Derek Thompson

Did you hear from psychologists who said, you know, this is something where I think I have several ideas for how we can get back to baseline?

It's very difficult, I think, to engineer mass cultural change.

Mass cultural change does happen, but it seems so spontaneous.

It seems so sui generis.

I remember I was writing a column a few weeks ago about the baby boom.

And the baby boom is so interesting because on the one hand, it's like the most famous sociological phenomenon in the last 100 years.

Like we named an entire generation after it.

You walk down the street, you ask anybody, what's the baby boom?

Like everyone knows what it was.

No one knows why it happened.

Like,

If you look at the 200-year history of fertility in the West, it's basically a flatter declining line for most of that 200 years, except for one 30-year period where, boop, it goes up dramatically.

Why did that happen?

You ask economists, they're like, hey, maybe it was housing policy here.

Maybe it was antibacterial drugs that reduced the mortality rate of giving birth over here.

Maybe it was household...

equipment, household electronics that might have made it more efficient to take care of a home.

Maybe it's this, maybe it's that.

No one has a full skeleton key.

But what you can't debate is it was a cultural phenomenon.