The Art of Manliness - #604： The Boring Decadence of Modern Society

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast on the surface

00:00:11.760 can feel like we've made a lot of technological economic and cultural progress during the past

00:00:15.840 30 years but if you look closer you start to notice that in a lot of ways we've been running

00:00:19.700 on repeat for several decades now my guest today argues that this is what typically happens to rich

00:00:24.020 and powerful societies a period of growth and dynamism such as we experienced after world war

00:00:28.420 two is followed by a period of stagnation and malaise same as ross douthit and his latest book

00:00:32.980 is the decadent society how we became the victims of our own success we begin a conversation discussing

00:00:38.040 ross's idea of decadence and how it's particularly marked by the quality of boredom we then explore

00:00:42.400 how decadence manifests itself in different areas of our society ross and i discuss how even though

00:00:46.880 the realms of economy and technology might seem vibrant or at least they did before the pandemic

00:00:51.280 struck americans are actually starting fewer businesses moving less for work and making

00:00:55.340 fewer life-altering innovations than in times past we then discuss the fact that clothing styles

00:00:59.820 have been changed all that much from the 1990s the repercussions of couples having fewer children

00:01:03.920 and the calcification of our political institutions we enter conversation with how each of us as

00:01:08.380 individuals can fight back against decadence after the show's over check out our show notes at

00:01:12.760 aom.is decadence ross joins me now via clearcast.io

00:01:17.080 all right ross douthit welcome to the show thanks for having me it's good to be here so you got a new

00:01:31.600 book out the decadent society how we became the victims of our own success so let's start off with

00:01:36.420 this definitions what do you mean by decadence because i think most people associate that with

00:01:40.180 chocolate or sex right and you know there's some chocolate and sex in the book but mostly i'm

00:01:46.280 arguing that we should understand decadence to mean stagnation drift repetition and boredom at a really

00:01:55.080 high level of wealth and civilizational development so basically once a society hits a certain point of

00:02:03.120 you know for want of a better word success and its growth rates slow down it stops thinking about the

00:02:09.840 future its political arguments go in circles its culture starts to repeat itself and i think

00:02:15.360 boredom is kind of the key thing like so if you think about about sex the decadence the decadence of 0.63

00:02:22.200 the real real decadence with sex is like the most boring orgy in the world basically oh so before we

00:02:29.580 get to your case that our current culture is a decadent one let's take a look at history are there any 0.70

00:02:33.800 other examples from previous societies or civilizations where you saw that they arrived at decadence the way

00:02:39.420 you define it yeah i mean i think decadence is a pretty normal historical phenomenon and just about

00:02:46.380 every society that has any kind of success goes through decadent phases or enters decadent periods

00:02:51.480 right so the you know the obvious example is if you start the clock on the roman empire around the time

00:02:58.640 that you know the famous orgies are happening right in nero's rome and then you run forward to the actual

00:03:04.640 fall of rome or the fall of the western roman empire that's about 400 years and there are you

00:03:10.340 know moments of vigor and creativity in that span but basically you could say that the roman empire was

00:03:15.620 in various ways decadent for centuries before it fell apart or to pick examples from the second

00:03:21.400 millennium you know the ottoman empire for about 150 years in the time when it got called the sick man of

00:03:27.580 europe was pretty obviously decadent the chinese empire in the hundred years before you know as european 0.85

00:03:33.580 powers gradually picked away at it so those are sort of big famous examples but really any rich society

00:03:41.280 is going to have decadent phases and periods when it sort of gets stuck and can't figure out how to

00:03:46.780 advance so it's a very normal thing for for successful societies to enter into and why is that is it because

00:03:53.940 once you reach a level of success you're just starting to play you're playing not to lose you're just

00:03:58.120 trying to keep what you got so you're not taking in risk to make advances yeah it's some of that some

00:04:03.740 of it is that you know there are sort of limits to human creativity in a particular cultural context

00:04:09.560 and so it makes sense that after you've you know i mean to take the case of the united states after

00:04:15.600 you've you know invented the great american novel and invented the movie industry and then revolutionized

00:04:21.400 the movie industry a few more times you might start to run out of ideas and just start making the

00:04:26.000 same star wars movies over and over again right and in the same way in politics right so if you build

00:04:31.660 up a really successful constitutional order or a really successful system of government over time

00:04:37.900 the system sort of gets big and heavy and locked in and it's too sort of too big to fail in the

00:04:44.760 language of the last financial crisis it gets harder and harder to reform it so even if you want to change

00:04:49.840 and adapt the system to new realities it gets harder and harder to do that and i think you know that's what

00:04:54.780 you see in washington dc right now but i think your original point is right too that you know once

00:05:00.440 once a society is really successful it you know it runs out of enemies to challenge it it runs out of

00:05:07.620 you know fears to motivate it and it gets older right and this is a big thing that's happened in the

00:05:12.800 western world we've we've had we have fewer kids society's gotten older and being rich and old is a good

00:05:18.940 recipe for decadence so i've seen you start to flesh out these ideas uh in your articles and then

00:05:24.660 new york times for about a year or so but when did you start noticing that you know america and

00:05:30.840 western society has probably entered into a decadent phase so in a certain way i've been working on this

00:05:37.100 book for like six or seven years i guess and i got sort of sidetracked by other projects and personal

00:05:43.460 stuff but so i really started working on it after the 2012 election which is a long time ago now and

00:05:50.620 part of the motivation was that we had just lived through this massive financial crisis where in the

00:05:56.600 aftermath everyone in my profession was saying well you know this changes everything you know it's it's

00:06:02.920 gonna you know it's gonna really gonna radically transform our politics in all these kind of ways

00:06:07.840 and instead we ended up in 2012 with you know barack obama versus mit romney in what was in certain

00:06:14.400 ways the most boring and dispiriting imaginable presidential election and this you know i had

00:06:21.240 come of age as a journalist and writer after 9-11 so i had gone through this cycle once before where

00:06:27.440 you know some big event happens and people say well you know this is the moment when our decadence ends

00:06:33.660 and vigor is restored and new things happen and then politics fell quickly back into the same

00:06:40.220 the same patterns as before so having gone through that twice i felt like there was sort of a lesson

00:06:46.220 there which is that even big events even financial crises and massive terrorist attacks don't necessarily

00:06:53.120 change the trajectory of a wealthy stable somewhat stagnant society that much now obviously when i

00:06:59.740 you know was planning to publish the book i wasn't anticipating that we would get yet another immense

00:07:05.280 world-altering disaster happening while i was actually out promoting the book so it remains to

00:07:11.480 be seen whether the pandemic will have effects that 9-11 and the financial crisis didn't have it's

00:07:17.940 certainly possible that it could be a bigger jolt and an actual redirection but so far i think western

00:07:23.980 civilization has come through the 30 years since the cold war ended without having its stagnation

00:07:30.720 altered that much even by dramatic seeming events well let's dig into this these the different types

00:07:36.260 of stagnation that you highlight in your book and the first one is economic stagnation and i've seen

00:07:41.440 this argument put out by tyler cowen the economist you know it may look like we're making a lot of

00:07:47.040 progress economically technological innovation but really not i mean so what is the evidence that

00:07:54.340 economists point to that say really the world has been economically stagnant for maybe 40 50 years

00:08:00.120 so first there's just a sort of deceleration in growth right so if you go back to the late 1960s

00:08:07.320 early 70s which is when i sort of start my story you have a period in the post-war era of really rapid

00:08:14.880 dramatic economic growth and then you have the stagflation of the 1970s and you have sort of

00:08:19.860 temporary recoveries of growth under ronald reagan and bill clinton but each time when the next recession

00:08:25.800 comes along it sort of wipes out a lot of those gains so basically over the last couple generations

00:08:31.340 we've settled into a normal where four or five percent growth is incredibly rare and 1.5 to 2 percent

00:08:38.280 growth is the best that we're going to get seemingly and at the same over the same period you've also had

00:08:45.920 fiscal policy change dramatically so you know western governments and especially the united states now run

00:08:52.860 immense peacetime deficits in a way that we didn't have to 50 or 60 or 70 years ago so basically you

00:08:59.720 have an economy where we are spending more public money in order to sort of goose extremely low great

00:09:07.140 growth rates as opposed to an earlier era when you you know when the government didn't have to do that

00:09:12.600 kind of deficit spending work and you've got four or five percent growth without it so it's important

00:09:18.040 to stress this is not the end of growth it doesn't mean the progress has ceased entirely people still

00:09:23.580 get richer societies are still getting richer but they're just doing so at a very slow pace and at a

00:09:29.660 pace where we are doing this sort of weird thing where we take our own surplus and pay ourselves extra

00:09:35.380 money to feel to feel like we're growing more than we actually are and but some people you know this

00:09:41.260 has kind of come up in the past 10 years some people are noticing like they're not they're not experiencing

00:09:46.200 that growth economically you know the people talk about like my dad did better than me financially

00:09:52.180 working a factory job not going to college and then here i am laden with thousands of dollars of

00:09:57.580 student debt working not a great job right now this and this is something that economists as they do are

00:10:03.960 constantly arguing about right like like how much better off is you know the average american worker

00:10:09.920 today versus 40 or 50 years ago and there are sort of two competing theories one competing one

00:10:15.960 theory says look growth has slowed down but there has been growth goods and services have gotten a lot

00:10:21.580 cheaper you know your tvs and and iphones are you know amazing in a way that your dad working the

00:10:27.780 factory job couldn't have imagined the counter argument is that a few really big ticket things have not

00:10:33.540 necessarily gotten cheaper it's not clear that real estate has gotten cheaper you know college and a

00:10:39.100 college education has become more and more important and that hasn't gotten cheaper and health care

00:10:43.440 hasn't gotten cheaper you've had a lot of health care cost inflation so there's sort of this these

00:10:48.000 you know it basically depends on how you weight different things if you say the most important thing

00:10:53.180 is you know sort of the cost of consumer goods and what's available to you there then people are

00:10:59.360 definitely better off but if you say the most important thing is you know a man's ability to support his

00:11:04.940 family on a single income and live in a middle-class house then things are a lot more ambiguous and it's

00:11:10.060 less clear that people are better off to that that latter point i just saw a meme going around as a

00:11:15.720 picture of like an al bundy's house he had this nice two-story house and we're like a guy in 1987

00:11:21.380 who worked as a shoe salesman was able to live in a nice house like this again it was television

00:11:26.240 but i think it kind of it's trying to make that point you know my my grandparents lived in santa

00:11:32.980 monica california so my dad grew up there in the 50s and they had a one-story sort of mission style

00:11:40.260 california house you know probably three bedrooms nice backyard with an orange tree and you know my

00:11:47.440 grandfather was a you know god rest him a not very successful salesman right he was he wasn't al bundy

00:11:54.760 but he wasn't like he wasn't not al bundy right and my grandmother didn't work and they were able to

00:12:01.620 afford that house in basically an earthly paradise right and flash forward 70 years their house has

00:12:08.360 been torn down after they passed away the houses there are now two stories they're too big for their

00:12:13.840 lots they all cost two million dollars and that's a change right and you know and you can still get

00:12:20.240 like the the salesman might still be able to get a version of that house maybe more cheaply made

00:12:27.040 out in an excerpt somewhere in a hotter part of california that fewer people want to live in

00:12:31.840 but still the yeah the shift the shift from my grandfather's era to today in that sense is is real

00:12:39.140 now it is also true that there are fewer men who are shoe salesmen today and more men who are white

00:12:44.280 collar workers right so there is a smaller population of would-be al bundys but yeah but there's there's 1.00

00:12:51.740 definitely been a shift i mean it's the it's the simpsons phenomenon too right like you know the the

00:12:57.320 the simpsons home is sort of this paradigm of middle-class life and homer simpson is nobody's

00:13:03.540 idea of you know an a student or uber meritocrat and it's that springfield maybe it still existed in

00:13:12.080 the 80s it doesn't exist today well this also with this point of stagnation you make the point that

00:13:17.560 technology has stagnated which is interesting because most people think well no in the past

00:13:21.580 20 years things have sped up we got the internet we got smartphones we've got slack tiktok whatever

00:13:26.880 so what's the the case that we we're actually not innovating as much as we once did well it's similar

00:13:32.840 to the to the argument about growth right that there is clear innovation in a few you know really

00:13:39.620 significant areas right digital technology and communications technology have changed immensely

00:13:45.080 over the last 30 or 40 years silicon valley barely existed a couple generations ago now it's the

00:13:51.160 center of the global economy every time you you know take out your iphone you're experiencing an

00:13:55.940 amazing technological revolution but that revolution takes you know is most important for communication

00:14:03.180 entertainment leisure you know it's an it's an economy of convenience and you haven't had the same

00:14:09.960 kind of changes in other areas of the economy relative to what people expected you know if you go back

00:14:15.140 to 1950s science fiction you know people are imagining that what has what happened what did

00:14:20.560 happen with the computer right that huge computers get shrunk down and stuck in your pocket would happen

00:14:25.060 with like atomic energy so everyone would drive around a you know a clean safe atomic powered automobile

00:14:30.860 in the year 2020 and things like that and that hasn't happened you know we do have you know we have

00:14:37.320 hybrids we're finally getting electric cars but it's taken a very long time energy costs haven't been

00:14:43.000 revolutionized the way people expected transportation hasn't been revolutionized things like the self

00:14:48.100 driving car kept get pushed further and further out and you know the same goes with health and life

00:14:53.600 expectancy right you've made some sort of slow grinding progress against cancer in the last 30 years

00:14:59.820 but the expectations of the era when you know penicillin was being invented was that you were just going

00:15:05.420 to have sort of a cascade of cures that you know first we cure polio and then we'll cure cancer and then

00:15:10.680 we'll cure alzheimer's and dementia and that hasn't happened either so it's been the growth we've had

00:15:16.360 has just been very monodimensional very very tech heavy and it's been hard for tech to transform other

00:15:24.100 sectors you know like when tech money leaves tech and tries to transform you know uh the how we give

00:15:32.780 blood how we you know how we take blood in pharmacies right you get theranos you get these companies that

00:15:38.000 spend a ton of money and end up being being frauds or you get we work you know we're revolutionizing

00:15:44.220 workspace and then it turns out the company isn't worth nearly what anyone expected so there's just

00:15:49.080 been a challenge of taking the one area where we've had major progress and transforming the rest of

00:15:55.280 society and also you make the point too and i've seen this case made as well is that the innovations

00:16:00.420 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

00:16:05.380 rather have indoor plumbing and electricity and i could do without my smartphone like i could get

00:16:12.400 by and life would be or i'd like i'd rather have antibiotics than a smartphone so like the stuff

00:16:17.620 we've the innovations we made they're like they're definitely they're not big i mean they're not it's

00:16:21.320 like it doesn't move the needle too much when in the grand scheme of things right i mean there's a

00:16:26.240 sense in which and this is you know cowan's point tyler cowan who you mentioned earlier that

00:16:30.880 there was a range of inventions that in hindsight looked like kind of low-hanging fruit where you

00:16:37.320 know once you could once you figured out a few things about electricity or biology you know there

00:16:43.740 were a bunch of really big transformative things that you could do really quickly basically in a 100

00:16:48.560 to 150 year period and now we're in a period where you know there's still a lot of impressive

00:16:53.880 cutting-edge research going on and at some point it may cash out in revolutions um but for now the

00:17:02.260 research is more impressive than the results i guess is one way to look at it right you had this

00:17:06.900 quote from a guy named mark stein talking about imagining a man in the late 19th century and going

00:17:12.780 to the 1950s and coming to our age this reminder have you been to the wheel the carousel of progress at

00:17:18.060 disney world yes a long time ago but yeah yeah that reminded me of that because okay for those who

00:17:23.720 don't know the carousel of progress is this little ride you get in with animatronics and there's like

00:17:27.500 this dad who starts out in the 1900s and he takes you through the the advancements in technology and

00:17:33.660 you start out in 1900s you get the 1920s and there's like electricity and indoor plumbing then they get

00:17:38.640 the 1940s more advances and then you get the 21st century which was made in 1993 so all the characters

00:17:46.300 are like wearing neon windsuits and and it's still like that and i remember you get to the 21st century

00:17:52.680 and you're just completely underwhelmed it's like you can talk to the oven which we i guess we have

00:17:58.200 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

00:18:04.100 not looking forward to the 21st century if that's what it is i'm looking i'm looking online right so

00:18:08.920 they have a kid wearing a a sort of oculus rift style headset right yeah grandma has two in the 20 but

00:18:16.580 but but the neon the clothes too are this is one of the smaller points i make in the book and i'm

00:18:22.440 stealing it from a journalist named kurt anderson but you know he makes the point that if you watch

00:18:27.020 movies from or just look at pictures from any decade in the 21st century you in the 20th century

00:18:34.160 excuse me you get this really clear distinction decade to decade in fashions and styles and what

00:18:40.400 people are wearing you know nobody mistakes the 1930s for the mad men era no one mistakes the mad men

00:18:45.600 era definitely for the 1970s and then somewhere around the 1990s things stop changing that much

00:18:53.380 and so if you turn on friends and fraser now you know the hairstyles are a little different some of

00:18:57.460 the clothes are a little baggier but there isn't you know there hasn't been that kind of fashion

00:19:02.420 turnover either so you know the the sort of jetson futuristic wardrobes that you know the jumpsuits

00:19:08.560 of star trek and so on none of that has actually happened which might you know might be a good thing i

00:19:13.180 don't want to wear the star trek jumpsuit but it does suggest too that there's been this that the

00:19:18.560 changes in fashion reflect changes in technology and we haven't had either of those changes yeah i've

00:19:24.320 noticed that too like i look at high school kids and they're wearing the same thing that i wore in

00:19:29.260 high school totally 20 years ago t-shirt jeans pair of converse that's it like that's what that was my

00:19:36.080 uniform and i see kids still wearing that yeah and if you walk around a college campus you know all the

00:19:40.680 guys have the if they're pretentious they have the same you know black peacoat that i owned when i was

00:19:45.960 you know young and pretending to be an adult and it's not you know it's not ugly but it's nothing

00:19:51.600 like the the change from the 50s to the 70s say and then yeah this is this idea of you know repetition

00:19:57.040 and culture as well i mean something you see too with with style and then also other parts of culture is

00:20:02.900 that we keep going back into the past for our inspiration so like with style you know you see these

00:20:10.060 decades of research over 90s are back now i guess so i think windsuits in some cases are back that

00:20:14.860 whole seinfeld norm court thing kind of had a thing but like where there's the rate the rachel haircut 1.00

00:20:20.900 came back the rachel haircut came back i'm sure like luke perry sideburns are going to come back

00:20:25.980 eventually but you also see this like with films and art and music nothing i mean if you listen to a

00:20:32.040 song today that was made you know today compared to 20 years ago not that much of a difference

00:20:36.920 yeah i mean i think the last big musical innovation was the rise of rap and hip-hop which

00:20:43.820 still gets cast by some you know some people as like this you know it's the new thing that the

00:20:49.180 youth are into but rap and hip-hop have been around i mean what are we now 2020 so for 35 40 years

00:20:57.080 and there is you know i i think you can make the argument that basically we're all still living

00:21:02.940 inside baby boomer pop culture and that almost everything that matters in our pop culture was

00:21:10.200 sort of invented somewhere between 1930 and 1970 or 1975 with the with the exception of the harry potter

00:21:17.520 stories right that's that's the one sort of millennial era sort of pop culture juggernaut but star wars

00:21:25.080 star trek the entire comic book universe if you go into a mall at christmas time except for mariah

00:21:30.300 carry you know 80 percent of the christmas carols will be from that you know period from world war

00:21:35.080 ii through the 1970s and you know part of that just reflects the fact that that was a really dynamic

00:21:40.280 and creative era in american history and it's not you know it's not entirely a bad thing to have that

00:21:47.240 kind of stuff to rework and play with and i you know i enjoy the marvel movies in their way but it is

00:21:53.340 i think a sign of a certain kind of stuckness and repetition that did not characterize america in

00:22:01.300 1960 1965 or so we're gonna take a quick break for your words from our sponsors and now back to the

00:22:09.320 show yeah with movies yeah you talk about we're reboot like star wars is still going on even though

00:22:14.640 it was you know the first one came out in the late 70s the marvel movies that's pretty much it

00:22:19.180 and then even when they come out the new movie it's typically a reboot of a franchise that existed

00:22:24.260 for 30 years yeah and this is and this is actually this has happened especially in the last 20 years so

00:22:31.640 if you go back and look at the budget the box office top 10 from you know then the mid 1990s

00:22:38.960 you would have one or two sequels but it was very normal to have original movie stories that nobody had

00:22:46.160 ever seen before right that were you know no stories completely original everybody's reworking

00:22:50.940 and remaking things you know shakespeare didn't come up with all his own stories but there's a

00:22:56.980 difference between you know mel gibson coming up with braveheart out of the true history of william

00:23:03.680 wallace but you know making a movie that nobody was making in the early 1990s versus the 17th film

00:23:11.380 in the marvel extended universe right and again i think this goes back to this idea of decadence

00:23:16.380 being like you're not you're playing not to lose it's like the movie studios know that a marvel movie

00:23:22.060 will do really well so that's what they're going to put out and they're not going to take a risk on

00:23:26.500 an eternal sunshine on the spotless mind right and when they do take risks people get you know punished

00:23:34.820 or find that they don't have the capacities that you need so this is this is my theory of star wars right

00:23:40.360 that the original star wars movies are great interesting creative pastiches of old hollywood

00:23:46.640 you know adventure movies and akira kurosawa and so on and then lucas wanted in the prequels to do

00:23:53.860 something sort of deeper and more sweeping and more tragic and really interesting right so he had high

00:24:00.440 ambitions he just didn't have the capabilities and the capacities to actually do that and so the results

00:24:06.860 were kind of laughable and so then thereafter once the movies are turned over to disney you get the

00:24:11.980 retreat to safety the playing not to lose where it's like well you know we tried doing a movie

00:24:16.720 of doing movies about galactic politics with like senate speeches and so on and nobody wants to do that

00:24:22.560 again so we're just going to literally make the original trilogy over again with the same beats and

00:24:28.560 you know the genders of some characters switched and that's how you get the jj abrams star wars movies

00:24:34.640 all right so we've talked about stagnation with the economy with culture but another area where you

00:24:40.720 you highlight where decadence can take root and stagnate is in our institutions so talking about

00:24:46.440 political institutions you can even see corporate corporate institutions what are some examples of

00:24:51.160 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 0.94

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 0.50

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 0.99

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 1.00

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 0.50

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 1.00

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

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The Art of Manliness - April 22, 2020

#604： The Boring Decadence of Modern Society

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