Hmm. I like the evolutionary framing, but don´t know if `the desire for solitude´ is what is being searched for.
It was perfectly possible to be alone before phones. In fact, you could truly be alone, in a way that's difficult now.
The phone gives me a constant stream of optimized semi-sociability. I feel like I'm interacting with people, but without any of the annoying constraints that accompany physical social life. I can respond when I choose. I can listen to the most interesting people talk, etc.
I think it rather has to with anxiety. We like social interaction. We don't like social confrontation, the feeling of talking to strangers, etc. Markets and technology cater to that and give us low-effort digital wall-e land. We are not forced to overcome anxiety, which is so important for romantic life.
Also, digital life makes that our digital social graph and our physical ones barely overlap, so we have less in common with the people physically surrounding us, qua values, conversation topics, etc.
Also, being able to be constantly in touch with one's high school friends, family, etc, through WhatsApp / FaceTime also takes up social energy without giving opportunities for new (local) friend groups and romantic prospects
Also, chat groups create a harder "in vs. out"-dynamic for social groups, decreasing serendipity and "friend of a friend"-dynamics that were so typical for romantic adventures.
And there's probably countless other ones.
Thus I don't think it's "our evolutionary desire for loneliness" but rather "there is a difference between our social preferences and the social environments that are best for finding romantic partners, and wealth and especially the internet have allowed us to optimize for the former"
Yes, it was possible to live as a hermit for many people, but most didn't seek that out. I would say instead that our screens function like good-enough-substitutes for socialization. People can spend time on social media and they don't feel like they're missing out in the same way someone actually disconnected does.
I agree that "solitude-seeking" is looking in the wrong place for that reason; solitude has always been easy. But there are loads of things that could be Goodharting into this (potentially in combination):
1) Idleness-seeking (laziness). "If everything is fine, do nothing" or "minimise expenditure of effort to get results" are fairly sensible command lines for a hunter-gatherer, for whom getting food/shelter/socialisation is complicated. For moderns it's trivial to get these things, hence a desire to do nothing. Phones were the final nail in the coffin, as they can scratch the social itch without the effort involved in leaving the house; loosely, it's the equivalent of microwaving ramen when you're hungry instead of hunting a deer.
2) Shelter-seeking. If shelter was rare for hunter-gatherers, "stay in good shelter unless you have to leave it" is a good principle. We all have fantastic shelter by hunter-gatherer standards, so if people don't have to leave it they won't. The advantage of this is it explains the non-phone parts of this.
3) Attractiveness-seeking. The people on the phone are more interesting and sexy than most people's real-world acquaintances. We've not evolved a proper "phones aren't real" sense, so it looks like our option is to interact with/look at interesting/sexy people or boring/unsexy people, with only the latter being irl.
4) Fire-seeking. This isn't original to me, but the idea is that people like bright screens because bright moving objects are meant to be salient. Doesn't explain birth rates that much, save in as much as they're downstream of phones.
5) Porn screwing with mate-seeking. Humans are mostly monogamous, so it seems possible that we don't seek out partners when we're "sexually satisfied" and porn tricks people into thinking they're getting some, even if on a conscious level they wouldn't view it as a proper substitute. Although I suspect some really do treat it as a substitute.
I'm less convinced by the anxiety argument, because it doesn't seem to apply that uniformly; social anxiety is a fairly niche phenomenon and most people don't (or at least, didn't) have a particular problem interacting with others, even strangers. It could be a conscious manifestation/explanation that people use for why they don't want to leave the house, though.
I think you hit the nail in the head. Evolution made us want to seek out fatty/sweet foods because in nature, those foods also came with benefits (and tended to satiate us before we overate). But social media (is like junk food and) essentially allows people to choose to eat empty calories, so to speak, and get their pro-social hit (human beings being social creatures, after all) without having to engage in stuff that may seem daunting but make us stronger/better.
I think it's difficult to pin down a single cause because it's a cumulative effect, leading to something like anxiety and stress (or lack of control of your behavior, as you descend into coping mechanisms?). There are many evolutionary mismatches.
One hint is that a human doomscrolling, because they are sitting at home without a clear path towards doing something productive or being social, could be similar to an animal stuck in a zoo exhibit who starts throwing up and eating it because they don't have a clear path to perform one of their instinctual duties. The zoo, and the modern environment, are both forms of captivity.
I think if wealth is higher than it's been, and some people are complaining that they don't have enough wealth to have kids, while other people are also complaining that they have a lack of meaning in their lives... there's some sort of mental illness affecting people's judgement on this subject. Instead of just taking them at their word, we should try to understand what is causing them to think this way.
I think this makes sense. The evolutionary pressure is to avoid unrewarding stress of which much regular in-person and telephone socializing consists of.
I think this also helps explain the decline in the use of alcohol which acts as a crutch in those situations that can now just be more easily avoided.
I don't think there is a "fertility crisis" in the first place. The world is already significantly overpopulated (which is a contributing factor to the rise in obesity, because overpopulation depletes the soils of nutrients and leads to quality degradation like grain-fed cattle, "farm-raised" salmon, and soy-fed pork to control cost). Promoting more fertility will just make the problem even worse.
Instead we have an old-age welfare state problem. The solution is not to can-kick the problem down the road by increasing fertility and worsening the world's overpopulation even more. The solution is to restructure old-age entitlements to make them wealth-tested (e.g. a retired couple in a $3 million mansion with a $3 million 401k should not receive subsidized Medicare) and to restructure government debt through coordinated bond wipeoffs (a global government debt jubilee).
Whether or not it is "crisis," it certainly is a fertility nosedive. Even if we let it continue to whatever your preferred global population number is, there is no reason to think we could just level out there.
If the global population significantly declined the fertility rate would eventually rebound as the price of land decreased. We are currently far above the population optimum.
You are making an assertion that isn't actually based on any evidence. The price of land in depopulated parts of rural Japan is fast approaching zero, yet I do not see people seeking to move to those places and buy land there.
It's not just Japan. If you're European, the same applies to large swathes of inland Spain, and if you're American I'd guess that much of the interior is fairly cheap...? This land thing only makes sense if people are farmers, or if you're specifically talking about urban rents in dense cities, which don't seem likely to decline for a long time. Even in the UK, housing is affordable outside the Southeast and that doesn't cause anyone to move there.
Can confirm the same trends in Central Europe. The semirural areas that are being abandoned lose all sorts of services, thus becoming very unattractive to return back to.
I haven’t studied the statistics extensively, but every graph I see shows fertility rates declining similarly in countries with both large and small GDPs and/or wealth redistributing social nets. Waiting for an “eventual” evolutionary rebound based on leveling of land price, sovereign debt, soil nutrient quality, etc. requires central planning at unprecedented scale or letting nature do her thing for enough generations that it will become a beyond debate crisis. There will be a lot of human suffering on the way down and back up.
This was genuinely brilliant. I clicked on this article thinking it was time to cancel my subscription because I hadn't been reading Hanania very often lately, but this post is a perfect example of why I'm happy to give him a few bucks a month. Somehow, Richard, you've managed to come up with a novel explanation for the fertility crisis, an explanation that none of the countless other heterodox thinkers toiling away on this issue have devised. Good work.
his post did make me feel bad for Louise Perry though, because she has a book coming out on this topic, and I doubt that her explanation will be as good (to be clear, I love Perry's work).
I think the evidence is weak that the desire for solitude is built in. I think it's equally possible that humans just have a variety of inclinations, like listening to stories, seeing beautiful people, and feeling accomplishment, that modern industries like movies and video games hyper optimize for. There was nothing in the ancestral environment trying to exploit quirks of our psychology, now there is.
Looking at the data, with a very few minor exceptions, any country where girls get 9 or more years of education results in a fertility rate less than replacement. Female education is the decisive factor. So if you’re looking for government “solutions”, the answer is obvious.
Good luck trying to reverse female education that much in developed countries, though. Also, would you really want to live in a society ruled by the Taliban?
I am merely pointing out the data, Richard, not advocating for The Handmaid’s Tale. The data suggest that all the pro-natal government policies in the world will not work. Which brings me to the next little tidbit you can verify. As men’s real wages increase by 1%, fertility increases by 1%. As women’s real wages increase by 1%, fertility declines by 4%. Real wages increase with increases in productivity. Education improves productivity. The population in the West is inevitably going to crash, until society has changed radically enough to change the behavior of men and women. Not in my lifetime, but before 2200 certainly.
Does this control for these countries being total crapsacks in other ways? I'm pretty sure that ceteris paribus if my wife were illiterate that wouldn't make me want to have more kids with her, which is certainly a limiting factor on fertility. Both of us being illiterate/peasant farmers/needing children to look after us when older/not understanding birth control probably would though.
You’re a techno-optimist! I like that. But here’s a question for you. Suppose a drug was found to “cure” homosexuality. One might be found if people were allowed to research the question. Would such a drug be allowed on the market? Would parents be allowed to give it to their children? I am not a biological determinist, despite the comments above. Biology creates tendencies, but ideology locks them into action. Ideology cannot be fought with government programs (except for individual freedom—freedom is always fought with government programs). Of course, it cannot be fought at all if people are not even allowed to talk about the biological tendencies, and right now, except for a few hated heretics, people do not talk.
Interesting post, but I would challenge it on several fronts:
(1) People pay a lot of money to live closer to other people. You can have isolation at very low cost in rural areas, and you can get a whole house in West Virginia for the mid five-figures. But people continue to move out of the countryside and pay up to live around fashionable people in fashionable, crowded neighborhoods.
In East Asia this is taken to unbelievable extremes. People will pay a fortune to live in some supremely dense neighborhood in Seoul or Shanghai, even as the rural parts of Korea and China have millions of abandoned homes that you could live in for free.
(2) In the data we find that fertility is lower the denser a place is. Fertility is lowest in high rise apartments where you live near hundreds of others and gets higher the further out you get.
The ultra-crowded Asian cities have the world's lowest fertility rates: 0.4 in the core of Shanghai 0.55 in the core of Seoul.
Sprawly exurbs have much higher fertility than inner city areas. The most fertile state in America is South Dakota while Manhattan, America's densest place, has a TFR under 1.0.
(3) Liberals tend to live around more people. Conservatives are much more spread out geographically. Yet fertility in the US is almost 2x as high for conservatives as for liberals.
(4) Fertility is actually inverse of partner count. Your polyamorists have very low fertility, your religious couple that only ever had sex with each other has very high fertility.
I do think evolution explains things, but my story is simpler. We evolved so that the thing we desire (sex) causes the thing evolution needs (babies). Now we can get sexual release without babies, either though contracepted sex or porn.
The antisocial people are at home getting off to Onlyfans or something like it. The extroverts are racking up the partner count while using contraception. Neither is getting pregnant.
What is the answer? As I see it, the best answer is conscious and intentional pronatal values. That is, the direct belief that society or I myself should have more kids. That's why conservatives have 2x the fertility of liberals. That's why Israel has 4x the fertility of Korea. That's why the religious have way higher fertility than secular people. All within the same external conditions.
Conservatives, the religious and Israelis believe in marriage, for purpose of having children, for the sake of the future.
1. People move to cities because that's where jobs are, not because that's where people are. They move to those cities and then spend all their free time alone in their apartment.
2. This is too confounded to be strong evidence against Richard's thesis. It could be that smaller home sizes are overpowering whatever effect on fertility living around more people has, for example.
3. See above
4. I'd be very surprised if this remains true after adjusting for religious belief.
Not just jobs but activities, services, health care...but we still want to minimize our stress levels so the unrewarding activities get cut first (reward = pleasure - stress).
I've been thinking about the book Flow. Came out in the 1990s. It's about structuring our daily consciousness so that abilities optimally meet challenges. If challenges don't meet our abilities we feel boredom. If challenges are too much for our abilities we feel stressed. Optimal flow is like riding a skateboard or playing a good game of chess. And to me a flow state is mostly solitary. I mostly get it alone - reading, or running. Other people are more likely to take me out of the flow state and put me into stress or boredom. Is that part of it?
I think it has more to do with humans being naturally drawn to high-status or interesting people rather than ordinary ones. Parasocial relationships can crowd out real-life interactions and make relationships with everyday people feel less exciting or lower status by comparison.
I'm not sure it's quite "the desire for solitude." While people in many traditional societies struggle with intense social pressures, the "wealth-siphoning" effects of traditional cultures happens only once people can get actual wealth, and hunter-gatherers don't. Nowadays, our ancestral h-gs are generally called "immediate return foragers," with the key element there being "immediate return": anything they gather or kill immediately begins to rot, and there's nothing they can do to stop it, which means they can't really build up wealth, even by hiding it away.
I think, rather than being a desire for solitude, it's the other way around: people fear social interactions more than almost anything else. If you ask people what they're most afraid of, one of the most frequent things is "public speaking." The Greek phrase "come back with your shield or on it" is effectively threatening someone with social death if they do not get actual death. People in their 90s, whose friends have all died, just say "yeah I guess it's my time to go soon" rather than just making new friends. In the ancestral environment, you didn't have much to hide - everybody knew everybody and you didn't and just couldn't own much in the way of personal property - but you ABSOLUTELY had to be TERRIFIED of social death.
This would actually work even without needing us to have evolved to actively seek out solitude. We just need our instincts to actively seek out social interaction to be too weak for the modern day. Basically, since social interaction came free in the ancestral environment, we didn't evolve to actively seek it out like we did for high-calorie food. So now that it's no longer the default and must be actively sought out, we get way less social interaction than what's healthy.
Maybe a combination of an NSAID and a betablocker could help. Supposedly social pain and physical pain share brain circuits and betablockers can mitigate the tendency of the heart to get worked up in social situations.
I’m not sure how much I attribute to a specific evolved desire for isolation, but I agree that most of the specific causes people point to are downstream of more fundamental forces. On the fertility issue, these are the main ways I think our individual psychology and sociocultural mechanisms are maladapted to our current environment of unprecedented abundance and individual freedom:
1. Basal drives that misprice the costs of being alone and the benefits of socialization. This results in what I like to call the isolation gradient, whereby greedy maximization of individual local preferences mechanically leads to isolation because one does not have to compromise their preferences to accommodate those of others. Our drives are miscalibrated because it’s highly evolutionarily novel not to have socialization forced on us by necessity. There’s also the fact that the costs of isolation are distal and have complex externalities, which naturally makes the problem hard to solve.
2. Big chunks of our culture adapted to restrain fertility because we only recently got out of the Malthusian trap.
3. The aspects that did encourage fertility have mostly been blown up by liberalism, for good and for bad. (I’m using a very broad definition of liberalism here, basically meaning an unprecedented expansion of individual freedom.)
4. Contraception reliably decoupled the rewards of sex from reproduction, removing evolution’s main carrot for getting us to have kids.
5. Because people cannot know the rewards of having children ahead of time, they underrate them relative to known alternatives.
6. Modern entertainment and phones have made being alone more compelling, but they provide only parasocial empty calories. We weren’t adapted to get such non-nourishing but reinforcing social stimuli.
7. Overpricing of optionality relative to committing to a relationship and having kids. We never had to deal with having so many choices.
8. To the family, children are now almost entirely an economic cost rather than a benefit due to their labor.
9. Urbanization is necessary for the modern economy but actively hostile to fertility.
Anyways, I’m sure there are a bunch more, and of course all these intersect with major hobby-horse themes like phones or feminism. But the silver lining is that it implies we’re in an adaptive selection event rather than being permanently doomed.
I think this one is pretty straightforward. My very simplified summary of what vaguely sophisticated tribal monkeys want is: security, ease, status, and autonomy. Ease/status and security/autonomy could be treated as being somewhat in tension with each other.
Ease/status - people with nothing often take risks and strive to attain status or some status equivalent like wealth at a level they find acceptable, once they have it, they often pivot to protecting it - pulling up ladders, price fixing, etc. Another way of putting this is something like "people want as much as they can get for the fewest number of calories." Once you have the status, you don't want to keep busting butt to maintain it.
Security/autonomy - a tribe, protective parents, an adult male (if you are female) are all very useful things to protect you from the elements, enemy raiders, and hyenas. They also exert control over you - making you share resources, making various demands on your fertility that may not coincide with your ideal personal reproductive strategy, etc. It's not a mystery why rich people since the beginning of civilization tend to buy huge palaces they can use to isolate themselves from everyone else and exercise control over who enters that space. Giant walled compound you control is pretty much the apotheosis of both security and autonomy. The difference is that there used to be many poor peasants to fill up your harem or downstairs or whatever. Now, digital walled compounds are cheap and easy to procure, and there are way fewer poor, desperate people who are willing to staff yours on your terms when they can have their own.
Some kind of much more tailored matchmaking service that finds other humans with overlapping ideas of what makes an ideal walled compound would probably be useful here, but I have 0 idea how to scale that. Maybe AI can do it. Maybe if we ever do get very customized AI assistants who understand us, they can interact with other people's assistants and play matchmaker or some similar sort of thing.
Fandoms are very weird and often toxic, and I am pretty much over them, but I did meet my husband in one. Encouraging people to lean into the social aspect of their weird hobbies probably isn't the worst thing here - yes, do cosplaying, go to nerd conventions, pride parades, Trump boat rallies, and so on. There's at least other humans at those. From anecdotal evidence anyway, the people at these kinds of things are often very weird and have stupid ideas, but they are usually not the kinds of misanthropic, neurotic, deeply unpleasant people who occupy and dominate the online versions of these physical spaces. Put another way: "my dad is a fun-loving redneck grandpa at a fish fry and a miserable old coot at home watching Fox news."
I’m personally a more shy kind of person. I don’t like talking to strangers that much. Can’t say for certain if that’s typical, but what I can say is that in all my years of going out with friends, they too are not super extraverted. I can look around and see that maybe 2/3rds of friend groups that are out are same-sex. And then 1/3rd are mixed, but with equal amounts of each sex, so it strikes me as they already knew each other. If large groups are freely mingling, I would expect groups to be more mixed than they are.
I think the idea is that we evolved in smallish groups. But if you go out to a large club with several hundreds of people, it’s actually less typical for someone to be readily comfortable with talking to plenty of people. But any time I mention that, people on the internet always seem to be very extraverted - they think that unease is completely absurd.
So this is a case where my lived experience doesn’t match up with what people on the internet say.
Great article. This is why I subscribe - there’s always new and interesting insights that I don’t really see anywhere else. This article reminded me of the Solarians in Isaac Asimovs Foundation series. “ The 20,000 citizens of Solaria live miles apart from one another and interact almost exclusively through technological holograms. Every aspect of their life, from agriculture to personal hygiene, is entirely managed by robots, rendering them physically repulsed by actual human contact.” I always thought this was far fetched, but maybe there is something there about humans actually desiring isolation and replacing real human interaction with technology.
Hmm. I like the evolutionary framing, but don´t know if `the desire for solitude´ is what is being searched for.
It was perfectly possible to be alone before phones. In fact, you could truly be alone, in a way that's difficult now.
The phone gives me a constant stream of optimized semi-sociability. I feel like I'm interacting with people, but without any of the annoying constraints that accompany physical social life. I can respond when I choose. I can listen to the most interesting people talk, etc.
I think it rather has to with anxiety. We like social interaction. We don't like social confrontation, the feeling of talking to strangers, etc. Markets and technology cater to that and give us low-effort digital wall-e land. We are not forced to overcome anxiety, which is so important for romantic life.
Also, digital life makes that our digital social graph and our physical ones barely overlap, so we have less in common with the people physically surrounding us, qua values, conversation topics, etc.
Also, being able to be constantly in touch with one's high school friends, family, etc, through WhatsApp / FaceTime also takes up social energy without giving opportunities for new (local) friend groups and romantic prospects
Also, chat groups create a harder "in vs. out"-dynamic for social groups, decreasing serendipity and "friend of a friend"-dynamics that were so typical for romantic adventures.
And there's probably countless other ones.
Thus I don't think it's "our evolutionary desire for loneliness" but rather "there is a difference between our social preferences and the social environments that are best for finding romantic partners, and wealth and especially the internet have allowed us to optimize for the former"
Yes, it was possible to live as a hermit for many people, but most didn't seek that out. I would say instead that our screens function like good-enough-substitutes for socialization. People can spend time on social media and they don't feel like they're missing out in the same way someone actually disconnected does.
I agree that "solitude-seeking" is looking in the wrong place for that reason; solitude has always been easy. But there are loads of things that could be Goodharting into this (potentially in combination):
1) Idleness-seeking (laziness). "If everything is fine, do nothing" or "minimise expenditure of effort to get results" are fairly sensible command lines for a hunter-gatherer, for whom getting food/shelter/socialisation is complicated. For moderns it's trivial to get these things, hence a desire to do nothing. Phones were the final nail in the coffin, as they can scratch the social itch without the effort involved in leaving the house; loosely, it's the equivalent of microwaving ramen when you're hungry instead of hunting a deer.
2) Shelter-seeking. If shelter was rare for hunter-gatherers, "stay in good shelter unless you have to leave it" is a good principle. We all have fantastic shelter by hunter-gatherer standards, so if people don't have to leave it they won't. The advantage of this is it explains the non-phone parts of this.
3) Attractiveness-seeking. The people on the phone are more interesting and sexy than most people's real-world acquaintances. We've not evolved a proper "phones aren't real" sense, so it looks like our option is to interact with/look at interesting/sexy people or boring/unsexy people, with only the latter being irl.
4) Fire-seeking. This isn't original to me, but the idea is that people like bright screens because bright moving objects are meant to be salient. Doesn't explain birth rates that much, save in as much as they're downstream of phones.
5) Porn screwing with mate-seeking. Humans are mostly monogamous, so it seems possible that we don't seek out partners when we're "sexually satisfied" and porn tricks people into thinking they're getting some, even if on a conscious level they wouldn't view it as a proper substitute. Although I suspect some really do treat it as a substitute.
I'm less convinced by the anxiety argument, because it doesn't seem to apply that uniformly; social anxiety is a fairly niche phenomenon and most people don't (or at least, didn't) have a particular problem interacting with others, even strangers. It could be a conscious manifestation/explanation that people use for why they don't want to leave the house, though.
Comprehensive!
I think you hit the nail in the head. Evolution made us want to seek out fatty/sweet foods because in nature, those foods also came with benefits (and tended to satiate us before we overate). But social media (is like junk food and) essentially allows people to choose to eat empty calories, so to speak, and get their pro-social hit (human beings being social creatures, after all) without having to engage in stuff that may seem daunting but make us stronger/better.
I think it's difficult to pin down a single cause because it's a cumulative effect, leading to something like anxiety and stress (or lack of control of your behavior, as you descend into coping mechanisms?). There are many evolutionary mismatches.
One hint is that a human doomscrolling, because they are sitting at home without a clear path towards doing something productive or being social, could be similar to an animal stuck in a zoo exhibit who starts throwing up and eating it because they don't have a clear path to perform one of their instinctual duties. The zoo, and the modern environment, are both forms of captivity.
I think if wealth is higher than it's been, and some people are complaining that they don't have enough wealth to have kids, while other people are also complaining that they have a lack of meaning in their lives... there's some sort of mental illness affecting people's judgement on this subject. Instead of just taking them at their word, we should try to understand what is causing them to think this way.
Yes, yes. Social interaction in meatspace takes effort and courage. Screens can be turned off.
I think this makes sense. The evolutionary pressure is to avoid unrewarding stress of which much regular in-person and telephone socializing consists of.
I think this also helps explain the decline in the use of alcohol which acts as a crutch in those situations that can now just be more easily avoided.
I think at the very least what Hanania is saying is directionally correct
Evolution is the prism through which all behavior should be viewed in order to be properly understood.
I don't think there is a "fertility crisis" in the first place. The world is already significantly overpopulated (which is a contributing factor to the rise in obesity, because overpopulation depletes the soils of nutrients and leads to quality degradation like grain-fed cattle, "farm-raised" salmon, and soy-fed pork to control cost). Promoting more fertility will just make the problem even worse.
Instead we have an old-age welfare state problem. The solution is not to can-kick the problem down the road by increasing fertility and worsening the world's overpopulation even more. The solution is to restructure old-age entitlements to make them wealth-tested (e.g. a retired couple in a $3 million mansion with a $3 million 401k should not receive subsidized Medicare) and to restructure government debt through coordinated bond wipeoffs (a global government debt jubilee).
Whether or not it is "crisis," it certainly is a fertility nosedive. Even if we let it continue to whatever your preferred global population number is, there is no reason to think we could just level out there.
If the global population significantly declined the fertility rate would eventually rebound as the price of land decreased. We are currently far above the population optimum.
You are making an assertion that isn't actually based on any evidence. The price of land in depopulated parts of rural Japan is fast approaching zero, yet I do not see people seeking to move to those places and buy land there.
It's not just Japan. If you're European, the same applies to large swathes of inland Spain, and if you're American I'd guess that much of the interior is fairly cheap...? This land thing only makes sense if people are farmers, or if you're specifically talking about urban rents in dense cities, which don't seem likely to decline for a long time. Even in the UK, housing is affordable outside the Southeast and that doesn't cause anyone to move there.
Can confirm the same trends in Central Europe. The semirural areas that are being abandoned lose all sorts of services, thus becoming very unattractive to return back to.
Do they get cheap before they lose the services? I struggle to grasp how anywhere with net outflows can have high land values.
I haven’t studied the statistics extensively, but every graph I see shows fertility rates declining similarly in countries with both large and small GDPs and/or wealth redistributing social nets. Waiting for an “eventual” evolutionary rebound based on leveling of land price, sovereign debt, soil nutrient quality, etc. requires central planning at unprecedented scale or letting nature do her thing for enough generations that it will become a beyond debate crisis. There will be a lot of human suffering on the way down and back up.
Your proposal seems like a great way to disincentivize savings, anyway.
This was genuinely brilliant. I clicked on this article thinking it was time to cancel my subscription because I hadn't been reading Hanania very often lately, but this post is a perfect example of why I'm happy to give him a few bucks a month. Somehow, Richard, you've managed to come up with a novel explanation for the fertility crisis, an explanation that none of the countless other heterodox thinkers toiling away on this issue have devised. Good work.
his post did make me feel bad for Louise Perry though, because she has a book coming out on this topic, and I doubt that her explanation will be as good (to be clear, I love Perry's work).
I think the evidence is weak that the desire for solitude is built in. I think it's equally possible that humans just have a variety of inclinations, like listening to stories, seeing beautiful people, and feeling accomplishment, that modern industries like movies and video games hyper optimize for. There was nothing in the ancestral environment trying to exploit quirks of our psychology, now there is.
Yep. As I noted in a previous comment, social media is kind of like junk food: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-weve-been-thinking-about-the/comment/265793478
As an aside I theorize that 'information' is also subject to evolutionary mismatch and analogizes with the junk food idea.
Looking at the data, with a very few minor exceptions, any country where girls get 9 or more years of education results in a fertility rate less than replacement. Female education is the decisive factor. So if you’re looking for government “solutions”, the answer is obvious.
Good luck trying to reverse female education that much in developed countries, though. Also, would you really want to live in a society ruled by the Taliban?
I am merely pointing out the data, Richard, not advocating for The Handmaid’s Tale. The data suggest that all the pro-natal government policies in the world will not work. Which brings me to the next little tidbit you can verify. As men’s real wages increase by 1%, fertility increases by 1%. As women’s real wages increase by 1%, fertility declines by 4%. Real wages increase with increases in productivity. Education improves productivity. The population in the West is inevitably going to crash, until society has changed radically enough to change the behavior of men and women. Not in my lifetime, but before 2200 certainly.
Does this control for these countries being total crapsacks in other ways? I'm pretty sure that ceteris paribus if my wife were illiterate that wouldn't make me want to have more kids with her, which is certainly a limiting factor on fertility. Both of us being illiterate/peasant farmers/needing children to look after us when older/not understanding birth control probably would though.
Or we find a pharmaceutical/tech solution to change behavior, like we did for obesity.
You’re a techno-optimist! I like that. But here’s a question for you. Suppose a drug was found to “cure” homosexuality. One might be found if people were allowed to research the question. Would such a drug be allowed on the market? Would parents be allowed to give it to their children? I am not a biological determinist, despite the comments above. Biology creates tendencies, but ideology locks them into action. Ideology cannot be fought with government programs (except for individual freedom—freedom is always fought with government programs). Of course, it cannot be fought at all if people are not even allowed to talk about the biological tendencies, and right now, except for a few hated heretics, people do not talk.
"Less then replacement" may mean 1.8 or 0.8 kids per woman. The first is manageable; the second is a disaster.
Interesting post, but I would challenge it on several fronts:
(1) People pay a lot of money to live closer to other people. You can have isolation at very low cost in rural areas, and you can get a whole house in West Virginia for the mid five-figures. But people continue to move out of the countryside and pay up to live around fashionable people in fashionable, crowded neighborhoods.
In East Asia this is taken to unbelievable extremes. People will pay a fortune to live in some supremely dense neighborhood in Seoul or Shanghai, even as the rural parts of Korea and China have millions of abandoned homes that you could live in for free.
(2) In the data we find that fertility is lower the denser a place is. Fertility is lowest in high rise apartments where you live near hundreds of others and gets higher the further out you get.
The ultra-crowded Asian cities have the world's lowest fertility rates: 0.4 in the core of Shanghai 0.55 in the core of Seoul.
Sprawly exurbs have much higher fertility than inner city areas. The most fertile state in America is South Dakota while Manhattan, America's densest place, has a TFR under 1.0.
(3) Liberals tend to live around more people. Conservatives are much more spread out geographically. Yet fertility in the US is almost 2x as high for conservatives as for liberals.
(4) Fertility is actually inverse of partner count. Your polyamorists have very low fertility, your religious couple that only ever had sex with each other has very high fertility.
I do think evolution explains things, but my story is simpler. We evolved so that the thing we desire (sex) causes the thing evolution needs (babies). Now we can get sexual release without babies, either though contracepted sex or porn.
The antisocial people are at home getting off to Onlyfans or something like it. The extroverts are racking up the partner count while using contraception. Neither is getting pregnant.
What is the answer? As I see it, the best answer is conscious and intentional pronatal values. That is, the direct belief that society or I myself should have more kids. That's why conservatives have 2x the fertility of liberals. That's why Israel has 4x the fertility of Korea. That's why the religious have way higher fertility than secular people. All within the same external conditions.
Conservatives, the religious and Israelis believe in marriage, for purpose of having children, for the sake of the future.
1. People move to cities because that's where jobs are, not because that's where people are. They move to those cities and then spend all their free time alone in their apartment.
2. This is too confounded to be strong evidence against Richard's thesis. It could be that smaller home sizes are overpowering whatever effect on fertility living around more people has, for example.
3. See above
4. I'd be very surprised if this remains true after adjusting for religious belief.
Not just jobs but activities, services, health care...but we still want to minimize our stress levels so the unrewarding activities get cut first (reward = pleasure - stress).
I've been thinking about the book Flow. Came out in the 1990s. It's about structuring our daily consciousness so that abilities optimally meet challenges. If challenges don't meet our abilities we feel boredom. If challenges are too much for our abilities we feel stressed. Optimal flow is like riding a skateboard or playing a good game of chess. And to me a flow state is mostly solitary. I mostly get it alone - reading, or running. Other people are more likely to take me out of the flow state and put me into stress or boredom. Is that part of it?
I think it has more to do with humans being naturally drawn to high-status or interesting people rather than ordinary ones. Parasocial relationships can crowd out real-life interactions and make relationships with everyday people feel less exciting or lower status by comparison.
I'm not sure it's quite "the desire for solitude." While people in many traditional societies struggle with intense social pressures, the "wealth-siphoning" effects of traditional cultures happens only once people can get actual wealth, and hunter-gatherers don't. Nowadays, our ancestral h-gs are generally called "immediate return foragers," with the key element there being "immediate return": anything they gather or kill immediately begins to rot, and there's nothing they can do to stop it, which means they can't really build up wealth, even by hiding it away.
I think, rather than being a desire for solitude, it's the other way around: people fear social interactions more than almost anything else. If you ask people what they're most afraid of, one of the most frequent things is "public speaking." The Greek phrase "come back with your shield or on it" is effectively threatening someone with social death if they do not get actual death. People in their 90s, whose friends have all died, just say "yeah I guess it's my time to go soon" rather than just making new friends. In the ancestral environment, you didn't have much to hide - everybody knew everybody and you didn't and just couldn't own much in the way of personal property - but you ABSOLUTELY had to be TERRIFIED of social death.
> ...which means they can't really build up wealth, even by hiding it away.
Couldn't they build up wealth by stashing tools?
This would actually work even without needing us to have evolved to actively seek out solitude. We just need our instincts to actively seek out social interaction to be too weak for the modern day. Basically, since social interaction came free in the ancestral environment, we didn't evolve to actively seek it out like we did for high-calorie food. So now that it's no longer the default and must be actively sought out, we get way less social interaction than what's healthy.
And alcohol is a highly imperfect substitute for GLP 1s
Maybe a combination of an NSAID and a betablocker could help. Supposedly social pain and physical pain share brain circuits and betablockers can mitigate the tendency of the heart to get worked up in social situations.
I’m not sure how much I attribute to a specific evolved desire for isolation, but I agree that most of the specific causes people point to are downstream of more fundamental forces. On the fertility issue, these are the main ways I think our individual psychology and sociocultural mechanisms are maladapted to our current environment of unprecedented abundance and individual freedom:
1. Basal drives that misprice the costs of being alone and the benefits of socialization. This results in what I like to call the isolation gradient, whereby greedy maximization of individual local preferences mechanically leads to isolation because one does not have to compromise their preferences to accommodate those of others. Our drives are miscalibrated because it’s highly evolutionarily novel not to have socialization forced on us by necessity. There’s also the fact that the costs of isolation are distal and have complex externalities, which naturally makes the problem hard to solve.
2. Big chunks of our culture adapted to restrain fertility because we only recently got out of the Malthusian trap.
3. The aspects that did encourage fertility have mostly been blown up by liberalism, for good and for bad. (I’m using a very broad definition of liberalism here, basically meaning an unprecedented expansion of individual freedom.)
4. Contraception reliably decoupled the rewards of sex from reproduction, removing evolution’s main carrot for getting us to have kids.
5. Because people cannot know the rewards of having children ahead of time, they underrate them relative to known alternatives.
6. Modern entertainment and phones have made being alone more compelling, but they provide only parasocial empty calories. We weren’t adapted to get such non-nourishing but reinforcing social stimuli.
7. Overpricing of optionality relative to committing to a relationship and having kids. We never had to deal with having so many choices.
8. To the family, children are now almost entirely an economic cost rather than a benefit due to their labor.
9. Urbanization is necessary for the modern economy but actively hostile to fertility.
Anyways, I’m sure there are a bunch more, and of course all these intersect with major hobby-horse themes like phones or feminism. But the silver lining is that it implies we’re in an adaptive selection event rather than being permanently doomed.
I think this one is pretty straightforward. My very simplified summary of what vaguely sophisticated tribal monkeys want is: security, ease, status, and autonomy. Ease/status and security/autonomy could be treated as being somewhat in tension with each other.
Ease/status - people with nothing often take risks and strive to attain status or some status equivalent like wealth at a level they find acceptable, once they have it, they often pivot to protecting it - pulling up ladders, price fixing, etc. Another way of putting this is something like "people want as much as they can get for the fewest number of calories." Once you have the status, you don't want to keep busting butt to maintain it.
Security/autonomy - a tribe, protective parents, an adult male (if you are female) are all very useful things to protect you from the elements, enemy raiders, and hyenas. They also exert control over you - making you share resources, making various demands on your fertility that may not coincide with your ideal personal reproductive strategy, etc. It's not a mystery why rich people since the beginning of civilization tend to buy huge palaces they can use to isolate themselves from everyone else and exercise control over who enters that space. Giant walled compound you control is pretty much the apotheosis of both security and autonomy. The difference is that there used to be many poor peasants to fill up your harem or downstairs or whatever. Now, digital walled compounds are cheap and easy to procure, and there are way fewer poor, desperate people who are willing to staff yours on your terms when they can have their own.
Some kind of much more tailored matchmaking service that finds other humans with overlapping ideas of what makes an ideal walled compound would probably be useful here, but I have 0 idea how to scale that. Maybe AI can do it. Maybe if we ever do get very customized AI assistants who understand us, they can interact with other people's assistants and play matchmaker or some similar sort of thing.
Fandoms are very weird and often toxic, and I am pretty much over them, but I did meet my husband in one. Encouraging people to lean into the social aspect of their weird hobbies probably isn't the worst thing here - yes, do cosplaying, go to nerd conventions, pride parades, Trump boat rallies, and so on. There's at least other humans at those. From anecdotal evidence anyway, the people at these kinds of things are often very weird and have stupid ideas, but they are usually not the kinds of misanthropic, neurotic, deeply unpleasant people who occupy and dominate the online versions of these physical spaces. Put another way: "my dad is a fun-loving redneck grandpa at a fish fry and a miserable old coot at home watching Fox news."
I’m personally a more shy kind of person. I don’t like talking to strangers that much. Can’t say for certain if that’s typical, but what I can say is that in all my years of going out with friends, they too are not super extraverted. I can look around and see that maybe 2/3rds of friend groups that are out are same-sex. And then 1/3rd are mixed, but with equal amounts of each sex, so it strikes me as they already knew each other. If large groups are freely mingling, I would expect groups to be more mixed than they are.
I think the idea is that we evolved in smallish groups. But if you go out to a large club with several hundreds of people, it’s actually less typical for someone to be readily comfortable with talking to plenty of people. But any time I mention that, people on the internet always seem to be very extraverted - they think that unease is completely absurd.
So this is a case where my lived experience doesn’t match up with what people on the internet say.
I'm sure there are many other instances where real life doesn't match up with what people on the internet say. :-)
Great article. This is why I subscribe - there’s always new and interesting insights that I don’t really see anywhere else. This article reminded me of the Solarians in Isaac Asimovs Foundation series. “ The 20,000 citizens of Solaria live miles apart from one another and interact almost exclusively through technological holograms. Every aspect of their life, from agriculture to personal hygiene, is entirely managed by robots, rendering them physically repulsed by actual human contact.” I always thought this was far fetched, but maybe there is something there about humans actually desiring isolation and replacing real human interaction with technology.