finding, that education assessment scores are declining in the US and throughout, I suppose the industrialized world match up with the finding that conscientiousness, at least in the US in this most recent paper of yours, is also falling.
- [16:16]
John Byrne Murdoch
Sure. So the way I tie these two together is that I. I've been thinking about this and I've come up with a catchy way of describing how the Internet, or specifically ubiquitous mobile Internet, smartphones and so on, how they impact us. And I think of it as the two Ds, which are distraction and displacement. So distraction, I think, doesn't need a huge amount of explanation. We have these devices now which are always competing for our attention. And you know, we are what we give our attention to. I know you done a huge amount of work on this space, but being conscientious is about delivering on the goals you made for yourself. And distraction is almost by definition is taking you away from what you thought, what you meant to be doing. Similarly, when it comes to intelligence, the way I've been thinking about whether it's intelligence or conscientiousness is we have an innate capacity and then we have the deployment of that capacity. And so someone might be super smart, people might be as smart today as ever, even smarter. But if our ability to express those smarts, as it were, keeps getting out, competed, displaced by or Distracted by devices, technology, then we're just not able to bring that to bear in the same way. So I think it's possible that similar things are going on there. And again, on displacement, these people like the analogy of muscles. You have your attention muscles, you have your focus muscles, your conscientiousness muscles. And if digital technologies, digital distractions, start pushing aside our sort of conscientiousness workouts or intellect workouts, those things could atrophy. So that's the framework that I think is maybe useful for understanding what could be happening with both of these.
- [18:03]
Derek Thompson
So you have this finding of declining conscientiousness at a time when we're also seeing declining education scores. The other findings that you have, neuroticism up, agreeableness down, extraversion down. These also seem to me to have what you called external validities. Right. Neuroticism up. Well, I look around the Internet, and I certainly see not just the Internet, but also surveys. And I see not only is negativity through the roof, but also self reports of anxiety and depression are up. When I see extraversion down, I think, well, I spent all this time writing the Antisocial Century about how we're spending less time around each other. And in many cases, this is chosen aloneness. It's people who could go out and see their friends who are choosing day after day and week after week to spend more time on their couch watching television on their phones. I wonder what you think it means. Don't necessarily draw from what I just said what you think it would mean for a population, especially of young people, to have lower conscientiousness, higher neuroticism, less agreeableness, and significantly less extroversion. What kind of a population would this describe?
- [19:17]
John Byrne Murdoch
Yeah, I mean, I think we can just think about this quite mechanistically. Right. So the extroversion is related to one's capacity to make new friends or relationships. Right. Think about all this just as a funnel. You put, less goes into the funnel, less comes out of the funnel. So if you. If people are spending less time going out, either physically or just going up to other people and talking to them, that is going to reduce the size of friendship groups. It could be playing a role in the decline of relationship formation that we've seen. Conscientiousness. Similarly, if people become less reliable, less dependable, they're going to find that those friendships start getting weaker. Maybe people end up. People talk about this a lot with the Internet. Right. It can be better at getting you more sort of shallow friendships. But it might not be brilliant at making or certainly maintaining those strong ones. So those two you can see going in that way again, neuroticism, anxiety, social anxiety. People might be all ready to go for that night out, go to the house party, and at the last minute they think, I don't know, what if this happens? What if that happens? And that overthinking that worrying again, can erode that social connectedness. So, you know, to the extent that we are a social species, to the extent that people get meaning from their shared experiences with other people, and this is, you know, very well supported framework for thinking about things, more anxiety, people being less reliable, people being less likely to go out and make friendships in the first place, you're going to get more atomization, you're going to get more loneliness. And again, these things are all very, it's very, very well established that loneliness, more social isolation leads to measurably worse outcomes.
- [21:04]
Derek Thompson
So we've established the what here. I want to talk now a little bit about the why. What is the strongest case that the most obvious usual suspect here, the Internet and smartphones, are significantly to blame for these personality changes that you've described?
- [21:21]
John Byrne Murdoch
I think there's two ways of looking at this. So in terms of the data we have, again, the, the slightly frustrating thing here is that the Data starts in 2014, and that is already a couple years into this period where we've had ubiquitous Internet in our pockets. But one thing would be that timing is that when studies have been done over the decades and decades and decades, we haven't seen this data. Now we have a period where we know that we've had this technological change which has enormous impacts on social relationships, and we start to see these changes. So the timings, while we don't have enough data to say they're absolutely perfect, the timings do seem to line up relatively well with that. The other, again, I think, is just thinking on a very basic level about what conscientiousness is and what distraction is. And if conscientiousness is doing what we intended to do and distraction is being pulled away from that, then they are essentially opposites or they feed off each other. And we know whether we're looking at data on the number of push notifications people get, the number of times people pick up their device, actual screen time itself. We, we know that there is more distraction or there are, there are more individual distractions than there were a generation ago, that all else being equal would mean less conscientiousness. So it's that Combination of the timing and the mechanism that I think lines up really well. A couple of other things I've been thinking about are just some of these concepts that have only really come into existence in the online era. So things like people being ghosted or. One that always brings to mind for me is the people sending messages that end with no worries if not. And that the idea that you would always give it always be giving people an outs like no worries. If you don't want to do this in a message, sure. Like on the one hand it is polite. But in a society where everything is face to face, you weren't constantly saying to people like, don't worry if you want to flake or bail at the last minute. And now that seems to become a thing as people have realized that flaking and bailing seems to be more of a thing.
- [23:31]
Derek Thompson
Yeah. The TikTok trend that my wife pointed me to when I was writing my feature story was what some folks call cancellation. The idea that people would record themselves dancing when someone canceled a plan with them. They would essentially be like, oh, it's absolutely fantastic that it's a Friday night and I can just stay at home and don't have to go out. I wanted to stay at home and watch Netflix anyway. And it's really interesting to think that you're looking at a generation that is spending more time alone than any generation on record. And they're also celebrating when their social plans are canceled. This speaks to not just a loneliness crisis, I think that's misdiagnosed, but a phenomenon of chosen aloneness, which seems very different and speaks to exactly what you found in this piece. Not just maybe rising neuroticism, but certainly declining extroversion. Less motivation to even put yourself out there in the first place. So I again asked the psychologist Lisa d', Amore, what do you think is causing this? It's easy to say blame the phones. Maybe the phones are to blame, but it's certainly common to say just blame the phones. So what does an actual child psychologist think about this? Here's what she told me in terms of what's causing this. Here's an unsexy answer. When it comes to a trend that is observed at the population level, I think we should assume there are many factors at work. Some contenders One, the pandemic for the extraversion finding. Two, the rise of a wellness industry that is often heavily focused on the self as opposed to being focused on others. Three, algorithmically driven digital environments that readily create psychological silos. So, number three, I think we've covered number one. I think it's important to say here, and correct me if I'm wrong, the changes that you're observing might have been accelerated by the pandemic, but the beginning of those changes predate the pandemic. This is a common phrase in lots of psychological and mental health changes that we've seen in the US Before I ask my actual question, is that right, that these changes both predated the pandemic and were mildly accelerated by them?
- [25:37]
John Byrne Murdoch
That's true, yeah. So actually, with conscientiousness, it's pretty much a straight diagonal line through the 2000 and tens up to the last couple of years. With neuroticism, agreeableness, and extroversion, you've got a slight decline pre pandemic, a slight decline post pandemic, but a sort of acceleration of that trend in 2020 21.
- [26:01]
Derek Thompson
So let's focus on the second idea that Lisa suggested, which I think is really interesting and surprised me, but it's one that I've just started to think about a little bit more again, the rise of a wellness industry that is often heavily focused on the self as opposed to being focused on others. End quote. So small. Spoiler alert. John, I am working on a piece right now about wellness and exercise. It's incredibly interesting to me that by all accounts, exercise rates and the number of people who say they participate in exercise or working out is rising across the population in the US at the same time that socializing is falling. That's a really interesting juxtaposition, and I don't want to say that one is to blame for the other, right. That like, if someone enjoys running three miles a day, that means they're antisocial. That's not my claim. But the juxtaposition of a rising wellness industry and declining sociality, that is an interesting one. And I wonder if there's anything that you want to pick up on there.
- [27:02]
John Byrne Murdoch
100%, and I'm looking forward to reading your piece. One thing I'll give you for free, you might already have this, but the really interesting wrinkle in the exercise data is that rates of team sport participation among people from sort of 16 up seem to be declining. But it's that individual you talked about. Running, running, gym workouts, those kinds of things are on the rise. So like you say, even with a healthy behavior, it has become more antisocial. You know, it's everyone's in listening to this podcast right now, probably in their run. So it's the individualization of everything. It's about, you know, setting those personal bests, which is a wonderful thing. Self improvement is a wonderful thing, but.
- [27:42]
Derek Thompson
And exercise is a wonderful thing, right?
- [27:44]
John Byrne Murdoch
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. These can all be good things, but it's significant, as you say, the shift from doing something that is more casual and social, like playing soccer or, you know, I'm sure, well, basketball, I was reaching there for a US sport. The switch from that to running or lifting weights. So yeah, I think that's super interesting. And yeah, I also think it's interesting how much of the wellness conversation often doesn't even talk about physical fitness. It is often that the self care, the the sort of therapy speak, that kind of thing, rather than saying get out and go play ball with your mates.
- [28:23]
Derek Thompson
You said physical fitness. You mean social fitness. I suppose that the exercise industry doesn't talk about, doesn't emphasize the social dynamic.
- [28:30]
John Byrne Murdoch
Of it, or I would even say both. As in, sure. Specifically, it doesn't tend to be emphasising go do your team sport. It's more about personal improvement. But I think often a huge amount of wellness is not even about the physical at all. It's the focus on the mental, which, as you've shown in your reporting, ignoring or at least de emphasizing the physical, when we know how dramatic the positive impacts of that can be, I think is quite striking.
- [29:02]
Derek Thompson
This episode is brought to you by KPMG. Making an impact is how KPMG helps make the difference. KPMG applies advanced tools and strategic thinking to convert data into actionable knowledge and deliver value by improving performance through transformation, modernizing processes with technology, harnessing the power of data, navigating complex MA transactions and enhancing trust among stakeholders. Go to KPMG US Advisory to learn more. KPMG make the Difference.
- [29:36]
John Byrne Murdoch
This episode is brought to you by Prime Prime Delivery is fast.
- [29:39]
Derek Thompson
How fast are we talking?
- [29:41]
John Byrne Murdoch
We're talking a cooler for your snacks, a folding chair, a Bluetooth speaker and a six pack of your favorite seltzer. Delivered by tomorrow.
- [29:49]
Derek Thompson
Fast.
- [29:49]
John Byrne Murdoch
Oh yeah.
- [29:50]
Derek Thompson
Extra napkins, last minute guac bowls, backup.
- [29:54]
John Byrne Murdoch
Phone chargers, even a replacement remote.
- [29:56]
Derek Thompson
Fast.
- [29:57]
John Byrne Murdoch
I feel like I've ordered all of those things.
- [29:59]
Derek Thompson
We're talking everything you need for game day. Fast, fast.
- [30:02]
John Byrne Murdoch
Free delivery. It's on Prem.
- [30:05]
Derek Thompson
This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. Summer's almost out and fall's calling. Luckily, Nordstrom has everything you need for the season ahead, all under $100. Discover new arrivals from your favorite brands like Mango, Princess, Polly, Waif Free People, BDG and more. Whether you're planning a last minute getaway, heading Back to class or refreshing your office looks, you'll find the latest trends and beauty must must haves without breaking your budget. It's easy too, with free shipping, free returns and in store order pickup shop today in stores and@nordstrom.com I want to pull in AI here. I wonder whether the introduction of chatbots to young people's lives will create what I guess you could call conscientiousness polarization, which is too many syllables to ever catch on, but let me unpack it in a second. So like, someone with high conscientiousness might use deep research chatgpt like a personal tutor to make them smarter, to find research they wouldn't otherwise discover. But I could imagine someone with low conscientiousness using this exact same technology to just write all their essays for them, right? Essentially to outsource the act of thinking entirely. So the same technology could interact with people with totally different conscientiousness scores in a way that would deepen that personality trait. Have you thought a little bit about how large language models could play a role in furthering the trends that you've identified here?
- [31:25]
John Byrne Murdoch
Yeah, I mean, that's exactly the framing I've been thinking about as well. So I saw someone, I think, Talking about how GPT LLMs in general could be like, you could have this Socratic dialogue where you're constantly being pushed and guided through the topic, the academic topic that you're working on, the boundaries of your knowledge are constantly being pushed and you've got this sort of, it's like a strenuous workout for your brain where you're with a personal trainer that you're really being pushed to do your best. And I can totally, you can instantly see the types of people, either of their own volition or because of being pushed in that direction by their parents who would end up using LLMs like that. And then at the other end of the spectrum, and I think this is probably a much larger slice of the population, you've got people who when asked to write an essay about the book that they supposedly read, but they haven't because they were distracted by TikTok. Well, why not just get the LLM to write that essay, in short, remove the EM dashes. But that's the thing, and we don't want to get ahead of ourselves. This isn't happening. Or there's no evidence that this is happening yet. But it does feel like a tool which can simultaneously or could equally be used to enhance your knowledge or to sidestep the need to acquire Knowledge that is just a sort of conscientiousness multiplier that could really widen the inequalities and outcomes between high and low conscientious people.
- [32:54]
Derek Thompson
It's obviously hard to separate this research from the popularly known finding that young people in the us the very same group that you found plummeting conscientiousness and declining extraversion, are also self reporting less life satisfaction, more depression, more anxiety. Now I think that when I read about these trends, I typically see them associated with smartphone use. Sometimes they're associated with parenting. A rise of a common parenting. You recently offered a really interesting case that it is English speaking countries that seem to have the largest declines in youth life satisfaction. And we cannot forget the fact that in English speaking countries throughout the Anglosphere, the us, Canada, the uk, Australia, New Zealand, they all have very similar housing supply issues and thus skyrocketing housing costs. Can we pull a little bit of macroeconomics into this picture? Maybe begin by just restating the thesis of that piece why you think housing might be an important ingredient in the anxiety crisis of the English speaking world.
- [34:06]
John Byrne Murdoch
Sure. So I'll say there's two parts to this as well, right? So I think one is the sort of anxiety, mental health, wellbeing bit and the other is the extent to which people have this sort of ethic, this belief that if I work hard, I'm going to get results, I'm going to get rewarded. Which is also both of these things are things where we see young people in the English speaking world moving in a negative direction over the last 10, 15 years, which as I say, lines up with housing. And the reason I think this is interesting and is plausible at least to be one significant factor for me is that I think so much in life is about the gap between expectations and achievement and reality. So someone who never expects much and their life doesn't amount to much, sure, they're still not going to be the happiest people in the world, but there's no sort of sense of having been cheated, swindled along the way there. Whereas I think someone who starts out feeling that, right, this is how the system works, if I do my bit, I'll get what my parents got, what other generations have got, and then they find out that despite putting the work in, they don't get that. You can imagine how that can be particularly damaging to someone's psyche and certainly damaging to their sense of this sort of societal fairness, that if you work hard, you get rewarded. So I think what you have here is English speaking Countries have made homeownership the sort of go to signal or marker of having made it in life. And you've had generations that knew this was the case, that climbed the ladder, worked hard, got a house immediately. That's a bit of anxiety or stress reduced from their lives. Sure, there's still a lot else going on, but they've now got a, there's a stable base to build from, sense of security. And now you have a generation or two generations come along who start out with that belief, they put the work in and they don't get that result. So I think you can see how that could certainly shatter that sense that hard work is rewarded, but also can give that sense of constant insecurity that I'm still not there yet, I'm still scrabbling. Or even if that individual might have now gone onto the housing ladder, there are enough people around them, whether online or offline, that who are still putting this message out that you can see how there could be a material basis for what we're talking about here.
- [36:29]
Derek Thompson
I think it's interesting to think that the Anglosphere simultaneously values home ownership and values the ability to guard home ownership by establishing a set of rules that make it harder to add new homes in that area. And when you combine the two, what you get is, is a perfect storm where a generation might grow up, say this generation, people up to 35, 40 years old who have been instructed, have been taught, have been led to believe that the ability to buy a home is the singular ticket into a kind of adulthood freedom. And yet we've made it so difficult in the most high productive cities and some of the richest places to build homes precisely built because of, or in part because of the same jealous guarding of home values that leads to NIMBYism and reduces the ability to, to add to the housing supply. So it is a, it's a very, it's a very interesting, it's. I don't know how much stock I put into it. The phenomenon is inarguable. It is clear that English speaking countries have a unique problem compared to Western Europe. I don't entirely know why, but I do think it might have to be this relationship that the Commonwealth has or former Commonwealth countries seem to have with the landed gentry homeownership and the ability to protect it. I want to move a little bit into solutions here. I personally have no idea what it would take to raise the conscientiousness of a generation at scale. Raise the agreeableness of a generation at scale. Do you have thoughts Here, did you hear from psychologists who said, this is something where I think I have several ideas for how we can get back to baseline?
- [38:22]
John Byrne Murdoch
Yeah, I think there's two ways of looking at this. One is that there is a decent amount of evidence that people's personalities can change. And this is where we could get into the weeds of what do you even mean by personality? Now, for me, your personality is essentially like the accumulation of your behaviors. And so even if you're born a certain way, you can change your behavior. I'm sure most people listening to this have done this in one area of their life. And so there is in fact a wealth of evidence that specific training courses, other interventions can be used to tweak one's innate self, to be a more conscientious or less neurotic version of yourself. For example, you know, everyone's familiar with, for example, cognitive behavioral therapy, when it. Which. Which of course can help with neuroticism. There are similar types of exercises for conscientiousness. And the other thing here is a lot of this is about habit formation. You could. Someone could be innately slightly less conscientious. But if you build structures and habits into your life that take away the need to sort of constantly be trying all the time to do something, if you instead turn that into a routine, that can help. So I think part of that is just that there is go to evidence that there are strategies here that do work. The other thing I think about is that again, if we believe that digital distraction is part of this, then there are a wealth of strategies as well that people can use. So everyone talks about putting your smartphone in another room when you go to bed, so your sleep quality improves that probably that simple act better sleep enables you to be better at delivering on your own goals. If you put your phone more in do not disturb mode, something as simple as that, again, fewer distractions, you're more likely to deliver on your goals. And I have this at the moment, it's a column in waiting, as it were, when I can find the data, but wondering whether we might soon start to see screen time coming down. Certainly for a section of society, because there's so much discourse at the moment about the harms it might be causing. And I think if we saw that again to the extent that we think that's a key mechanism here, we could see simply through the reduction in distractions or reduction in displacement. Conscientiousness on the rise, more time interacting with people in person, more need to really sort of deliver on goals to show up literally, I think can help.
- [40:57]
Derek Thompson
It's very difficult, I think, to engineer mass cultural change. Mass cultural change does happen, but it seems so spontaneous, it seems so sui generis. I remember I was writing a column a few weeks ago about the baby boom. And the baby boom is so interesting because on the one hand, it's like the most famous sociological phenomenon in the last 100 years. We named an entire generation after it. You walk down the street, you ask anybody, what's the baby boom? Everyone knows what it was. No one knows why it happened. If you look at the 200 year history of fertility in the west, it's basically a flat or declining line for most of that 200 years, except for one 30 year period where, boop, it goes up dramatically. Why did that happen, you ask economists. They're like, hey, maybe it was housing policy here, maybe it was antibacterial drugs that reduced the mortality rate of giving birth over here. Maybe it was household equipment, household electronics that might have made it more efficient to take care of a home. Maybe it's this, maybe it's that no one has like a full skeleton key. But what you can't debate is it was a cultural phenomenon. Like you look at advertising for the 1940s, 1950s, like, it's incredibly, it seems incredibly reactionary today. But this idea that the highest expression of being a woman in America was being a housewife, or this incredibly popular notion that you should of course have two, three, four kids, this is what a good American household does, just seems to have emerged and then was quelched in the 1960s, 1970s. I'm so interested in how these things happen, how these paroxysms of cultural revolutions happen. And it seems to me like we're in the middle of one right now with a smartphone, where the evidence is just so clear that it's changing our mental health, it's changing our ability to focus, it's changing our test scores in verbal and mathematics. It might even, to your point, be changing our personality, making us less conscientious, less agreeable, less extroverted. But these things are very, very, very hard to turn around. And so that's why I'm glad that you're out there, like, popularizing the potential risks of the way that we're living, because I do think that's how it has to start. Right? The flood has to start with a little trickle. Any final thoughts on how one jumpstarts a cultural revolution that takes on a cultural revolution? Because I do think that is, to a certain extent, what we're in the middle of.
- [43:30]
John Byrne Murdoch
Yeah, I think the particularly tricky thing we've got here is that the very device that is doing a lot of the distracting is the device that is also used to capture what people are doing with their lives. And so one of the problems we have is that if you are out there taking selfies or making your fairly curated Instagram grid, you are not doing the big in person, deep Thai social activities that we're talking about here, or at least you're doing less of them. And so the main technology, the main means through which people get a sense of sort of what the culture is and what other people are doing, it almost excludes by default the much more deep social stuff. Right. That sort of dinner around the table with your mates is probably not on Instagram, but the selfie or the sort of heavily curated Instagram boyfriend picture, that kind of thing is. And so there feels like something inherent in the way we document our lives at the moment, which just makes it really hard to see the actually really meaningful deeper stuff. And so the closest I've got to an answer at the moment on something that might change and this is just really just spitballing and I don't think this will necessarily happen. But just imagine if we did end up pivoting from the current smartphone era to something more like the her earpiece, right. From the sci fi movie. So something where you've still got this device that is always on you, you're conversing with it, you can see how AI would be fed into that. Maybe it's got a tiny camera in it, but you are spending less time looking down at your phone and just life. There's much less sort of interference between that device and a deep connected life. Now again, the movie her is not exactly about deep connection between human beings. No. So obviously I could be going. This might just fail on its own terms, but I just wonder if something that changes us away from this sort of curated photo driven nose to screen world, some subtle change that is not brought about by someone wanting to get rid of smartphones, but just some technological change that makes this a thing that could have these sort of socio cultural trickle down effects that weren't anticipated.
- [45:59]
Derek Thompson
It's tough. I like this being a solution show. But values are tricky. Value change is really tricky. Some people value reading and some people don't. Some people value watching weird 1970s movies, some people don't. Some people value making friends in adulthood and some people don't. Changing values at a societal level I think is quite difficult. And My guess is, is that the most likely way that we begin to see these curves bent is that we see such overwhelming evidence, as we sort of saw in teen mental health, such overwhelming evidence that these things are damaging, that the graphical evidence scares people into a kind of mass cultural change. But it's very, very hard to do. And I really appreciate speaking of graphs, just the incredible work you do making visual the most important trends in the world. So, John Byrne Murdoch, thank you for coming on the show. Great to see you.
- [47:02]
John Byrne Murdoch
Thank you so much for having me.
- [47:22]
Derek Thompson
It.