Alice Evans
speaker
145 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 11 Mar
Alice Evans’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
As I said, cultural engineering is very difficult in a world of smartphones where everyone can curate their own echo chamber. So my totalitarian aspirations are limited in the 21st century.
That was a British joke. Sorry.
No, not at all. Not at all. I don't think they seem to understand it at all. And actually, even though I totally agree that China has masterminded massive success with electric vehicles, for example, or innovation, they can't seem to encourage people to couple up and have babies. And let me give you two examples of the limits of their cultural engineering.
So on Little Red Book, when I chat to my students, if you type in fertility in Little Red Book, which is their version of Instagram, right? So if you type infertility, and I'd encourage you to do this, download the app and do it, you will get all this antenatal propaganda. And I've previously blogged on this and it's really shocking.
It'll be all these horrifying images about how your vagina gets destroyed and your body is destroyed and it's the most painful experience of your life. It's like really horrifying and gory. And all these girls are saying, oh my God, this is horrific. I never want to do it. So Despite all the censorship and the Great Firewall of China, all that exists.
On top of that, young women will upload video blogs celebrating their independent life. So look at my nice apartment. I'm going to, you know, cut this bit of food and I'm living as an independent person, sort of glorifying and, you know, in many ways, rewriting the script, challenging expectations of marriage, etc. And I don't know why this antenatal discourse is passing the censors.
But yeah, it is. And it's consistent with all my interviews with Chinese women.
Let me say, I think that's an interesting hypothesis. But I think you see young people still doing things that are painful. So whether it's young women, you know, trying to get an Instagram face and having fillers and Botox and painful things or men spending painful times at the gym being secular monks, people do painful stuff.
I think the more direct causal link is people spending time on their phones and then feeling anxious about chatting to people at the bar.
I certainly think that people seem to be wanting to extend the freedoms and the lack of responsibility in their 20s. And let's add that, for example, in my interviews with Latin American men, many are saying to me that they don't necessarily want marriage and kids because it comes with those responsibilities. Right. And I think this could be even more salient than the pain of pregnancy.
Imagine if you're a guy in a pretty crappy labor market with lots of informal labor, lots of insecurity, lots of massive financial shocks and crises and inflationary pressures. And you're like, do I want to commit to a woman and say that we're going to raise two kids together and feel all that strain and responsibility? Or do I just want to chill out and play Call of Duty?
So that I think is, that's a really salient. I mean, I think that... progressives have generally underestimated how much women benefit from, as you were saying earlier, making that commitment of monogamous, permanent devotion and support. I think that while feminists have historically championed freedoms and shared care work, which are, of course, crucial to gender equality,
The people that actually listen to those messages of freedoms, pleasure and shared care work are men who love, who are emotionally connected and who value companionship with their wives. And now many men are saying, maybe I don't want those things. You know, maybe that's not everything I need. And that's a hugely important and undertold aspect of this global story. Yeah.
So I'm reluctant to make predictions, but... These are not predictions.
if fertility continues to decline and we are either ineffective or inactive, and simultaneously we do not have a large rise in immigration, which is super productive and super economically active, and simultaneously we do not see a massive boom in AI productivity. So if none of those countervailing forces occur, then we're all going to become
much poorer and perhaps politically also we might see some shifts with a rising, you know, support for more conservative groups.
For example, in the US, it's Republicans, as you know, who have more kids, right? So we should predict that Republicans will win more elections just by virtue of fertility. In Europe, we will just all become much poorer. Our public services will continue to deteriorate and we will have less spending power. So Europe is just in an economic doom loop.
And the US may be better because they'll get all the world's migrants. They'll get the most productive migrants. They'll get the most entrepreneurial migrants. But they should also become, if we're right, more conservative and more Republican.
Yes.
Well, I think certainly that if people grow up with a certain standard of living and a certain quality of public services, and then those deteriorate as a result of population aging and lower rates of economic dynamism, then people should get fed up and frustrated.
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