Transcription
Hello and welcome to the new culture forum. My name is Nina Power and today I'm joined by Louise Perry. Louise Perry is a writer. She's the author of the very successful The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. She is the host of Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast and she is a columnist at the Wall Street Journal's Free Expression newsletter. So, welcome Louise. Very lovely to see you.
Lovely to be here.
Um, so today we're going to be talking about several things. One of the main things is to do with perhaps a crisis in the relationship between men and women, particularly young men and women. and we're going to look at some of the reasons why things are difficult particularly for young people in Britain. Uh all of the different causes. We're going to be thinking about uh demography which is something that you've written a lot about and I know that you're working on a book about this question which will be out next year and you have some interesting theories about why there is a demographic crisis. what are the kind of causal factors and reasons why people all over the world but particularly in richer countries are having fewer and fewer children and what this tells us about our future uh as a species.
Um, but yeah, just to begin with, right, so today in Britain, uh a government review has found that nearly 1 million young people out of work are costing the country over 125 billion pounds a year. We also hear today that uh that 27 non-EU migrants are hired for every unemployed British youth. Um, I think we both have a sense that there is a whole series of things holding young people back. Um, I know you've also written for the Wall Street Journal about uh the exodus of young people as well. So, I'm just wondering if you can talk a little bit about current conditions, what it's like to be a a younger person, let's say, up to the age of 35 in Britain today.
Well, a big part of the story with the unemployment rates is um the welfare system and the fact that it is now possible for the first time in the history of the world. I would I would guess for people to um be on long-term disability payments for mental health conditions like anxiety, ADHD, autism, etc. Um, it is clearly the case that people are able to play the system.
Mhm.
Social media abounds with guidance on how exactly to play the system and the massive upsurge in people claiming mental health related disability payments since co I think is suggestive of the fact that people realized that the system was open to abuse as the furow system had been. And I mean I think this is like the main story as to what's gone on over the last decade just specifically in terms of young people on welfare. Um, I mean I suspect what's going to happen for a multitude of reasons is that the welfare system will barely last 100 will have will have barely lasted 100 years.
In terms of its um I think it will be regarded in retrospect as an experiment a well-meaning but basically quite foolish experiment.
Right. I mean, we heard a couple of months ago that uh there's now more money going out into the welfare system than there is coming in from taxes.
So income the income tax bill is now lower than the welfare bill.
Right?
Um, and obviously the government gets taxes from other places as well, but income tax is a very substantial source of government government revenue that well those welfare payments are not um are not just or even primarily going to unemployed working age people. It's mostly pensions.
Mhm.
And then of course the NHS is a whole other area of expenditure which is enormous. Um, and which I mean we don't people don't tend to think of either pensions or healthcare spending as welfare. Um, but these are novel expenditures for governments. You know, historically that the the NHS is what 78 years old. Um, the old age pension when it first came in uh Deoy George was uh very meager compared to to what we have now and most people cuz people of course had shorter life expecties and so the period of time that you'd expect to claim a pension was much shorter than it was now than it is now.
So whereas now we have this conception of the pension that you're supposed to spend 20 30 years even basically being supported by the state. Um, like it just it doesn't take I don't think you have to be like a crazy right rightwing ideologue to think that this is clearly not sustainable. I if it ever was. It's partly part of the problem right is to do with the fact that we've had um below replacement birth rates in Britain since the 1970s and there is just a mathematical problem where there aren't enough young working age people to support a growing number of of pensioners. Certainly, we can't be supporting, you know, loads of young people who are choosing to take disability payments rather than to work. Um, that's all nuts. Of course, the government or at least sections of government think that immigration is the solution to this problem, right? But I mean, how can immigration be the solution to the problem when we're looking at the fact that young people aren't able to get jobs because their jobs are being taken by people that employers can pay much less money to who are then sending home money remittances to their their families or the countries that they come from. Um, I mean, there's been lots of anecdotal reports of young people not being able to get work.
Yeah.
Um, I I take your point about the kind of what the anxiety and the mental health conditions and I'm sure that's being exacerbated by social media. I think we've also seen a collapse in in shame as a kind of structuring social mechanism like the idea that actually it would be shameful to claim benefits even if you were technically eligible that seems to have disappeared uh by the wayside. It's it's simply a question of what you can get of other people's money. Uh, I mean, this sort of great socialist experiment. I mean, we're supposed to in a way, I think, look back at the kind of that idea of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and things think, "Oh, this is cruel and unusual." But we've also got this kind of confluence of Yeah. I mean, simply millions of people coming from elsewhere who can be paid less.
Um, and if you were a young person today,
You might think, well, what's the point, right? What am I?
And indeed.
Yeah. So, so one strain of thought that's been popular within the conservatives, for instance, is that um our, you know, young native British people are lazy and feckless and we and we need to be bringing in kind of striving workers from overseas. Um, there are a few problems with that that strategy. Um, one is that it's actually not true that like like unemployment rates among white British people are actually relatively low compared with other ethnic groups. So that's one. So it's not even though there is this phenomenon is absolutely real of loads of people claiming claiming welfare sort of more or less legitimately. Um, it's by no means confined to just um natives. Two, um, there's this question of undercutting of wages. Like if you have people actually I was just having a conversation recently with a woman who's actually Eastern European, so she was of a previous wave of immigration from Romania. She and her husband are now thinking of going back. She works as a masseuse. And part of the reason is because she was working at a um a massage clinic. And the boss realized that if he brought in loads of people from the third world who were willing to live in horrible conditions like above the shop and work 7 days a week, 10 hours a day and you know, just were were willing to live basically wretched lives, then he could make more money from his business. And she said, "Well, I'm not willing to do that because Romanians in general are not willing to work those kind of conditions." She said, "I'd rather go back to Romania."
And there's a lot to be said for
Living in Romania by all accounts that I've been, but I'm told it's very nice. So this is obviously going to disincentivize people for if your choice is basically between competing with people from the third world who who are willing to suffer really wretched conditions in work and also in housing, say sharing an an HMO with lots of other people um or go on welfare, you'll most people would choose to go on offer that makes perfect sense if those are your choices but of course those are these are choices that have been generated by government policy. These are political choices.
Sorry for the interruption. Just want to let you know our second annual literary festival is taking place Friday the 5th to Saturday the 6th of June. Do get your tickets. We have a fantastic lineup. Our literary festival is basically the only free speech festival in the country where we platform uh writers and authors your favorite broadcasters who aren't welcome at other literary festivals. We've got Allison Pearson, Professor David Betts, Lord Nigel Bigger, David Frost, too many to mention. Do go to our website, new culture forum.org.uk or click on the link at the bottom of this video. Thanks so much.
Yeah, I mean, and I don't think this is what the people wanted. I mean, the formerly sensible parts of the left, if we want to call them that, were actually often very concerned about uh mass immigration in terms of labor because precisely for the reasons that employers could undercut the wages.
Strong leftwing position.
Absolutely. Um, and you know the idea of having uh to compete with people who are willing to live and earn so little money and all that money is going back anyway. I mean, I often think about well or you've imported like largely vast numbers of young young unmarried men right to who are are turning up in this country and and we know this even though that we're not really being given official numbers. It's also visually obvious that this is happening. Um, and the idea that then what are they supposed to do? Are they ever going to get married? Are they ever going to have a family? Are they just basically sort of like neoslaves from the future who just kind of do do this? I mean, the whole thing is so dystopian.
Yeah.
Um, uh, it's absolutely kind of bonkers. And we we know that that any time the British public had a chance to vote on mass immigration, they voted for less immigration.
Yeah. So we've had a successive succession of governments, both Tory and Labor, that have um just disregarded that and not only not done what people voted for, they've done the opposite.
The the challenge is gerontocracy. Okay.
So, what I think a lot of politicians had reasoned, maybe they were wrong, but I think this was their reasoning, is that yes, people say that they don't want immigration, and of course Brexit was a a clear indication of this,
But um they do want particularly older voters cuz older not only is there this demographic imbalance, but also older voters are more likely to turn out to vote. So, they're a powerful political force. Um, older voters also want to have affordable care homes. They also want to have plentiful NHS services available to them. Um, the only way, so governments have reasoned that we can provide that is by bringing in um workers from the third world and undercutting natives. In effect.
Um, I'm always amazed that doctors aren't more um I mean obviously junior doctors in particular have have there's been a lot of strike action and a lot of dissatisfaction but I think that most doctors haven't really caughten on to the fact that their government are deliberately using third world trained doctors to undercut their wages and indeed lots of I mean we have this crazy system in Britain bearing in mind you know Britain this is the country that like invented vaccination invented uh sanitation perfected antibiotics etc. Right? Like we have a very very strong history of medical um innovation and excellence. Um, we cap the number of doctors who can be trained in British medical schools because the reasoning is that you then have to go on to train in the NHS because the government in this country has a monopoly on healthcare. That's what the nature of the NHS. They and there are a certain number of jobs in the NHS and therefore they say well therefore we can only train a certain number of medics because they need jobs to go into. That's historically been the reasoning.
Which is why medical schools I think it's typically like 10 applicants to a place is incredibly competitive to get into medical school. You have to be really good. And then you get through this whole process and then the government will deliberately bring in people who have been trained in often very substandard medical schools overseas in the third world because they are cheaper basically because they don't have to pay their training and also because they will accept worse paying conditions. And there are even cases now of doctors who of of British people who've trained in British medical schools and then get into their training and there is actually no job waiting for them because the government is and then you'll have and then you'll have you know then you have the nerve sometimes from people to say oh well we you know we just we can't we can't get enough codacy. I was like what are you talking about?
Yeah, I have heard this. I mean, this is absolutely disastrous. I mean, this is a betrayal of all of those people have invested their time, energy and intellect and taken out huge huge loans in order to uh provide a service which is towards people's betterment.
Um, I mean, you're being punished by a sort of I don't know cruel and sadistic market within the NHS itself.
Well, it's not a market. It's kind of a monopoly.
Yeah. Right. I mean, I'm not sure if the free market would solve this necessarily, but it does mean that when it comes to say NHS policy, it is entirely within the hands of government.
Right?
Um, and government has its own >> kind of corporatism then, which is a feature of tyrannical and fascist states everywhere.
Um,
And then of course you have young doctors going and nurses and everybody wanting to go overseas to places like Australia, um, where they can be paid more.
Yeah. Well, I wanted to ask you about this actually. So I mean we hear a lot now about particularly uh maybe young men leaving if in their 20ies let's say you're a young ambitious entrepreneurial man who wants to get ahead in the world who wants to make good money. Uh, we've heard quite a lot of stories I think of of of people leaving to go to the UAE and going to Dubai and go to Australia and perhaps to America to some extent.
And if you were that person, if you were a young person, um, I mean, you're not old at all, you're still very young, but if you were, let's say hypothetically, sort of 22, 23, you've just got a good degree from a good university. Why wouldn't you leave Britain? Why would you stay in Britain if you're a young person today?
Yeah. I mean, one thing to say is that we don't really know how many people are leaving because we don't really know how many people are here. The British government has been very um slack about recording immigration and immigration properly. Um, uh, I mean until recently, maybe this is still the case, the key way in which we would monitor flows of people was literally having um employees of the government go up to people in um airport arrivals halls and say like what are you here for basically and kind of collect the figures. But it wasn't like seriously counting people in and counting out where which I don't really know why. I mean, I so I'm also I'm a dual national. more to Australian and I recently asked the Australian government in order to get citizenship for my children. I had to prove that I'd lived in Australia for a certain amount of time. And what you do is you send off to the Australian government to ask for your migration record and they send you this document which goes back to well, it went back to my my whole life, right? So I was born in '92, but I think it goes back earlier still. And it will say exactly the date you arrived and on which >> flight and the date that you left. And this you know for 34 years plus they'll tell you, you know, I thought why don't why don't the British government do this I I don't really know the answer I mean clearly the Australian government had the capacity I mean if the Australian government had the capacity to do this all these years we should assume the Brits did as well I guess it's just the will but anyway we don't really know how many people are coming and going or indeed how many people are immigrating um or or it's or which age group so I don't know if there's a sex cue with immigrants. I don't know if the government knows if there's a sex cube with immigrants. This also comes up when you're trying to work out whether there's um an exodus of very wealthy people, right, which has been reported in the press. But the way that you have to try and work that out, like the Sunday Times Rich List will basically just try and work out where people are now living by looking at things like their LinkedIn profiles, like where it says that they live. So, we don't really know is the is like the headline figure. Um, anecdotally, I mean, there were, this may be less true now because of course the war in Iran, about a quarter of a million British people living in the UAE and another quarter of a million British people living in other parts of the Gulf. So, that's half a million people. M
Um, the they're not going to take those countries are not going to take people who are like on pensioners or disabled people who you know otherwise dependent on the state obviously like these these states are very small in terms of what they offer people. Um, of course the trade-off is then you don't have to pay income tax so it's a it's completely different way of running a government. Um, but you know, so we should assume therefore that that's half a million people living in the Gulf who are probably net tax contributors or would be net tax contributors if they lived in Britain and who are skilled and young and eager to better themselves. Those are not half a million people that you want to be losing. Similarly this ex exodus to Australia which has been going on for a very long time. I mean Britain has had net immigration to Australia for all of Australia's history. Um, sometimes
Some some of it compelled at the beginning.
Right. Right. Including some my ancestors. Right. Um, obviously there were periods where those surges increased including in the 1970s when of course British economy was in dire straits. Um, it would be amazing if that weren't happening now but again it's difficult to be clear on the numbers but um but what people will say to you I mean if you are you just ask people I I I did just today actually I asked a woman who's in her 20s and her boyfriend's an investment banker and we were just we were just chatting and uh she was like she just had her phone stolen recently on the street. She's very frustrated about that. Um, housing is incredibly expensive even for a high earner. They're worried about crime. She didn't say it, but I got the impression that they were also worried about the negative effects of mass immigration. Like this is I I would say almost all of my British friends under the age of 40ish have at least floated the idea.
Yeah.
At some point.
I mean, this is this is very depressing, right? This is not a Britain which is encouraging people to look forward with hope to to start families to get married to uh defend the country in many ways. I mean, we recently had the government I mean you're you're quite right I think to say that we don't know the stats cuz people aren't we don't know who's here. Um, I mean, I I get the strong feeling that at some point if someone comes along and says, "Oh, well, now we've got the tech to work out who's here. We just need to surveil everyone and do kind of, you know, social credit and so on, people will go for it because at least then we'll know who's here." You know, they've set up the precondition for a situation of which there is sort of potentially millions of unvetted people wandering around. We have no idea who they are. But recently, we had the Labor government sort of bragging that they'd managed to get net migration down. But as you say, if this turns out to be all of the good people leaving and lots of sort of very lowskilled potentially criminal people arriving, this is not a good thing, is it?
Clearly or even I mean, or even people who are you know, like one of the one of the reasons that we had this huge surge in immigration under Boris Boris Johnson's government the so Boris wave yeah is because of social care visa so again this is going back to the gerontocracy point.
The government are worried understandably about people elderly or otherwise frail people having access to affordable social care particularly because it often ends up being um responsibility of local authorities to pay for this care. Um, and so they bring in the social care visa and have a a surge in this is primarily women um who'll be coming from places like uh Zimbabwe was a popular source of um people on this visa type who I'm you know, I'm sure these are overwhelmingly people who want to who who want to do a good job who want to better themselves and the lives of their families and are not criminal or any of this right like that they they are unobjectionable people.
Um, but they also don't earn very much money. I mean, that's kind of the whole point of of, you know, of their arrival. They don't earn very much money. Often bringing independents, children or elderly parents or whatever. And you need to earn in order to be a net tax contributor. I used to take to put in more than you take out of state coffers, you need to be earning at least in sort of the mid40s, like 45,000ish kind of figure. I mean, it depends on how you calculate it because obviously it depends how long you live and and all these kind of things but anyone who's earning 25 30 35 kind of these figures that are for for low for low paid work or even less there's no way that they're they're net contributors. And you might say okay well the work needs to be done so it's worth you know this nature of economy is that we a nature of this kind of at least semi-ocialized like quite significantly socialized economy is that we people need to do these jobs and we redistribute money to sort of make it happen. But you've just got to like you've just got to do the math. You've got to think about it. Okay. If you've got one young tech worker going to Dubai and taking his >> tens of thousands a year in income tax contributions with him and then you've he's being replaced by someone who's coming on a social care visa from Zimbabwe, that's not good for state finances. It's really bad for state finances and I there are people I think in government who realize this.
Yeah. But yes, it's I mean, we can imagine a different situation let's say like perhaps a slightly poorer Britain perhaps where there's been you know, the return of various people who are not economically contributing or in fact taking money away from uh the British taxpayer and the British state. Um, and we have perhaps a slightly smaller country that maybe is encouraged to kind of rebuild itself and to think about the future and to be optimistic and maybe everyone can kind of muck in and access this sort of spirit which maybe still uh remains.
And yeah to encourage people to think kind of collectively about their future. And I I wanted to ask you about this question of demographics, right? because I know that you're you're working on this and you're thinking about this very seriously and we often hear very different explanations for why uh the birth rate has largely declined particularly in richer countries. This would of course include the UK. Sometimes people talk about technology. Sometimes people talk about feminism. Uh sometimes people will uh talk about well mass immigration having a sort of inhibiting effect on people's desire families. Some people will invoke material and economic causes, the difficulty of getting on the housing market. Other people will talk about perhaps uh new anxieties that have arisen among young people about their capacity or aptitude to to form a family or to to have these adult markers, you know, getting married to uh having a house and having children. Uh sometimes people will invoke religious ideas perhaps the death of gods and and the death of Christianity the death of nationalism the death of a a sense of shared purpose uh is also contributing so I really want to ask you Louise uh if you had to bolly down >> what is going on
It's a very big question you know I mean in some senses you know you don't actually like so my book is about falling fertility rates but only about a quarter of it is about the cause.
Sure.
Um, because the cause is important but you don't actually have to the thing that I'm actually more interested in is um how this is going to change the world.
And politics and economics and everything and in some sense you don't actually need to know the cause in order to track this because at this point um a significant population decline is already baked in so even if you were able to reverse it immediately I mean if it was something really simple if it was just house prices.
And then the government could you know, flick a few switches and then house prices declined and then all of a sudden everyone started having families, then, you know, that would be useful information, right?
Um, it isn't. Okay. I mean, it's frustrating, right? Because I I obviously I I'm a I'm a great um supporter of the nation's young people and I hate the gerontocracy. I want to smash it to pieces, right? So, there is obviously a bit of me that that would like it to be as simple as that. like the people the reason people aren't having children is because they can't afford to get in the housing ladder. And it would feel intuitively true that people, you know, if only we had an extra bedroom, if only we could afford for the mom to stay at home or whatever it is, then we would have more children. The problem is that it doesn't seem to be true.
Um, because there are other parts of the world. I mean, it is absolutely the case that Anglosphere house prices in particular have been crazy. Again, this goes back to gerontocracy. It's because governments, I mean, Trump said this quite explicitly actually last year. He said, "I don't want house prices to go down because that makes home owners poorer."
Yeah. Older people are more likely to be owner occupiers and they have seen their house prices go up a lot since the 1990s. I mean, it's actually been stagnant for a while in real terms, but certainly in the '90s and 2000s, it went up a lot. And people are intending to basically cash these cash these assets out and and use them to pay for their their their social care and their private pensions. Um, whether or not they'll actually be able to I don't know because it may, you know, we can't guarantee like who is going to buy these houses realistically is always a question you have to ask. Um, but the reason the house prices have gone up is because governments have allowed this to happen. Um, because they have uh deregulated lenders um because they have uh limited building building they've given away to nimism because they've admitted mass immigration. And you know these are all these are policy choices that have been made particularly in the Angosphere because in the Anglophere there's a particular um cultural emphasis on owning your own home.
Yeah.
Which you don't see for instance in German speaking countries where people are more relaxed about renting longterm and that means that in German speaking countries um house prices have been much less um housing is more affordable um even in some of the mega cities or somewhere like Tokyo like house prices are relatively affordable compared with local wages partly because they do a lot of building and partly because Japanese have low levels of immigration. Um, Germany, Austria and Japan all have very very low fertility. The fertility is actually a bit lower than ours. So if it were just housing, right? And I mean, there have been various attempts to I could go on about this forever. There have been various attempts to try and disentangle these factors cuz basically all the factors that you mention just track with modernity.
Yeah.
It's kind of a bundle of things that happen at the same time when you modernize. And so trying to work out which one of those things is causing people to be um not not be minded to have children is very difficult.
Sure. I mean, there's no reason why it would be one thing. I mean.
Well, I don't know. People always say that like, oh, well, it must be loads of things. Is it though? Because if you look at this is happening across >> every single country pretty much fertility rates have fallen um a lot and still falling. That includes parts of the world that are still very fertile. So subsaran Africa for instance they're above replacement but that the fertility is still falling there and has fallen a fair bit.
Um,
I think half of countries now are below the replacement threshold. Um, so if it were loads of things why would you expect all of those things to happen? I feel like razors it's one thing.
Yes. I don't know. I mean, well, well, fair enough. I mean, perhaps there's some mysterious mysterious specieswide thing what that did humanity senses that we're reaching capacity in terms of occupation of the planet and I think self.
Coals I find that quite an interesting idea so I think I think what's actually going on I'm going to try and explain this clearly because it's a little bit technical I wish it was house prices wouldn't that be wouldn't that be nicer you know um or feminism or any of these things the problem I mean the problem is with all of those I should say all of those various explanations that are very popular is that they just don't they can't explain this. If it's feminism, why is it happening in the Middle East?
If it's uh or indeed in like North Korea is massive force. If it's liberalism, why is it happening in North Korea?
Um, if it's uh contraception like then I mean I think contraception probably is part of the story. I think people it's now easier for people to not have children basically. But um fertility rates in a country like Britain, I mean falling since 1800.
And actually we fell below replacement briefly in the 1930s. So actually people can control their fertility surprisingly well without the use of hormonal contraception. So the problem is for all of these ideas there's a there's a there's a counter example and um people have a tendency to just want their own political hobby horse.
Yeah.
To be it. And so progressives will always say it's cuz child care is unaffordable and men don't do enough housework and conservatives say it's because people aren't getting married young enough or whatever. And yeah, I think it's probably a a biological phenomenon actually as much as anything. So there's this idea in um evolutionary science of a slow life history strategy versus a fast life history strategy.
Um, and it varies between species. So an example of a very fast life history strategy species would be the mayfly. And an example of a very slow life history strategy species would be the blue whale. So the mayfly has I don't know thousands of eggs and lives for a day and is very very live young in its in its strategy. Whereas a blue whale will calf every I don't know five or 10 years and put all of their resources into the calf and live for 200 years etc. Um, humans are obviously further towards the blue whale end of the spectrum, but we are plastic.
Mhm.
Including biologically. So, so for instance, a a girl who has been raised in more stressful conditions, including fatherless in a fatherless home when you control for things like body weight and other factors which can affect this will start her period younger. So, she will adopt a faster life history strategy. not consciously but her body will adopt a faster life history strategy because she lives in those conditions of stress than if she hadn't grown up in conditions of stress. So when you adopt a faster life history strategy, you will um have more children, you'll start having sex younger, you'll be more risk tolerant.
Um, because you you you have clocked from your environment that you're living in a dangerous setting where lots of your children are likely to die. you're quite likely to die. You need to get a rigle on and kind of like live your life now. Whereas the slow life history strategy is better suited to conditions of peace and affluence and stability where it makes more sense to put all of your resources into say having one, two, or three children and putting all of your resources.
Because they're more likely to survive. That they're more likely to survive and you have all the time in the world.
To concentrate on building your building up your resources in various ways. So in the in the modern world that would mean like going to university for a long time, focusing on your career before having children when you have your children putting a lot of resources into their education, things like that. These are all slow life history strategies which do make a lot of sense if you live in conditions of um peace and stability and affluence.
Well, and and you know the decline in mortality of of children who are born and also of mothers giving birth. I mean, that's been one of the major medical success stories.
When I was looking at the when I was first looking at this question for this book which I've been working for a couple of years I did have a baby in the middle. you know, um I was I was thinking what could it be like what is the thing that has happened to everyone at not quite the same time but like roughly like between 1800 and now and um that would lead to such a uniform phenomenon worldwide. What is the one thing that's happened to us? One thing that's happened to us, there's this amazing graph that you can that was constructed by some researchers who were trying to work out um child mortality statistics across different times and places.
So that's so child I think they define it as children dying before the age of 15 and they looked at preodern societies across the world and also industrialized societies and so on. And basically the species norm is about 40% of children die before they're 15 which is very shocking statistic which I think most people aren't really aware of. I think because it's so horrible we we've sort of blocked this out. Um, I think that most people would be very surprised to hear that until quite recently it was that high. It's it's also that high among a lot of other primates. So it seems to be maybe the species norm is around 40%. It will obviously go up in certain um conditions but it's just very high. And then what happens after the industrial revolution is it does this like really really fast downward trajectory. And now even in very poor parts of the world child mortality is low like by historical in relative historical terms child mortality is really low. It means that in some sense we are experiencing an evolutionary mismatch like it's a good evolution.
Yeah. So an evolutionary mismatch is when you're it doesn't have to be humans. A species has evolved for a certain set of environmental conditions and then those environmental conditions change. So an example would be of evolutionary mismatch would be um obesity is caused by the fact that we now live in conditions where we have access to plentiful cheap calories and our ancestors didn't. And so we can easily become obese in our environment um because genetically we're primed to be greedy and hungry cuz that made sense right in in conditions of scarcity.
Um,
I think that in terms of the not just the child mortality but also all sorts of other things about the comforts of modern life. The fact that we um we have food around us all the time too much of anything. The fact that we
Yeah. Right. Like we live very very cushy lives as a consequence of the industrial revolution.
Yeah.
And um that is an evolutionary mismatch and I think that what has happened is that it basically pushes us so far towards being slow life history strategies that we almost fall off the edge. Like we are so focused on investing everything into um just um having a small number of children and being and delaying everything that clearly quite a lot of people just forget to have children or only have one and here we are.
I mean, I do wonder I mean my preferred explanation is the religious one.
I know obviously I.
It's not it's there's not religion does have a role.
Yes.
Yeah.
Okay. Well, look, because one of the counter examples is that the only groups of people, however small, who are above replacement birth rate, are the extremely religious.
Yeah.
Right. Whether it's um Orthodox Jews, uh Mormons, uh Catholics. I mean, we personally know people who are very uh devout and different religions. I mean, I have a Jewish rabbi friend who has seven children. We have Catholic friends who have nine children. Yeah. And this is not particularly unusual among very traditional and orthodox versions of those religions, right? Where every child is is understood to be a gift from God. Suffering is built in to the religion. Um, there are kind of uh I don't know spiritual mechanisms for coping with with let's say the loss of a child. Um, everything has a higher meaning and a purpose. And this is radically different from an understanding of the world that is just I don't know indifferent to nihilistic about the future of life or life itself you know I mean we have a government that has brought in lots of bills of like late stage abortion like with the the attempt to bring in the the maid type euthanasia end of life stuff. I mean this is like a a culture that seems to not value life at all.
Yeah. And I so I I I mean, I know these are small counterexamples with.
No, there are telling counterexamples because you know that the the one country which is sort of radically exempt from this general pattern is Israel right it's very interesting so Isra even secular Jews are slightly above replacement and obviously ultraorththodox Jews are massively above replacement level um.
So maybe what's going on there is partly that Israel uh Israelis feel a sense of existential threat.
So even though and are and are acutely aware of mortality, not least because of the Holocaust being within living memory. And so it may be that despite being modern and high-tech and comfortable in lots of ways and not having child mortality anything like 40%. Um, people are still sufficiently um psychologically uh disturbed by the possibility of danger that they feel children.
Well, yes. I mean, they're not wrong, right? Yeah. But also I think that might but the level of danger they're experiencing is sufficient I think to counteract this effect. Um, ideology is absolutely a part of this. One way in which we are different from mayflies and blue whales is that we are ideological creatures and um you can both so you can hasten this effect. I should say by the way that the fact this link between child mortality and um fertility rates is is like settled science within demography. This isn't just me cooking this up as a journalist, you know, my my chinny reckon.
The first demographic transition that so that's what happens immediately post-industrialization where you have uh a a society's in a Malthusian equilibrium with very high levels of mortality and high levels of fertility.
Suddenly the mortality drops because you have medical science improving basically and people's living conditions improving and then there's a lag where you see exponential population growth and then the fertility drops as well. So that's what happens in say the 19th century in Britain and then later in other parts of the world which industrialized later.
All that I'm saying and and this has been long been known that that the child mortality is a very very crucial indicator of whether that's going to happen.
All I'm saying is that that's still happening now. Is that that process which has been ongoing for 200 years. There was no reason why it needed to stop at two, right? People having an average of two children is not like a magical number that we were always going to stop at in order to replace our population. There's no reason it wouldn't sink below as indeed it has. It might stink it might sink still further.
Um, but this can this process can be made this can be accelerated or decelerated depending on ideology. So there's very interesting data for instance looking at um people in Brazil who got access to cable American cable TV before other people in other parts of this country got access to it. The people who got access to American cable TV saw faster and further declines in fertility than the people who didn't. Um, there's also been a lot of talk about smartphones in this regard that smartphones seem to accelerate fertility decline in the third world in particular.
That makes sense if what's going on is that people are receiving ideological messaging from say Washington dynasty or something which tells them that low fertility societ that that having a small family is high status and advisable.
Um, and conversely you can get messaging from your subculture if say you are a traditional Catholic that having lots of children is good and this will obviously influence like the fertility is mimemetic.
Yeah.
Um, in both directions. So that's obviously going on. It's just that that process of mimisis is kind of layered on top of a biological phenomenon that is also going on.
Yeah. I mean, I think there is an awful lot of sinister propaganda that is being waged from above at different moments depending on what people want.
I I tend to think so what people will sometimes say is like, oh, of course, because we've all been we get told that motherhood is low status. We get told that having children is a waste of your time, etc. And I think, okay, but who's telling it? Who's telling you that? I tend to think that these kind of cultural products are emergent from.
Okay.
A society in which those things are not considered to be valuable rather than the other way around. I mean obviously yes sometimes you will have sort of elite taste makers.
Intertwined.
Yeah.
Backward and forwards. Okay. Um, let's uh finish up by on a positive note. Let's finish on a positive note. So, Louise, um,
If you're a young person today, male or female in Britain, uh, what advice would you give?
>> I'm going to do my Peter Hitchens line. Immigrate.
No, >> no. Not not immigrate. Let's say to try and, uh, build a hopeful future Britain, which may or may not have fewer people. And maybe, you know, maybe we don't need so many people here. Maybe there are ways of living together and and fixing the country and um having a kind of hopeful attitude towards the future. I'm answering your question for you, but um what would you what would you say to someone in their let's say early 20ies who's just finished a degree uh and is thinking about what to do with their life?
>> Um well, so think about the birth rates thing. I'm not I'm not a catastrophist about this. Okay. So, I think I think low birth rates spells the end to the welfare state, but also the welfare state has existed for a tiny tiny sliver of human history. Like it's not that's not existential. Um people find ways around this basically. Um I I obviously if we had in infinity resources But we don't. So anyway, so I don't I don't think that we should be too um terrified of a future where we transition to basically an older way of doing things in that regard even though the transition will be very difficult and very very politically tumultuous. And I do think that actually a lot of the political tumult that we're experiencing right now comes back to the birth rates question. Um because everything that we've spoken about today like dertocracy and immigration and whatever like they all to some extent have their origin in this phenomenon which is not going away. um we are going to see significant um decrease in population but then I think okay we're going through what um evolutionary biologists call a bottleneck >> where certain traits are being selected for normally we've had a lot of bottlenecks through human history normally what's selected for is something so the black death for instance which kills selected for death presumably.
>> Well, you know that one of the things actually that that one of one thing that did emerge genetically from the black death is that the people who are descended which would probably include us people who are descended from um people who survived it have stronger immune systems.
>> Sure.
>> Which means that they're more prone to having autoimmune diseases where the immune system sort of turns on you. that that we see these these relics of these selection events throughout um throughout human history. Um we're all descended from the people who got through them. That's happening now as well. So, but it's not disease or famine or war or any of these things which historically have caused bottlenecks. It's something much stranger. It's just people wanting to have children. So, South Korea, which has the lowest fertility rates in the world, um they are currently on track, if their fertility rate um stays steady for three generations, they're currently on track to have about six great grandchildren for every 100 South Koreans alive today. So, a loss of 94% of the population, which is amazing, like over like a century. Like, no disease has ever done that.
>> That's that's really dramatic.
>> And obviously, that is going to change South Korea. I mean, I I don't think that that will persist indefinitely. I mean, obviously, if this did persist indefinitely, they would eventually go extinct. We would all eventually go extinct. I don't think that that's likely to happen. I think it's much more likely that whatever traits the people who make up that 6% possess, those are traits which somehow make them resistant to this phenomenon. Like why is it that you know people that we know who have 6 7 8 nine children yes it's partly ideological it's cuz they belong to these subcultures so you should ex expect those ideologies to survive and to prosper and conversely you should expect ideologies that discourage >> you know >> to die out >> this was this was important in early America Puritans had more children than Quakers >> because Puritan women tend to get married younger than Quaker women is that they had longer for childbearing shakers are remembered for their furniture and that's it, right? Like they they did not have this significant influence on American history because they they they advised against reproduction because it was an antiatal ideology. We should expect antiatal ideologies also to die out for the same reason eventually. Um there may also be traits that other traits that these people that people who have lots of children or at least have some children have good sense of humor >> maybe. I don't know. Yeah. Like something like some kind of psychological resilience. So what I say I guess to the to the 20-year-olds or whoever who are you know is in a way if you care about this is the we are living in the crucible of history >> you doing something as basic as just deciding to have children >> and in and therefore carrying on a part of yourself into the future is very historically consequential actually like it's it's this is a very strange period of human history and The good thing about this evolutionary bottleneck is it's bloodless. Like it's of all the bottlenecks to live through, this is by far the most pleasant. Um, so you know, so I really I'm not a massive doomer about this at all. I think that it it's tumultuous. It It's also interesting and I just think it's very important which is why I think we should be talking about it.
>> Thank you, Louise. So, we're going to head over to the members section now. For everyone else, thank you very much for watching. We'll see you next week.
>> Hello, I'm Philip Kisley, senior fellow here at New Culture Forum and director of NCF LitFest. Yes, our literary festival is back. We had such a great time last year. Two days packed to the rafters with huge names, talks, conversations, and panels. And guess what? No one got cancelled. There's a novelty in this day and age. So, we thought we'd do it again. Friday and Saturday, 5th and 6th of June. Put those dates in your diary because we have Telegraph columnist, novelist, and all round hero Allison Pearson, one of the great champions of our culture. We have Professor David Betts. He'll be talking about his worldclass research, publications, the state of the nations, and where we're headed. You'll have the opportunity to meet him. You can ask him questions. It's unmissable stuff. We have the wonderful Sue Cook and Professor Nigel Bigger and Dominic Frisbee and Lord Frost. Returning this year, I'm delighted to say, is literary agent Matthew Hamilton. He's a fearless hero as well. So many more names, so many more surprises. But that's all you're going to get from me, at least for the moment. Click on the link below to get your tickets. Now, we've got some great discounts for NCF members. So, here's a tip from me. If you aren't already a member, click on the other link down there and become one before you buy. There are loads of benefits, loads of perks, and you'll become one of the NCF family. That's important now more than ever. And this is an important event. It's the only genuinely alternative high-profile literary festival, and we want you to be part of it. Join us please on the 5th and 6th of June. It's in Westminster. It's NCF LitFest 2026. See you there.