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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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Simultaneously, as people spend more time on their phones hooked on these echo chambers, polarizing differently, not just by gender, but polarizing. Right. then the less time that we spend socializing with different other people, the less we develop understanding right across genders, right across political groups.
And as we become more illiberal, I would predict that would fuel political authoritarianism because those guys are the bad guys and we'll do anything to stop them from winning and we'll support our strongman to stop those crazy people winning. So I would just expect lots of economic frustrations, lots of support for illiberalism, etc. It's a bad future, right?
Absolutely. Yes. So you'll have this political lobby group of old people who are directly concerned with pensions and health care rather than economic dynamism and frictions. So then it becomes harder to be a young person. And so we go back to the disadvantaged man.
It's harder to move upwards as a disadvantaged man and harder to get a wife if the entire voting system is rigged by these old people who don't care so much about you.
I don't think that's true because, I mean, in China, when you talk about those cities, those tower blocks, China is currently dealing with massive local government debt because so much of the local governments, their assets are in buildings that no one is buying. So that's not a win. Those empty cities are no sense of win.
No one is moving to those cities because there's no jobs, no demand, nothing there.
So let's say, you know, it would be amazing and I'd love to see it if some community group forged a space in the US and like, OK, how can we arrange this community space? Maybe it's 100 households. How can we arrange it in a pro-coupling, pro-fertility way? That would be fascinating to explore. But just because there's a plot of vacant land, I wouldn't expect anything to follow.
No, no, I don't.
Yeah. So two things on that. So I think, first of all, it's really important that the young people understand the economic implications. So they take it as seriously as we do climate breakdown, first and foremost. And that's what I do in my lectures. And then I think that given my realization that so much of this is driven by the rise of singles, I actually would pivot to say,
You know, so many young Americans are not happy. You know, one of the richest countries in the world, a lot of young people are deeply lonely and unhappy. And one of the most unique and wonderful things that we have as humans is to find people to love and care for and build emotional connections and devotion and support each other and understand each other.
So going back to the writing the Hollywood script, I would go back for those rom-coms and celebrate the romantic love because when people shift their focus from celebrating the freedoms or the secular monks of the 20s to thinking more about, okay, how can I build friendships and romantic love? Then you get people finding love earlier and And then that should encourage a higher rate of coupling.
So I think the romantic love would be my optimistic, positive focus that I think would, you know, restore both socialising, friendships, mutual understanding, empathy, happiness and down the line fertility.
Yes.
Thank you.
You have the option of going out with your friends, getting dressed, coordinating. Or you can just relax, chill out on the sofa and watch a film or play a video game. And maybe that's a bit easier, a bit more relaxing when you've had a hard day, you just crash out and relax.
Italy has the highest share of people over 65 years old among all EU member states.
From Mexican villages to the Atlas Mountains to Uzbek towns to Korean universities. And by talking, learning from young men, older men and women across the world, I've started to think about, OK, well, why is fertility collapsing? What's going on? And my interviews have really helped me understand this massive global problem.
So I guess there's the right wing, the left wing, and then there's the Alice Evans take. Okay. I think the conservative right in the US will blame childless cat ladies, right? So they'll say that women are overeducated, they're living with their cats, and they're very, very selfish. Correct. But... Here's the thing.
That theory has two major omissions, because the collapse in fertility is happening at vastly different political economies. I mean, in Tunisia and Turkey, female labour force participation is very low, around 30%, and yet their fertility is only 1.5%. So even in places where women aren't even getting jobs, they're not having kids. You know, in India, extremely patriarchal casteist society.
But in Tamil Nadu in the south, it's got exactly the same fertility rate as England and Wales. That's 1.4%. So it's not just about these overeducated women pursuing their careers. Also, there's also a class-based variation. So the US right tends to blame these overeducated women. In Sweden and in Finland, the rate of childlessness is actually amongst the most disadvantaged people.
Showing 101–120 of 145 · page 6 of 8
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