#604： The Boring Decadence of Modern Society
Episode Stats
Summary
On the surface, we ve made a lot of technological, economic and cultural progress during the past 30 years. But if you look closer, you start to notice that in many ways we ve been running on repeat for several decades now. My guest today argues that this is what typically happens to rich and powerful societies. A period of growth and dynamism such as we experienced after World War II is followed by a period of stagnation and malaise.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast on the surface
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can feel like we've made a lot of technological economic and cultural progress during the past
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30 years but if you look closer you start to notice that in a lot of ways we've been running
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on repeat for several decades now my guest today argues that this is what typically happens to rich
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and powerful societies a period of growth and dynamism such as we experienced after world war
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two is followed by a period of stagnation and malaise same as ross douthit and his latest book
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is the decadent society how we became the victims of our own success we begin a conversation discussing
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ross's idea of decadence and how it's particularly marked by the quality of boredom we then explore
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how decadence manifests itself in different areas of our society ross and i discuss how even though
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the realms of economy and technology might seem vibrant or at least they did before the pandemic
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struck americans are actually starting fewer businesses moving less for work and making
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fewer life-altering innovations than in times past we then discuss the fact that clothing styles
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have been changed all that much from the 1990s the repercussions of couples having fewer children
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and the calcification of our political institutions we enter conversation with how each of us as
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individuals can fight back against decadence after the show's over check out our show notes at
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aom.is decadence ross joins me now via clearcast.io
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all right ross douthit welcome to the show thanks for having me it's good to be here so you got a new
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book out the decadent society how we became the victims of our own success so let's start off with
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this definitions what do you mean by decadence because i think most people associate that with
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chocolate or sex right and you know there's some chocolate and sex in the book but mostly i'm
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arguing that we should understand decadence to mean stagnation drift repetition and boredom at a really
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high level of wealth and civilizational development so basically once a society hits a certain point of
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you know for want of a better word success and its growth rates slow down it stops thinking about the
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future its political arguments go in circles its culture starts to repeat itself and i think
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boredom is kind of the key thing like so if you think about about sex the decadence the decadence of
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the real real decadence with sex is like the most boring orgy in the world basically oh so before we
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get to your case that our current culture is a decadent one let's take a look at history are there any
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other examples from previous societies or civilizations where you saw that they arrived at decadence the way
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you define it yeah i mean i think decadence is a pretty normal historical phenomenon and just about
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every society that has any kind of success goes through decadent phases or enters decadent periods
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right so the you know the obvious example is if you start the clock on the roman empire around the time
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that you know the famous orgies are happening right in nero's rome and then you run forward to the actual
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fall of rome or the fall of the western roman empire that's about 400 years and there are you
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know moments of vigor and creativity in that span but basically you could say that the roman empire was
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in various ways decadent for centuries before it fell apart or to pick examples from the second
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millennium you know the ottoman empire for about 150 years in the time when it got called the sick man of
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europe was pretty obviously decadent the chinese empire in the hundred years before you know as european
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powers gradually picked away at it so those are sort of big famous examples but really any rich society
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is going to have decadent phases and periods when it sort of gets stuck and can't figure out how to
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advance so it's a very normal thing for for successful societies to enter into and why is that is it because
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once you reach a level of success you're just starting to play you're playing not to lose you're just
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trying to keep what you got so you're not taking in risk to make advances yeah it's some of that some
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of it is that you know there are sort of limits to human creativity in a particular cultural context
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and so it makes sense that after you've you know i mean to take the case of the united states after
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you've you know invented the great american novel and invented the movie industry and then revolutionized
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the movie industry a few more times you might start to run out of ideas and just start making the
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same star wars movies over and over again right and in the same way in politics right so if you build
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up a really successful constitutional order or a really successful system of government over time
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the system sort of gets big and heavy and locked in and it's too sort of too big to fail in the
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language of the last financial crisis it gets harder and harder to reform it so even if you want to change
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and adapt the system to new realities it gets harder and harder to do that and i think you know that's what
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you see in washington dc right now but i think your original point is right too that you know once
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once a society is really successful it you know it runs out of enemies to challenge it it runs out of
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you know fears to motivate it and it gets older right and this is a big thing that's happened in the
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western world we've we've had we have fewer kids society's gotten older and being rich and old is a good
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recipe for decadence so i've seen you start to flesh out these ideas uh in your articles and then
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new york times for about a year or so but when did you start noticing that you know america and
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western society has probably entered into a decadent phase so in a certain way i've been working on this
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book for like six or seven years i guess and i got sort of sidetracked by other projects and personal
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stuff but so i really started working on it after the 2012 election which is a long time ago now and
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part of the motivation was that we had just lived through this massive financial crisis where in the
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aftermath everyone in my profession was saying well you know this changes everything you know it's it's
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gonna you know it's gonna really gonna radically transform our politics in all these kind of ways
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and instead we ended up in 2012 with you know barack obama versus mit romney in what was in certain
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ways the most boring and dispiriting imaginable presidential election and this you know i had
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come of age as a journalist and writer after 9-11 so i had gone through this cycle once before where
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you know some big event happens and people say well you know this is the moment when our decadence ends
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and vigor is restored and new things happen and then politics fell quickly back into the same
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the same patterns as before so having gone through that twice i felt like there was sort of a lesson
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there which is that even big events even financial crises and massive terrorist attacks don't necessarily
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change the trajectory of a wealthy stable somewhat stagnant society that much now obviously when i
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you know was planning to publish the book i wasn't anticipating that we would get yet another immense
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world-altering disaster happening while i was actually out promoting the book so it remains to
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be seen whether the pandemic will have effects that 9-11 and the financial crisis didn't have it's
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certainly possible that it could be a bigger jolt and an actual redirection but so far i think western
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civilization has come through the 30 years since the cold war ended without having its stagnation
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altered that much even by dramatic seeming events well let's dig into this these the different types
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of stagnation that you highlight in your book and the first one is economic stagnation and i've seen
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this argument put out by tyler cowen the economist you know it may look like we're making a lot of
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progress economically technological innovation but really not i mean so what is the evidence that
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economists point to that say really the world has been economically stagnant for maybe 40 50 years
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so first there's just a sort of deceleration in growth right so if you go back to the late 1960s
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early 70s which is when i sort of start my story you have a period in the post-war era of really rapid
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dramatic economic growth and then you have the stagflation of the 1970s and you have sort of
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temporary recoveries of growth under ronald reagan and bill clinton but each time when the next recession
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comes along it sort of wipes out a lot of those gains so basically over the last couple generations
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we've settled into a normal where four or five percent growth is incredibly rare and 1.5 to 2 percent
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growth is the best that we're going to get seemingly and at the same over the same period you've also had
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fiscal policy change dramatically so you know western governments and especially the united states now run
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immense peacetime deficits in a way that we didn't have to 50 or 60 or 70 years ago so basically you
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have an economy where we are spending more public money in order to sort of goose extremely low great
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growth rates as opposed to an earlier era when you you know when the government didn't have to do that
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kind of deficit spending work and you've got four or five percent growth without it so it's important
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to stress this is not the end of growth it doesn't mean the progress has ceased entirely people still
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get richer societies are still getting richer but they're just doing so at a very slow pace and at a
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pace where we are doing this sort of weird thing where we take our own surplus and pay ourselves extra
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money to feel to feel like we're growing more than we actually are and but some people you know this
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has kind of come up in the past 10 years some people are noticing like they're not they're not experiencing
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that growth economically you know the people talk about like my dad did better than me financially
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working a factory job not going to college and then here i am laden with thousands of dollars of
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student debt working not a great job right now this and this is something that economists as they do are
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constantly arguing about right like like how much better off is you know the average american worker
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today versus 40 or 50 years ago and there are sort of two competing theories one competing one
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theory says look growth has slowed down but there has been growth goods and services have gotten a lot
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cheaper you know your tvs and and iphones are you know amazing in a way that your dad working the
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factory job couldn't have imagined the counter argument is that a few really big ticket things have not
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necessarily gotten cheaper it's not clear that real estate has gotten cheaper you know college and a
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college education has become more and more important and that hasn't gotten cheaper and health care
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hasn't gotten cheaper you've had a lot of health care cost inflation so there's sort of this these
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you know it basically depends on how you weight different things if you say the most important thing
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is you know sort of the cost of consumer goods and what's available to you there then people are
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definitely better off but if you say the most important thing is you know a man's ability to support his
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family on a single income and live in a middle-class house then things are a lot more ambiguous and it's
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less clear that people are better off to that that latter point i just saw a meme going around as a
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picture of like an al bundy's house he had this nice two-story house and we're like a guy in 1987
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who worked as a shoe salesman was able to live in a nice house like this again it was television
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but i think it kind of it's trying to make that point you know my my grandparents lived in santa
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monica california so my dad grew up there in the 50s and they had a one-story sort of mission style
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california house you know probably three bedrooms nice backyard with an orange tree and you know my
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grandfather was a you know god rest him a not very successful salesman right he was he wasn't al bundy
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but he wasn't like he wasn't not al bundy right and my grandmother didn't work and they were able to
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afford that house in basically an earthly paradise right and flash forward 70 years their house has
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been torn down after they passed away the houses there are now two stories they're too big for their
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lots they all cost two million dollars and that's a change right and you know and you can still get
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like the the salesman might still be able to get a version of that house maybe more cheaply made
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out in an excerpt somewhere in a hotter part of california that fewer people want to live in
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but still the yeah the shift the shift from my grandfather's era to today in that sense is is real
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now it is also true that there are fewer men who are shoe salesmen today and more men who are white
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collar workers right so there is a smaller population of would-be al bundys but yeah but there's there's
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definitely been a shift i mean it's the it's the simpsons phenomenon too right like you know the the
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the simpsons home is sort of this paradigm of middle-class life and homer simpson is nobody's
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idea of you know an a student or uber meritocrat and it's that springfield maybe it still existed in
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the 80s it doesn't exist today well this also with this point of stagnation you make the point that
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technology has stagnated which is interesting because most people think well no in the past
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20 years things have sped up we got the internet we got smartphones we've got slack tiktok whatever
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so what's the the case that we we're actually not innovating as much as we once did well it's similar
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to the to the argument about growth right that there is clear innovation in a few you know really
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significant areas right digital technology and communications technology have changed immensely
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over the last 30 or 40 years silicon valley barely existed a couple generations ago now it's the
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center of the global economy every time you you know take out your iphone you're experiencing an
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amazing technological revolution but that revolution takes you know is most important for communication
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entertainment leisure you know it's an it's an economy of convenience and you haven't had the same
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kind of changes in other areas of the economy relative to what people expected you know if you go back
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to 1950s science fiction you know people are imagining that what has what happened what did
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happen with the computer right that huge computers get shrunk down and stuck in your pocket would happen
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with like atomic energy so everyone would drive around a you know a clean safe atomic powered automobile
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in the year 2020 and things like that and that hasn't happened you know we do have you know we have
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hybrids we're finally getting electric cars but it's taken a very long time energy costs haven't been
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revolutionized the way people expected transportation hasn't been revolutionized things like the self
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driving car kept get pushed further and further out and you know the same goes with health and life
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expectancy right you've made some sort of slow grinding progress against cancer in the last 30 years
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but the expectations of the era when you know penicillin was being invented was that you were just going
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to have sort of a cascade of cures that you know first we cure polio and then we'll cure cancer and then
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we'll cure alzheimer's and dementia and that hasn't happened either so it's been the growth we've had
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has just been very monodimensional very very tech heavy and it's been hard for tech to transform other
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sectors you know like when tech money leaves tech and tries to transform you know uh the how we give
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blood how we you know how we take blood in pharmacies right you get theranos you get these companies that
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spend a ton of money and end up being being frauds or you get we work you know we're revolutionizing
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workspace and then it turns out the company isn't worth nearly what anyone expected so there's just
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been a challenge of taking the one area where we've had major progress and transforming the rest of
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society and also you make the point too and i've seen this case made as well is that the innovations
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we've had in the past 40 years like they're not i mean they're game changers but they're not like i'd
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rather have indoor plumbing and electricity and i could do without my smartphone like i could get
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by and life would be or i'd like i'd rather have antibiotics than a smartphone so like the stuff
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we've the innovations we made they're like they're definitely they're not big i mean they're not it's
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like it doesn't move the needle too much when in the grand scheme of things right i mean there's a
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sense in which and this is you know cowan's point tyler cowan who you mentioned earlier that
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there was a range of inventions that in hindsight looked like kind of low-hanging fruit where you
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know once you could once you figured out a few things about electricity or biology you know there
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were a bunch of really big transformative things that you could do really quickly basically in a 100
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to 150 year period and now we're in a period where you know there's still a lot of impressive
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cutting-edge research going on and at some point it may cash out in revolutions um but for now the
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research is more impressive than the results i guess is one way to look at it right you had this
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quote from a guy named mark stein talking about imagining a man in the late 19th century and going
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to the 1950s and coming to our age this reminder have you been to the wheel the carousel of progress at
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disney world yes a long time ago but yeah yeah that reminded me of that because okay for those who
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don't know the carousel of progress is this little ride you get in with animatronics and there's like
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this dad who starts out in the 1900s and he takes you through the the advancements in technology and
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you start out in 1900s you get the 1920s and there's like electricity and indoor plumbing then they get
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the 1940s more advances and then you get the 21st century which was made in 1993 so all the characters
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are like wearing neon windsuits and and it's still like that and i remember you get to the 21st century
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and you're just completely underwhelmed it's like you can talk to the oven which we i guess we have
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with like alexa infused ovens but that's about it and i was like that's that's that's not i'm not i'm
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not looking forward to the 21st century if that's what it is i'm looking i'm looking online right so
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they have a kid wearing a a sort of oculus rift style headset right yeah grandma has two in the 20 but
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but but the neon the clothes too are this is one of the smaller points i make in the book and i'm
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stealing it from a journalist named kurt anderson but you know he makes the point that if you watch
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movies from or just look at pictures from any decade in the 21st century you in the 20th century
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excuse me you get this really clear distinction decade to decade in fashions and styles and what
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people are wearing you know nobody mistakes the 1930s for the mad men era no one mistakes the mad men
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era definitely for the 1970s and then somewhere around the 1990s things stop changing that much
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and so if you turn on friends and fraser now you know the hairstyles are a little different some of
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the clothes are a little baggier but there isn't you know there hasn't been that kind of fashion
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turnover either so you know the the sort of jetson futuristic wardrobes that you know the jumpsuits
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of star trek and so on none of that has actually happened which might you know might be a good thing i
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don't want to wear the star trek jumpsuit but it does suggest too that there's been this that the
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changes in fashion reflect changes in technology and we haven't had either of those changes yeah i've
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noticed that too like i look at high school kids and they're wearing the same thing that i wore in
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high school totally 20 years ago t-shirt jeans pair of converse that's it like that's what that was my
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uniform and i see kids still wearing that yeah and if you walk around a college campus you know all the
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guys have the if they're pretentious they have the same you know black peacoat that i owned when i was
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you know young and pretending to be an adult and it's not you know it's not ugly but it's nothing
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like the the change from the 50s to the 70s say and then yeah this is this idea of you know repetition
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and culture as well i mean something you see too with with style and then also other parts of culture is
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that we keep going back into the past for our inspiration so like with style you know you see these
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decades of research over 90s are back now i guess so i think windsuits in some cases are back that
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whole seinfeld norm court thing kind of had a thing but like where there's the rate the rachel haircut
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came back the rachel haircut came back i'm sure like luke perry sideburns are going to come back
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eventually but you also see this like with films and art and music nothing i mean if you listen to a
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song today that was made you know today compared to 20 years ago not that much of a difference
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yeah i mean i think the last big musical innovation was the rise of rap and hip-hop which
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still gets cast by some you know some people as like this you know it's the new thing that the
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youth are into but rap and hip-hop have been around i mean what are we now 2020 so for 35 40 years
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and there is you know i i think you can make the argument that basically we're all still living
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inside baby boomer pop culture and that almost everything that matters in our pop culture was
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sort of invented somewhere between 1930 and 1970 or 1975 with the with the exception of the harry potter
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stories right that's that's the one sort of millennial era sort of pop culture juggernaut but star wars
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star trek the entire comic book universe if you go into a mall at christmas time except for mariah
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carry you know 80 percent of the christmas carols will be from that you know period from world war
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ii through the 1970s and you know part of that just reflects the fact that that was a really dynamic
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and creative era in american history and it's not you know it's not entirely a bad thing to have that
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kind of stuff to rework and play with and i you know i enjoy the marvel movies in their way but it is
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i think a sign of a certain kind of stuckness and repetition that did not characterize america in
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1960 1965 or so we're gonna take a quick break for your words from our sponsors and now back to the
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show yeah with movies yeah you talk about we're reboot like star wars is still going on even though
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it was you know the first one came out in the late 70s the marvel movies that's pretty much it
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and then even when they come out the new movie it's typically a reboot of a franchise that existed
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for 30 years yeah and this is and this is actually this has happened especially in the last 20 years so
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if you go back and look at the budget the box office top 10 from you know then the mid 1990s
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you would have one or two sequels but it was very normal to have original movie stories that nobody had
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ever seen before right that were you know no stories completely original everybody's reworking
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and remaking things you know shakespeare didn't come up with all his own stories but there's a
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difference between you know mel gibson coming up with braveheart out of the true history of william
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wallace but you know making a movie that nobody was making in the early 1990s versus the 17th film
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in the marvel extended universe right and again i think this goes back to this idea of decadence
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being like you're not you're playing not to lose it's like the movie studios know that a marvel movie
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will do really well so that's what they're going to put out and they're not going to take a risk on
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an eternal sunshine on the spotless mind right and when they do take risks people get you know punished
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or find that they don't have the capacities that you need so this is this is my theory of star wars right
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that the original star wars movies are great interesting creative pastiches of old hollywood
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you know adventure movies and akira kurosawa and so on and then lucas wanted in the prequels to do
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something sort of deeper and more sweeping and more tragic and really interesting right so he had high
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ambitions he just didn't have the capabilities and the capacities to actually do that and so the results
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were kind of laughable and so then thereafter once the movies are turned over to disney you get the
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retreat to safety the playing not to lose where it's like well you know we tried doing a movie
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of doing movies about galactic politics with like senate speeches and so on and nobody wants to do that
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again so we're just going to literally make the original trilogy over again with the same beats and
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you know the genders of some characters switched and that's how you get the jj abrams star wars movies
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all right so we've talked about stagnation with the economy with culture but another area where you
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you highlight where decadence can take root and stagnate is in our institutions so talking about
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political institutions you can even see corporate corporate institutions what are some examples of
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sort of stagnation there well so the easy one is just is just politics and government right that and
00:24:57.580
then this is the part of decadence that i think everybody accepts as a reality i get very little
00:25:02.720
argument about this that you know basically over the last 40 or 50 years you've had the combination
00:25:09.080
of a 200 year old constitutional structure a 100 year old welfare state and partisan polarization
00:25:16.900
make our political institutions less trustworthy less trusted and complete you know over time completely
00:25:24.200
dysfunctional so you know we've reached a point where you know a president can expect to maybe pass
00:25:30.760
one piece of legislation even if his party controls controls the house and senate when he takes office
00:25:37.560
you have these figures coming in in different ways who seem like they could be revolutionary
00:25:41.620
obama comes in and everyone's saying he's going to be the liberal fdr and donald trump comes in and
00:25:48.100
everyone says oh it's you know this transformational populism and then one thing happens and then nothing
00:25:54.080
else happens for the rest of the presidency and policy gets made increasingly by the bureaucracy and the
00:26:00.300
courts and congress just sort of abdicates everything except when there's a pandemic and you actually
00:26:05.180
have to do something right so politics policy making still happens under emergency conditions you could
00:26:10.300
you know you have budgets get passed when you're running going to hit the fiscal cliff bailouts happen
00:26:16.000
when the economy is tanking and we'll spend two trillion dollars uh when the whole economy is shutting
00:26:21.400
down but otherwise the system can't actually be reformed and all of those emergency things that happen
00:26:29.060
you'll notice just add more to deficit spending you know rightly so in certain cases we should be doing
00:26:34.940
more deficit spending in a pandemic but it doesn't reflect any kind of structural reform so that's
00:26:40.980
politics i think in other areas what you have is it's not that level of dysfunction but you have
00:26:47.040
a lot of you know consolidation and monopoly power i think that's a again a feature of sort of the playing
00:26:52.980
not to lose dynamic that you were describing so you know even in silicon valley right the most dynamic
00:26:58.860
sector of the economy has still ended up dominated by four or five companies after this brief wild west
00:27:05.640
period of real entrepreneurialism and entrepreneurs then sort of compete to get bought up by these bigger
00:27:12.080
companies or even like in higher education with you know where everyone said ah the internet's going to
00:27:18.120
come along and it's going to you know hugely disrupt higher ed and all these schools are going to are
00:27:23.320
going to uh you know are going to have to be totally reinvented and you know maybe the pandemic will
00:27:29.420
accelerate some of that but you know if you go and look at the u.s news and world report rankings of
00:27:33.880
colleges there's no list that's more stable unchanging you know places move up and down university of
00:27:41.140
chicago has climbed a little bit but you would you would not look at american higher ed and say oh this is a
00:27:47.600
sector where you know you could start a new college and you know become become really successful and
00:27:52.900
attract a lot of students it's more like you know no you have these old behemoths competing for a
00:27:58.440
shrinking population of students relying on foreign student money to keep them solvent and you know the
00:28:05.300
university of phoenix isn't going to topple that system well yeah that point you made about
00:28:10.040
entrepreneurship i think yeah there's this idea we have in our narrative that we have about ourself
00:28:15.740
in our current age that we're an age of entrepreneurs you should look at all these
00:28:18.220
tech startups but you point out and other economists have shown is that we're actually
00:28:23.180
less entrepreneurial than we were 40 or 50 years ago like less fewer smaller businesses are opening up
00:28:28.900
yes fewer fewer fewer old companies are going out of business fewer new companies are opening up
00:28:36.080
it's harder to keep a new company in business than it used to be
00:28:39.180
and also people are literally just not moving as much as they used to which again is sort of surprising
00:28:45.220
and counterintuitive people say oh you know the reason society is so adrift and atomized now is that
00:28:51.640
everybody's moving around more and more and nobody stays in one place but weirdly americans are more likely to
00:28:57.300
stay in one place than they were 20 or 30 years ago they're less likely to move in search of work
00:29:02.720
they're more likely to end up in the area where they grew up or the area where they moved after college
00:29:08.060
and and that's a big that's a big shift and a sign of sort of again sclerosis people getting locked in
00:29:15.320
place and it and it you know it interacts with government policy too right so you have a large
00:29:20.620
large bureaucracies that are based in states that mean if you're you know if you're whether you're getting
00:29:26.480
welfare somewhere or if you have to pay child support you know you have visitation rights there are all
00:29:31.760
kinds of structural forces that that tend to keep people within state lines in a way that might not
00:29:38.120
have been the case 50 years ago but is that necessarily a bad thing like people settling down
00:29:42.520
or in like you know establishing roots in a community or is that is it or if people are people
00:29:46.600
not moving and they're not doing that i think the problem is they're not doing either right so you
00:29:50.900
have a lot of these sort of you know decayed decayed communities that people that you know don't
00:29:58.540
provide enough work but people aren't leaving them to find new work and that's i think a story of
00:30:03.580
you know in a lot of sort of midwestern former rust belt america you have a lot of towns and situations
00:30:10.440
like that a lot of the zones where the opioid epidemic is worst are like that people instead
00:30:16.180
of moving or getting hooked on drugs so yeah it's not you know it's not necessarily a bad thing to
00:30:22.400
to stay in or come back to your hometown and there are there are ways in which we should probably want
00:30:28.540
more people you know sort of a certain kind of talented american would probably be better for
00:30:34.160
the country if they did move back instead of just clustering in a few elite mega cities but for a lot
00:30:41.760
of the people who are staying they're not staying to put down roots they're just staying and sort of
00:30:45.940
drifting yeah i can see like if you moved a lot there'd be an incentive for you to get involved in
00:30:51.220
your community because you're trying to get something i at least i saw that with my parents you know
00:30:55.460
they moved to a new place and my you know mom was involved in the neighborhood the neighborhood
00:31:00.740
women's group and planning parties and things like that and that's not really happening anymore in
00:31:07.000
the neighborhood that i grew up in and it finally took like the moms who did this stuff 30 years ago
00:31:12.720
to get it going again in my mom's neighborhood so they're planning parties again well not anymore
00:31:16.520
because we got the pandemic going on but it's yeah it seems like this is like a forgotten skill of how
00:31:21.680
like of community building people just again i think it's a sign of decadence like this i don't
00:31:25.920
want to do this anymore it's too much work i don't know how to organize myself or other people
00:31:29.920
yeah and it also reflects changes in family and the economy too right so like the other thing
00:31:35.900
about our economy is it's not just that we you know in order to have these growth rates or running
00:31:41.380
higher deficits we also have more people working than ever before which is a good thing insofar as
00:31:48.920
you know it means that you know women can be professionally fulfilled in a way that they
00:31:53.620
couldn't be in 1945 or 1955 but it also means that families that would like to have one earner
00:32:01.440
and have the other spouse at home can you know feel like they can't afford it and that in turn means that
00:32:07.740
the communities themselves have fewer people in them day to day not again not right now but when the
00:32:13.380
pandemic ends you know if you have an economy built around two earner households there isn't
00:32:18.660
time and space for community building there you know the neighborhoods of 60 years ago where kids
00:32:26.360
played in the streets where that worked because parents were home and so you had a sense that your
00:32:31.400
kids were being supervised by somebody even if they weren't you weren't supervising themselves and all of
00:32:36.720
that goes away in a two earner economy well speaking of family life you also make this point that in a
00:32:42.820
decadent society fewer kids are born what's going on there what's causing the decrease in fertility is
00:32:49.600
it economics is it cultural shifts is it like a combination of all that stuff yeah i mean it has
00:32:54.660
to be all of it together it's a little bit mysterious this is sort of one of the basic you know almost
00:33:00.900
universal facts about rich societies the world over is that they all have too few kids to reproduce and
00:33:07.800
sustain themselves and the u.s was an outlier to this trend for a long time and 20 years ago there
00:33:13.560
was sort of this assumption that you know just like we were more religious than the rest of the
00:33:17.660
developed world we also had bigger families and more kids but more recently and especially since the
00:33:24.360
great recession that's changed and our fertility rates are below replacement too just like europe and
00:33:29.460
east asia and you have places where they're way below replacement like our fertility rate is like
00:33:34.860
1.7 now with two being replacement level places like south korea are down to one so they're literally
00:33:42.460
having half as many kids as they would need to sort of maintain their current population and some of this
00:33:51.060
reflects you know obvious facts like you know declining infant mortality means you you know don't have to
00:33:59.080
have seven kids to have four grow up to adulthood you know we're not an agrarian economy anymore so you
00:34:04.220
don't need five strong sons to work in your fields and women have more opportunities than they did 50
00:34:09.700
years ago so they're less likely to become mothers but it's really unclear why it's settled this low
00:34:16.420
you know especially because people still say that they want more kids than we're actually having
00:34:22.460
that you know men and women both say they you know the average desired fertility desired family size is
00:34:28.840
like two and a half kids and we're ending up with 1.6 or 1.7 kids instead so it has to have something
00:34:34.780
to do with these economic trends where people feel like they have to work harder to stay ahead and the
00:34:40.200
costs of these basic goods for families have gone up education health care housing and so on but you
00:34:47.020
know it also has something to do with culture generally that's something to do with the thing we were
00:34:52.460
talking about beginning that you know rich societies or comfortable societies are less likely to
00:34:57.400
take risks and you know sort of try new things and in this context having a kid or having a large
00:35:04.880
family is in certain ways one of the more challenging and riskier things that you can do
00:35:09.640
and so people do less of it and then something's happened with the internet too right where so far
00:35:15.820
internet dating internet sex pornography all of these things seem to sort of push the sexes away from
00:35:24.480
each other a little bit more so it's not just the number of kids are going down the number of people
00:35:29.620
getting married is going down number of people in relationships goes down and the amount of sex
00:35:34.420
goes down americans are having less sex than they did when i was in college which you know it's hard
00:35:39.860
to believe let me tell you but there it there it is no yeah we had that uh that journalist uh from
00:35:47.400
the atlantic who did that article about the sex recession oh yeah yeah yeah and yeah it was a
00:35:52.640
terrific piece yeah all those factors uh i mean it's just sort of a whole bunch of factors going in
00:35:57.700
on at once to cause less sex in relationship forming going i'm sure well i don't know the pandemic could go
00:36:03.740
either way i think the pandemic i think the pandemic pushes people deeper into decadence i think in this in
00:36:11.160
this case unless you get i think you could see a bounce back where once people sort of post quarantine
00:36:16.800
once they're allowed out of the house and the economy starts recovering that you could have you
00:36:21.440
know more dating marriages and babies then but over the next year or so you know people are nobody's
00:36:28.860
going to be dating right or they're going to be dating virtually um and you've already seen you know
00:36:35.180
porn hub is doing very well right like you know this is this is a this is a this is a better moment
00:36:41.320
probably for porn hub than for baby making even if people are stuck in the house with you know their
00:36:47.240
spouse or significant other they're in a context of you know economic anxiety if they already have kids
00:36:53.540
they're dealing with those kids you know i don't know i mean we're having a baby in a couple weeks
00:36:58.040
ourselves so i sort of these thoughts are these thoughts are in my mind but we yeah we didn't
00:37:05.380
conceive the child in the lockdown and i doubt that we would have so uh i mean what's the future of
00:37:10.880
decadence are we just kind of gonna just kind of hang out here for a while and this sort of blase
00:37:16.260
boring stagnant thing or i mean does it or do we have to like you know pray for an apocalypse like
00:37:22.560
do they all become accelerationist and and want the world to end or can we get our we work our way
00:37:27.900
out of it so i don't think you don't want to pray for an apocalypse right because there's some people
00:37:33.260
on the internet that do that though no i listen i i i i totally understand that impulse you know the
00:37:39.180
desire for excitement desire for drama and but the reality is that most apocalypses probably all
00:37:48.380
apocalypses are worse than decadence and that you know decadence is bad but as long as you're in it
00:37:56.900
there's a chance that you can get out of it without having to endure the collapse of civilization
00:38:01.800
and that should be option a you know before you go all the way to tyler durden and blowing up the
00:38:08.060
credit card companies and you know people pounding mash in the ruins of new york city you might want
00:38:14.280
to try and sort of a you know you might want to try a renaissance without the dark age i guess first
00:38:20.600
but that's you know that's challenging and it's hard to get one and i think what you sort of can
00:38:27.080
hope for again we're sort of living through a moment like this right now is that instead of a
00:38:31.880
big apocalypse coming along and leveling society that a sort of moment of crisis that exposes some
00:38:39.660
of the realities of decadence that are hidden when things are going well you know that exposes sort of
00:38:45.320
the problems in your public health bureaucracy or you know the problems in your government or you
00:38:51.480
know the ways in which your society is sort of overextended and doesn't know how to make things
00:38:56.100
anymore and so on like that something like that can be a spur to change and transformation in a way
00:39:02.940
that doesn't require you know 100 million dead people so that would be the sort of the optimistic
00:39:09.180
take on the era we're living through now is that once we come out of this agony there will be
00:39:15.020
sort of an opportunity to shift things in our politics shift things in our economy to have a
00:39:21.200
little more growth and dynamism to sort of you know maybe people go so deep into the virtual cocoon
00:39:26.520
during the lockdown that they come out and they're ready to do more things in the real world but it's
00:39:32.600
also totally possible right that you know you go through a crisis like this and people come out of
00:39:38.200
it and and they tell each they tell each other now everything's going to be different but in fact
00:39:43.680
you sort of slip back into the way things were before very quickly except your system your government
00:39:49.140
is a little more discredited your you know your local communities are a little less functional and
00:39:54.400
you're just actually a little deeper in decadence than you were before and you know that in the roman
00:39:59.500
empire right like rome had a series of of epidemics pandemics over its hundreds of years of decline
00:40:06.780
that played a big role in the decline and after each one there was presumably opportunities for
00:40:12.440
reinvigoration that you know you've got a diocletian and the constantine sometimes they took them
00:40:17.160
but for the most part they just sort of pushed the empire further along its decadent trajectory
00:40:23.980
and it sounds like if any change is going to happen like a renaissance it'll have to be
00:40:28.300
bottom up like you can't look to the institutions that are decrepit to save yourself save you from decadence
00:40:35.540
well i think for most people listening to this podcast that's absolutely right yeah the the war
00:40:41.460
against decadence starts in your home or business or community right you're you know you you sort of
00:40:48.440
strike a blow against decadence when you start a company or start a family or you know during the
00:40:54.800
pandemic you know and start you know plant a garden in your backyard or figure out how to you know repair
00:41:01.020
things yourselves like you know these that that sort of attitude i think is the appropriate one for
00:41:09.080
the average person maybe especially the average man to take that being said you know if you're in
00:41:15.780
politics right i mean i you know i write a column about politics as my day job so i'm spend a certain
00:41:21.780
amount of time thinking about you know well what should senators be thinking about what should people
00:41:25.760
who work for a president be thinking about you know there there are ways in which you know individual
00:41:32.000
actors can try and redirect a system right you know you you do have these moments in history where
00:41:39.400
you know really talented political figures come along and effectively rebuild or refound a system
00:41:45.760
i don't think you can give up on the idea that some kind of political refounding is possible
00:41:52.200
and that that could then have you know some kind of virtuous interaction with the efforts that people
00:41:58.740
are making from the bottom up you know so if you get the right statesman you could get policies that
00:42:04.040
make the life of the entrepreneur or the father easier than it is under our current situation i like
00:42:10.520
that idea of individuals pushing back against decadence reminded me of that flannery o'connor quote
00:42:15.140
push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you but in this case you have to push harder
00:42:20.540
right because the thing about decadence is it's this it's this sort of soft pillow like that's i mean
00:42:26.920
that's and that's sort of the challenge in a way is that is that it's not you know it's it's not
00:42:33.120
like i think about this in in the context of religion right because i'm i'm a practicing catholic of some
00:42:39.060
kind and you know you have a lot of my sort of fellow believers who will say well you know as america
00:42:46.080
becomes christian less christian you know we're going to get to a point where society is so
00:42:50.480
anti-christian that you'll have a you know a landscape of persecution or something and i don't
00:42:56.740
think that's actually the challenge i think the challenge for religious people which i think applies
00:43:02.000
beyond religion is that society is not going to persecute you they're just going to sort of you
00:43:07.040
know ignore you and encourage you to you know not not get up and go to church on sunday morning
00:43:12.680
because it's much easier to sit around and see what's on netflix and that applies i think that
00:43:18.120
applies across the board i think you know there's there's nobody you know maybe someone in your you
00:43:22.660
know zoning committee or someone in city hall is going to keep you from building an addition to your
00:43:27.440
house yeah i mean obviously there's like bureaucratic red tape here and there but nobody's preventing you
00:43:32.060
from starting a family nobody's forcing you um not to get married it's just there's a lot of other
00:43:37.560
other entertaining stuff you could be doing and it's easy to just you know marijuana is legal now
00:43:42.500
right you know you can just sort of drift it's soft so you have to push harder push harder i like that
00:43:48.220
well ross this has been a great conversation there's some place people can go to learn more
00:43:51.080
about the book and your work yes i mean you know obviously copies are available at amazon.com
00:43:57.100
and but i should also say since we're in this this pandemic moment that if you have a local bookstore
00:44:02.460
that is you know selling books delivering books having you pick up books to try and you know keep
00:44:08.440
making some money in this context i would obviously urge you to buy the book there and support your
00:44:13.880
local businesses and then you know i write a column twice a week for the new york times so you can
00:44:18.800
find me there and on twitter at douthit nyt all right ross douthit thanks so much time it's been a
00:44:24.200
pleasure absolutely thanks so much for having me on my guest today was ross douthit he is the author
00:44:29.120
of the book the decadent society it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere also check out
00:44:33.540
our show notes at aom.is slash decadence where you can find links to resources where you delve deeper
00:44:37.800
into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast check out our website at
00:44:49.580
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00:44:53.220
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