0:04

On this episode of News World, the high

0:07

standards set for modern American parenting

0:10

are unrealistic and setting

0:12

parents and our kids up to

0:14

fail. Our culture tells

0:16

parents there's one best way to raise kids.

0:19

Enroll them in a dozen activities, protect

0:21

them from trauma, get them into the most expensive

0:24

college you can. If you can't

0:26

do that, don't bother. And

0:28

we now see record rates of anxiety,

0:31

depression, medication, debts,

0:35

loneliness, and more in America's

0:37

children. In his new book

0:39

Family on Friendly, how our

0:42

culture made raising kids much harder

0:44

than it needs to be, best selling author

0:46

Timothy Karney says it's time to

0:48

end this failed experiment in overparenting.

0:52

I'm really pleased to welcome my guest, Timothy

0:55

Karney. He is the father of six children,

0:57

a senior fellow at the American unerpresence'

1:00

An, a columnist at the Washington Examiner.

1:14

Tim welcome and thank you for joining.

1:16

Me on news World. Thank you for

1:19

having me.

1:20

You and your wife, Katie have six children. In

1:23

your book, you wrote the quote childhood

1:25

anxiety is a result of helicopter

1:28

parenting. What does that mean?

1:31

So with helicopter parenting you can

1:34

mean a couple things, but just the image of

1:36

the parent hovering literally or figuratively

1:39

over the child. When I

1:42

was a kid, we played little league.

1:44

I rode my bike to the fields. My parents

1:46

came to a couple of games if the weather was nice, and

1:48

they thought that that was the nicest thing to do on a Friday

1:50

night. That's out the window

1:53

now. It's intensive, expensive travel

1:55

sports where you're in Delaware for a field

1:57

hockey tournament every other weekend. It's

2:00

cracking the whip on homework every

2:02

night and hiring tutors. It's

2:04

also when they're little, a constant

2:06

fear that there's some kidnapper,

2:09

well trained kidnapper with a getaway car

2:12

around every corner. And so

2:14

it's a safetyism. It's an over

2:16

ambition, a parental anxiety

2:19

that trickles down into a childhood

2:21

anxiety, and it involves forgetting that

2:23

childhood is supposed to involve freedom and

2:26

fun. And it really

2:28

started in the upper middle class, this overparenting,

2:31

but it's trickled down to the middle class and the

2:33

working class, and so it's driving down birth rates.

2:35

You know, new we have record low birth rates now

2:37

less than one point seven babies per woman.

2:40

And also this epidemic of childhood

2:42

anxiety. There are economists

2:44

who like this. Belsaw Hill, who's a friend

2:47

of mine at the Workings Institution, she praised

2:50

quality over quantity parenting.

2:52

But my argument is that it's actually low quality

2:54

parenting to make childhood

2:57

into this sort of constant audition

2:59

for getting into Princeton. That

3:01

high pressure is not good for anyone.

3:04

So how do you think this evolved.

3:07

It's got a lot of roots. One

3:09

of them really has to do with

3:11

the secularization of our country. Frankly,

3:14

so in this book, I talked to all sorts of fates.

3:16

I went out to Mormon Utah and Idaho.

3:18

I went to Jewish neighborhoods

3:20

in Maryland, and I went to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

3:24

I write it from a Catholic perspective. All

3:27

of these parenting pathologies show

3:29

up in all of these communities, but a lot less because

3:32

I think if you view humans as

3:34

sort of naturally good, then

3:37

you not as worried about

3:40

their outcomes. But in a more secular,

3:42

more materialistic world, I think

3:44

we'd say, okay, well a I'm

3:46

going to plan a family super

3:49

planned postpone it agonized,

3:51

get married in your thirties, have your kid, in your

3:53

late thirties know that it's just the

3:56

right moment. Once you've done that, it

3:58

becomes so much more pressure to get it

4:00

exactly right, rather

4:02

than you grow up, you have kids and

4:05

you try to teach them well. So

4:07

that's part of it. But also just the idea that

4:09

the humans value is in their worldly accomplishments.

4:12

I think that leads to this added pressure.

4:15

So I really do think our culture's values

4:17

have driven this.

4:18

And you make the point that this

4:21

is also a real problem

4:23

because we have this false

4:25

sense of how dangerous the

4:27

world is.

4:29

Oh yeah, I mean people really

4:31

do think that kidnappings

4:34

happen around every corner

4:36

every day, and so kids aren't free

4:39

to wander the neighborhood.

4:41

There are neighborhoods that are unsafe, and

4:43

we had a crime wave in twenty twenty. In most

4:45

of the country it's gone down, but in a lot of places it

4:47

hasn't. My wife and I we moved out of

4:49

Montgomery County, Maryland into Fairfax

4:51

County, Virginia, in part because the government there

4:54

wasn't taking the crime wave seriously.

4:56

But in any event, America is much safer

4:58

today than it was when I was a kid.

5:00

In the eighties and nineties, just by any measure

5:03

of crime is way down from them.

5:04

And you make a void, which I think is startling

5:07

that while there are these very

5:11

high value and

5:14

greatly paid attention to events with young

5:16

kids, the fact is to

5:18

something like one hundred

5:21

abductions a year in which

5:23

a stranger grabs a child.

5:25

Out of a population of three hundred and thirty

5:28

million, So that is it

5:30

seems to happen every day.

5:32

That's a staggering number. Unlike

5:34

everybody else, when one of these things does occur,

5:36

they can be two weeks of news and

5:39

it makes you feel like it's around the

5:41

corner and everyone's at risk, and

5:43

based on your data, in fact,

5:46

it's so unlikely that

5:49

to warp your life around it is

5:51

almost a psychological problem.

5:54

Yeah, your child is as likely

5:57

to be killed by a lightning strike as

6:00

is to be abducted. And

6:03

when something is that rare, you can't really

6:05

protect so well against it. I mean, at least with a lightning

6:08

storm you can see the clouds coming, I guess,

6:10

but it's incredibly rare. It's less than one

6:12

in a million occurrence, and

6:14

so you shape your life around

6:17

that. Now, there are real risks to children,

6:19

you know, drowning, car accidents, these are

6:21

the things that the actual accidental,

6:23

horrible things that happen to children. And

6:26

I'm hyper aware and on guard

6:28

around a swimming pool or at the beach with the

6:30

kids. But the fact is that we

6:32

were much more likely to get on the beltway and drive

6:34

with our kids, which is much more dangerous than to let

6:37

them walk to the park that's three blocks away.

6:39

And so what that does then is

6:41

it sets a cultural norm, and the parents who want

6:43

to let their kids go to the park, some of

6:46

them feel like they're being judged. And

6:48

I tell the story from Montgomery County of parents

6:50

who did let their kids go to the park and the police

6:52

busted the parents for it, took the kids away

6:54

for a little bit because they thought it was unsafe,

6:57

and the parents said, show me one point where

6:59

they were in day. The only danger was

7:02

the Child Protective Service is taking the

7:04

kids away for a few hours. So those

7:06

threats that parents worry about are

7:08

based on how a national

7:10

media, even before social media,

7:12

just they're being a national media. If it happens,

7:16

you know, once a week somewhere

7:18

in America and you hear about it every week,

7:20

it sounds like it's happening around you all

7:22

the time. But it's again a

7:24

one in a million.

7:26

So in a sense, you have a kind

7:28

of fearful parenting. My

7:31

child won't get into the right college, my

7:33

child might will be in danger physically,

7:36

my child won't have the right skills. I

7:38

need to keep them so busy that they can't do drugs.

7:41

It's almost like the paranoid parent,

7:43

if you will.

7:45

Yeah, I call it a mantle of fear that we

7:47

feel we're supposed to wear like. And again,

7:49

I talk to parents who feel that they should be

7:51

afraid that when they let go and

7:54

let their kids wander the neighborhood, they feel

7:56

guilty about it, and so

7:59

that it really is a cultural

8:01

issue. And I try not to make it be an individual

8:03

thing, but I do. It takes effort to overcome

8:05

it. It takes community saying, you know,

8:07

we are going to let our kids wander.

8:09

I know dads who have done that, who gathered the other dads in

8:11

the neighborhood and said, Okay, can we all agree

8:14

our kids can run around the neighborhood. And

8:16

if somebody else's kids run into your

8:18

house like kids are allowed to come into my house,

8:20

I might kick them out, but you know, we're going to let

8:22

the kids run the neighborhood, and that

8:25

takes an actual effort these days, when the norm

8:27

is the paranoid parenting you're talking about.

8:29

I think back to my own childhood. There

8:32

was a very relaxed attitude about

8:35

my wandering off. I

8:37

lived in a small town till I was eleven, so that

8:39

may have been part of it, but there

8:41

really was no sense. You could just go out and wander

8:44

around and as long as you got home for

8:46

dinner, they didn't care.

8:48

And so this stuff that we didn't really

8:50

think about that was kind of the wisdom of our

8:52

parents. Social science and

8:54

psychology are actually showing

8:57

the value of it. In the American Journal of

8:59

Pediatrics recently, they said there is

9:01

an epidemic of childhood anxiety, and

9:03

a primary cause of it is the

9:05

lack of independent play by children

9:08

unsupervised by adults. One

9:10

writer who was this sort of upper

9:13

middle class liberal writer

9:15

realize her husband said to her when

9:17

she was working on a book about parenting, and says,

9:20

oldest is ten years old. How

9:23

much time do you think she's spent unsupervised?

9:27

And the mom said, in her ten years,

9:30

probably less than an hour in

9:32

ten years, and that's what they realized that they

9:34

had because that's what they had absorbed

9:37

from other parents, and so they had to

9:39

deliberately intentionally

9:41

unschedule their kids. My

9:44

wife and I were similar, where we put our daughter

9:46

in a valet program that was close by because

9:48

people said, oh, it's the best, the Maryland

9:50

Youth Ballet. They produce prima ballerinas.

9:52

We thought, oh, of course, we want to give our kid the best,

9:55

and then we realized she was doing three

9:57

hours a week at age eleven

10:00

of the best valet and that this is horrible

10:02

for everybody. And when we pulled there, we

10:04

were all so much happier. So we had sort of backed

10:06

in thoughtlessly to this hyper

10:09

intensive parenting.

10:10

How much of that relates also to a

10:12

underlying fear and if

10:14

I don't keep you scheduled, you'll end up either

10:17

doing drugs or in some way

10:19

getting into trouble.

10:20

Well, I will say that the valid thing

10:23

that parents fear is too much

10:25

time on social media, the internet and

10:27

smartphones. So this is a new

10:29

and Jonathan Hate just came out with a book

10:32

on this too, called The Anxious Generation. But

10:34

in Family and Friendly I talk about that's

10:37

one reason that some parents overschedule

10:39

their kids, as they say, oh, well, the only other alternative

10:42

is that they're going to be on Instagram or

10:44

TikTok for many hours, and I do think

10:46

that that's harmful for kids.

10:48

So I read somewhere that, particularly for

10:51

teenage females, that social

10:53

media is a major source of bullying and

10:56

a major source of anxiety.

10:58

Anxiety, so social compare Who's

11:00

the term I learned while working on my book that

11:02

you look at it, you see the party that

11:05

you miss. You look at this filtered

11:07

and perfectly posed picture, and you're envious

11:09

of the other girls. For boys,

11:12

the danger is porn. It's

11:14

like an unending supply of it. And

11:17

when I talk to young women now, they say,

11:19

you're writing a book about how people are getting married and having

11:21

kids. Well, half the men my age

11:23

are addicted to porn. And

11:25

so these are real dangers. And the

11:28

answer to both overscheduling and

11:31

to the online dangers,

11:33

a lot of it is let

11:35

your kids be bored, let them roam,

11:38

let them play pick up basketball. And

11:41

obviously it's not possible to protect your kids

11:43

from every harm. One of the middle chapters

11:45

in the book, though, is about the tech and about

11:47

how the dating apps delay marriage

11:50

and they don't actually

11:53

accelerate it, but how social media

11:55

sort of rewires our mind and it uproots

11:57

us from community who

12:00

are on social media all day what they're

12:02

doing. If you think about it, you

12:04

were wandering your small town, you were in some

12:06

ways becoming more rooted in where you were

12:08

from. In social media, you're

12:10

becoming uprooted, uprooted from your family,

12:13

from your community, from your faith. And that ends

12:15

up being really bad for kids. And

12:17

so this is another problem, is

12:19

that we have weaker communities

12:21

in weaker extended families. That's

12:23

bad. That again contributes to childhood anxiety,

12:26

and it contributes to lower birth rates. I think.

12:44

You talk about the baby bust, and

12:46

you trace it all the way back to two thousand

12:48

and eight. What is it and why did

12:50

it start.

12:52

So in two thousand and six. In two thousand

12:54

and seven, my wife and I we had our first kid. In two thousand

12:56

and six. There was a lot of babies born.

12:59

Four point three million babies in two thousand and

13:01

seven. There were more babies born than even at the peak of

13:03

the baby boom. The total fertility

13:05

rate, which is the most common birth rate you hear

13:07

was at two point one, which

13:10

is the replacement level, that's

13:12

what would keep a population stable over time.

13:15

Since then, it's dropped every year, down

13:17

from four point three million babies down to

13:19

three point six million babies, from

13:21

two point one birth rate down to below

13:24

one point seven birth rate, basically

13:26

every single year. When it first started,

13:28

people said, oh, it's a great reception. People can't

13:30

afford to have kids. But then the economy started

13:33

to improve and the birth rate kept falling.

13:35

In twenty nineteen, before the pandemic, we had the best

13:37

economy in my life and

13:40

the lowest birth rate in my life. And

13:43

so it's hard to pinatus on the economy.

13:45

We talked about tech. The iPhone came out in

13:47

two thousand and seven and the baby bus started

13:49

the next year. That might be a

13:51

coincidence, it might not. Obviously

13:54

it's a problem too. Not everybody believes

13:56

it's the problem. And in my book I talk about the

13:58

economic problems the socials,

14:00

and how it reflects the sort of failure

14:02

of our society to support

14:05

families. We sort of think, okay, have kids,

14:08

but they're all your own, you know, don't

14:10

bug the rest of us. Don't let them make noise at

14:12

the restaurant and don't bring them on the airplane, and

14:14

don't expect us to accommodate parents.

14:17

I think there's a lot of reasons to be upset about

14:19

the baby busts.

14:20

And do you think it's likely to continue?

14:23

Yes, because it's all self reinforcing.

14:25

When people have fewer kids, that results in people

14:27

having fewer kids. This is true for a lot of reasons.

14:30

One you look in a place

14:32

like South Korea, which has the lowest

14:34

birth rate in the world. A lot of recent

14:36

articles in major newspapers

14:38

here talked about how there's

14:41

an increasing push to ban children

14:43

from more places in South Korea.

14:45

Once you're not used to kids, then

14:48

the world gets less built for kids and

14:50

less built for families. Just think about

14:52

neighborhoods that have a lot of kids. Once there's a lot

14:54

of kids, they're like, Okay, let's put up a new playground, Let's

14:56

make sure the sidewalks are a little wider. There's

14:59

family restaurants and that sort of thing.

15:01

Those don't happen in places where they're

15:04

fewer kids. And then you think about Capitol

15:06

Hill. You remember the Capitol

15:09

Hill staff. These are mostly young

15:11

childless people these days, they're

15:14

the people making our policies, some of

15:16

them never see a kid all day long,

15:19

and so they're shaping our world

15:22

without children in mind. So I do

15:24

think that the baby bus causes

15:26

more baby bus and so

15:28

right now we've fallen from two point one to one point

15:31

sixty five in about fifteen years.

15:33

I expect that to keep going down less of course,

15:36

everybody reads my book and we get a baby boom

15:38

starting in nine months.

15:40

You cite what I think is one

15:42

of the most fascinating examples

15:45

of this change, and that's South Korea.

15:47

I mean, despite all the talk about

15:49

China's one child policy, it's

15:51

actually South Korea, which

15:54

as a free country, suddenly shifted

15:56

years and became the lowest birth

15:58

rate in the world. How do you analyze

16:01

them.

16:01

It's tricky, but I've been reading everything

16:04

i can on this and comparing

16:07

it to other cultures. They

16:09

have always had a

16:12

very workest careerist

16:15

policy for the

16:17

men there, and

16:20

it was just sort of established that working career

16:24

are the highest callings. I don't think

16:26

there was a lot of respect given to

16:30

mothers, who were largely expected

16:32

to stay at home. I argue

16:34

one of the chapters of my book that we need more stay

16:36

at home moms, but they need to be celebrated

16:38

and vaunted and recognized and accommodated.

16:42

And so in a culture that set its

16:44

ideals as about career success,

16:47

well, once there was more equality,

16:50

the women wanted that career success.

16:52

And then once a lot of the men were competing against a

16:54

lot of the women, it became harder and a lot

16:56

of men dropped out of the labor force. So now

16:58

what you have is is women who

17:01

want more career success, men who

17:03

don't necessarily want to bother the

17:05

hustle in the workforce, so they

17:07

are not attractive as husbands, obviously,

17:10

especially to women who can make their own money. And

17:12

so a lot of those cultural shifts

17:14

happened. Again, it's also rapidly secularized.

17:17

It's a very secular country, and

17:20

so we can talk about values,

17:22

but I think a lot of it has to do with mood.

17:24

It's an increasingly sad place where

17:27

if you're just focused on your career,

17:30

if you are a man who doesn't think you have

17:32

high career prospects, if you're a woman

17:34

who thinks, well, i'd like to marry but there's not that many

17:36

men out there, And now you're

17:38

shrinking because of the baby bus theres

17:40

and that exacerbates the sense of sadness.

17:43

It seems like a dying culture that's

17:45

just about putting your nose to the grindstone.

17:48

The last chapter of my book is called civilizational

17:50

sadness, because I think that's what ties

17:53

South Korea, Northern Europe, Southern Europe,

17:55

the United States all together.

17:58

It's in different ways. We do

18:00

not see sort of the human

18:02

race as a good thing.

18:04

It's not just a

18:06

Western civilization plus Japan and career.

18:08

I mean, you make the point. Mexico

18:11

has collapsed in birth rates,

18:14

Brazil, Malaysia, Vietnam now

18:16

now below replacement fertility

18:18

race, and even Nigeria is

18:21

rapidly declining in number

18:23

of children. There's something going on worldwide

18:27

in the civilization that is sending

18:29

a signal that having children

18:31

is less important and maybe for

18:34

women, having a career is more important. I don't know what

18:36

it is, but it is apparently a worldwide

18:38

phenomenon.

18:39

Yep. I think that again, the idea is the

18:42

modern idea of the individual, disconnected

18:46

from the community and from

18:48

past generations. In future generations,

18:50

it's a very modern, overly

18:53

individualistic mindset

18:56

and the places that have the most babies

18:59

are place which is not just a well,

19:01

yes at our religious but also that

19:03

have robust religious

19:06

communities. And I think a

19:08

robust, sort of less religious community

19:11

could play some of this role. But the more

19:13

that we are just sort of floating about

19:15

as individuals, or if you get married it's

19:17

just a couple and you're alone, the less

19:20

you're going to think about the past and the future, the

19:22

less support you're going to think that you have. And

19:25

I think that that, again is sort of part of

19:27

modernity. Some of it is technology, some of

19:29

it is just again the sort of Tookville

19:31

talks about this in democracy in America, like the spirit

19:34

of equality and democracy, two

19:36

great things. If they become all consuming,

19:39

well, then it does disconnect us

19:42

from one another. A wise woman

19:44

once said, it takes a village to raise a child.

19:47

Now Hillary might have meant the Department of Health

19:49

and Human Services, but historically

19:52

it was the extended family, the neighborhood,

19:54

the church, the school.

19:56

Well, and you made a boy, which I frankly not thought

19:59

about that. It's not a function of

20:01

cost, because a lot of people think, gee, if

20:03

we could change the income equation, but

20:05

in fact, wealthier people are

20:07

less likely to have children than poorer

20:09

people.

20:11

And it's not really more expensive to

20:13

raise kids. So I cite lots of economists

20:16

and actually the cost of raising kids hasn't really gone

20:18

up unless you insist on doing all

20:20

the travel, sports and the private tutoring. The

20:23

exception to that, though, is housing. Housing

20:25

costs in the last three years have gone up, and

20:28

more expensive housing does deter family

20:30

formation. That doesn't explain the baby

20:32

bus because that's been going on for fifteen years.

20:35

That's where I would focus policy, because

20:37

we have the discussion about the child tax credits,

20:39

the Biden administration monts to subsidized

20:42

childcare. What I

20:44

would focus on at the governmental level, are

20:46

there obstacles to building

20:48

more housing, more family friendly housing.

20:51

Are there federal policies

20:53

regulations that make it totally

20:55

unprofitable to build a starter

20:58

home? Where our

21:00

part of Northern Virginia, New McLain,

21:03

Virginia, every house that's less than

21:05

four thousand square feet gets torn down

21:07

and replaced by this massive mansion

21:10

where people have two kids and I don't know what they

21:12

do with all their six thousand square feet. But

21:14

those smaller houses,

21:17

that was what a family could afford and buy

21:19

and you ask a builder now, they say it

21:21

would make no sense, and not just in McLain where

21:23

the land's really expensive, but almost anywhere. It make no sense

21:26

for me to build a house that somebody could buy for two

21:28

hundred and fifty thousand dollars because

21:30

just the permits are going to cost me two hundred

21:33

thousand dollars. So housing is a one

21:35

place where I really say policy ought to

21:37

say what can we do to make it more affordable

21:40

for families? But outside of housing, you're.

21:41

Right, does that almost become a

21:44

big fight over localism.

21:46

A lot of these regulations and a lot of these

21:48

fees are deliberate.

21:51

Yes, there are people who want to keep

21:53

down the housing suck. And

21:56

then an unhelpful kind

21:58

of yimbie response is that we should build

22:00

massive apartment buildings in every neighborhood. I

22:02

think the next thing I want to study

22:04

at AI with housing people

22:07

with family folks is what

22:09

is the actual pro family housing

22:12

policy because it's not big apartment buildings, so those

22:14

are not family friendly, but it's certainly

22:16

not no new development because high

22:19

housing prices. One of the most valuable

22:21

things you can do as

22:23

a parent is live close to your

22:25

own parents. Now I say, the

22:27

optimal distance is just far enough that they

22:30

can't hear you screaming at your own kids. A

22:32

block away from Grandma is

22:34

one of the best things to do. And this is one of the things that

22:36

makes Israel unique. Most parents live

22:38

within twenty minutes of their own parents, and

22:42

that's really hard in sort

22:44

of the large metropolitan areas in

22:47

the United States because of the costs of

22:49

housing and so anything that

22:51

can increase density but in

22:53

a family friendly way. That's a really complicated

22:56

thing. But it's not being studied right

22:58

now because Americas just

23:00

started to pay attention to the baby

23:02

bus. Europe has been paying attention

23:04

to it for fifteen years. But here, my agent

23:06

was surprised to learn that birthrate through low and

23:09

falling three years ago. It's just

23:11

really hitting our radar screen.

23:29

You know. It's interesting. When I was Speaker of the House,

23:31

we did a lot of work with Jimmy Carter

23:34

and Habitat for Humanity, And

23:36

when the Republicans decided to have their convention

23:39

in nineteen ninety six in San Diego, we

23:42

thought, that's terrific. We will go out and we

23:44

will build a Habitat for Humanity house.

23:47

Well, the cost of the permits

23:49

in San Diego was

23:51

greater than the total cost of the house

23:53

in Georgia, and that was

23:56

for a habitat for humanity house. There

23:58

was no one like charitable exams or

24:00

poor people exemption. It was unbelievable

24:04

how much they charged and have never gotten

24:06

over two other things that are fascinating

24:08

that you bring up one and I did not

24:10

know this. Will you make the assertion that

24:13

there's been a gap in child bearing

24:15

between conservatives and liberals, at

24:17

least since the early nineteen eighties.

24:20

Yeah, so some of that gap

24:22

is due to the fact that

24:24

conservatives are more religious, but even

24:26

controlling for religion, I'd

24:29

say most of it is due to religion, but

24:31

there's even some leftover. Even if you control

24:33

for religion, there's even some conservatives

24:36

outbreeding the Libs, as you could

24:39

say, And some of

24:41

the baby bus is suited the fact that young

24:43

women are more likely to be liberal today than they were

24:45

fifteen years ago and thirty years

24:48

ago. Why would that be

24:50

one. I think that conservative

24:52

people are just more likely to be rooted

24:55

in a place to live near

24:57

grandma, to be raising their kids in a small town.

25:00

Liberal Americans are often more

25:02

likely to be trying to get

25:04

above their backwards upbringing or

25:06

whatever they think. Also, a lot of

25:08

liberalism in the last thirty years has been

25:11

sort of dark and brooding

25:13

about the future, whether it's climate change

25:16

or the racial settler colonial

25:18

guilt of an American. But I don't

25:20

want you to think that this means that the future everybody's

25:22

going to be conservative, because

25:25

we have the public schools out there whose job it

25:27

is to turn conservative kids

25:29

into liberals.

25:30

I used to teach environmental studies and

25:32

taught in the Second Earth Day back in

25:35

nineteen seventy one, and in

25:37

that period, the catastrophism

25:40

which still exists, for example, in climate was

25:42

in part focused on population.

25:46

And you had Paul Erlick, who has

25:48

been amazingly wrong

25:51

about every single thing he's written, but

25:53

remains a tenured professor of Stanford

25:56

with great prestige on the left. And

25:58

he wrote a book called The Population Bomb, and

26:00

what she said basically that

26:02

by the year two thousand, Britain would

26:04

be starving to death. It's the last

26:06

great stand of Malthusian economics.

26:09

And yet everything they said about

26:11

the population boom, it's very

26:13

hard for them to switch gears and realize we're

26:15

now worldwide seeing a

26:18

declining rate of population,

26:20

not a rising rate. And I assume

26:22

that the next generation Paul Early will

26:24

write a best selling book called the

26:27

Population Bust and how it threatens us

26:29

or something. But are you surprised

26:32

at how totally Aerlic was wrong?

26:35

Yes? What's the first line of the book. The

26:37

race to feed humanity is over and we've

26:39

lost. Humans are better nourished

26:41

now by a million miles

26:44

than they were when Erlick wrote that book,

26:46

and the population is much larger.

26:48

So to me, that's the most telling

26:50

detail. In fact, we've

26:53

reached about twenty years ago peak

26:55

agricultural land. The human

26:58

species uses up less land every

27:00

year because again farming

27:02

efficiency, grazing efficiency, that

27:05

sort of thing. So we're taking up less of the planet,

27:07

and the rural population will in

27:09

the life span of my children start

27:12

to shrink unless something changes. What

27:15

was interesting and telling about Erlich and

27:17

so I use his quotes in the last

27:19

two chapters, isn't my book? Because

27:21

he said, tell a woman she can have as many kids

27:23

as she wants is like telling someone that

27:26

they can throw as much trash in their neighbor's y

27:28

ared as they want. And that to

27:30

me was so telling. That idea that children

27:32

are an externality, a

27:34

negative externality, and that children are kind of

27:37

like trash. That was reflective.

27:39

And he tells the moment that he came to fear

27:41

over population was in a cab ride

27:44

through Delhi in

27:47

India and just

27:49

the filth he saw, all the people.

27:51

He said, the people talking, people, visiting,

27:54

people, eating, people, people, people.

27:57

He actually says people, people, people,

27:59

people as like his image of Hell,

28:02

and I just thought that is so telling.

28:05

There's that saying Hell is other people. And I think

28:07

that's what Erlik believes. And

28:09

that's why again I come back to the civilizational

28:12

sadness. I think that it's

28:14

trickled into the spirit

28:16

of our age, especially among a lot of our elites,

28:19

that people, people, people

28:21

are the problem, that what we need is sort

28:24

of a more sterile, clean life,

28:27

and that misanthropy of

28:30

Erlick. I think, even though he was wrong

28:32

on everything, I think that has sunk

28:34

into the spirit of the day.

28:36

There's a certain sense on the left that Gaya,

28:39

Mother Earth is offended

28:42

by all of these human beings, and

28:45

instead of seeing us as part of nature, they

28:47

see us as a parasite, risking the destruction

28:49

of nature. It's a very interesting

28:52

phenomena. I think your work is

28:54

fascinating. I wish you well

28:56

at looking at housing policy next and

28:59

we want you to come back and educate

29:01

us when you're ready to on that topic.

29:04

I'm really delighted that you

29:06

wrote Family on Friendly How

29:09

our culture made raising kids much harder

29:11

than it needs to be. It's available on

29:13

Amazon and bookstores everywhere, and

29:15

I think folks ought to read it and understand

29:18

that we really have gone down a cultural

29:21

road that is ultimately destructive

29:23

and we need to rethink where we are and how we're

29:25

dealing with it. And Tim, I want

29:27

to thank you for joining me. This is a

29:30

very very interesting conversation.

29:31

Thank you, my pleasure.

29:38

Thank you to my guest, Timothy Carney. You

29:40

can get a link to buy his new book Family

29:42

on Friendly on our show page

29:45

at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld

29:47

is produced by Game of three sixty and iHeartMedia.

29:50

Our executive producers Guarnsey Sloan.

29:53

Our researcher is Rachel Peterson.

29:55

The artwork for the show was created

29:57

by Steve Penley Special

29:59

Things. Thanks to the team at GINGRIDGH three sixty.

30:02

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30:23

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