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
They're least likely to have children.
Absolutely. So many people across the world experience economic difficulties. And so these could be like very high house prices in New York, making it much more expensive to have an apartment with an extra room or the very expensive cost of childcare. You know, when I was in San Francisco, people would say, oh, it might be 30,000, super, super expensive.
And that's prohibitively difficult for many families. Now, those difficulties are real, and governments should take those economic concerns seriously, and I'm all here supporting cheaper housing, more affordable housing, greater access to safer, accessible childcare.
However, I don't think that explanation is a full story, because it won't explain why it's happening everywhere all at once, even at very, very different levels of income. And so that brings us to the Alice Evans theory. Yes, exactly. So what has happened everywhere all at once is that we see a rise of singles.
And the rise in singles, that is, I mean, people neither being married or cohabiting, and it precisely correlates with the decline in fertility. Now, previously, late from the 1960s, American couples had fewer children. But now what's happening is they're not even forming those couples. So in America, for example...
Over half of 18 to 34 year olds are neither in a steady relationship nor living with a partner. Furthermore, just out from Pew, most single Americans don't feel much pressure to find a partner. Half say they're not even looking.
Oh, that's a great point. But that's actually going down too now. In America, it's been the least educated who are less likely to marry. And that's where there's been the steepest decline in fertility.
So, here's the thing. I think historically people would have married for one of three reasons. Very crudely, love, money, or respect. You know, in conservative societies where singledom is totally stigmatized, then you have to marry for respectability. You know, in India, where it's so important, lots of aunties and uncles might be pestering people, you know, when are you getting married?
When are you getting married? You know, for my grandparents, it was just the done thing to get married. But now as society liberalises, you know, Miley Cyrus championing flowers, I can buy myself some flowers. There's more permissibility, so that's one thing. There's also economic convergence. So as women earn their own incomes, they can increasingly be more independent.
So compatibility increasingly depends on love, whether people really enjoy each other's company. But of course, there are lots of frictions. You know, people might be manipulative, deceitful, unfaithful. And if there are lots of frictions, they may call it quits.
So that might be one aspect of it, economic convergence between men and women's earnings and cultural liberalization making singledom more permissible. On top of that, on top of those shifts, I think the big change that we see all across the world, all at very different levels of income, is the massive improvement in hyper-engaging online entertainment. In that TikTok, video games, Call of Duty,
World of Warcraft, Bridgerton, Netflix. You can browse Blackpink's live stream. Let's go! or go on Pornhub. I'm going to skip this one. Anything you like. All these technological advances enable instant access to world's most charismatic, charming content. Or maybe you prefer to do sports bets and gambling.
And so why venture out when everything is at your fingertips, from Netflix to Zoom meetings? And so we see, tracing the data over time, that there is growing isolation. Young people are spending much more time alone. So in recent surveys, 65% of young American men say, no one knows me well. 28% of Gen Z didn't socialize with anyone they didn't live with in the past week.
So we just see this global trend and it is absolutely global. So, for example, last year I was in Mexico and lots of different Mexican little towns. And mothers would say the biggest problem here is that our teenage sons are spending all their times in their bedroom.
And I'll hear the same stories in little Indian villages, in Bangladeshi villages, all these people being hooked on hyper engaging media. Are there any countries that buck the trend? Well, yes, actually. So, for example, I was in Uzbekistan for a month last year and there there's been an increase in fertility.
When I'm in Uzbekistan, people typically ask me four questions and the answer should always be yes. Do you like Uzbekistan? Do you like Uzbek food? Are you married? Do you have children? And that tells you a lot about people's priorities, a national pride and also this strong onus that women should be married and have children. So that's one option.
You just pump up the status of marriage and fertility. In Georgia, their Orthodox patriarch similarly did the same of bumping up the status of children and fertility. In Hungary, they tried to give people cheaper mortgages if they promised to be married and have children.
But what I'm saying, the Alice Evans theory of the collapsing fertility, is that these pronatal incentives of saying $2,000, $5,000 to have an extra child... They're simply too small if the prior constraint is that most people are increasingly single. I think that most governments are putting the cart before the horse by focusing on couples rather than realizing this prior constraint.
And I think that if I'm right, that the problem is technology, this hyper engaging media distracting us from us and driving this digital solitude, which ultimately prevents people from forming couples. then we need to think, well, you know, we have various options. Could we regulate technology in some way? Could we introduce further restrictions?
Or what can we do in schools to ensure that we're fostering social skills? Because just as we see declining maths and English reading skills across the OECD, simultaneously, my interviews suggest that if people aren't spending time socialising, then they're not necessarily developing the capacity to bond and charm and woo people
Showing 121–140 of 145 · page 7 of 8
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