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- [00:00]
David Goodhart
I do think one of the problems, and one of the reasons why politics is sort of so difficult in some ways these days than it used to be, is that when politics was primarily socioeconomic, it was easier to come to compromises. It's easier to split the difference on issues to do with levels of public spending or levels of redistribution. When it comes to these issues that are more to do with identities and immigration and national sovereignty, it's much harder to come to. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
- [00:42]
Yasha Munk
Who do we value and respect in society and why? One dimension of this that we don't think about enough is the respect that we give to people who are college educated, who are white collar workers, and the lack of respect we sometimes accord to those who have only graduated high school, who work in blue collar jobs, who often have very skilled trades and professions, might make decent money, but may not feel as though they gain the same kind of respect at the local block party when they tell people what their job is. Well, one of the people who has fought most carefully about the transformation of our society into a knowledge economy which prizes certain kinds of workers over others and encourages a certain set of values in them, the values of the anywhere who is comfortable in any kind of locality over those of the somewheres is David Goodhart. David was the longtime editor of Prospect magazine in the United Kingdom, and he is the author of what he sometimes called the Anywhere trilogy, including the Road to Somewhere, Head, Hand and Heart, and most recently, just out in paperback, the Care Dilemma. Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality. David and I talked about all of these issues. Is it helpful to think about the distinction between somewheres and anywheres? Are there really a lot of anywheres? And what other cultural attitudes? What does it take to create an economy in which we equally value and promote people who are productive in all kinds of different ways, not just white collar workers, but also blue collar workers? And finally, how do we solve the care dilemma? How do we create a society in which we have genuine gender equality, in which we don't exclude women from the labor market in the way we used to do, but in which there actually is sufficient provision of childcare, of elder care, and sufficient dignity for those rendering those crucial services? In the last part of this conversation we talk about what actual changes we need in order to rebalance our economy and rebalance our economy of respect in society. And I share my top secret theory about how only Britain can save a German from humorlessness, why going straight to America is not going to fix the problem. To listen to that part of the conversation, please become a paying subscriber. And I'm offering you 25% off this week. So go to jaschambunk.substack.com thegoodfight for 25% off your first year of subscription. That means that for three episodes a week, you pay about a dollar a week. Jasamunk.substack.com thegoodfight. David Goodhart, welcome to the podcast.
- [03:58]
David Goodhart
Thank you for having me. I enjoy listening to it.
- [04:00]
Yasha Munk
I've been thinking for the last months about the different ways in which the worldview that I had and that I think just the political mainstream had in the year 2000 when I was 18 and went to university, has started to come apart, to fall apart. And part of that is the fact that we believe that nationalism was the ideology of the 20th century and it wouldn't really have much impact in the 21st century. There's parts of it about the kind of way in which the arc of justice is long but would bend towards justice, especially when it comes to questions of civil rights, the idea that only cranks would have problems with significant levels of immigration and so on. But at the heart of it, I think, are some of the concerns that you've written about over the course of your last three books, really, which is the kind of slightly triumphalist idea of a very global educated, rising middle and upper middle class for whom access to good degrees and educational opportunities would pave the way to a future that is better for them, but better for their societies as well. What happened in terms of those assumptions? Why is it that that broad idea felt so natural until quite recently in our politics and has, as you would argue now, been proven to be wrong in many ways?
- [05:29]
David Goodhart
Yeah, well, as you kind of indicated, I wrote this book in 2017, the Road to Somewhere, that talked about the value divides, the education based value divides between the people I call the anywheres and the people I call the somewheres. And these are real world. I mean, it was based on the uk, but I think it has application to all rich countries, really. And I didn't, I invented the labels. I didn't invent the worldviews. They're there in the British social attitude surveys and all sorts of data. And it's one of the things that the value divide, the anywhere somewhere value divide is clearly one of the things that contributed enormously to both the Brexit vote in 2016 in the UK and Trump's first election in that same year and indeed his re election. And it's, I mean the anywhere worldview, as you implies, the kind of highly educated people are comfortable with mobility partly often because they've experienced it by often going to residential universities. Being part of a world where it's kind of where it's comfortable, where change is something that you can take in your stride. Openness, autonomy, these are things that sort of come naturally because of the experience of life that you yourself have had as a mobile graduate. It kind of leans towards a natural kind of liberalism. And of course you then go on into a job that pays you well and gives you high status. And the more comfortable, it's a sort of basic of psychology, isn't it? The more secure you are, the more open and liberal minded you're likely to be and vice versa. And the somewhere grouping, a larger but less influential group of people who tended to be less well educated and more rooted and whose identities were often much more connected to place and group and therefore more susceptible to being discomforted by social change in a way that anywheres who sort of were more adapted to it. And I think that was something that had been sort of heming away beneath the surface for 20 or 30 years, probably from the late 80s, early 90s. And there's a word, this kind of inchoate somewhere pushback blew up in 2016. Well, obviously populism itself is a sort of revolt somewhere against the over domination of the anywhere worldview. I think the, you know, I do want to make it clear, I think both of these worldviews in their mainstream form are perfectly decent. And by the way, it's not as binary as the kind of anywhere somewhere distinction implies. I mean if you read the book you'll see there are lots of different kinds of anywheres. There is the kind of extreme version actually, I might just quote that. One of the things that actually prompted me to write the book was the experience of, of going to a Oxford college dinner in 2011 and finding myself sat between the two most powerful non elected people in the UK at the time, the head of the British Civil Service, a guy called Gus o' Donnell, and the head of the BBC, a man called Mark Thompson who actually went on to manage the New York Times. I think he's still based in the us. And I was chatting to Gus o' Donnell and I said to him I was writing a book about immigration. I was, I wrote a book called the British dream in 2013 about the successes and failures of post war immigration. And Gus o' Donnell said to me, oh I, when I was at the treasury, the chief civil servant at the Treasury I used to argue for the most open door possible. I think it's my job to maximize global welfare, not national welfare. And I, you know, I kind of reasonably liberal minded person but I thought coming from the head of the National Civil Service, this was pretty extraordinary. And I turned to Mark Thompson to my right and said, did you just hear what Gus o' Donnell said? The head of the National Civil Service said it was his job to maximize global welfare. And Mark Thompson said oh well, I agree with him. And I think that it was, that sort of impelled me to write the road to somewhere because I think it's. I mean Mark Thompson and Gus o' Donnell are not representative of all anywheres. Anywheres are like 25, 30% of the population somewhere, somewhere greater, 45, 50%. And as I say there's a kind of range. I mean that is an extreme anywhere position. But nonetheless the problem is not the anywhere worldview. The problem is not. It is the over domination of the anywhere worldview. What the populists call the uniparty, whether it's the centre left or the centre right have generally followed the same path. You know, they've been pro globalization, pro, you know, when it comes to education, expanding higher education and rather neglecting traditional apprenticeships and technical education, when it comes to the economy, prioritizing the higher managerial and professional and financial jobs, being indifferent deindustrialization, relatively indifferent to levels of immigration and national sovereignty. I mean there's a sort of a worldview that has led to a certain set of policies that have tended to benefit the anywhere class. They have validity in their own right, but I think there's also a degree of self interest behind them. And the somewhere pushback would promote a very different set of policies.
- [10:59]
Yasha Munk
So tell me a little bit more about this distinction. I think this distinction between the somewheres and the anywheres is really evocative. And I do recognize something in that that I think is true. And probably I count as an anywhere. As somebody who's lived in many different countries and so on, I guess I wonder how many anywheres there are. Or it may be one of those situations where there's a lot of weak anywheres, but I'm not sure that there's a lot of strong anywheres. So yes, there are people who will move abroad at the drop of their hat to Japan or the United States or France for some kind of academic opportunity, for their studies, for some kind of job opportunities. But how many of those people are there really? How many people are there really who are not quite firmly rooted in a national community and in many ways in the local community. You look at the United States levels of geographic mobility actually much lower than they used to be in the past.
- [11:56]
David Goodhart
Yeah, no, absolutely. And this is one of the points I was making with the Gus o' Donnell quote, that there are, there are varieties of anywheres and varieties of somewheres. When I was doing the work on the UK and looking at the British social attitude surveys, I estimated that the mainstream anywhere worldview was pretty big. 25, 30% of the population perhaps, and many of them holding much milder versions of the any world than the Gus o' Donnell one that I quoted. And I also talked about an in betweener group, quite a big, you know, 25% of the population who kind of had elements, significant elements of both worldviews and then a more core somewhere group of perhaps 40, 45%. So yeah, I mean, you're right, it's not. And of course, somewheres and anywheres often agree on a huge range of subjects. You know, often a lot of the old, the old kind of left right issues, size of the state market versus state levels of public spending, redistribution and so on. Anywhere in some ways can fall on both sides of those older divides. And obviously they would agree on lots of things. Everybody wants the government to be uncorrupt and efficient and the health services to work well and so on and so forth. So there's plenty of overlap still in our politics. But I do think one of the problems, and one of the reasons why politics is sort of so difficult in some ways these days than it used to be, is that when politics was primarily socioeconomic, it was easier to come to compromises. It's easier to split the difference on issues to do with levels of public spending or levels of redistribution. When it comes to these issues that are more to do with, with identities and immigration and national sovereignty, it's much harder to come to compromises. And I think this is one of the problems. And one thing, I mean, I'm absolutely not in favor. Although my book was seen as a sort of, in some ways a kind of moderate defense of populism, if you like. I mean, a kind of defense of the somewheres in the light of the kind of over domination of the anywhere ideology. I mean, I think what we absolutely don't want is for kind of over dominant anywhere rule to be replaced by over dominant somewhere rule.
- [14:23]
Yasha Munk
And you would say that something like Donald Trump is over dominance over somewhere.
- [14:26]
David Goodhart
Yeah, I am. Your revenge is exactly the opposite of we need to find new balance between kind of any, we need anywheres and we need anywhere views. But we need a better balance between the two worldviews. And we need a kind of new generation of politicians who I think have yet to emerge. And they could come from using the old categories, either the center left or the center right, who can find a balance, a bridge, if you like, between the two worldviews.
- [14:59]
Yasha Munk
How similar or different is your view to that, for example, of Michael Lind, who would argue that really the problem is that a broader professional managerial class has come to be really dominant in Anglo Saxon societies and perhaps some Western European societies as well, and that this professional managerial class is educated at a similar set of elite institutions that inculcates in them particular kind of values and that therefore institutions which were meant to be politically neutral, whether that is a public broadcasting service like the BBC in the United Kingdom, whether that's a national radio station like NPR in the United States, whether that is universities themselves, whether that is courts, whether that is even some corporations, start therefore to reflect the background assumptions that this broader kind of social milieu has come to have about the world. And so these institutions start slowly eroding their own legitimacy because that was premised on being able to trust them to
- [16:08]
David Goodhart
be
- [16:11]
Yasha Munk
guided by long standing principles like neutrality or the kind of investigative ethos, the skeptical ethos of traditional journalists. But that now appear to really be firmly on one side of a more salient political divide which increasingly divides the kind of professional managerial class and its values and interests from the rest of society. Do you see your framing as similar, complementary, in conflict with this?
- [16:39]
David Goodhart
Yeah, no, I think he's using different language perhaps to describe something relatively similar. And Mike is a friend of mine, indeed I introduced him to British audiences when I was editing Prospect magazine a few years ago. And I'm a fan, I mean, I think for the movement to the left of the professional class, I think is one which sort of took off really in the. Well, there's an old saying that in the 1980s, and I think this applies to the US as well as the UK that the right won the economic argument, you might even say the economic stroke political argument, it tended to win elections in that period and the left was gradually winning the sort of social and cultural argument. And I think, I think we're seeing the truth of that. We've seen the truth of that sort of over the last few decades. And I think it's one of the most significant political factors. And it relates to my argument about the over domination of the Anywhere worldview. The most significant political fact is the movement to the left of the professional class of large swathes of the middle. Indeed, what we even think of as the, as the middle class has changed. I mean, we tend to think now of a professional, an accountant, a lawyer, a medic of some kind. You know, if you go back sort of 40 or 50 years, you think of a middle class person, you think of a shopkeeper or a business person, obviously one would still classify them as middle class. And I think the expansion of higher education, which obviously happened in Europe a little bit after the US that's really started to, to have that impact on. I mean, as recently as the 1990s, more than half of people in the professional managerial class in the UK did not have a university degree. They would have had professional qualifications that they acquired while working. And the fact that you have that long period, three, four years in a separate institution, you move away from your hometown, the people you grew up with, your family, and you move to a different place and you're inculcated into a, a different worldview in many cases. Obviously not everyone who goes to university is on the liberal left, but for all sorts of historic reasons, I mean, universities are there partly to challenge tradition and authority. And so there is a sort of, you might say there is this kind of institutional bias towards liberalism in those places and. Yeah, and you've seen it play out now in the long march through the institutions. And now liberal inclined professionals dominate our society.
- [19:14]
Yasha Munk
Yeah. This is something that I've long been ambivalent about with universities and with the idea of meritocracy more broadly. Now, obviously, I think meritocracy is incredibly important and I'm rather skeptical of some of the easy dismissals of meritocracy. I always find that the writers who say that meritocracy is something unimportant or troublesome should go to some of the places in a, the world where there generally isn't any meritocracy and see both what that does to people's aspirations and to the ability of those countries to actually have economic growth and deliver on basic goods. When you have the alternative to meritocracy in place, which is being hired because you're somebody's relative or because you bribed somebody, believe me, that is a lot worse than the meritocratic ethos that you thankfully have in much of the West. But I do also agree that at the moment we have both elements of fake meritocracy where people think that they deserve everything, even if actually they got into their positions through some significant amount of social and other advantage. And this insulated meritocratic class. And that's what we get to universities and the role they play. Of course, it is good for elite universities to look as broadly as possible to find people from disadvantaged backgrounds to give them good degrees and hopefully propel them to the meritocratic class. That is part of the point, to give them the ability to have positions of influence and responsibility in society. But a side effect of this is that every year you go into those more deprived communities, you take the top 10, 5, 2% of most talented 18 year olds, you carry them off to a lovely college campus where they make friends with the science of great families, with their talents and connections, and they never go back. Perhaps they go back for Christmas or in the United States for Thanksgiving. Perhaps they drew on the story of triumph out of adversity for some kind of social justice points in the language of a new professional managerial class. But most likely they are being taken out of the precise communities that most need their talents. And I think this is a terrible dilemma at the heart of a meritocracy, which is difficult to know what to do about.
- [21:37]
David Goodhart
Yeah, no, I think that's an interesting point. I mean, I think you've seen a merger of kind of traditional financial and economic elites with, as it were, the meritocratic elites and often the traditional elites themselves have to pass the exams, but they have all the benefits of private educations or tutors or whatever to help them through. And there is this kind of merger between those heavily assisted people, as it were, from traditionally privileged backgrounds with, as it were, the new privilege to have earned their way. And it's one of the ways in which you might say that the, you know, elites legitimize their continuing rule through the concept of meritocracy. And of course, we're all meritocrats in the basic sense. You know, we want the most able people to be in the appropriate jobs, particularly at the top of society. Nobody wants to be operated on by someone who's failed their surgery exams, et cetera, et cetera. But you know, as some wag put it, you know, once, you know, of course, of course we want the clever, the clever guy in charge. That's just sort of automatic. But then suddenly, when the clever guy's child and grandchild is also in charge, we think that something's not working.
- [22:58]
Yasha Munk
I have two thoughts about meritocracy, which I guess are somewhat controversial. The second probably more than the first. The first being that I wonder whether we've overstated and exaggerated how much social mobility we ever had. Now, what happened in the 50s and 60s and 70s is that the ranks of the middle class hugely expanded. So if you were at the 50th percentile of German or British or American society in 1930, you were a manual worker. And probably if you were in the 70th percentile of the population in those decades, you were a manual worker by the year 2000. If you were in the 50th percentile, you were a white collar worker with a high school or perhaps some kind of associate's degree. If you were in the 70th percentile, you probably had a college degree and were a white collar worker. The experience of what it meant to be at the same level of society was completely transformed over the course of those decades. That doesn't mean that there was so much movement from the bottom of society to the top of society. That also existed. But that was never the main motto of that feeling of social mobility. And that's much harder because by definition, for somebody to move from the bottom to the top, somebody needs to move from the top to the bottom. And so there's losers, and losers are always hard in politics and incumbents work really hard to avoid losing. The other thing I wonder about is whether there was a one time window for huge amount of social mobility because of background conditions. Now it's relatively uncontroversial that there's some amount of heredity of intelligence at the individual level. So it's nothing to do with groups. Simply the child of two exceptionally intelligent parents is probably going to experience some reversion to the mean that is most likely going to be more intelligent than the average member of a population. And in the past, the kind of opportunities for mobility were so limited that there was a tremendous amount of talent at every level of social station. But in this moment of genuine social mobility and openness, a lot of that society has become reasserted. And of course, there's a lot more assortative mating now. A lot more people marry the partners and the spouses in part because they had a very similar level of socioeconomic achievement. And so you put those things together and you would sort of expect a little bit lower levels of social mobility for both of those things. Right. So what's happened now is that we don't have a similar expansion of white collar jobs, for example. We already have a huge share of population in white collar jobs, a limit to how quickly that's going to expand. And perhaps some of those natural motives of social mobility have certainly not gone away, but have attenuated somewhat. And the combination of that is that this promise of social mobility, that if we only send enough people to college, everybody's going to be better off and everybody's going to have the nice social values of Yenny west, has proven to
- [26:00]
David Goodhart
be
- [26:03]
Yasha Munk
really a chimera.
- [26:04]
David Goodhart
Yeah. And of course that is the most controversial thought, which is that we've already kind of redistributed ourselves according to ability and that actually the people, many at least of the people at the top are the people that should be there. But I think you're quite right. We had a huge expansion in the US and the UK in the 50s, 60s, 70s, where there was a huge expansion of white collar employment, professional employment, huge expansion of education, expansion of health services, et cetera, et cetera. There was more room at the top, as the sociologists say, and, and people rose. I mean, I think, on the contrary, actually, I think our societies have been much more socially mobile than we usually give them credit for. And it's true that has slowed down to some extent. And what we attribute that to, whether we, you know, as it were, the pessimistic argument would be. Well, because the sorting has already taken place. I think the more optimistic argument would be simply that because there is less room at the top and people are very good at preserving their position in the social hierarchy. But one of the arguments, I mean, the book I wrote following the road to Somewhere, was called Head, Hand, Heart, the Struggle for Dignity and status in the 21st century. And one of the arguments against people, like in a way, against Michael Young and Michael Sandel and so on, I argued it wasn't an argument against meritocracy as such, it was an argument against the definition of merit in meritocracy, which I think has been far too focused on a certain kind of human aptitude, the exam passing, sort of analytical intelligence kind, and that we may have gone as far as we can in, as it were, assorting those roles fairly. And that actually what we really need to do now is to say, well, yeah, that's a certain. Obviously we need clever people to solve all the world's problems, climate change, et cetera, et cetera, but actually we've kind of overvalued and there's a long tail of people in the kind of knowledge economy who are really contributing no more than somebody who works with their hands or indeed someone who works with their heart. I mean, the use of emotional intelligence in care jobs and so on, being able to bath somebody or undress some old person sensitively in a way that, that is respectful to them. It's an extremely skillful, emotional and physical thing to do. And yet people who do that tend to be on minimum wages and arguing for a shift in status away from the cognitive to the practical intelligence and emotional intelligence, at least over the long term. It's difficult to think of practical ways in which that could be promoted, but I think that's the direction of travel we should be thinking about.
- [28:58]
Yasha Munk
Yeah, one of the interesting things about that is that in a sense, I would say we reward and value manual skills a lot in our society. You can actually be a plumber and work hard, of course, but make really quite good income. The problem with plumbers, both in the United States and the United Kingdom, is not that they're not making a good amount of money. And there's lots of trade jobs where you can leave high school at 18. And if you're talented and hardworking, you train in some very particular skill that is needed in a relatively high tech industry. And in the United States you can make six figures in your early mid-20s. So it's not actually the case that we generally undervalue, certainly in some cases, but that we generally undervalue manual skills or manual labor. But the problem seems to be one of cultural recognition, that even if you are doing this quite highly skilled work that helps a company be very productive and make a real contribution. When you go to your local bar or your local party and the person next to you says that they're a lawyer and the other person says that they're a teacher and you say that you're a plumber or you, you know, somebody with specialized skill in a certain kind of craft, you probably feel like the odd one out, like the loser, quote unquote, in that kind of round. And so what's interesting is that actually I recognize what you're saying, I think you're right about what he's saying, but it's not necessarily a question of money. It's kind of a question of cultural respect and recognition.
- [30:39]
David Goodhart
Yeah, I think, and I've read somewhere that there's interesting evidence for this from dating apps. The people in relatively low level kind of knowledge economy jobs are doing better on dating apps than people in actually very highly played blue collar jobs. So maybe we have a problem with the kind of female selection bias here.
- [31:03]
Yasha Munk
But yeah, and with some amount of social pressure, I mean, nowadays it's certainly out of fashion to judge people for who they date, except on two dimensions. One is the age gaps, which have become much more moralized than they used to be. But the second is probably educational gaps. And that can be the case certainly
- [31:22]
David Goodhart
for
- [31:25]
Yasha Munk
the male lawyer who marries a pretty girl who doesn't have a great degree and they'll be accused of dating a bimbo or something like that. But also the other way around. I think that if you're a young professional woman in your twenties in New York and you date a firefighter or a plumber, there might be a little bit of, oh, I bet he's hot, or something like that. But then I think quite quickly there would be a lot of judgment from your social circle. Do you have anything to talk to them about? How can you stand spending time with somebody who wouldn't have anything to say? And those kind of assumptions, I think, would quite quickly come to the surface in many social circles.
- [32:06]
David Goodhart
Yeah, and I think, yeah, I argued in Head, Hand, Heart that we are reaching head, but I haven't seen that much evidence yet for a better spread of the kind of status that we've been talking about. But I do think sometimes these things sort of continue in a kind of half life for decades after they've ceased to be economically or even culturally valuable. The kind of biases that we've been talking about, the kind of bias, the anywhere worldview bias, which is the successful person is someone who, from whatever background, they do well at school, they go to an Ivy League university and they have a high status professional job. And that is the kind of model for society and that is what everyone should aspire to. And we'd moved then in a society where if you go back to the 1950s or even the 1930s, there were lots of little ladders up, There were lots of opportunities for social mobility, as it were, pre the kind of high education, higher education, hegemonic period, where there's sort of one big ladder up. You know, you do well at school and you get onto that, you get into the college stream at school and you're on that one big ladder. I hope we're gonna move back, as it were, to a world of lots of little ladders and a better spread of sort of cultural value across a broader range of kind of head, hand and heart. One of my fears, though, is that social media, I mean, so there used to be this thesis, the relative deprivation thesis, that somebody, a British sociologist, wrote a book, I think, in the 50s or 60s called the relative dep. Deprivation, which is about how everybody judged themselves by the people a couple of rungs above or below them on the social ladder, which was why people didn't feel huge dissatisfaction if they had a very ordinary life, because they were only comparing themselves with the people in the next door street. But in the much more open, transparent world introduced first by television, now even more by social media, everybody is comparing themselves to the most beautiful people on the planet or the cleverest people on the planet. And that is kind of bad for people's mental health. And I think it contributes to this sense of demoralization that we're seeing in our societies, particularly if you are in the 50% of people. I mean again, this argument maybe, maybe applies to 15 or 20 years ago. Tony Blair made this famous speech in 1999 saying that 50% of school leavers in the UK should go to university, should go to college. Extraordinary thing in some ways to say clearly nobody who was helping him write that thought for one moment that their children would not be in the 50%. I mean it was kind of, there has often been, I think that kind of anywhere lack of empathy, an assumption that kind of everybody is like them. And not only does that potentially create the 50% of people who don't go to university feel like second class citizens, like demoralized second class citizens. But of course now we have the question that even people that do go to university, because we've expanded university much more broadly than we've expanded, as you were saying earlier, the, the number of higher professional jobs, which is what universities traditionally train people for, those jobs have risen, but only by a small amount. But the number of graduates chasing that number of jobs has risen enormously. So you then get two sets of dissatisfied people, the people who don't go to college at all and then the people who do go to college but are in a kind of low paying back office job. And this is the elite overproduction point, isn't it?
- [36:07]
Yasha Munk
I like this idea of peak white collar jobs or peak college educated dominance. And we've seen some early signs over the course of the last years that actually the income of people at the top end of the distribution have stagnated and the incomes of people at the bottom end of the distribution have grown more quickly. We've seen signs that some people with college degrees are finding it harder to find, find jobs either because the skill level of the sort of marginal extra person who's gone to college over the course of the last 10 or 20 years doesn't always justify those high levels and partially because of structural changes so that even graduates of coding programs in elite universities suddenly are finding it hard to find jobs. And that of course relates to questions of artificial intelligence. You know, 10 years ago when people talk about artificial intelligence, they were talking about all of the drivers that were going to be displaced. And that is coming. When you look at Waymo and the rapid increase in the miles driven by Waymo and the astonishing safety record of Waymo, I think it is obvious that we're going to have more and more self driving cars. And that's probably a good thing for humanity, even just in terms of a number of deaths that are going to be avoided. But because the main advance of artificial intelligence so far has been with GPTs, with chatbots rather than with robots that are embodied, it now looks as though white collar jobs are at much greater risk, much faster than blue collar jobs. And there's a really interesting theory about this whose name now escapes me, according to which actually the hardest thing for AI to do is the things that took evolution the longest to create. And those are our motor skills, that is our vision, that is the things that we think of as basic, because all human beings can do it and a bunch of animals can also do it. The thing that's relatively easier for artificial intelligence to recreate is the stuff at the very end of the evolutionary history, the cherry on top of the, that actually has a less long evolutionary history. And so it may be that the spread of artificial intelligence, at least in the first phase, is going to decimate white collar jobs. Jobs in HR in all kinds of contexts, can suddenly be done by a bunch of ChatGPT agents. But those blue collar jobs, because we haven't gotten as far with embodied artificial 1000 yet, are still going to be in high demand. So is AI another contributing factor to peak white collar, peak college graduate?
- [38:48]
David Goodhart
Yeah, I hope so. Yeah. AI is now coming for the kind of lower end of the cognitive class in a way that automation came for factory work and blue collar work many decades ago. And yeah, I mean, I talk about the future being in coding and caring. Actually, it turns out that coding is done pretty effectively by AI, so it may actually just be caring. But I think these are all going to be pushing towards this better balance between head, hand and heart capabilities. But I mean, I think it'll be really fascinating to see where we end up with in terms of the kind of the upward revaluing of emotional labor and care, because I think it has historically obviously been associated with women, often done for free in the home. And it tends to, it creates positive externalities. Care work often produces positive externalities for society. That is very hard for the carer, whether in the domestic realm or the public economy, to capture. And of course, this is a problem society used to solve by making it very hard for women to do anything else other than care jobs. And now that we've largely removed those constraints, we're kind of left with. So society's got to rethink, I think, the whole. This is one of the things I talk about in my last book in what I grandly call the anywhere trilogy, which is called the Care Dilemma. The Care Dilemma, Freedom, family and fertility. And it's about this kind of, again, it's about a rebalancing the tension between freedom for men and women, but particularly for women over recent decades to not be just defined as a mother or a housewife and to have financial autonomy, not how do we preserve all those freedoms while also investing enough in the care that we say that we want for old people, for young people, both having the babies and looking after them. And I think we're not there yet.
- [41:13]
Yasha Munk
So tell us about how the status of care work has transformed in our society over the last decades and why we're now at an impasse with it. As you were saying, there was one unjust but coherent solution to it until about the 1960s, which was simply that half of humanity was not really invited into the workplace except in certain very particular roles and time limited ways. And so they were the ones who provided the care work. It was women who raised children, who looked after their elderly relatives. And since they were excluded from the workplace, there was plenty of that work to go around. And of course, there was also certain kind of institutions for people who fell between the cracks and so on to some extent. But that was the basic component, the biggest brick of the solution. Now, for a number of decades, we were somewhere in between as women entered the workplace in greater numbers, as some of those older conservative norms still held. You ended up with a kind of mix of different models in society. But increasingly it looks as though we are in a rather feminized world. I'm really struck by the fact that in what, by the way, I think is a normative scandal, but virtually nobody talks about American universities now discriminate against women in. In their admissions because at the same level of achievement, there's so many fewer guys. And so it takes much better grades and a much better record for women to get into the Ivy League or other kind of top American schools, because the universities are so worried about not having the right kind of gender ratio that they prefer or the students prefer or Whatever it may be, which I think is quite striking, but it shows sort of the success of women in this new knowledge economy. But then of course also the fact that it creates a crisis for the care system. So what do you think is the solution? Is the solution a complete professionalization of the care system so that more and more forms of care are simply monetized and made part of a capitalist market and hopefully with welfare state institutions helping to finance them for those who are in need and who can't pay for them? And that's the solution? Is it robots and AI? Is that in 20 or 30 years, what's going to solve the problem? Is it a change of social norms so that more people, perhaps more men and probably mostly more women, go back into carrying vocations whether or not they're paid or not? How do we solve the evident need for care in our society in a way that doesn't create the gaps of care that we currently have, nor the injustices and the forms of exclusion and oppression that women suffered in the past?
- [44:12]
David Goodhart
Yeah, I think it undoubtedly does require men to step up more in the care domain. And I think they are actually stepping up more than they are often given credit for. At least in the UK we've shifted in the last 20 or 30 years. We've gone from the distribution of domestic labor being like 70% female, 30% male, to something more like sort of 55 or 60, 45, 45, even in more educated households. But I also think it is a matter of shifting social norms because I think what's happened is that we've had a kind of. You talked about feminization. Indeed we have various institutions that become very heavily feminized. Education at all levels, primary, secondary, now higher education, very, very dominated by women. The health sectors tend to be dominated as more and more women move into the professional, you know, higher, higher med jobs as well. Obviously they've historically dominated nursing. You know, most hospitals are like 80, 85% women publishing, very, very female dominating. More and more institutions are becoming female dominated. But I think what we've experienced so far, and this may change, and I hope it does, is what one might call a sort of a male default feminism in a way. I mean the structures of status haven't changed. We've just both men and women are obviously equally sort of status seeking creatures. And when all the status remains in the public realm, in the professional jobs, in that kind of anywhere public realm world, then women are going to seek to compete equally with men in that world, which is fair enough. But We've not had a form of feminism has actually raised the status of traditionally female areas of life. So I think, I argue in my book that we've kind of. We're not feminized enough in some respects in our society in the sense that we. We haven't adapted gdp. Politicians are complete slaves to GDP when it comes to making big policy decisions about the economy. And GDP fails to capture a huge amount of productive work done in the home. And we've not made any attempt to adjust that. Almost all of what counts for family policies, essentially childcare policy and childcare policy is about making it possible for. For both parents to spend less time in the family and compete equally in the public realm. There's actually a brilliant. Can I quote Anne Marie Slaughter, who I quote in the book, very prominent feminist American, worked for Hillary Clinton, runs the. It's the New America think tank, I think, isn't it? She says this. My generation of feminists was raised to think the competitive work our fathers did was much more important than the caring work our mothers did. Women first had to gain power and independence by emulating men. But as we attain that power, we must not automatically accept the traditional man's view, actually the view of a minority of men about what happens. And I think that is a very wise thing to say. And I think it also actually represents one of the biggest gaps between the political class and ordinary opinion in both of our societies, both in the and the US that nobody wants to go back to the 1950s. I mean, British social attitude surveys ask people, do you agree with the statement a man should go out to work and a woman should stay at home and look after the home and children? And it's like 6 or 7% of people agree with that. But equally, when asked what is the ideal form of childcare when children are preschool, the number of people who say both parents working full time is also like 8 or 9%. People actually would like it if we made it easier for people, through public support of various kinds, for one parent to stay at home when children are very young. And we haven't yet quite, I think, got to the point where that is seen as a desirable thing, at least by the political class. I think it will be extremely popular if it was made easier for people to afford to be able to stay at home in those. That's one of the reasons why our families are in such a mess. I mean, nearly half of children in the UK are not living with both their biological parents at the age of 14. It's probably even Worse in America.
- [48:54]
Yasha Munk
Right. I'm going to read you a couple of messages from my excellent producer Leo, who is very much enjoying the conversation but is saying yet most managers are men. Even in feminized industries, we're not really feminized enough until there's quality, affordable childcare for all. And perhaps it's not really surprising that we don't value feminist or women's work. And so how do we balance those kinds of concerns? Well, on the one hand, young women are doing much better than young men. And at this point, something like 60% of recent college graduates in the United States are women, which is astonishing. On the other hand, it's still true that often at more senior levels, women then drop out of a workplace. And I heard secondhand, so I'm not going to name the school remarks from a dean of a major major business school in the United States who said five years out from graduation, half of the women who graduate from this business school end up being out of a workplace because they marry very successful and affluent men from a similar kind of background. And once they have kids, they decide to stay at home. And perhaps that's good in terms of raising those kids. There are advantages to that. But it also actually again replicates a world in which at the highest levels, the managers, even in a workplace that might end up being 60, 65% women at some point might continue to be men. So is there a way of fighting for the interests of men, men and of women in a way that isn't rival, or are we eventually going to end up in some amount of rivalry here between those different.
- [50:30]
David Goodhart
Well, I don't think there's so much about between men and women. I think it's to do with listening to all kinds of women. There was a British sociologist, woman sociologist, Catherine Hackim, a few years ago who did a survey of adult British women in which she found that 20% of British women were very, very work focused, mainly educated, professional, career focused, often wanting to have families too. 20% were very, very family focused. And 60% were what she called adaptive, meaning wanting to have both decent jobs and careers and a family, but being prepared to, wanting to put family first when children were very young and put careers on hold if necessary. And I think essentially to the extent that we have a family policy or a debate about family in the UK in the US it tends to be very dominated by the 20%. And the 20% are very career focused women. And that's fine up to a point. And we have made huge strides in terms of equality I think 47% of all public appointments now in the UK are women. 40% of MPs are women. As we were saying earlier, huge areas of the economy that are now more and more of the medical schools and the legal schools and so on are dominated by women. I think we've done okay in that respect, and I don't think we should be pursuing the kind of chimera of sort of 50, 50 everywhere, because I think we've also grown up to appreciate that feminists, perhaps 20 or 30 years ago, it would have been an article of faith that men and women are not only equal, but essentially the same. I think you don't hear that any longer. Mainstream feminists like Helen Lewis or who's the woman that wrote Invisible Women. It's actually just up here. Caroline Correardo Perez. I mean, they don't argue that any longer. And actually the whole trans debate and the defense of women only spaces has kind of reinforced the fact that men and women are actually different in quite important respects. And we shouldn't necessarily be pursuing 50, 50 everywhere, but we should be respecting motherhood and valuing the family more and not insisting that everybody leaves it as quickly as possible to join the GDP economy.
- [53:02]
Yasha Munk
Yeah, there's a kind of. Well, I have two thoughts about this. One is from a sociology paper that I read at this point about 15 years ago. And so these things may have changed somewhat, but I found it to be quite striking at the time, looking at different gender norms and expectations about motherhood in Southern Europe, in Western Europe and in Northern Europe, let's say. So in Southern Europe, in places like Italy, at the time we expected, expectation was that, yes, as a woman you should work, but once you have children, you should probably stay at home with a child. And that both is very constraining on the choices that women could make. It helps to explain the incredibly low fertility rate in those countries because a lot of women do feel like they have a choice between work and having children. So a bunch of them choose not to have children. But at least there is a coherent way of living up to the norms, which is to say that if you have kids and you stay at home, society sees you as having done the right thing. There are some countries like Northern Europe and Scandinavia, which have a genuinely permissive set of attitudes which tells people, do whatever you want, have kids, don't have kids. If you have kids, stay at home, go to work. We're going to try and make any of those models work. It's really up to you. It's Genuinely your choice. That of course, seems like the right approach to me. And then there's a set of countries, including Germany and Austria and so on, which have norms where you basically can't win either way. Where the idea is if you don't have kids, then you're a childless woman and there's something wrong with you. If you do have kids and you continue to work, then you are Rabenmutter, a raven mom who isn't really looking after her kids in the way that she should. And if you have kids and you stay at home, then you're a weird housewife who doesn't really have full social respect. Because really, to be a modern woman, you need to be in the workplace. And if you've taken yourself out of the workplace, there's something wrong with you. And so there's just a set of inconsistent gender norms in such a way that whatever you do, you're going to end up having judgment passed on you. So that's, I think, an interesting thought. The other thought relating to this is about places like Scandinavia and Alice Evans talked about that when she was on the podcast. It's quite a well known finding now that has been replicated in a number of studies. And that's the global gender paradox that you would think that women choose, for example, more male coded professions where there's more gender equality, that women in Sweden are more likely to end up being doctors who are engineers than women in Iraq or in other more patriarchal societies. But what actually happens is the opposite, that the more gender equal a society is, the more women tend to cluster in professions that have often been thought of as rather feminized. And so that seems to indicate that genuine choice is not going to lead to what my mother's generation. My mother was a conductor, musician in a generation where there was not many, and a single mother in a generation where that was not true of many people. But members of that generation may have expected, once we have genuine equality, we're going to have 50% of conductors be women and you're going to have women be in the workplace as much as men, and very few women are going to choose to stay at home. And it's not clear that if we generally give people more choice, that is going to be the general outcome. It obviously will be the outcome for, for some, like my mother, who I think would always have chosen to do those things. But it's not going to be the answer for some others.
- [56:40]
David Goodhart
No, absolutely. And all the opinion polls in the UK anyway say that women, when asked, would work less if they could afford to their ideal arrangements, they would work far less or not at all in the first few years of their children's life and not hand their child over to a nursery at the age of six months or nine months. And there is a fair amount of evidence to suggest that that's also not, it's not good for the child to start care at such a young age. Now clearly we need in order for it to be possible for women to combine family and career. We clearly we haven't got there yet. We've made quite a lot of progress towards better, particularly in Europe, less so in America, better maternity arrangements, better support at work. But we need to go even further, I think, and have almost an assumption that in the reproductive years women and men will have a bias towards part time work. We need a kind of a part time work culture for people when they are at their most sort of reproductively able. I think one of the optimistic things here is that these, these are sort of bridging issues between liberals and conservatives. I mean, if we assume that for sake of argument, I don't think it's really true. But the idea of strong stable families and higher fertility are sort of coded, right, as it were. They are seen as sort of conservative ideas. But actually to have strong stable families you need kind of liberal means. You need generous family policy that makes it possible for one parent, probably usually the mother, but maybe increasingly as women start to earn more men in many households, increasingly the man will be the stay at home parent. In those years we need a policy that makes that possible. We need more equal distribution of domestic labor between men and women in the household. And we also need more well paid, decent to go back to what we were just talking about. More well paid decent jobs for non college educated men which makes them a better prospect for women to settle down with and have children with.
- [59:11]
Yasha Munk
In the rest of this conversation, David and I talk about the so what? How is it that we can redress the imbalances that David identifies? What do we need to do in order to make sure that we actually give genuine respect to all workers, blue collar as well as white collar? And I share my secret theory about humor. I explain why I think that a German who goes to Britain may learn to have a sense of humor, but a German who goes straight to America probably won't? If you want to learn the answer as to why I think that, please support this podcast. Please get rid of these annoying pre recorded jingles and ads that you often hear from jarring voices selling you all kinds of things. Please go to jasamunk.substack.com and I'm throwing in 25% off this week. If you go to yashamon.com thegoodfight you will pay about a dollar a.