Derek Thompson

I want to pull in AI here.

I wonder whether the introduction of chatbots to young people's lives will create what I guess you could call conscientiousness polarization, which is too many syllables to ever catch on, but let me unpack it in a second.

So like someone with high conscientiousness might use deep research, ChatGPT, like a personal tutor to make them smarter, to find research they wouldn't otherwise discover.

But I could imagine someone with low conscientiousness using this exact same technology to just write all their essays for them, right?

Essentially to outsource the act of thinking entirely.

So the same technology could interact with people with totally different conscientiousness scores in a way that would deepen that personality trait.

Have you thought a little bit about how large language models could play a role in furthering the trends that you've identified here?

It's obviously hard to separate this research from the popularly known finding that young people in the US, the very same group that you found plummeting conscientiousness and declining extroversion, are also self-reporting less life satisfaction, more depression, more anxiety.

I think that when I read about these trends, I typically see them associated with smartphone use.

Sometimes they're associated with parenting, a rise of accommodative parenting.

You recently offered a really interesting case that it is English-speaking countries that seem to have the largest declines in youth life satisfaction.

And we cannot forget the fact that in English-speaking countries throughout the Anglosphere, the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, they all have very similar housing supply issues and thus skyrocketing housing costs.

Can we pull a little bit of macroeconomics into this picture?

Maybe begin by just restating the thesis of that piece, why you think housing might be an important ingredient in the anxiety crisis of the English-speaking world.

I think it's interesting to think that the Anglosphere simultaneously values homeownership and values the ability to guard homeownership by establishing a set of rules that make it harder to add new homes in that area.

And when you combine the two, what you get is...

a perfect storm where a generation might grow up, say this generation of people up to 35, 40 years old, who have been instructed, have been taught, have been led to believe that the ability to buy a home is the singular ticket into a kind of adulthood freedom,

And yet we've made it so difficult in the most high productive cities and some of the richest places to build homes precisely because of, or in part because of the same jealous guarding of home values that leads to nimbyism and reduces the ability to add to the housing supply.

So it's a very interesting... I don't know how much stock I put into it.

The phenomenon...