Dr. Louise Perry joins us to talk about her new book, A Case Against the Sex Revolution, and why she thinks we should all wait until marriage to have children. She also discusses her new musical, A Beautiful Noise, which opens in Toronto on April 28th.
00:01:00.000Why is this such a controversial subject to say, we're not having enough children and maybe we should think about ways of encouraging people to reproduce the society in which they live?
00:01:13.360Why do people think it's inherently fascist?
00:01:27.160I mean, this just seems sort of, it's like one-on-one stuff.
00:01:31.020Do you think there's a way to stop the decline?
00:01:35.060Louise Perry, so good to have you back.
00:01:37.380We had you on the show a couple of years ago.
00:01:40.060You're doing great work since, and I'm really delighted because I thought it's probably one of our most watched interviews and certainly one of the most popular internally among everyone here.
00:01:49.200It was absolutely fantastic discussions, mostly about your last book.
00:01:52.800I know you're working on another one, but that's still to come.
00:01:55.860And we were talking mostly about men and women in the modern context and relationships and so on.
00:02:44.340There were certain things I sort of wavered on in the book.
00:02:47.600So, you know, to summarise very briefly, like, the argument of the book is that sexual evolution is often presented by progressives as being unambiguously good for women.
00:02:56.400My argument is actually there's been costs to women and to men in lots of important ways.
00:03:01.340And that there's wisdom in some old sexual norms, which we've thrown out the window post-sexual revolution.
00:03:08.120And actually, like, there's a lot to be said for resurrecting them.
00:03:11.140So, marriage is one example that actually marriage is really good for protecting the interests of women and children in a lot of ways.
00:03:24.120I made the recommendation in the book for women reading in particular to wait for maybe six months into a new relationship before having sex as a way of having a chance to assess this guy's character, not be befuddled by hormones, all that stuff.
00:03:45.200And I did think at the time, should I just go for it and say, wait until engagement or wait until marriage?
00:03:54.440Because what better indication is there of genuine commitment, et cetera, particularly if you're going through marriage counselling and all that kind of stuff?
00:04:04.100And my mum said, no, don't, because if you say that, that's the only thing anyone will remember about that book.
00:04:09.920And that will be, like, the first line of every review, you know, like, crazy lady makes the case for waiting till marriage.
00:04:35.420Do you know what's interesting about, isn't, I just think it's such an interesting thing about the modern world in general, where I think lots of people who are in the public eye to any extent now, we have, like, a thing we say in public, and then there's the thing we will say to our children.
00:05:25.520Even if, on some issues, the more practical opinion is, as in this case, the right wing opinion.
00:05:34.340So, Louise, you're very, why are opinions that don't work in a practical sense high status?
00:05:41.180Well, I suppose, I mean, Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs thesis is very persuasive.
00:05:46.960There's probably a lot to do with signaling.
00:05:49.980I think, as well, that one of the features of modernity, I suppose, is you don't get a lot of immediate feedback on bad decisions.
00:06:00.180Particularly, say, so, like, one example would be the welfare state, the modern welfare state acts as a cushion, basically.
00:06:09.660That if you make some bad decision, the welfare state is there as a safety net to cushion the blow.
00:06:18.500So, I think that if that weren't there, people would probably be forced to reckon with reality a lot more in, I don't know, something like, something like single motherhood.
00:06:32.420You know, it's absolutely true, you know, the feminist critique of the shaming of single mothers, that the shaming of single mothers causes a lot of harm to women and their children.
00:06:43.620It's also the case that single motherhood is itself catastrophic, particularly in eras when there isn't a safety net, you know, like, you really are facing some very difficult choices.
00:06:54.040And that's, of course, why traditional norms around not hooking up with some random guy exist, because that's a catastrophic outcome for the mother, for her children, for her family, etc.
00:07:05.400I guess the welfare state exists, the welfare state can now cushion that blow, at a very high cost, you know, it's still really rough being a single mother dependent on welfare.
00:07:18.220It's also true that it probably, like, removes some of that immediate feedback to bad norms, and therefore allows us to continue thinking that these norms are okay.
00:07:32.540And also, particularly when, of course, the people who are expressing luxury beliefs, they're not really worried about their daughters becoming teenage single mums or whatever, right?
00:07:44.780I also think, as well, when it comes to talking about single mums, we talk about single mums a lot.
00:07:50.720We don't talk about the men who know that they have children and have walked away from their responsibilities.
00:07:56.940And as someone who used to be a teacher, you can all drink now, I've said it, that used to make me so angry.
00:08:04.280It used to make me so angry, because I could see the damage it did to these kids.
00:08:09.020Having an absent father, or actually, even worse, having a dad who one day wanted to play dad, and then for a couple of months couldn't be bothered.
00:08:19.120Yeah, which is actually worse from the effects that I saw.
00:08:21.780Yeah, it's true. And hey, I mean, the fact that single mums get shamed more than deadbeat dads, which I think generally they do, is dreadful, because they're the ones who hung around.
00:08:32.080They're the ones who made the commitment to their children.
00:08:35.600It's curious, isn't it, that we don't shame deadbeat dads more than we do?
00:08:38.760I don't know. I don't know why that is.
00:08:42.680I mean, so the feminist argument would obviously be that there's sort of particular shame attached to female sexual indiscretion more than to male.
00:08:54.520And that's true, but then I generally don't believe in patriarchy.
00:08:58.240So, like, in terms of patriarchy, there's this, like, great explanatory force, this, like, invisible force which influences all of society.
00:09:09.680So there's probably, it probably comes down to the fact that in the ancestral environment, women are the more valuable reproductive resource, to put it in really crude economic terms.
00:09:26.000It's because a woman can have maybe one baby a year max, like, the number of women you have in your society determines how many babies you can have, basically.
00:09:36.380Whereas in theory, men can impregnate women all the time.
00:09:39.380And, like, you could, in theory, have just one man who's fathering loads and loads of children.
00:09:44.840So there is, which is where the male expendability thing so-called comes from, the idea that men are less valuable than are women.
00:09:51.400I think in this instance, what's happening kind of perversely is that because of that, because of that valuable nature of women's reproductive potential, women making unwise sexual decisions is worse, is worse for society, is worse for her family, and therefore attracts more opprobrium.
00:10:14.800I think that's probably what's going on.
00:10:15.780And it's also a vicious circle, and I don't think people talk about this enough, because if you're a kid from a single-parent family, you're more likely to be a single parent.
00:10:27.080And because we replicate what we see, particularly in childhood.
00:10:31.500So if you've never seen a healthy, positive relationship, then it's going to be far more difficult to have one for yourself, because you don't know what that looks like.
00:10:40.560Yeah, absolutely. And it becomes really normalised. And this is one of these weird things about the invention of the pill, right?
00:10:45.980Like, who could have predicted that the invention of the pill, and also the decriminalisation of abortion, which happens soon after, would have produced more illegitimacy?
00:10:55.140That's really weird, right? You'd expect the opposite, because suddenly women have control over their fertility.
00:11:01.860But I think the reason is, it's because the absolute amount of extramarital, premarital sex that was happening increased.
00:11:11.260And because contraception, particularly that early form of the pill, isn't actually that reliable, of that amount of extramarital, premarital sex that was happening, you know, even only 1% of women getting pregnant, that's still a lot.
00:11:28.700Some of those women are always going to keep the baby, they're not going to want to have an abortion for whatever reason.
00:11:32.120And so all of a sudden, you have this spike in illegitimacy. And I think that produces this sort of feedback loop, where it becomes normal, and it becomes normal.
00:11:44.540And now, I mean, I think in the UK, it's like half of kids are now born outside of wedlock. I think we crossed that threshold a couple of years ago.
00:12:16.380Where you have one male having multiple female partners and some portion of men not having any, right?
00:12:24.000The monogamous system that prevails until recently in the West is quite unusual.
00:12:30.340I think it's 20% of societies have a monogamous system, which does, of course, include some of the most successful civilisations to have ever existed,
00:12:38.960including Christendom and Roman Empire.
00:13:54.180I mean, I think it's not, I'm just, I'm surprised in literally zero cases when you find out that some high status man has lots of women on the go.
00:14:02.860I mean, obviously there are men who don't do that, regardless of how successful they are.
00:14:07.520But it's so common because I think they kind of can.
00:14:12.200And also because, I mean, I think he said politicians.
00:14:14.860Politicians are always kind of famously philanderers also because they, I think a certain type of personality is attracted to politics.
00:14:21.940I'll put it gently, which is probably also attracted to that kind of, you know, lots of dark triad traits, right?
00:16:35.740Men are attracted to youth and beauty.
00:16:37.000Although I always think that we probably do slightly exaggerate that in terms of, I mean, I think that there are obviously plenty of examples.
00:16:44.560Leonardo DiCaprio is kind of the famous example of this, right?
00:16:47.000The guy who will never date a woman over the age of 25.
00:16:50.380But which I always think is kind of funny because he's also never had children with any of these women.
00:16:53.560So it's almost like he's like, the point of that drive is to reproduce with, like, maximally fertile women with great genes.
00:17:02.000It's kind of like he's just amassed, like, a fleet of Ferraris and he's never driven them or something.
00:17:06.500Like, it's like, it's like weird, it's weirdly maladaptive behavior, even though it's driven by an evolutionary...
00:17:14.200There is a kind of teenage dimension to all of this.
00:17:38.500I'm sure, you know, she's very open about this.
00:17:40.960And she would say that there's, like, there's a threshold in terms of how attractive a man is where women are willing to tolerate not being the only woman.
00:17:50.880Like, if he's so attractive and the condition of being with him is that you're part of a harem, there's a point where women will be like, okay...
00:18:24.220I think it's totally possible, and in fact there are loads of cases where this is the case, where you can say that at an individual level that might be fine and that for some people that might be fine.
00:18:56.120Because we do know that fatherhood kind of tames men in terms of men commit less crime and, you know, that just societies with lots of sexually frustrated men are more, less peaceful societies.
00:19:11.060And also I know you can go from that to be like, oh, well, in that case we need to be apportioning women to all of the incels and, you know.
00:19:18.440There's a very dystopian vision that could lead from that insight.
00:19:25.480But it's also just, you know, you can compare, say, different African countries, some of which are side by side, some of which are Muslim, some of which are Christian and therefore either permit polygamy or don't.
00:19:34.860And you can see straightforwardly these otherwise similar societies are made more violent and unstable and have more domestic violence and have more child abuse and whatever by virtue of not being monogamous.
00:19:44.640So just based on the data, you can quite clearly see that the monogamy norm is a good one.
00:20:18.400Yeah, I mean, my theory, although I don't really have any proof for it, it's just vibes, is that it's that those things might be linked.
00:20:25.460It might be that when you have this sort of copious availability of sexual stimuli, you don't feel the need to go out and actually do the hard work of building a relationship with a real person, that maybe sex has less mystique.
00:20:38.460I mean, I think that's definitely, I think it's definitely the case that when men are not allowed to have sex before marriage and when they can only get married when they have done various adult things, like you've got a job, you've got a house, you earn X amount, whatever, they are going to be extremely motivated to do those things.
00:20:58.740Whereas if men can get sex just by being good looking or even not, like why, that motivation is removed.
00:21:07.340So I think there's definitely, I think sexual frustration, I think good societies know how to harness sexual frustration to productive ends.
00:21:16.880And it's also interesting as well is that so many people on SSRIs, and one of the things that SSRIs do, particularly women, is it kills libido.
00:21:26.260So what you have is just so many people in society who literally have no sex, right?
00:21:31.800Yeah, and also the pill does weird things to people's sexuality, to women's sexuality.
00:21:35.220Like women are more, women are more attracted to less masculine men when they're on the pill.
00:21:41.640And so there's this phenomenon of women who've been on the pill their entire lives or their entire adult lives, and then they get off the pill to have a baby, and they suddenly find that they don't fancy their partner anymore.
00:21:53.460I know, and it causes, you know, obviously a lot of personal tragedy.
00:21:58.280But yeah, we're meddling with a lot of weird psychoactive drugs as a standard thing that we give, particularly teenage girls.
00:22:08.260We just put them on the pill, we put them on SSRIs, we don't really think about it.
00:22:11.020But obviously they are going to have quite serious effects on the developing brain.
00:22:15.880Absolutely, and then if you think about it as well, you talk about the sex recession, that leads to some very dire consequences when it comes to population.
00:22:28.880I mean, in general, I think, is the birth rate dropping because people are having less sex?
00:22:37.320There's this kind of fashionable view that you'll hear among some demographers that actually the pill doesn't really have anything to do with birth rate decline.
00:22:51.300Because birth rates were declining before the pill was invented.
00:22:55.120In countries like France, for instance, birth rates started declining quite early in the 19th century.
00:22:59.100And people are able to limit how many children they have through, like, crude versions of fertility tracking and things like that.
00:23:34.020It does things like, for instance, means that getting married becomes less necessary because if you can have premarital sex without the expectation of getting pregnant, because it normalizes premarital sex, basically.
00:23:46.340And then the drive to get married is reduced.
00:23:48.400And, you know, one of the, of all the policies that the Hungarian government has introduced to try and encourage natalism, the one that has been most effective has actually been the marriage incentives.
00:24:00.900Weirdly, because they also do things like they'll give you a massive sum of money towards a house.
00:24:04.160And you do have to be married to get it.
00:24:05.440But, like, there are various policies available which are much more financially impactful.
00:24:09.080And yet the one that actually seems to be, or is thought to be the most effective, is the one encouraging younger people to get married.
00:24:15.240Because it seems like people get married and they're like, oh, okay, this is the next, the next thing we do is have kids.
00:24:20.160It's like a psychological intervention.
00:24:28.800But to me, that does seem like the really watershed moment in terms of producing low fertility.
00:24:34.800There are a lot of writers that I see now, yourself included, obviously, talking about the pill as something that you may not necessarily want to take.
00:24:42.980Certainly as an automatic thing, as a rite of passage into womanhood.
00:24:51.840I actually think that, you know, when the pill was first introduced in Britain and America, and I think most countries, to my knowledge, it was only available to married women.
00:24:59.320And then there was a gap of some years and then it was made available to unmarried women.
00:25:02.760I think that using the pill within marriage to space your births is a very good use of it because it's really bad for your body basically to have 10 kids in most instances.
00:25:17.420There are some women who are super women and who can do it, you know.
00:25:20.800But you, you read these accounts of women, you know, in the days before reliable contraception was, were, was available.
00:25:30.660And they're just, they're made so unwell by just being constantly pregnant or nursing and, and really just feeling like powerless to, you know.
00:25:40.280So I, I, I, that's even more the case if you have a caesarean, for instance, you need to take a break before you have another baby to, to prevent things like uterine rupture.
00:25:48.180So I think the pill has a place and other kinds of reliable contraception have a place.
00:25:54.680What I don't think is a good thing though, is the kind of mass effects.
00:25:59.180I mean, it's going back to that thing again, right?
00:26:00.560Individual cases, it can be great, but the, these, a culture is more than the sum of its parts.
00:26:06.540And the, the mass social effects of the pill, I think, have generally been negative.
00:26:13.320And the population conversation is fascinating to me because if you look into it for about three seconds, you instantly get, like, you, you can be shown one graph and you suddenly like get everything, right?
00:26:25.280Our population in, particularly in Western countries, but not just in Western countries, is just way below replacement.
00:26:30.660And, you know, Francis was talking, we were having lunch and he was talking about the fact that teachers are getting fired from schools now because there's not enough kids.
00:26:43.260Particularly in central London, there's loads of schools closing down.
00:26:45.940So, you've got that going on and yet, whenever I see any politician who, who's like, maybe like Miriam Cates says, you know, whatever you think about the rest of her politics or whatever, she just says, we need, we need to talk about babies.
00:26:58.940And suddenly, like, the swarm of rage descends upon them.
00:27:02.620The same with, look, I don't know much about Viktor Orban.
00:27:05.340I read bad things about him in the papers.
00:27:07.280Okay, let's assume that they're all true.
00:27:08.680So, but still, like, why, why is this such a, like, a controversial subject to say we, we, we're not having enough children and maybe we should think about ways of encouraging people to reproduce the society in which they live?
00:27:22.540Why do people think it's inherently fascist?
00:27:25.180I mean, it's worth saying that basically every country cares about this up until five minutes ago.
00:27:31.660There used to be this line in Australia, encouraging people to have more children, that it was, you have one for mum, one for dad, and one for Australia, encouraging people to have three kids.
00:27:40.940So, it's, it's, it's definitely not, I mean, it's also the case, like, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and so on encourages high fertility.
00:28:12.300Like, if you, if you're, if your country has a shrinking population, you don't have enough young men to form an army, obviously you're incredibly vulnerable.
00:28:21.240I mean, this just seems sort of, it's like 101 stuff and yet, yes, I mean, I mean, I love Miriam, but yeah, she stands up and talks about natalism and people just, people on the left lose their minds.
00:28:33.340Why is the, I, that, because natalism is like a clever word, like intellectually used, but like the idea that people in a country ought to replenish the population by having children.
00:28:45.440Yeah, the families are good, the babies are good.
00:28:50.300Like, we have this, by the way, this is another thing that pisses me off, which is like, we have this term now, something as coded as right wing, which basically means it's not right wing.
00:28:58.700It's just a bunch of dickheads in the media think that you shouldn't talk about this issue.
00:29:04.060Which, like, so why is this coded as right wing?
00:29:08.020Yeah, I mean, it's a really fascinating question.
00:29:10.280Like, why would, why would the most affluent people and comfortable people who have ever lived in the history of the world, besides that actually having babies is bad and is onerous?
00:29:22.760And is, I mean, because what you'll hear so often, right, there's like a little bit of truth to it, but I think it really misses the mark, is that old people can't afford to have children.
00:29:30.240Which means, like, translates as people can't afford to maintain the lifestyle associated with having two incomes and no kids when they have kids, which is absolutely true.
00:29:41.960And it's also the case that obviously house prices in many urban centers are incredibly high and there is downward mobility.
00:29:47.580Like, the baby boomers were pretty much the peak in terms of affluence and comfort.
00:29:52.620But it's also kind of crazy because it's literally the opposite trend globally.
00:29:57.120The poorest countries have the most kids.
00:29:58.820The richest countries have the fewest kids.
00:30:00.240And actually, that is the single best predictor of people having children, is crossing the certain threshold in terms of GDP per capita.
00:30:07.680It's somewhere like 5,000 to 10,000 US dollars per person per year, which is not very much, right?
00:30:13.420Like, like countries that are below replacement now include countries like, like Nepal, like Sri Lanka, like much of the Middle East, much of South America.
00:30:21.920You know, we're not talking just the rich countries.
00:30:24.040This is now increasingly a global phenomenon.
00:30:26.160And, yeah, I mean, so the big mystery, and I'm not sure if I have, it's sort of, I think you've reached the point where you have to, you can't just think of it in materialist or economic terms.
00:30:38.240You have to start thinking in almost spiritual terms.
00:30:40.100Like, people in rich countries have just lost the will to reproduce themselves and to reproduce their cultures.
00:30:47.060And in fact, often think that doing so is a bad thing.
00:30:50.020They think that there's something suspect about their cultures, about their genetic line, whatever, like there's this, it's obviously not everyone by any means, but there is a kind of elite faction that has this incredible, like, drive to suicide almost, like cultural suicide.
00:31:06.300And, yeah, I mean, it's quite hard to explain that without thinking of it in spiritual terms.
00:31:14.640I mean, I, I'm, the thing I'm driven to think, which isn't very a happy thought, is that maybe, you know, the, I think when I last came on the show, we talked about why the progress model of history is really silly, right?
00:31:26.500To think that everything gets better all the time, a model of history, which is, um, obviously simplifies, but which probably has a lot more truth to it than the progress model is a civilizational cycles model.
00:31:38.380So the idea that civilizations rise, they, they peak, they fall.
00:31:42.080And the, a, a common feature of civilizations at their decline phase is this complete loss of confidence.
00:31:51.180And this complete, I mean, you, you, in the, in the final centuries of Rome, you, you will read people complaining about how the elites have all stopped having kids.
00:32:02.280Like, the, the, there was a tax brought in on childless men to try and encourage elite childless men to, to reproduce.
00:32:09.300You know, they had exactly the same phenomenon.
00:32:11.000And the Romans, of course, were using more primitive forms of contraception and abortion and, and obviously used infanticide.
00:32:15.920So they had different means of controlling their fertility, but it was the same phenomenon.
00:32:20.840And people were saying the same things.
00:32:23.080And there does just seem to be a point where a civilization, yeah, reaches this, this like spiritual malaise and maybe we're just there.
00:32:32.760I know it's not a very happy answer, but I think that's, that's from, from doing all my research on this subject, I can't really help but reach that conclusion.
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00:33:14.280That would explain about what's going on when we talk about the climate.
00:33:18.160Because to me, when you talk, it seems to be more prevalent in America, actually, where people say they're not going to have kids because they're worried about the climate.
00:33:44.860Like, if your priority was preserving other species and natural environment and so on, then, like, reducing the number of humans in the world would be obviously your goal.
00:33:54.440And that's where you reach the point where you almost can't, it becomes almost impossible to have a debate with someone.
00:34:02.120Like, if we don't share those premises, if you don't think that humans are good, if you don't think that having kids is good, if you don't think that being alive is good, you know?
00:34:09.160Like, I joke, I'm not joking, like, there are anti-nationalists sometimes who think that it is, it is better not to, better, better to have never been born, right?
00:34:21.260There are people who think that, not very many of them, but there are some, and there's just a point where you can't, you can't really have a conversation, like, because those priors, they're not rational priors, they're, like, deeply, deeply felt profound priors.
00:34:36.220And if you don't share them with someone, then there's not really anything that you can agree on.
00:34:39.440So, on this point about, because, I don't know, I've been talking about this for a long time, this feeling of, like, civilizational decay.
00:34:49.840Sort of, there's a whiff of it in the air.
00:34:53.240And it's interesting, I know you read my piece about Australia, because you go to Australia and it's sort of like, you feel like you've gone ten years into the past, but, like, in a good way.
00:35:02.880You know what I mean? So, they're still on the way towards that, whereas he, and to compare and contrast is very interesting.
00:35:10.600Do you think that once, do you think where the past event horizon, the point of no return, where you just go, you've gone so far down this path now that you're just, there's no coming back?
00:35:25.340Yeah. I mean, I think the thing to, you know that meme a little while ago about how men think about Rome every day?
00:35:39.360And I think that the fall of Rome is really instructive. I mean, it's obviously not the only example of a civilizational decline, but it's probably the most, the one we think about most often is the forefront of our minds when we think about this thing.
00:35:50.820And, you know, the thing to know about the fall of Rome is it took centuries. And even though there are obviously, you know, you'll, you'll, a lot of people will think of artistic representations of barbarians sacking Rome or whatever.
00:36:02.440That doesn't really actually represent what it was like to live through, except in some cases. For most people living in the Roman Empire, it would have felt just like kind of slow decline with occasional speeding up, right?
00:36:18.800And you just would have less connection with the center of empire. You would become poorer. Technology that was previously available to you wasn't available anymore. I mean, we didn't, Rome didn't really completely collapse, right? I mean, to some extent, it retreated to Byzantium. It morphed into the Roman Catholic Church. You know, it's not like Latin is still with us. It's not like it was a complete collapse. It was just a fall from that peak.
00:36:42.220And, you know, that's probably what's going to happen in some way over the coming centuries to the West and people on the edges of empire, which kind of includes us. I mean, obviously, Britain used to be at the center of empire, but now we're very much a vassal of Washington. We're just going to have less. We'll become poorer. Technology we once had will no longer be available. Communications that we once seemed normal to us will kind of.
00:37:12.740I just want to press you on this point, though, ladies.
00:37:16.000The question I was asking is, do you think there's a way to stop the decline?
00:37:19.760Oh, no, probably not. But I also don't want to be completely- the term my husband uses for this is he calls me a collapsed hard.
00:37:29.100And if I talk too much about collapse, he's like, no, you can't be a collapsed hard in my house. I'm actually not being- I'm not saying that, like, I'm not-
00:37:38.420I'm not prophesying apocalypse. I'm not saying there's going to be- I'm not saying go prep with your, you know, tins of beans and guns, right?
00:37:46.080But you're also saying that- you're saying the decline is not going to be overnight, and it's not going to be explosive all the time, and it's not necessarily going to be chaos and violence.
00:37:55.640And that we're not going to lose everything.
00:37:57.500Like, we're going- probably what will happen, right, is that sites of technological sophistication will just kind of shrink and entrench, that they'll be, like, new Byzantiums.
00:38:06.160My point is, there's a big difference between being a Roman and an Italian who sells ice cream on the ruins of what used to be a real civilisation.
00:38:16.080No offence to Italians, whom I love. But do you see what I'm saying?
00:38:21.900Okay. What I'm saying is, yes, it will be slow and maybe not as painful and is not awful and is not straight away and blah, blah, blah, as some people might like to imagine.
00:38:34.020But there's a big difference between being a great civilisation and living on the ruins of one, feeding off whatever remnants are still around.
00:38:43.120Yeah, no, no, no. I'm not pretending it's not bad.
00:38:45.160And you don't think there's any way to stop that process?
00:38:49.540We've yet to find- no one has ever reversed the birth rate decline. It doesn't mean it can't happen, I guess, in theory, but, like, no one has ever done so.
00:38:59.300And much as I support a lot of pro-Natalist policy, if nothing else for selfish reasons, like, I would love a tax break, it doesn't actually work really very well.
00:39:11.500Like, the Hungarians have nudged their birth rate up a little bit, they're never close to replacement, though.
00:39:14.920I mean, what's very likely to happen, maybe sooner rather than later, is that very fertile subpopulations are obviously going to flourish, you know, and generally very fertile subpopulations are the very religious and the very conservative.
00:39:28.200So, to some extent, we've already seen this in Israel, you know, that Israeli politics has moved to the right, is widely remarked upon that it's moved to the right quite significantly in recent decades.
00:39:40.000And probably the reason for that is it's because the most liberal Israelis have been having the fewest kids and the most conservative and religious Israelis have been having the most, and that's starting to show.
00:39:51.100And so that will probably happen everywhere.
00:39:53.400There are these projections about what portion of the American population is going to be Amish in, like, 200 years.
00:39:58.680I know it sounds funny, but, like, they have a lot of kids, and they're pretty good at retaining their, they're pretty good at sustaining that fertility.
00:40:43.120He doesn't say, we're not going to have running water, we're not going to have electricity or anything like that.
00:40:47.360More like, we're going to stagnate, and there's going to, we just won't, I mean, we already have seen that, to be honest.
00:40:52.860But we're just not going to see the sort of, all the stuff we're imagining, like, robots, AI, whatever, it's just, actually, probably just not going to happen.
00:41:00.780The thing that he said that really stuck in my mind is, was, Elon has five years to get to Mars, or it's not going to happen.
00:41:06.540Because we'll reach that point where there just aren't enough, like, bright young engineers to go round, to do all the stuff that he's doing.
00:41:16.380There just, there just isn't enough human capital to get to Mars when you have a shrinking population.
00:41:21.480And when, you know, the bright young engineers you do have are being funneled into keeping the electricity network running, and stuff like that.
00:41:29.020You don't have, like, excess human capital necessary to do things, do crazy things like go to Mars.
00:41:38.400I think the one thing that gives me hope around this is, if you look at the other countries, who you could say are rivals, competitors, whatever you want to say, call them.
00:41:51.820I mean, they're not doing great either.
00:42:42.580So not super high, but much higher than South Korea.
00:42:45.120So it won't be that long until South Korea, even though it has a technological advantage over North Korea, will not have a military advantage because it doesn't have the people.
00:42:53.660Louise, is there a biologic element to this in that things like microplastics?
00:42:58.100Because I've been reading lots of studies that the quality of young men's sperm is in freefall.
00:43:15.280Like, the pill has pretty bad effects on the natural environment, which may be implicated in low sperm counts, along with things like microplastics.
00:43:22.480But as far as I know, the problem is not that people are trying to have kids en masse and not managing it.
00:44:48.040And I mean, that's also true, you know, I've got to say, for like my hobby horses, like being pro-marriage and stuff, it's also the case that plenty of socially conservative places that love marriage or whatever are still sub-replacement.
00:45:19.480So if you're automatically, if you're sending out that message and what you're saying, the kids are undesirable, then why would people want to have kids if they're constantly being told that they're not wanted?
00:45:38.020I think another problem that people have, and this is in some senses, I think, the issue with wealth-causing low fertility, is that, you know, I go onto Instagram or whatever, and I see I'm bombarded with images of what a luxurious, comfortable, child-free life looks like, right?
00:46:36.340I also think the children are just wonderful and it's, like, the most meaningful thing you can do with your life, right?
00:46:41.440But there's just no getting away from the fact that it does, it has economic implications.
00:46:46.060And a lot of people, like, when it comes down to it, they're just like, I'd actually rather have a bit more money and only have one or two.
00:46:52.680Well, this is one of the things about, that I think we increasingly need to talk about in modern society, which is, I think we live in the age of money.
00:47:01.660And so we've forgotten that money isn't the most important thing.
00:47:05.520At the same time, as I think it's fair to say, you know, I was having this conversation with somebody last night.
00:47:11.100Like, I'm a first generation immigrant.
00:47:24.180And I've basically had to create this with Francis and build a pretty successful career in doing what I'm doing to be able to have what baby boomers in America had in the 60s on one income.
00:48:43.940You know, if what you're trying to do, if you want to design a fertile culture, it probably has to look something like a village.
00:48:51.860Because that seems to be, of all sorts of social technology we've ever invented, that seems to be the best one for encouraging people to have children,
00:48:59.780like, having their extended family around, being in a very settled place, all this kind of stuff.
00:49:03.760But anyway, so historically, yes, I mean, villages have always, rural areas have always been the engines of fertility.
00:49:09.000And then people go to the city and either have fewer children or die from plague or, you know, I mean, I mean, this is a point, actually, like, again, worth remembering.
00:49:18.640When my husband accused me of being a collapsed hard, I saw in the paper recent, I think it was a Lancet, had a piece on low fertility the other week.
00:49:26.540And it mentioned the fact that the global population has not shrunk since the Black Death and is now set to shrink quite soon, which makes it sound very frightening.
00:49:39.300It is worth, like, reflecting on the fact that, yes, I mean, normally population only shrinks because of disease, war, famine, some sort of disaster.
00:49:48.740That's not true for us. Like, the reason that our population is set to shrink is because people have just, like, don't fancy having kids, which is kind of great.
00:49:59.880I mean, if you have to go through a period of population decline, this is definitely the most pleasant.
00:50:06.360But it's still, like, it still spells only one thing, which is civilisation decline.
00:50:11.020Yeah. And with that as well, there's this other phenomenon that has started to bubble up, which is surrogacy, which I find...
00:50:35.280Yeah, because, well, you get these people now who want children, but don't want to go, sometimes don't want to go through the rigours of an unpleasantness of being pregnant and having a child.
00:50:50.460Yeah, like, I mean, I'm pregnant right now, I can tell you pregnancy sucks, like, I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
00:50:56.700I actually had a really interesting conversation in my podcast recently with a woman called Catherine Pakulik.
00:51:01.280He's had eight children and also has, I think, six stepchildren.
00:51:06.040And she wrote a book about women who...
00:52:14.740And I can, I get why these celebrity, you know, rich ladies or whatever, rich men, want to farm it out to poorer women.
00:52:27.420Although, but then the thing is, as Mary Harrington likes to say, pregnancy doesn't just make a baby, it makes a mother.
00:52:33.120There are psychological components to pregnancy, which are essential in terms of priming you to care for this helpless newborn when he or she is born.
00:52:45.620And we, we can't replicate that, you know, science.
00:52:51.100It's beyond science to try and imitate that.
00:52:54.020Louise, in the interest of promoting the natalist message, let me mansplain pregnancy for you.
00:53:00.560No, but I, I have heard from some other women that it's a, it's a mixed bag, I think, pregnancy.
00:53:20.000Like you, um, I remember vividly, so I've just come to the end of morning sickness and I had the same thought while writing a book about pronatalism, right?
00:53:46.300And I think also that's just, it's just life, isn't it?
00:53:49.600Like, you, like, it's very rare to accomplish anything that's really worthwhile without some hardship.
00:53:54.860Do you think part of it as well, and I was thinking about this because when I was teaching, people always used to say to me, oh, you know, kids are this, kids are that.
00:54:03.760Most kids are really lovely and wonderful.
00:54:06.060You get, you know, the others that you think, you know, you could be put somewhere else and, you know, society would be better for it.
00:54:11.940But the vast majority of them, uh, chill out, Adolf.
00:54:17.460Yeah, trust me, some of their mums definitely have the smart, long and honest conversation with their mums.
00:54:24.040But we, we now see motherhood and being a parent as long, onerous, incredibly unsatisfying.
00:54:33.540Because most of us don't have encounters with children, the only time we really notice with them is if we're in a plane or in a public space,
00:54:40.680they're having a meltdown and we're like, oh my God, shut the up.
00:54:45.980And the joys of, I think the joys of parenthood tends to be hidden.
00:54:49.880Partly because maybe we don't talk about it enough.
00:54:52.120Because you don't want to be smug, do you?
00:54:53.840Like, particularly if you've, particularly, I don't know, if you know, if you know that you're talking to people who are struggling with infertility or if you have friends who, you know.
00:55:04.060But I mean, I should say that anecdotally, by far the most common reason I know for women in my peer group not having kids is because they haven't found the right man.
00:55:12.640Like, the, the sort of girl boss narrative about this, that what's happening is women are just choosing their, like, fancy shoes and handbags and pursuing their careers over having children.
00:55:25.200So, you know, that ideology absolutely exists.
00:55:28.700I think overwhelmingly, though, that's not what's going on.
00:55:30.900Like, I think at least 90% of British women say they want to have children at some point, and yet only 75% of my generation will end up doing so.
00:55:55.280I always think that, for fathers as well, but I obviously only know it from the mother's perspective, having children just changes your moral universe.
00:56:06.040Because suddenly, it's the number one thing you care about in the whole world forevermore, and you would die for your children without even thinking about it.
00:56:14.160And not only that, it also means that any time you encounter a child's suffering, like, even in fiction or something, you think of your child.
00:56:21.760Like, you become so much more acutely sensitive to any harm coming to children and so on.
00:56:27.880Yeah, and that's just so hard to, it's so hard to directly empathise with that feeling if you've not been through it, and hard also to explain it.
00:56:39.200But at the same time, Francis, like, when my son comes in here, everyone's like, oh my god, he's so cute.
00:56:44.400You know, so I think having kids around, this is, you were making this point, but can we come back to the urbanisation conversation, actually, Louise, a little bit?
00:56:53.960Because I guess one of the things I wanted to ask you about is, there was a time when conservatives in particular, but lots of people, banged on about the nuclear family.
00:57:02.920And I wonder if the nuclear family is actually a big part of why we're here, because it takes more than a nuclear family to raise a child, as I'm rapidly discovering.
00:57:13.000And is it maybe just particularly the urbanisation of society where you basically have older generations staying put in rural areas, younger generations moving in, you create separation, cities are not exactly encouraging you to have kids anyway.
00:57:27.980And then that is then, and it's like, then you're going, it's super expensive, I'm surrounded by people who don't have kids, and therefore I've got all these other disincentives, I'm not increasingly living in a safe or comfortable place, I don't have my own home, and I'm not going to get this help that, you know, 100 years would have been expected, which is grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc.
00:57:50.580Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And it's this kind of tragedy, in a sense that, you know, Britain had the first industrial revolution, right, and we also had birth rate decline earlier almost than anyone else.
00:58:04.740And so we're, you know, with the exception of some of these North East Asian countries, we're further along this road than anyone else.
00:58:12.060And one theory as to why Britain had the first industrial revolution is because we abandoned clannishness earlier, we basically invented individualism, right, and then exported it, of course, to, you know, America is now, of course, famous for its individualism, America is, was originally a British colony, right, so it's all the same culture.
00:58:30.240Um, individualism is absolutely amazing for wealth generation, absolutely amazing for encouraging people to be mobile and innovative and entrepreneurial and all the rest of it.
00:58:41.820Um, and, you know, for a long time, like that allowed British people to dominate the world because we had the combination of individualism and also high fertility.
00:58:51.080I mean, for such a long time, Britain was a net exporter of people. We talk so often now about mass, mass, net immigration. We had net emigration for centuries because we were sending, we were, you know, having loads and loads of kids and sending them to Australia, Canada, everywhere.
00:59:05.360And the problem, though, that we've now found is that eventually individualism eats itself because you have this problem that you describe exactly, that you don't have people move around, they don't have the extended family networks anymore, they're not, they're not settled in one place, they don't, you know.
00:59:26.760I mean, one of the reasons, right, why people have fewer children when they're not surrounded by extended family is that extended families are constantly telling you to have kids because your grandmother or whoever is constantly sort of prodding you about it.
00:59:39.940Like, your friends, your friends don't have any genetic investment in you having children.
00:59:44.160They might have some other, it might suit their interests in other ways, but generally they don't have that genetic investment, whereas families do.
00:59:50.600And families also will drop everything to help their, their children, grandchildren, whatever, who are, of course, their genetic, represent their genetic future.
01:00:02.040So, yeah, I mean, shredding the family kind of can't help but disincentivise people from having children.
01:00:06.780All right, well, there you go, it's the last days of growth.
01:00:11.620I guess the question before we do our last one is, you're pregnant, you want to have more kids, in this declining, dying, collapsed, hard world.
01:00:41.440It might feel like this feeling of loss and sort of cultural malaise isn't very happy.
01:00:46.540But also, we're getting to live off the fumes of the amazing civilisation that our ancestors built, you know.
01:00:53.900If you'd lived in the 19th century, say, or earlier, you would have got to feel that sense of, like, confidence and, like, certainty and all of this.
01:01:03.000You also would have had to worry about your kids dying of cholera.