The Decline of Marriage: Why We Need to Prioritise Family Life (Ed Davies)

18:42Amol Rajan:I hadn't thought about that, that sort of two or three generations ago, a lot of people got married because it was more of a cultural norm and got married much younger, much younger than in their early 20s, like you, 22. And they did that more as a precursor to buying a home, even though homes were cheaper, more gettable. Yeah. They would do the marriage first and then the home. Yeah.

19:01Ed Davies:Yeah okay where did that why is that flipped? So I mean there's I definitely think there was an interesting moment in the sort of in the late 20th century where you moved from being able to get a mortgage on two salaries rather than one. And at the time it didn't really matter because in the mid to three quarters way through 20th century most people were marrying young. The vast majority of people were married. But then as marriage tails off and you can still buy a house on two salaries if you're married suddenly home ownership becomes a privilege of the married. And so people who are thinking, well, I can't do this till I get married are in trouble because over here, people are getting married, suddenly have two salaries, twice the spending power.

19:39Ed Davies:There are then issues down the line around if you want to have a family and childcare and all these sorts of things because housing gets more expensive. But certainly you tend to find that married people have by far the best housing situation.

19:48Amol Rajan:So when I'm 42, when I started thinking about this delayed sort of adulthood, my 20s, started writing columns about about 15 years ago. So I was inspired or moved to do that because I found that actually a lot of my female mates were saying, you know what? I mean, this is obviously a huge generalization. It's anecdotal. But a lot of them were saying, I'd love to just meet someone and get married and sit down. And it's really interesting. We had this discussion on the Today program desk the other day. We've got lots of female producers, brilliant, brilliant human beings. My friends and colleagues were in their early 30s and some of them have got younger siblings.

20:21Amol Rajan:And they were saying, you know, this whole kind of decade of celebration of, you know, I'm going to go to Australia. I'm going to eat some pistachio chocolate from Dubai, whatever. A lot of them are getting to 20-odd and thinking, what did I do with my 20s? And you know what? There's an argument to say, you should be free to do that. Make mistakes. Work out what you want to do. Try with a few different careers. Try with a few different partners. Try and launch that company. Do that crazy thing. Spend that six months in Thailand. We talk a lot about the celebration of autonomy and live your best life.

20:51Amol Rajan:I think we possibly talk less about the fact that, on the flip side of that, some people get to 30 and think what have I just done?

20:57Ed Davies:Yeah I think you're absolutely right. I do think we have slightly sold a generation down the river on this stuff. That we sort of temporal happiness, that feeling a moment of excitement is the thing that matters when we have totally devalued the deep satisfaction that comes from taking on responsibilities and making commitments in our lives. And you think of there is definitely a trade-off in having children. Having children's hard work. You know you're talking about you have four children. That's a lot of children to be looking after.

21:24Amol Rajan:Did you start

21:24Ed Davies:young you've got two and so yeah i mean i have both my children in my late 20s and there's no doubt it's hard work but the trade-offs are huge i mean the the sort of the benefits you know when when your baby first laughs i can remember it like clear as a bell from yesterday because it's and it sounds pathetic in a way like someone laughed and it's one of the best memories of your life but it it broadens your emotional range in a way that the lows are lower and the highs are higher do you feel that we also talk about parenthood too much in the in a sort of negative way absolutely parenthood motherhood and fatherhood as well i think motherhood is sort of talked down as something that gets in the way of your career and that we don't value fathers in the way that we should and they are both aspects of marriage together that we have talked down hugely over over generations so that people don't think i want to do that there's actually talking sort of viral clips there's one on i've seen on social media recently of this young woman who is holding a baby as her friend's baby first time and just collapses in tears and it's the first time she's ever held a baby and it is that thing of if your friends don't have kids and you don't have people around you having kids and getting married you tend not to do it yourself and suddenly you're exposed to this life and this small child it definitely resonates something really deeply in

22:30Amol Rajan:you i mean can i just say is the the argument against all of this the pushback against all of this which um a lot of people will feel is that the delayed entry to adulthood and extension of childhood and this decade of liberation was worth it. And it was worth it for lots of reasons. It was worth it because freedom is good. Freedom is a wonderful thing. And the autonomy to pursue your own preferences. Why not? Let's be free. And the second thing is that the old ways, which is, by the way, something that went on for centuries. But, you know, the model of the nuclear family that was perhaps prevalent in 1950 concealed a lot of unhappiness.

23:11Amol Rajan:a lot of women trapped in marriages that didn't want to be there a lot of women who didn't have the fulfillment of professional life that they deserve and wanted and a lot of women who basically were subjugated by men do you think there's anything in that so i think there is a grain

23:26Ed Davies:of truth in that yep definitely the the the ability to get out of bad situations has definitely been a good thing um i think there is also though it's really overstated um so there has what's overstated So the degree to which this was necessary. So most people historically didn't stay in horrendous situations. They did find a way out anyway that that divorce has been around for thousands of years. Most people found their way out. It's also it underestimates the incredible protective and nourishing nature of marriage. So, but in terms of protection, married women are the least likely to experience domestic abuse.

24:02Ed Davies:There is something about having a partner who is committed to you and to the same extent keeps out other men from your life because they are committed to you.

24:10Amol Rajan:That's really important. Because you've got this, you've got this stat in the CSJA work, which says that there's a big difference between cohabiting couples and married couples in terms of the prevalence of domestic abuse. So cohabiting individuals are twice as likely to be victims of domestic abuse as married individuals. This is three times for single individuals, five times for those who are separated. So that's a CSJ argument that marriage, basically the act of committing, doing it in public, putting that ring on and being a married couple makes you less likely to indulge the worst successes of a relationship.

24:44Amol Rajan:Yeah. Not just worst successes, violence, which is unforgivable.

24:47Ed Davies:Yeah. I mean, so stats like that, they don't control for other factors. So there is some self-selection, but you are talking huge magnitudes of effect. I mean, five times more likely to be a victim of domestic abuse in some circumstances than if you're married. So we can't say that that's definitely marriage has five times effect, but we can say it definitely seems to have a huge protective effect. And certainly that was sort of this idea that marriage was to subjugate women. Actually, it is really protective. and particularly you know when you start to have a family the idea is is that those those early days those early months it's not possible for for a woman to go out and work and having that man there who you know who has explicitly stated they are committed to your well-being and flourishing

25:25Amol Rajan:is a protective factor so we talked a bit about the causes of this decline in marriage and the family we talked about the trade-offs involved what are the consequences do you think what is what what are we living with as a result of this graph which was flat for centuries and now looks like the side of a mountain where marriage out of nowhere in the last 30 40 years has fallen off a

25:46Ed Davies:cliff yeah so the sort of the top order consequence is stability and then that has many subsequent problems around it so on that stability thing it means that families are much less likely to stay together now than they were and so this is that thing of in in i was born in the mid 1970s late 1970s if you were a 16 year old uh in the mid 1970s when you sat your o levels you had a 90 percent chance of living with your biological mum and dad we would by sort of 10 years later that already dropped to 80 and for children born at the turn of the century by the time they sat their gcse's it was about 50 50 so stability has massively declined with the collapse since the

26:24Amol Rajan:turn of the century half of people in this country don't live with their dad at 16 age 16 they don't

26:31Ed Davies:live with both biological parents yeah so there's a really interesting study done by the institute for fiscal studies called the deaton review of inequalities and it looked at how family stability has changed and so they looked at the millennium cohort study and found that children in that study by the time they reached sort of gcse middle middle of their teen years it was just over half were

26:48Amol Rajan:living with both their parents but going on what you said earlier about the socio-economic background here if the figure is that if you're born after the 2000 by the time you're 16 the chances of living with both your parents not just your mum but yeah both your parents is 50 presumably based on what you said earlier yeah if you're from a poorer background your chance of living both your

27:07Ed Davies:parent is significantly lower still exactly that completely that so i mean interestingly we're so bad at collecting data on this it's quite hard to know but we do know sort of a different way of viewing it that yes in the bottom quintile your chances as a snapshot last year family resources survey of living with married parents is 20 there's about another 10 who live with cohabiting

27:27Amol Rajan:parents okay so one in five kids from the poorest background in this country born after 2000 one in five live with married parents yeah you talked about so what are the consequences the consequences with stability um a massive loss of stability um more chaotic homes yeah what do you think in terms of education welfare outcomes what do you think we're living with as a society in let's be frank in ways that perhaps people are a bit squeamish about talking about yeah so i mean the reason i

27:53Ed Davies:have come to this is i work at a political think tank and so the way that most of my work looks at is what is the lens that i view education and family breakdown what is the lens of welfare and family breakdown so that that tends to be my sort of sweet spot and if you are concerned about government spending you cannot afford not to be worried about this so if you look at dwp figures if you are department of work and pension sorry yeah i'm sorry i'll use lots of jargon now no no

28:17Amol Rajan:go for it go for it um the csj is the center for social justice which is a how would you describe

28:23Ed Davies:a center-right think tank uh sort of poverty think tank so we have we have people actually from all political persuasions on our board and in our team um but our focus is the root causes of poverty and so yeah if you look at the different impacts on different political departments it's huge so in department of work and pensions everyone is really concerned about the welfare bill at the moment and rightly so because it is really unaffordable if you look at family structure and the effect on that you are 10 times more likely as a child to grow up in a long-term workless household if it is a single parent household compared to a couple household it's huge it's a very stark difference if i mean part of my sort of interest in this work came from talking to teachers as well if you go into schools now i was talking to a head teacher just the other day actually he's got 40 years experience who said i've probably dealt with 3 000 cases of children you know causing mischief from quite minor to serious safeguarding and i can count on the fingers of one hand the number where there hasn't been a problem at home and when you look at the data for outcomes that both i mean in the uk us and other countries have done research on this it has an enormous effect on your child the stability of their home life so the classic really good u.s study done out of princeton they they identified uh what they call fragile families cohabiting lone parent households and found you are twice as likely to drop out of school if you are from what they call a fragile family and the sort of the gold standard of uh of research is replication like can we so we did a study at the csja where we thought that's an observational study we'll do a survey of 5 000 adults and get them to look back on their lives and find if they failed at school.

29:54Ed Davies:And then you sort of, you control for all these factors and found exactly the same result that if they had experienced family breakdown, they had twice the chance of failing at school. So those sorts of stats are fairly well established now

30:04Amol Rajan:as being pretty rigorous. So would you say that there's a causal connection between this graph, this precipitous flat line for centuries and then a sudden drop in marriage and family stability, you'd say there's a causal connection between that and worse educational outcomes, higher welfare spending and greater crime? Exactly that. I think there are some people who would say you cannot prove it's causal. Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, we had Jonathan Haidt a few weeks ago talking about the smartphone. The whole tenor of people who respond to Jonathan Haidt's campaign to get smartphones and similar technology out of school say, you know, you can't prove it's causal.

30:42Amol Rajan:There might be a very strong correlation between when Instagram popped up and incidents and other social media platforms and incidents of depression, anxiety among teenagers or worsening test scores. But you can't prove it's causal. how can you how can the csj prove that there is this causal connection so the thing you can't do

30:57Ed Davies:is randomized controlled trials this is i mentioned earlier so i used to work at the british medical journal and the sort of the gold standard of research is these randomized controlled trials where you put you know traditionally someone on a drug someone on a placebo you have a control group and you just can't do that with family life i cannot force people to get married or force them to separate and send a control group to the moon so there will be some people who say this is just not provable you can never prove sort of causation on this and i understand that from a sort of academic research point of view i think that's fair but do you think that that argument gets in the way of looking at the world exactly that exactly that and so when i look at all the research if all the research and it does all thousands of pieces of research point in one direction and some of them are good regressions and they're good observational studies and they have been replicated if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it's a duck and i think we've got tied up in this world i can't quite prove it it almost seems quite strange to me that if we saw these sorts of statistics in employment or drug abuse or any other area we would be wringing our hands saying what is going on we need to we need to address this but i think this comes back to a sort of more cultural point that it's so sensitive like this stuff we're talking about you know between the two of us statistically one of our marriages won't last right so it's immediate but it is you know looking at producing the room that's two out of four of us you know all these things they're immediately personal and sensitive and so talking about them becomes really really hard and so we don't have conversations like this very often

32:31Amol Rajan:i really hope you're enjoying this conversation with ed davies the research director at the right-leaning anti-poverty think tank center for social justice if you are enjoying this conversation and you know what even if you're not but i know you are please subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds. That way you won't miss future episodes. Two other quick things. One, if you do subscribe, just make sure you've got your push notifications turned on so you get an alert whenever we publish a new episode. And also, number two, go on, give us a five-star review. You know you want to, because if you do that, it not only helps other people discover our work, but it also makes you feel like you're making a really valuable contribution to the growth of Britain's Most Exciting Podcast.

33:12Amol Rajan:Have I mentioned that that's what we are? Yeah, anyway, here we go back to Ed Davies

33:18Ed Davies:we focus on the part of the internet that most people don't know about it's called the dark web undercover in the furthest corners of the dark web US special agents are on a mission to locate and rescue children from abuse move in now from the BBC World Service World of Secrets the darkest web follows their shocking investigations Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

33:58Amol Rajan:Let's go through the arguments that you come up against. One of them would be people say you can't prove its cause when you'd say you make the point you just made. You can't randomise controlled tests for this. Another is the problem with the U.S. is you just want to go back to the 1950s. You've got this glamorous kind of sepia-tinged nostalgic idea of the post-war family, and it never really existed. And another argument would be, you know, who the hell are you, paternalistic government or whoever, to say this is how things should be. Let's walk through those arguments. And by the way, another argument would be, which I hear a lot, and I want to air because this is a safe space, is people would say, you've got a right cheek, two blokes talking about this.

34:36Amol Rajan:Imagine being a woman and being told that you've got to stay married in order to pursue your freedom. Let's go through those arguments. So first of all, are you, if you advocate for a return to an older conception of family stability and for more marriage, are you trying to turn the clock back to the 1950s?

34:55Ed Davies:No, and I think it's really important to be clear on that, that marriage has evolved over the years. And I think the marriages that people have will need to evolve, and rightly so. I think some of the gains, some of the problems of the last 50 years have been caused by the gains of the last 50 years. And you want to try and keep that both. Life is trade-offs. Yeah. But that doesn't throw away the fact that that alliance and that partnership, that marriage is hugely beneficial to both of you and to your children and to society. So the type of the context of marriage might change a bit. But the actual importance of marriage really hasn't.

35:24Ed Davies:And that's why, you know, it's one of those classic things that we think, you know, we're so modern and intelligent. We've done away with this thing. It's not coincidence that every single advanced society for thousands of years has done this thing. Do you feel that feminism has overreached? I'm sort of, I'd be shy to criticise feminism as such because it has definitely done some really good things. But I do know that there are people, women, my wife, who really slightly recoil at this idea that women and men are in this battle, really. And to your point of, you know, are you being trapped in marriage?

36:01Ed Davies:The best marriages are adventures. They're brilliant. Like you have a mutual support to travel the world and do things. And suddenly you are doing this with company.

36:09Amol Rajan:Because a lot of people think that the issue of feminism is not that it overreached, but actually that it's a completely unfinished revolution. They look at, you know, there's a, in all the talk, and we'll get onto the role of boys, in all the talk about toxic masculinity, which is at the extreme end, it's kind of adolescence on Netflix or Andrew Tate and all that palaver, which I even dread to say his name because why give him that publicity? But I don't know if you saw, by the way, one of the funniest clips I've ever seen this week went viral of Andrew Tate explaining that he's too clever to read books.

36:38Amol Rajan:I mean, it's so farcical. Anyway, I think I'm allowed to say impartially about Andrew Tate that I'm pro-book.

36:44Ed Davies:We'll come back to that,

36:45Amol Rajan:because I do think the Andrew Tate thing is more interesting than people give credit. Yeah, no, I'm sure. We'll come back to that. But in all the discussion about kind of lost boys, and that's one of the subjects close to your heart, people talk about the feminisation of society and the fact that we've kind of devalued some male roles and we've kind of elevated feminine sort of sentiments. and a lot of women hear that and they don't like the fact that two blokes are talking about this and they'd say you know what the issue is that we still live in a patriarchy you know if you look at FTSE 100 bosses very few of them are women if you look at gender pay or equal pay there are many many institutions where women get paid less for doing the same job which by the way is illegal under equal pay so there's a lot of people listen to this saying actually you know if the price of feminism is that it's in some instances reach too far.

37:35Amol Rajan:In some instances, it gets a bit of pushback from blokes. Actually, it's a battle worth fighting and continuing to fight because there's a lot of women who are still oppressed. So I think you're probably right to a degree.

37:49Ed Davies:I think there is also a lot of women... I'm not saying it's my view.

37:51Amol Rajan:I'm trying to be a devil's advocate.

37:53Ed Davies:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think also what you see is that we have sort of gone along with stated preferences versus revealed preferences. So I'll talk a bit about the difference of that. So there has been this great push for right across government in every department for high female employment. And generally, I would say that's a good thing. But when you actually interview women and survey women, particularly in those first few years after having a child, do you want to work full time? consistently 70-80 % say no I want to be home more than I am ideally I'd work part-time I don't want this and yet every nudge in government has gone towards we want to get you back you know it's 30 hours a week from nine months old you get government support in child care and so there are these nudges that push against what people want and so I do worry a bit that some some sort of understandable voices and loud voices in the cultural sphere are pushing a life that women don't want and there are some great organizations who get by their very nature get very little publicity there's one called mothers at home matter who have huge support among mothers and you see the same thing on mumsnet um but by their nature they're not at work they're not working in politics they're at home because they want to be at home with their kids are you saying that these

39:09Amol Rajan:revealed preferences in surveys uh and elsewhere revealed that for a lot of women not all women There's no such thing as a blanket rule. But for 70 % or 80 % of women, they would like for that period to stay at home while men go to work.

39:22Ed Davies:So sorry, yeah. So back to the reveal preferences. It's things like, so in our work on boys, we've had a lot of pushback on the idea that men are providers and protectors. It's like that's not modern thinking. Women can provide themselves and protect themselves. But when you look at how they actually behave, I mean, the classic is dating apps. Like most women put six foot as a filter on dating apps. 80 % of women say they want someone to be six.

39:43Amol Rajan:six foot oh that's right you know i'm so glad i got in before as a sort of five foot seven and three quarters inches uh i'd have been screwed in this age yeah obviously my face would do a lot of work wouldn't it is that how these dating apps work i've got no idea okay um so there is that

39:57Ed Davies:sort of they there is this instinct for protection likewise that that provider instinct women both economically and educationally they tend to marry level or up they want someone who is earning more or is as educated or better than them whereas men are more comfortable marrying down and so i do think there is this thing we're pushing and pushing and pushing on this thing that actually behaviors don't and surveys don't necessarily align up to and so there becomes this negotiation between what what what is advancement and coming back to the marriage point what is a good thing for marriage to develop into and what are the things that we don't want to leave behind some of those instincts about actually you know when my child is six months old i don't want to leave them

40:34Amol Rajan:for 30 hours a week but also this is all about as you say the grown-up conversation is about trade-offs and yeah you know david goodhart has written a book i think this is most recent called the care dilemma yes about how you can sort of reconcile these you know it's a completely natural thing at different stages of your life to want different things so for instance i would say it's an entirely coherent and consistent thing to recognize that if 70 or 80 percent of women uh in the survey data that you cite say that they would like in those first few years after a child is born to be at home and to be a really good domestic provider of care at the same time they do a want to go back to work and b they think it really sucks that there is this motherhood penalty yeah and the motherhood penalty is the if you look at equality at work the thing that holds women back compared to men uh in a very very general uh sense i think and tell me if i'm wrong here is that when they become mums if they're fortunate enough to become mums not everyone is fortunate enough to do that but if they become mums that is four five six years if they have a couple of kids out of their careers at a critical moment and that's kind of what you need to address isn't it is that how do you reconcile the desire to be at home but also a grown-up acknowledgement

41:45Ed Davies:that the motherhood penalty does hold people yeah so i think there's probably two sides to this so on the first side i think people do recognize that and there are some really interesting sort of trials happening around the world to try and negate that i mean i went to hungary a while ago where they are scrapping all taxes for mothers of children so they have a flat 15 tax if you have two children and you're under 40 you won't pay a penny isn't that meant to try and incentivize having more kids so it's to incentivize more kids but then to ensure that women don't experience lower income so when they go back they have they will have effectively get a higher and 15 higher income um so the aim is to do both and there are trials like that happening around the world which are really interesting but the other thing i would say and i think this is really important is that we talk about motherhood penalty because of income.

42:28Ed Davies:And this goes back to what we were saying earlier about motherhood. Do we not value motherhood? Like a lot of mothers want to be mothers. And that is a value in itself. But because we can't put an economic term on it, we don't value it. And I think a lot of our problems have come because we just, we value cash and we don't value relationships. We don't value being a mother or a father. We don't value our marriages because we can't really put a financial figure on them. So it's the penalty is about cash. Whereas I would argue, and I think almost every parent in the world would argue, the greatest thing in their life is their children by far.

43:00Amol Rajan:And yet we're viewing it as a penalty. Is there also a complexity here, which is that one of the efforts made to reduce the motherhood penalty has been to improve shared parental leave and to encourage poor blokes. People always cite Scandinavia to encourage men to do their fair share at home. And I say this, you know, I took by virtue of working at a great organisation institution like the BBC, I took full advantage of shared parental leave for the birth of each of my four children. And I'm really proud to have done that. But it's almost like there's a sort of tension there if you do that, because that if you encourage men to be more at home, does that somehow undermine the kind of traditional conception of men as the provider and women as the caregiver at home?

43:43Ed Davies:Yeah, and again, it's sort of stated versus field preferences here is that although we have shared parental leave, actually take up is tiny. And it tends to be from quite wealthy, middle class type occupations, working in the BBC, working in civil service, that tends to be where it comes from. Actually, what you see in practice is, particularly in working class, it would be great if everyone got at least their two weeks maternity leave. And this is something we've campaigned on, because a lot of people don't take that. But actually, a lot of men in particular, they don't really want a lot of maternity leave.

44:11Ed Davies:They want to feel like they're providing for their family at a moment when they maybe can't care because their partner's breastfeeding.

44:16Amol Rajan:But what's the moral position you take on that as to whether or not men should be more involved in their hellishly hard work at home? Because a lot of, I mean, you've done it, you know, you've been through the nappy valley. A lot of women and indeed a lot of men will take a moral view, which is that men should pull their bloody weight. Yeah. And they should do it at home. And frankly, and it's a funny thing, this, because I think about this a lot. I think about this a lot. When I revealed to friends and colleagues that are lucky enough to be having a third child and then a fourth child, as it happens, I was amazed by the number of men over the age of 60 or 70 that I knew who responded with the same joke.

44:54Amol Rajan:where they said, oh, that's interesting. When I had a third child, I made sure that we had rather a lot of board meetings in New York. Nudge, nudge. Or they'd say, oh, that's interesting. I see you'll be presenting the programme an awful lot from Belfast or Edinburgh, whatever. In other words, the joke, and I get it. I'm not actually trying to make a judgment on those, because they're of a different generation. But their kind of joke was, you know, you want to get away when the third child is born. Genuinely, Ed, for me and my mates, I'm 42, our thing is to be at home. You know, I feel so lucky to be able to see my children.

45:24Amol Rajan:It is the best thing in my life, together with my marriage. It is incredibly important to me. And isn't there a slightly kind of a pushback to your position, which is actually it's true that in their revealed preferences, maybe actually men do want to provide, and they think of providing as going to work and earning the wage. But maybe more men need to step the hell up and be better at home and change more nappies and do some of the domestic drudgery because it is just unfair that that burden falls so much on women.

45:51Ed Davies:yeah so i think there are a few aspects to that there is definitely this is about the evolution of marriage we were talking about earlier that particularly with women working more and enjoying it and earning money um i think there does become this thing of it's a bit of a balance now more than it was and men are doing more than they historically did they are spending more time with their children that's not equal yet but they are um there are all different aspects to all marriages and relationships like that no two marriages are the same and i'd be really hesitant to ever intervene in an individual marriage.

46:21Ed Davies:So you should be doing more or you should be doing less. It is something that you need to negotiate between the two of you. But having that conversation is really key. And actually, completely separately to my CSJ work, I worked for 15 years as a volunteer for a charity that did antenatal classes for dads. So it was called Dads to Be. And we go into London hospitals first Monday of the month. We talked about 50 dads, about what it is like being a dad. And sort of antenatal classes in hospitals tend to be what's the birth going to be like? And we were like, no, what is the next 18, 26 years, average of your child will leave home, going to look like for you at home?

46:56Ed Davies:How are you going to negotiate it? And the main thing we really did was set them up to talk and have these conversations with their partner. And it's a slightly difficult one to sort of say at a population level what's right and wrong. And as I say, there are...

47:09Amol Rajan:And I can see you understandably where you're being prescriptive about individual relationships, right? Because each home is unique and you've got to make it work in your particular circumstances. But I can also get the impression that you have some, not sympathy with, but recognise that some blokes use the motif of, I want to be a provider, go to work, to excuse the fact that they basically don't pull their weight.

47:31Ed Davies:Yeah, I think there is a bit of that. And I mean, there is certainly, there are men who basically behave like a dick. Am I allowed to say that on this show? You're allowed to say that. And so there's definitely, you know. And isn't it a victory of feminism?

47:44Amol Rajan:Isn't it a victory of 20th century feminism that even you would applaud that that is more socially disapproved of than it perhaps used to be?

47:51Ed Davies:Yeah, definitely. I think the sort of getting dads involved in their kids' life is good. But to your point, is this a moral question? I think it's just a happiness question. I think you'll find an awful lot of dads who are thrilled that they've got more involved in their kids' lives than they have in previous generations. This has changed over the last generation for the better, I think. I think that partly driven by feminism or the fact that women are just simply going to work more, that it has sort of necessitated it. But I do think there is a culture of people saying increasingly, yeah, hang out with your kids.

48:15Ed Davies:They're great.

48:16Amol Rajan:We're also talking at a time when we have this extraordinary, extraordinary, I suppose it's a relationship of a kind, welfare issue in this country. You've got hundreds and hundreds of thousands of young people, 18 to 24, who are not in education, employment and training. If they move on to welfare, they often don't come out of welfare. what do you suppose is the connection between the sharp decline of marriage the complete transformation of family life on the one hand with its uneven distributional effects by socioeconomic background and the welfare quote unquote crisis yeah so i absolutely that statistic

48:51Ed Davies:i gave earlier that you are 10 times more likely to be in a long-term unemployed household if it's a lone parent household than a couple household is key it's just really hard like raising children and working at the same time is hard if there's two of you. If there's one of you, it's incredibly hard. And so as you see the rise of lone parent households, you should absolutely expect to see some of this dependency. I think, I mean, one of the most interesting statistics around this is that unemployment, and particularly long-term unemployment, is basically not a thing among married fathers. It's sort of, at various ages of children, it fluctuates slightly, but it's always 90 % plus employment among married fathers.

49:26Ed Davies:And something that having a family does is it gives you responsibilities. responsibilities i i if if i don't go to work my children don't get fed they don't get clothed and so you find that it doesn't hold true for just married men it doesn't hold true for just fathers but if you are utterly in this and you're taking on responsibilities you feel the burn of that responsibility and it's a privilege as well it's not just a bad thing it's like wow i i feel like this is a really good thing that i am building my life and i'm building a future generation i do have real concerns about the direction of travel on this though from government so things like universal breakfasts are a worry and the department for education put out a video when universal breakfast came in and the question wasn't how does this help you work or what's it with your relationship it was what are you going to do with your free half hour and i really worry about the idea that this responsibility is a burden like this responsibility of raising children and having a healthy marriage is a joy like we do this well we all benefit how does that connect to the universal breakfast because the breakfast is a way of outsourcing what should be done at home Exactly that.

50:25Ed Davies:So I think it's one of those things where one of the great, you know, I think back to breakfast with my kids flicking porridge at the wall age two, you know, fruit flying. They are some of the great joys of my life is just feeding my children.

50:36Amol Rajan:But the twin aims of the universal breakfast idea, I mean, maybe you'd say that this is the adverse consequence, but Bridget Phillipson didn't set about to kind of ruin family life. She wanted to, A, make sure kids had a nutritious meal before they start school. And, you know, rather than eat a pack of crisps, actually had some porridge because porridge is better for you than crisps kids. But secondly, to help people from the poorest backgrounds get to work. But if you are a single mum in a part of the country which has real challenges and you're struggling to feed your family, if you can rely on school to do the breakfast, it means you get to work earlier.

51:12Ed Davies:So those breakfast clubs did already exist. The universality of them says to everyone that it matters more that you get to work than that you give your child breakfast. But it does matter more to people to get to work if they need to feed their families. Which then again comes back to we definitely value GDP and income more than we value parenthood and family and life.

51:29Amol Rajan:and it is that as a country but for that individual parent if you're a parent who's sort of on minimum wage and you kind of i know you make 100 100 a week and it with your bills and food it costs you 80 yeah you need to make sure you get to work at 7 15 in the morning

51:43Ed Davies:because otherwise you're in trouble but as you say as a country those incentives that we put in as a government then dictate how we view things so that incentive to make sure that you are absolutely economically inactive active by certain time in the morning means that we will now feed your children three meals a day often and i think that's gently undermines family life and the fact that it's not just about people who like i'm fully in favor of helping people who really struggle to afford it in all sorts of trouble but it's now universal and you look at a lot of these policies you know the child care i mentioned earlier 30 hours from nine months you don't get that if you stay at home it's the thing is we want to get you back in the workforce when i was working in the department of health i was an advisor there for a couple of years we looked at social care for the elderly we were looking at how can we help families support each other and we came up with various sort of small ideas and when we went to the treasury the treasury said no you absolutely can't do this because it might mean people leave the workforce in their sort of late 50s and early 60s and it just speaks to a culture that says the only value we give to an individual now is that sort of they are an individual unit of economic productivity that needs to serve GDP and we will happily undermine your family ties your responsibilities at home in order to achieve that aim and I think some of the dissatisfaction that people feel with politics right now is because of that.

52:56Ed Davies:And they wouldn't necessarily articulate it in those terms, but it's this feeling that this economy doesn't work for me. It works for me if the economy serves me and my family and we get to build a life together. But if actually me and my family just serve the economy, that doesn't really work. And so thinking of these marriage rates and extending childhood and people working later, you have all these people who get to sort of age 40 who haven't had families who are sitting in strip-lit offices in their cubicles going, what have I done? Increasingly, I'm thinking, you know, I should have got married in my early 20s like they've done for the whole of human history.

53:27Ed Davies:And suddenly I've got a nice flat and a decent car and I've got a sort of a career, but it's not like I'm overjoyed by that.

53:35Amol Rajan:Some of them might think I'm living my best life. I could go to Australia and have a good time

53:39Ed Davies:and I don't need to run it by anyone. I don't need to think about childcare. There is a sort of a, again, that sort of state and real preferences. There are people who absolutely talk like that. There are influencers all over online who are like, here I am in my car. Yeah, doing kettlebell work. When you look at what makes people happy, none of that. So, I mean, do you remember David Cameron's happiness index that he did back in 2010? I do remember that. So we still collect data on that. They don't really publish it anymore, but ONS still does that. And we did an analysis of that a couple of years ago.

54:05Ed Davies:And the top thing, people, that sort of correlates with life satisfaction is physical and mental health. So if you ask them if they're happy with their life, if they're physically and mentally well, that tends to be the top thing. Second thing is whether they're married. That that is the most likely indicator of having a satisfying life. and then you've got housing income all these things much like income's about eighth on the list and so when you actually look at what makes you happy the things that we are selling on instagram don't even make you happy like they won't give you a good life these things that funnily enough people have done for thousands of years are the things that will build a satisfying life on and

54:39Amol Rajan:they're disappearing see i know the value of connection being above all else but i do quite fancy that trip to australia to be on a beach doing workouts and drinking delicious cocktails

54:49Ed Davies:but maybe that's all ahead of me. The other thing about that though is it's relative. You will really love that now because you have the responsibilities and things back home. Like if you offered me that at 20, I'd be like, yeah, that'd be cool. You offered me that now, having raised kids, I'd be like, yeah.

55:00Amol Rajan:Oh my God.

55:01Ed Davies:Like give me 24 hours by myself. You mentioned Andrew Tate is more interesting. Why do you think Andrew Tate is more interesting than we've understood? Well, I mean, this is moving from sort of marriage and family into men in particular. And I do think there's... And lost boys. Yeah. A big concern of yours. So yeah, we've been doing a lot of looking at sort of the lives of men and boys in particular. and there are definitely distinctions with girls and women as well. One of the things about Andrew Tate that comes back when we talk to young men is that, and this is going to sound really crude, but he doesn't hate them.

55:31Ed Davies:They feel that they are constantly tarred with being toxic, that they are, you know, it's interesting that the recent violence against women and girls strategy, which is a really important strategy, don't get me wrong on this, that matters, but one of the things they've talked about is giving misogyny classes to boys in school and it's this sort of drip, drip, drip out of government of we don't really like you, you don't matter, you're toxic. I think some polling said 41 % of boys at school have been taught that their masculinity was in some sense a problem. So as an 18-year-old boy, you're looking, you've come up through this and you're looking at the world around you and you're thinking, I don't think anyone even likes me.

56:06Ed Davies:And then you see Andrew Tate and he's saying, stop watching porn, get a job, make your bed, work out, and I appear to like you. wow, suddenly it doesn't look so bad.

56:18Amol Rajan:You know, I've heard, there's only two things come to mind. One is a lot of people, a lot of blokes who are commentating on Andrew Tate say the thing that is difficult is that the things you just listed, 70 % of things they can get on board with. It's the 30 % on top where he's, you know, currently facing various criminal investigations where he's a pretty rampant misogynist in the views of most people. But that 70 % of kind of, you know, you be a bloke and it's all right to feel what you feel. A lot of people clearly are huge. I mean, I think it's just a fact, isn't it? Huge numbers of people around the world are interested in that.

56:53Amol Rajan:And what you said earlier about kind of, you know, he doesn't hate you. Puts me in mind on something that Richard Reeves said in his book, Boys and Men, where he said that the cultural script of modern feminism has been a series of do's. Do be this. Do feel this. Do, you know, have a fulfilling career. Do be a great mum. Do whatever. and that a lot of boys are hearing a cultural script which is a series of don'ts and a huge alarming number are attracted to Andrew Tate.

57:19Ed Davies:Completely and it is exactly that that boys are looking to be fathered like whether that's by their father or their sports coach or by their youth centre they are looking for somebody to show what it is like to be a man and if they they don't find it out in the real world in their real lives they will look for it online and find various really unpleasant toxic influences but that have a bit of fatherhood in there.

57:40Amol Rajan:So where Where do they go if the 30 % or more of Andrew Tate, which is disgusting and objectionable and worse than that, and sometimes may have criminal implications, where do they go for the person who is not 70 % but 100 % the role model that makes them feel who they should be?

57:57Ed Davies:And that is exactly, I mean, our Lost Boys project is looking at exactly this. And I think one of the big questions are, are we putting mentors, role models, fathers in the lives of boys to make sure they have those so they don't feel the need to go online and see an Andrew Tate? It's what Gareth South gets interested in. Exactly that. So Gareth's been a superb advocate for this. And he talks a lot about the coaches in his life who weren't just nice to him. Like sometimes they really pushed him, but they cared about him. And it is that thing. If you feel that no one cares about you, that doesn't mean you don't be hard on boys sometimes, but it shows you care about them.

58:27Ed Davies:And so it is, do you have that man in your life that's showing you the path to fatherhood and to adulthood and cares about it? And for most boys, that will be their dad. But lots of boys don't have dads at home these days. So it's a question of, okay, what else can we put in their life? is there a youth worker is there a sports coach is there somebody else in their community an uncle a neighbor something like that who can be that map to adulthood for a boy and increasingly that's really disappearing so like i say you know half 16 year old boys don't don't live with their dad a third of primary schools have no men at all in them even in secondary school women are number men two to one there are sort of wards in this country where you could very easily get to the age of 18 without really having had meaningful contact with another man and that that has come about incredibly quickly over the course of just a generation or so that these young men are suddenly going well i don't really know what being a man looks like we talk about the scale of the issues

59:21Amol Rajan:and also the interconnected problems that you think that um they causally uh are related to what would you like to see happen now to try and fix some of this stuff there's a cultural thing which is more of a slow burn maybe a cultural pushback in terms of things that we can do at

59:33Ed Davies:the individual social state market level yeah so it is a cultural thing predominantly that this this goes right across sort of everything but i do think that these different institutions have a role they can play and particularly you know my role is in westminster and so i'm thinking what can government do about this i think the mistake that government can and might make is thinking that it can just pull a lever you know we'll turn taxation into family taxation rather than individual taxation everything will be okay that would help but actually you're trying to change culture you're not just trying to change policy so i would think the thing they need to do really is pick 30 policies some of which will cost nothing at all and do them all at once to try and completely shift culture and so yes changing the tax system costs a lot of money very important fine good do that but at the same time things like antenatal letters in hospital can we write to dads just say dad can you come to this class we tend to write to mums and not dads and even when we do include dads we refer to them as non-birthing partners and things like that we need to make really clear that being a father is an important role and it costs nothing for us to do that through state leavers like put it in the antenatal letter i mean i mentioned that i worked for a charity that did antenatal classes for dads it cost nothing i was a volunteer i was there for two hours on a monday night one midwife stayed behind we got 50 guys in a room and said right this is what the next 18 years of your life look like these are the things to consider it's not hugely expensive you can get dozens of people involved every week doing stuff like that so i think there is a danger with this stuff we think we can pull a lever in its policy and be okay and And that just won't cut it anymore.

1:01:00Ed Davies:I'm afraid the collapse is too steep. But there are absolutely things government can do to influence culture. And then beyond government as well. One of the things that's come back really strongly in our work with men and boys is that men are not stepping up. They are not volunteering. They are not getting involved in the lives of boys. And one of the messages that we've been trying to get out, and I know you mentioned Gareth Southgate, he's been great on, is encouraging men. Like, where can you get involved? Where's the local sports club? Where's the local youth club? Can you give an hour after work?

1:01:25Ed Davies:Can you go and read at your local school? Be a leader, yeah. Be a leader, yeah. Yeah, and young boys will develop, but if you're not actively in their lives helping developing them, well, don't be surprised if they don't develop how you'd want. So to make sure you are doing that, and there is as well, I think a really important point around this does need to be men. Like there are some brilliant women working in this space, and I don't want to sort of talk that down, but young boys are drawn to men. Like if you go into a primary school, they all love the male PE teachers. Like they do, they're just drawn to them.

1:01:53Ed Davies:You talk to teachers, you see them flock around the male PE teachers. I can tell you, I mean, two more than the female pete yeah i can tell you that the names of my boys pete teachers at school i don't think i could tell you a single other subject like because they talk about them they are drawn to these sort of active male figures and so i think being really honest even if it's slightly awkward about this does need to be men raising boys is a really significant part of this

1:02:14Amol Rajan:is this part of do you feel that basically the cameron happiness index big society agenda which slightly fell away because of the financial crisis yeah the government is in coalition that went from being economically focused, having the social ambitions to being much more economically focused in a traditional Conservative way, perhaps, as how George Osborne would describe it. Do you feel that this agenda has slightly fallen away, but it's coming back? Yeah, I really do. It's interesting.

1:02:39Ed Davies:I think there is a recognition born out of necessity right now, financial necessity, that we are taxing more than ever and spending more than ever and things aren't getting better, that social capital matters. But I think if you think back to, as you say, sort of 2012, 13, 14, when this was being talked about, there were a lot of people who said this is just a cover for cuts and that, you know, this is a way of the government trying to save money by making you look after each other. When you talk to charities and things about it now, they sort of whisper, I think he might have been right. I think he was onto something.

1:03:11Ed Davies:But it's not just that this is cheaper. It's going back to that really basic stuff that relationships matter. It's better. So we work at the CSJ with hundreds of small charities. And the idea is that they work in things like addiction recovery or working with ex-offenders. And we try and understand what works at a local level and can you translate it to a national level. But I must have visited dozens, if not hundreds of these over the last 10 years. And my massive takeaway in almost every case is that the absolute heart of all these recovery centers, people getting people into work, working with ex-offenders, is if you don't have a trusted relationship, it doesn't work.

1:03:49Ed Davies:Relationships are absolutely central to this. And it's one of those things that sounds a bit soft. It's like, all you need is love and all that kind of thing. But people change people. That's how this works. And so if you don't have relationships at the heart of all these things, they don't work. So coming back to big society, if you want to help someone, you don't just throw money at them or put them in a system. You need a person who's got their back.

1:04:10Amol Rajan:But final thought, because you're going to very kindly answer some questions. Can you fix the crisis of social connection and social capital without money?

1:04:21Ed Davies:uh yes 100 i mean barring the last few years we have never been richer in the whole of human history and yet we always had higher human capital we were always members of associations and sports clubs and things like that we always had high marriage rates it's now we have more money than ever that we seem to have stopped doing that and i think the problem is actually we think that money can replace these things when it really obviously can't ed davies thank you so

1:04:44Amol Rajan:much for being so radical uh you know weirdly so you some of what you're suggesting might sound like it's going uh it's a reassertion of traditional values but actually um in the current context and post 20th century liberalism i think it's quite radical you're going to very kindly stick around and answer some of our listeners questions aren't you i am yeah very grateful for it but thank you so much for coming in thank you very much

1:05:09Amol Rajan:well there is no doubt that some of the statistics which the center for social justice This is right-leaning think tank where Ed is the research director. Some of the statistics which they marshal do show a very, very profound change in one of the atomic units, not the only one, but one of the atomic units of our society, the family and the couple, in the past few decades. And I think, broadly speaking, it's worth saying that a lot of people aren't aware of that sudden change. So I'm glad we gave it some recognition and put a spotlight on it. My question, and you heard me pushing back on a number of his arguments there, is always with poverty.

1:05:43Amol Rajan:and the Centre for Social Justice is a right-nealing but anti-poverty charity, it's always hard to work out whether you're dealing with poverty or the consequences of poverty. You know, are couples breaking up because they're so poor or are they so poor, are people so poor because they're breaking up? And I just think that's a nuance that's worth considering. I would say that the broader issues around social capital and the decline of institutions that just love you for who you are, whether that's the family home or whether that's trade unions or faith groups or sports clubs or voluntary associations.

1:06:17Amol Rajan:I think that that is a coming issue in British politics. It's not just Ed Davies and the Centre for Social Justice, which is right-leaning, but people like Gordon Brown and pollsters like James Kanagasurium, who we're going to get on this podcast, who are looking at this issue. And it's very interesting to me that the collapse or decline of social capital, which we're contending with as a country, often has the biggest and baddest, the biggest and worst consequences for people with low economic capital. That is, the poorer you are, the more the collapse of social capital limits your life chances.

1:06:48Amol Rajan:And I think that could well be an emerging agenda in British politics, which actually goes beyond left and right.

1:06:58Amol Rajan:Well, that is it for this episode. To make sure you don't miss future conversations, and why would you want to miss a future conversation? This is Britain's most exciting podcast, as you know by now. Now, please do subscribe to Radical on BBC Sounds. And remember, if your eyes need a little treat, you can watch episodes of Radical with Amal Rajan on the iPlayer as well. What a wonderful thing to do with your weekend if you're bored and in need of some stimulation. And I should just say that last week, Nick, my esteemed colleague and friend Nick Robinson, spoke to the British-Iranian actor and comedian Omid Jalili shortly before the latest conflict broke out in the Middle East.

1:07:32Amol Rajan:They discussed not just Omid's support for military action against Iran, but his journey into Khombani via the fall of the Berlin Wall and being shot in Northern Ireland. It's a really interesting episode. But to be clear, it was recorded before the recent events, to describe them rather euphemistically, before the recent missiles started flying over and into Iran. Speak to you next week. Thank you so much for your time and attention as ever. Goodbye.

1:08:07Ed Davies:We focus on the part of the internet that most people don't know about. It's called the dark web. Undercover in the furthest corners of the dark web, US special agents are on a mission to locate and rescue children from abuse. Move in now. From the BBC World Service, World of Secrets, the darkest web follows their shocking investigations. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your BBC podcasts.