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00:00:13.320hey everybody how's it going thanks for joining me this afternoon i've got a great stream with a
00:00:31.340great guest that i think you're really going to enjoy so of course the affordability debate
00:00:37.240continues to rage the burrito gate has exploded and people have drawn lines across the conservative
00:00:43.300commentariat? Are you pro-affordable burrito or are young people entitled? Of course, this is the
00:00:48.900dumbest aspect of this debate. This is a far more serious and consequential discussion. And somebody0.99
00:00:54.620who has done a lot about this has even written a book about leaving a legacy that you should really
00:00:59.240just throw at anybody who tells you about the affordability crisis. It's Johan Kurtz, and I
00:01:04.180brought him on to discuss it today. Johan, thank you so much for coming on, man. Thanks, Aaron.
00:01:32.900Now, when we originally were discussing this, it was about housing prominently. Other things, of course, health care, cost of child care, all these other things. But that was the more serious issue. Now, Andrew Colvitt of the TPUSA, you know, he said, oh, one of my guys, one of my staffers says a radio shouldn't cost $20.
00:01:51.540Now, obviously, he was just making an offhand comment there.
00:01:54.580That was not some serious policy discussion.
00:01:56.740He was not really trying to win the debate with that.
00:01:58.740He's simply saying, look, here's what young people are noticing around me.
00:02:01.800And I think since I'm a guy who's plugged into what young people are struggling with, we should listen to this issue.
00:02:09.160And, of course, everybody ran with us and said, oh, spoiled kids with their burritos.
00:02:13.300And suddenly we just had basically the millennials swap in the burrito for what the boomers used to say about millennials when it came to avocado toast.
00:02:20.920that it's just about them spending too much money on fast food and if they would just you know go to
00:02:25.540a cheap grocery store and cook their own meals then they too could have the american or in your
00:02:30.220case english dream and therefore you don't need to worry about this this is a false crisis these0.73
00:02:35.040people are making up they're just just too entitled to be ridiculous but you wrote a piece
00:02:39.540on this that i thought was very insightful it's echoed a lot of things that i've talked about but
00:02:44.420put it down in a much more detailed and i think interesting way and what you talk about in that
00:02:48.960article is that it's not just about the fiscal capital that young people are missing out on.
00:02:53.680It's the social capital. And the fact that every dollar you spend or every dollar you make doesn't
00:02:59.500have to just go to the usual things that a young person would invest in. It also has to pay for
00:03:04.980all of this social capital that is broken down, that's no longer available to young men and young
00:03:10.160women when they're starting a family. So I want to get to the social capital part. But before we do,
00:03:16.600it's probably on us for at least five minutes to discuss the financial part, because this is so
00:03:22.000often dismissed by, I think, a lot of the conservative commentariats. So can you just
00:03:28.780lay out in raw terms, why the idea that the cost of living is just not a huge issue and is not
00:03:35.660impacting family formation, why that might be false in some way?
00:03:40.320Yes, well, it's sort of important to disaggregate the basket of figures that
00:03:46.180get lumped in, which, taken in aggregate, paint a general picture that can be shown
00:03:51.460to be rosier than I think the reality is.
00:03:54.780So if you look at, for example, how the price of goods has changed over the past 20, 30
00:03:59.840years, overall, real earnings are up for young people over the last few decades, which
00:04:08.180would imply that they are richer in inflation-adjusted terms than the generations who came before
00:05:04.580and suddenly you find it's rent it's the cost of child care it's the cost of education
00:05:12.440health insurance and you know buying homes the the share of of millennials who own homes in
00:05:22.060their 30s is significantly below that of generation x which is in turn below that of the boomers which
00:05:27.880is in turn lower than that of the silent generation so the things which are really
00:05:33.220important to the transition through a kind of really stable uh middle-class existence of the
00:05:40.340kind that has always implicitly underpinned the american dream and i will say my mother's family
00:05:45.700are all american so i have a bit of a dog in this fight uh english english though my accent is um
00:05:51.780you know uh graduating from a good education getting a stable career finding a good spouse
00:06:00.020buying a nice home and having children. Anchoring the debate on the price of a
00:06:06.100burrito, it's an interesting flashpoint, but I do think that these deeper issues risk getting lost
00:06:12.660in the discussion. Well, and I think the point is for them to get lost. I think that that's
00:06:19.020intentional. I'm trying to remember, everything has a law attached to it, but there's some law
00:06:25.180of statistics or engineering where whenever you choose a criteria to measure things by
00:06:31.900it suddenly becomes a bad criteria because you change everything about what you're doing in
00:06:37.580order to produce that one number that selected gauge by which you're looking at uh the metric
00:06:44.460there and so what happens is when we want to make things look good we want to make the economy look
00:06:50.020good we play this shell game with the statistics in order to emphasize the parts that's why the
00:06:56.380biden administration and frankly the administration followed suit because they know it would be bad
00:07:01.480for their numbers to to not continue it you know adjusted the way that we judge whether we're in a
00:07:05.900recession uh so that we could afford we could avoid saying that we were in a recession by
00:07:11.320adjusting how we count poor people how we count uh you know housing how we count these different
00:07:16.020things we can bury the truth inside statistics i mean you look at the crime rate in the united
00:07:20.720states and at some level it's gone down that's true but in other ways major cities just stopped
00:07:26.080counting a lot of the crime so they could drive their statistics down is it really down or is it
00:07:31.280just that they stopped counting it and so we can see you know obviously uh you know people on on
00:07:37.200this channel might be familiar with thomas carlisle and his you know uh condition of england
00:07:42.060question. He berated modernity for leaning hard into statistics, looking at earnings,
00:07:50.000these kind of things, rather than actually being on the ground and looking what it's like to
00:07:54.420actually live as a working Englishman. He said you couldn't have a grasp of the condition of
00:07:59.480England through these raw numbers and statistics. You had to actually interact with the people.
00:08:04.460And it seems like almost all of these arguments come down to people refusing to look at the actual
00:08:10.280conditions of young people in america or in england and say ultimately well you know i have
00:08:15.800the statistic i see that an aggregate these uh goods are cheaper therefore your life is cheaper
00:08:22.080altogether but as you point out you know it is the things like health care is the things like
00:08:25.780child care is the things like education and it's the things like housing uh fuel you know these
00:08:30.720are the things that are everyday life that you really need don't get me wrong i like a cheaper
00:08:35.220computer i like a cheaper television but that's not going to help you have children that's not
00:08:39.660going to help you provide for a wife that's not going to help you build a family in a future
00:08:44.480you're not going to you know bequeath to your children uh your you know a pile of cheap uh
00:08:50.240flat screen television that that's not leaving a legacy there and so these are really terrible
00:08:55.920markers for the underlying health of the entire project and this is something that i think is so
00:09:03.000critical for conservatives to grasp because look even if you're you just for some reason don't care
00:09:08.720about, you know, young men or, you know, young women or families or anything, if you're just a
00:09:13.460pure Machiavellian caring about conservative politics, well, the people who vote conservative
00:09:18.260are people who have families, who have something to protect, something to conserve. That's, you
00:09:23.840know, you look at female voting and the magic wand is marriage. Single women and married women1.00
00:09:29.580vote radically different. That one, that one, you know, that one factor radically changes how they1.00
00:09:37.440behave and so this would be critical to that but for some reason there seems to be a perverse joy
00:09:43.280in some of the kind of elder millennial gen x commentators in almost spitting on or mocking
00:09:50.700young men for wanting to have a better life or saying hey we need help uh getting to where we
00:09:58.220need to be we want to be fathers we want to be families family men it seems like these guys
00:10:02.960take more joy in calling these guys incels than they do in reaching down and helping out the next
00:10:10.160generation. And in many ways, a Gen X or millennial conservative commentator sounds exactly like a
00:10:18.580feminist. Okay, you there incel guy in your mom's basement on the internet, why don't you get out1.00
00:10:24.660there and talk to a woman or something, be a man. Why do you think there is this obsession in this
00:10:31.140almost intergenerational conflict why is it so important for a certain percentage of these guys
00:10:36.940to crap on young men who are simply saying look you guys spent your you know built entire media
00:10:42.620platforms on talking about woke and how unfair it was to men and all the you know different0.98
00:10:47.400opportunities that were robbed from especially young white men you built careers on this but
00:10:51.780then when they say okay and now we need you to fix it it's time to mock us and you know throw us on
00:10:56.280Well, you know, I don't necessarily know all the figures well enough to provide a psychological assessment, but one thing, you know, perhaps one dimension we could introduce to this that does add useful nuance is that even within 10 years, you know, some of these guys are a bit older, conditions on the ground have meaningfully changed.
00:11:18.300and they've changed in ways which mean that it may have once been an option to buy less expensive
00:11:25.900options and it no longer is for reasons relating to to put it generously to use the scientific term
00:11:33.120social capital um you know as you unpack that you you quite quickly move into uh into into
00:11:39.180territory you need to be a little bit careful about navigating but um but i mean maybe to give
00:11:44.560one example. In London, where I'm from, the classic recommendation from middle-class parents
00:11:53.600is you don't need an expensive home. You should just get a starter home in somewhere like
00:11:59.740Kentish Town. Now, none of your American listeners will know where Kentish Town is, but
00:12:03.500it's always been a kind of nice, but not particularly nice, accessible, affordable
00:12:13.060um sort of first place to get a home leans young now if you walk down kentish town high street
00:12:21.000it is full of unsavory characters uh doing uh substances that are not good for them and walking
00:12:29.460around like zombies it is it is meaningfully different like you actually don't want to live
00:12:34.120there and what is certain is that you don't want to raise young children there and leave your wife
00:12:38.760walking them home late at night by herself. And that is, you know, perhaps it's unwise to use an
00:12:43.720English example. There are many examples I could call on from the U.S., but that has kind of
00:12:48.960happened across the board. Material conditions have changed, which means that it is no longer
00:12:55.080often wise to opt for the public school. There is actually a good reason to choose the private
00:12:59.500school. You know, if you go back 50 years and you look at the average public school, what you find
00:13:05.920is that 85% of the families who attend that public school, it's a working class thing,
00:13:11.400are intact families. There's a father and a mother in the home. They're raising them,
00:13:15.240if not according to devout Christian principles, in an implicitly Christian context. And you can
00:13:21.240have certain social expectations about what they will teach your children if you're over at their
00:13:25.540house. Now that intact family rate has totally collapsed. And the only place where it can be
00:13:32.720predicted and relied upon as a kind of norm, typically are in a harder to access spaces,
00:13:39.620charter schools, public schools, classical Christian education, homeschooling, you have
00:13:44.320to take more radical decisions. And really, in every facet of life, this thing where the easy,
00:13:50.960cheap public option, it turns out that it's not intrinsic to that thing, that it is good.
00:13:57.440Those things are good because they were embedded in a good culture, populated by good people.
00:14:02.720who sort of shared a vision and understanding and moral sense of life that you shared and thus
00:14:09.620you could you know you could slum it a little bit you could you know you don't have to be0.55
00:14:13.560precious you could do the you know more working class down with the mobile thing while you're in
00:14:17.140your 20s and people did that and they're able to look back on it and romanticize it because
00:14:22.600it's kind of like a nostalgic period of their life you know a bit like colleges for all of us
00:14:27.440you know we kind of remember the funny sacrifices and the you know undignified conditions that we
00:14:32.160lived in for a few years and it's a kind of like nice counterpoint to how far we've come
00:14:36.000and now when we hear you know i suppose when these older figures hear young men being like
00:14:40.920this is intolerable i can't live like this they think like well i live like it what's the problem
00:14:45.500let's you know let's put them in their place but the the lived reality as you were saying kind of
00:14:50.880good heart's law seeing like a state the lived reality is a lot of these places that were once
00:14:58.080maintained by social capital, which maybe we can define later, have actually broken down
00:15:04.300and are quite sketchy and are quite dangerous and are quite anti-family and really are not
00:15:10.220places that you would want to build a meaningful life in.
00:15:16.380It's the Family and Friends event at Shoppers Drug Mart. Get 20% off almost all regular
00:15:21.780priced merchandise. Two days only, Tuesday, September 1st and Wednesday, September 2nd.
00:15:26.880Open your PC Optimum app to get your coupon.
00:15:32.960Yeah, that's so critically important because, as you say, those examples exist in the UK, but they're also everywhere in the United States.
00:15:40.460And this is one of the early videos I made on the show was actually the Ben Shapiro paradox, which was talking about how while Ben Shapiro will espouse all these family values, the importance of family, these kind of things.
00:15:55.000everything about his economic formula is basically designed to destroy exactly that kind of life oh
00:16:02.380well you should just pick up and go wherever a job is you should not worry about community
00:16:05.940don't worry about family don't worry about the social capital that's been built by your family
00:16:10.300for generations you know just uproot all of that and chase whatever economic opportunity exists
00:16:15.720because that's that's what america is all about america is all about completely destroying your
00:16:20.620community and running to whatever economic opportunity presents itself. And obviously in
00:16:26.760America, the famous example is Detroit. You know, people say, well, you can go get a, you can get a
00:16:30.840house for $50,000. Sure. And all you need is, you know, the machine gun perched on top of your
00:16:36.180roof in order to make sure that your home is safe all the time. You know, this is a scenario where
00:16:41.520I went to public school when I was a kid. It was important for my parents that my sister and I
00:16:47.000kind of had that experience um and outside of one school in our entire time it was relatively safe
00:16:54.180you know we were maybe when we were getting the top tier education but you know you weren't
00:16:58.440worried about like literally not coming home that day i have taught public school you know in the
00:17:04.880kind of the modern era and to your point i when i would make calls home the shocking thing would be
00:17:11.700when the mother and father had the same last name that was the outlier by a large degree at least
00:17:17.56080 percent of the kids were from single parent homes or divorced homes of some kind the idea
00:17:22.900of an intact family was basically unicorn in that environment and everything you would expect flew
00:17:28.780you know kind of flowed from that you know we had prison riot style fights in the school uh you know
00:17:34.560i had parents you know when moms show up in stripper attire uh to parent night i mean it was
00:17:41.100an absolute disaster. So sending your kid into that environment is just child abuse. I mean,0.99
00:17:45.120it's just not acceptable. And so I think that, you know, I am in this older millennial
00:17:52.140generational divide. Yeah, I'm 42. So I have enough experience in what it was like before
00:17:59.800to know what this transition is. I guess maybe because I was teaching or because I was just
00:18:04.840maybe more aware. I know how much things have changed. But I'm not going to sit there and say
00:18:10.260that because i had the opportunity to get into the housing market just a few years before it
00:18:15.300exploded that i'm somehow a genius that i worked harder than everybody else and by the way my
00:18:20.640boomer parents went out of their way to make sure that my sister and myself were able to get our
00:18:26.040families into homes like they you know they forego luxury so not all boomers by the way you know
00:18:32.340the good ones are out there the responsible ones are out there um you know but but i'm aware of
00:18:37.680all of these advantages that i have had uh and so that doesn't mean that i am going to say don't
00:18:43.200work hard that doesn't mean i'm not going to tell young men that they need to get themselves in
00:18:47.080order and you know put their nose to the grindstone and make sacrifices but i'm also not going to
00:18:51.880pretend like i suddenly just did all of this on my own and that everybody else can just do it too
00:18:57.940if they were you know blessed to be born at just the right time to get into a housing market before
00:19:03.080you know it blew up with the help of a family you know that that just it would be incredibly
00:19:08.400selfish of me and arrogant to pretend that i had some kind of amazing skill in doing this
00:19:12.980but another big part of this is i think what you're in the most important inside of your essay
00:19:17.660was which was the social aspect the social capital involved because yes we can look at the financial
00:19:23.860issues we can look at the numbers we can point out bad tracking of statistics all of those things
00:19:29.420But what's really happened is the breakdown in all of those things that used to operate in the background that were built in to the social fabric, the idea that you had intact households that cared for each other, that cared for the neighborhood, that made places safe, that made places affordable, that allowed for child care and all these things that weren't a paid job, that kind of thing, that took a large amount of the burden off of young working families.
00:19:55.020When you have to pay someone to watch your kid that almost equals the amount of the income of your wife, well, you're just lighting that money on fire.
00:20:03.780When you have grandparents, uncles, aunts around to help out with that burden to make it possible for that child to not only be watched but also be cared for by actual direct family members who are invested in the welfare of the child, that's just a radically different way to grow up.
00:20:19.980but it saves a pile of money for the family.
00:20:22.720So can you just lay out what social capital is
00:20:26.280and some of the key areas that you think we've lost it
00:21:12.500How serious is the faith of your children?
00:21:15.200is it strong enough to withstand temptation in an increasingly materialistic society?
00:21:20.940Social capital is the value, and it's very real.
00:21:25.040In fact, it intensely affects your life in a lot of subtle ways.
00:21:28.780The value that exists in relationships and in networks, in institutions, and so forth.
00:21:36.580It's characteristic, for example, when someone describes a high-trust society,
00:21:40.520which is a society that is easy to navigate, rapid to navigate, in which you incur low transaction
00:21:47.060costs and don't have to call upon professional third parties for background checks and litigation
00:21:52.620and security screening and everything else. That is an example of social capital where you have
00:21:59.500mutual trust, you have a mutual set of obligations that is understood by everyone who everyone
00:22:04.360engages in automatically. There are a million ways in which conditions of high social trust
00:22:12.840make your life less expensive. And none of this shows up in the CPI, the consumer price index,
00:22:19.080or things like that, because it's not about the discrete cost of an individual item. It's about
00:22:25.480which items you have to buy and how many and when. So, for example, you might make the case,
00:22:32.660as people do when they point to the house in detroit that you can still get cheap houses
00:22:36.580but what is the context that that house is embedded within that kind of argument that
00:22:42.980kind of setup really extends to every aspect of modern life to give a simple one dating if you
00:22:48.820come from the same social circle in which you come to that first date with a young lady or man who
00:22:53.700you haven't met but who you have a lot of mutual friends with and maybe they're part of the same
00:22:58.020church or some other kind of trusted organization, you come with a recommendation, they will already
00:23:03.980know a lot about you. They'll know your background. They know why they've been set up with you. They
00:23:07.600know your prospects and what you're doing. And they know what community you're a part of. And
00:23:11.560they'll have a realistic sense, especially once they've spoken to you, engaged your intelligence
00:23:15.400and your wit and so forth, of your prospects in life. They will feel like, okay, I know what's
00:23:21.180going on. Is this person right for me or not? If you come with zero context, suddenly you have to
00:23:27.420establish a lot of that background in an anonymous context on the first date and you move into a far0.50
00:23:33.820more kind of uh dating environment that is characteristic of the third world with expensive
00:23:38.700signaling and ostentatious gifts and there was a very viral thread uh last week about an expectation
00:23:45.020that women in new york have now which is that a car will be sent for them to pick them up
00:23:49.260which is a very crass kind of like artificial bar that is being introduced to test the sort
00:23:54.780sort of financial prospects of the man they're meeting this is very much characteristic of low
00:23:59.080trust societies with weak social capital the same is true of marriage you know whether you exist as
00:24:04.420part of a thick network which has a beautiful church uh that sort of ties into your your own
00:24:09.300sense of religion or whether you have to go private for a venue the same is true of child
00:24:13.820care once you have them i do have a great relationship with your neighbor do you trust
00:24:19.660the way that they're raising their family do they go to the same church are they on the same school
00:24:23.680board and therefore when it's time to call a babysitter do you trust their teenage daughter
00:24:28.560or do you call a professional service and pay a far higher rate to a third party professional
00:24:33.600who you'll never interact with again? This character of transaction and cost and decision
00:24:41.200tree attaches to every aspect of life. Social capital is every bit as important as financial
00:24:46.960capital and that kind of seeing like a state 30,000 foot view where you quantify everything
00:24:52.880and you host these very abstract arguments which are exclusively framed in terms of a narrow set
00:24:59.200of poorly understood reductive metrics it misses all of that context which is why the lived reality
00:25:04.720on the ground can differ so radically from the kind of theoretical arguments that people make
00:25:09.920online it's the family and friends event at shoppers drug mart get 20 off almost all regular
00:25:17.040priced merchandise two days only tuesday september 1st and wednesday september 2nd
00:25:22.240open your pc optimal map to get your coupon
00:25:28.960yeah that is something that i think a lot of people just don't factor in when things have
00:25:33.840broken down families are so uh no longer intact there are so many temptations and options for
00:25:39.920people to go the other way you have just like these basic things that you can't do anymore
00:25:45.360or without having a high degree of skepticism, for instance, just a basic, hey, go ahead and send your son over to someone's house to have a sleepover.
00:25:56.500That used to be a very normal, common, healthy thing for you to do.
00:26:01.140Now you have to ask, well, what are the values of that family?
00:26:05.080What is my son going to be exposed to when they go over to this person's house?
00:26:10.820You know, if they have unrestricted access to the Internet, in three clicks, this person could completely destroy everything you've tried to do to kind of protect from what's going on in the world or, you know, all the things that are available there.
00:26:24.000And unless you're like super very aware of what that parent believes and what they allow with their child and everything, you don't just have this baseline of trust.
00:26:33.840And the problem then becomes, well, then you can't send your child over to those people's houses.
00:26:39.300So the safest way for them to interact is through screens, right? It's online where you think you can somehow curate it. And that has two more problems because obviously you're not actually curating it. You don't have the level of online control you think you do. But on top of that, you're also training that child to basically not build those social skills, not interact, not have a richer, deeper life that comes with true friendships and real human interactions.
00:27:03.780And so there are just these minor things, you know, just sending a kid over to a sleepover without thinking, you assume that that is just such a minor aspect of life, but it suddenly becomes a huge issue.
00:27:15.220And as you say, this kind of just radiates out through all of these aspects of, you know, can I just easily send my kid to a public school? Can I easily send my kid to a church? Do I have to worry about every single interaction they have?
00:27:27.420god forbid when they get to dating that kind of thing or am i going to be able to find a compatible
00:27:31.780person for them with a family that you know can respect those issues it's just a cornucopia of
00:27:36.740things that you always had to be careful about at some level but you could take most of it for
00:27:42.160granted and now it's every single interaction and i think these things really you know the issues of
00:27:48.220the of the social uh decomposition when it comes to this uh uh this uh you know uh capital stock
00:27:56.100ultimately boils down to three things that really have broken down entirely one is obviously as you
00:28:02.260pointed out repeatedly the church the church used to be like just the absolute center of social life
00:28:07.940it's where you've met spouses it's where you met friends it's where you got married it's where you
00:28:13.580got buried it was woven through the life of everything it's where you found business partners
00:28:18.080where you found employees where young men could find mentorships where young women could find
00:28:23.480the kind of people that they should ultimately be modeling their lives after. In every one of
00:28:28.660these scenarios, the church was the center of this. And so without this automatic kind of just assumed
00:28:34.220political and cultural and social and spiritual center of the community, all of these functions
00:28:41.100get kind of sent out into the market in some other way. And the market does them much less
00:28:46.660in a more inhuman fashion than the church would have done. I think the other two aspects that
00:28:53.160we really have to talk about are especially in america the civil rights act the fact that people
00:28:59.020are simply not allowed to voluntarily associate with people that they feel are more like them and
00:29:05.080are more likely to maintain their culture and project project their values and so therefore
00:29:09.780you can't build those societies it's literally illegal to only live around people who you feel
00:29:15.280actually hold that same culture and that same expectation and then finally it's the destruction
00:29:20.880of the idea of the mother that the you know so much of the social capital that you're talking
00:29:26.500about was sustained by the fact that women were at home that they were building you know that that
00:29:32.200that the un unquantifiable social capital they were building as mothers was far more valuable1.00
00:29:39.820than sending them into the workforce to earn you know something that increased gdp the mother is
00:29:45.980the person who is selecting for education the person mother is the person who's providing
00:29:49.740child care the mother is the person who's building community putting together those those social
00:29:54.340functions those church functions you know they're they're providing a safe network for children to
00:29:58.960be watched inside the community so they can roam outside without fear these are all things that
00:30:03.200don't show up at a balance sheet but by breaking them out of the role of the mother we create again
00:30:08.040all of those things that have to be moved into the market they become more expensive and every
00:30:12.240single one of those things becomes a tax on a young family trying to get started i mean that's
00:30:18.440exactly right. Yeah. I mean, the place that I recommend people start with on this topic,
00:30:24.220if they're interested in a comprehensive, if slightly liberal coded breakdown of the factors
00:30:30.520in systematic fashion is Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, who's kind of the quintessential scholar
00:30:37.220on this issue of social engagement broadly defined in America's life. And the revelation
00:30:45.800which begins that book is, if you go back to 1950, you find a level of social engagement
00:30:51.640amongst local groups, which is unthinkable. It's another world. It is just a completely
00:30:59.260different reality that people are living in. They are going out several times a week with
00:31:04.440big groups of people who they have deep relationships with that transcend context from the workplace
00:31:09.920to the church, to the social league, to the hall, to union membership, and they are really
00:31:57.700But some things are just so destructive and ill-thought-out and were ushered in with huge degrees of triumphalism that, looking back, it's kind of unthinkable and devastating the level of destruction that was wrought on these essential social institutions.
00:32:16.520I mean, yes, to take your points, women entering the workforce, it's funny.
00:32:24.000So Putnam looks at this specifically, and interestingly, what he finds is that the families who have the highest level of social engagement,
00:32:36.040measured by volunteering and entertaining and organizational membership and so forth,
00:32:41.360are families in which the mother voluntarily works part-time. In other words, these are families
00:32:49.460which are characterized by kind of agentic women who want to get involved. Their family setup is0.99
00:32:55.920such that they don't have overbearing financial pressures on them that forces them to work full
00:33:00.260time. And so they're involved. They're kind of in the house, they're out of the house, they have
00:33:03.940time for their kids, but maybe, you know, they are professionally involved on the side.
00:33:08.980Conversely, the women who are catastrophically, the families, not just the women, because this
00:33:14.720extends to the entire family, it doesn't characterize the woman alone, it also characterizes
00:33:18.340her husband and children. The families who have catastrophically low levels of social engagement,
00:33:23.860for example, which cut volunteering by more than 50%, are those in which the woman,0.94
00:33:29.940not through choice works full-time. It is no longer an option in the vast majority of the
00:33:36.240Western world to have a two-income household if you want to have a nice house. You can pursue
00:33:43.960other routes, but it's a real sacrifice and it requires strong, unusual people making radical
00:33:50.000decisions. And I encourage that, by the way. We're a single-income household. There's been
00:33:55.340real hardship associated with that, I still think it's worth it. But again, if you're asking how a
00:34:01.140population should be governed, you can't just say, do the radical thing, live like an outlier. You
00:34:06.260actually have a responsibility to think about the moral, physical and spiritual health of the
00:34:10.840population at large. And what we have done intentionally and unintentionally is impose
00:34:16.360conditions on the vast majority of the population, which pushes all households into the position in0.68
00:34:22.940terms of the gender arrangements, the sexual arrangements of lowest social engagement, which
00:34:28.360is the kind of two-income trap. Elizabeth Warren, of all people, summed us up brilliantly, which is0.91
00:34:33.360that once enough people have entered the workforce, once enough women have entered the workforce,0.92
00:34:37.440their excess labor moves from being impossible to quantify because it exists as social capital,
00:34:43.740which is not taxed, which is extremely productive, which has all kinds of
00:34:47.840positive externalities. It moves into being financial capital, which is taxed, which has
00:34:53.280a narrow range of applications. And that extra income then becomes financialized back into
00:34:59.580housing prices, which sort of suck it up. At that point, it becomes mandatory if you want to live in
00:35:04.520most nice neighborhoods in the United States to have two incomes. That is very much the norm.
00:35:10.980And families kind of have to figure that out one way or another. And so that suppresses family
00:35:16.100formation, it suppresses social engagement across the board. Immigration is another one that we0.99
00:35:21.860could talk about, and diversity. Putnam, as I mentioned, has fairly evident liberal dispositions.
00:35:31.220It's kind of funny because in the book, in Bowling Alone, for example, he lays out these incredibly
00:35:36.020impressive and methodical examinations of the issues, and he'll conclude them by being like,
00:35:41.140after examining a ton of evidence that this has been bad, socially speaking, he'll be like,
00:35:45.460Of course, it was a good thing that we're into the workforce en masse.
00:36:08.000And then at the last 5% of the book, he's like,
00:36:10.200well, we have to be good liberals anyway.
00:36:11.840And so even though I've just made the entire argument
00:36:14.240against this position uh at the end of the day with this is the only way we can exist and so we
00:36:18.900have to do that and funny enough i i could be wrong in this but i believe putnam actually
00:36:23.460suppressed a number of his findings for years especially on women uh working because he knew
00:36:30.060how controversial and like how heterodox this would be how he would be seen as a heretic of
00:36:35.660a liberal by acknowledging this so it is funny that this guy just can't stop running headlong
00:36:42.660into the truth despite like his hardest efforts to try to ignore or as you say at least say well
00:36:48.240but ultimately it's probably good we we have to pretend it was good even though all of my data
00:36:52.600and all my conclusions are showing it's a disaster yeah i i have mixed feelings about putnam because
00:36:58.400he he clearly doesn't want to be finding out the things he's finding but he does do a fantastic job
00:37:03.840of discovering them and reporting them you know in a in a what at least appears to be a fairly
00:37:09.040unbiased way. If he was conservative, it's kind of interesting to think about how much
00:37:14.340more radical the framing and discoveries would be. But the one that, to my knowledge, I've
00:37:20.380heard he suppressed for a long time, I think that is the accepted position, are his findings
00:37:26.280on diversity, which he wrote up in a later paper after Bowling Alone, a much more contemporary
00:37:32.380paper called E Pluribus Unum. And what he found there is that diversity, unfortunately,
00:37:41.820has a highly suppressive effect on social trust and people's willingness to engage in
00:37:48.240out-of-the-home activities across the board. And people basically just end up watching
00:37:53.240far more television. This isn't even like a kind of... So the theories which preceded
00:38:00.740Putnam's findings, but they didn't have access to the scale and quality of data that he ended
00:38:05.860up acquiring for the purposes of this study, whether either it was going to be true that
00:38:10.560diverse settings would engender conflict because two groups would come into contact and discover
00:38:17.560they were nothing like each other and retreat into their ethnic identities and sort of solidify,
00:38:21.720you know, I'm white or black or whatever, or that it would actually be a good thing.
00:38:26.920They come into contact, discover that they had a ton in common, that they were all human,
00:38:30.100and that, you know, there were good people on either side and tensions would be relaxed.
00:38:34.740Turns out neither of those things actually characterize what happens.
00:38:37.860Not only do people retreat from contact with the other, with people from other ethnic backgrounds,
00:38:45.020they retreat from contact with their own.
00:38:49.020And this is likely a reflection, and here I'm editorializing slightly,
00:38:54.420but this is likely a reflection of the fact that social capital should always be understood as a
00:39:04.340complex system. In other words, it has emergent effects which are difficult to predict and it can
00:39:10.580have runaway exponential effects if you change only a few of the underlying factors. Essentially,
00:39:17.780the more full and bursting the church is with young families, the more I want to take my1.00
00:39:24.340own family there because it's going to be a more relaxing experience and i'm going to have more
00:39:28.100friends there the same is kind of true for everything every family lost from participation
00:39:35.220every person every upstanding individual lost from participation in a social network
00:39:40.340makes the network less attractive for the next person to come along and very quickly if you
00:39:46.020undermine the integrity of social networks you get these runaway effects where actually no one's
00:39:52.980incentivized to participate at all. And this is worst of all in conditions of rapid change.
00:39:59.220If you look at white flight, for example, out of a city like Chicago or Detroit in the American0.96
00:40:05.300mid-century, you don't need to sort of moralize about the situation to observe that it clearly had0.97
00:40:12.980massively deleterious effects on both social and financial capital. A lot of those families
00:40:18.100were making decisions to leave behind homes whose houses were plummeting in value
00:40:22.580to move to expensive new suburbs that were less convenient than the kind of walkable neighborhoods
00:40:29.300that they had known for so long, and often the kind of thick ethnic enclaves that they were a
00:40:34.420part of if they were German or Scandinavian or Irish, et cetera. So they were leaving behind a
00:40:40.900lot. It's a really tough issue. It's not something where you can just look at it and take moral
00:40:47.460stock of it and say ah this is a good thing or this is a bad thing these are complex interactions
00:40:53.940of really often subconscious difficult to identify phenomena that have massive effects on the quality
00:41:01.620and trajectory of people's lives down the line so that's it's just not easy to dismiss them
00:41:06.660yeah and especially when it it comes to the fact that we're not supposed to discuss any of this
00:41:11.300it's incredibly taboo and so everyone kind of has that you know in the back of their mind
00:41:16.660but they're not allowed to explore that in any way.
00:41:20.320And that's intentional to make sure that you never actually come to logical conclusions about this.
00:41:25.020But, for instance, I've had discussions with women down in Florida.
00:41:29.700And there's not a lot of – most of the people here are older, but especially the white people are older.
00:41:37.260And most of those people having children are young, Hispanic, or other immigrant communities.
00:41:42.800And so I talked to one woman who she went up to Tennessee and she said, oh, this is so different. Like white women actually have children here. Like the culture is radically different down in Florida. Most white women do not have families or do not have more than one child in Tennessee.
00:42:01.900It's very common to see a white family with four or five children, young children, young families.
00:42:10.300That is just a thing that you, again, aren't really supposed to say out loud, but does radically change your outlook.0.56
00:42:17.700All of a sudden, everybody in your friend group has children.
00:42:20.620All of a sudden, it's normal to be the person who shows up to a social event with children.
00:42:24.900Their children have other children to play with.
00:42:26.900If you're someone who doesn't have a child, all of a sudden you're the one who's the outlier and you're the one receiving social signals and pressure saying maybe this is something you should be involved in and maybe this is something a person of your age should do.
00:42:39.840And so just that shift in and of itself, nothing said out loud, nothing explicit, no government program, but just a simple observation that when you are around other people like you, having young children, engaging in those scenarios, well, then you are encouraged to do that in a way that you just aren't when you're outside of it.
00:42:59.980And there's just nothing evident that you would put out there that you would list on any kind of application about what's going on here.
00:43:07.600But it is something that is going to be real.
00:43:10.680And if we don't address it, if we're too scared to acknowledge this factor, then we're going to keep getting exactly the same results.
00:43:17.320So no matter how many times people call you funny names for pointing this out, you have to engage with it.
00:43:22.720That said, I know that we have limited time today, Johan.
00:43:25.800So I just want to ask you an important question before we leave here.
00:43:29.980Uh, obviously we know the government is not going to fix any of this, right? Like they're going to
00:43:35.200keep printing money into the ground. Uh, the, the, the current political class is going to continue
00:43:40.180to kind of just burn the candle at both ends. Uh, there isn't going to be some radical change.
00:43:46.480I think, unfortunately in society, uh, when it comes to the structure, uh, we can all say
00:43:52.360individually, okay, we need to do better. We need to make sacrifices. We need to go through this,
00:43:56.600But what are some concrete steps that young people should be taking to put themselves in a better position to build social capital?
00:44:05.940I mean, we we don't want to be the boomers, right?
00:44:08.080We don't want to be the people who say we're going to push this off to the next generation.
00:44:11.900We're going to get what we can out of this.
00:44:13.860You know, if we don't plant these trees now, no one will sit under their shade later.
00:44:17.480So what should we be doing personally if we can't expect the government to come in and fix this for us?
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