The Biological Reason Socialism Always Fails — Nicholas Wade

26:43They become very disaffected. So what do you do with them? The traditional policies to send them off to fight the neighbor and have them die in battle. But if you start wars, it doesn't always turn out the way you hope. So it's much more stable, in fact, to distribute women equally, which is what monogamy does for you. So Europe became monogamous essentially under the influence of the church. And then in quite recent times, monogamy sort of spread, presumably by example to India and China. So now almost all the world is monogamous. And all this represents a sort of great big constraint on the natural male impulse to have as many wives and children as possible.

27:32And you also talk in your book about how this monogamy that has been imposed or implemented, however you want to describe it, on societies, it leads to a flourishing of society, both in terms of culture and economically, etc. That's right. And this is one way in which we have transcended our evolution to great advantage. These monogamous societies are much more stable and more productive. And another major example of the same thing is tribalism. So the whole world used to be tribal. In between when hunter-gatherers settled down at the beginning of agriculture some 10 ,000 years ago to one or two millennia ago now, all human societies were tribal.

28:24And tribalism is a very successful way and effective way of running a society because it keeps law and order without any police force or courts or laws. and it's very good at defense and it has many superb advantages such that it's very hard to get rid of. So there's a wonderful book by Francis Foucault with a political scientist in which he describes how the major civilizations of the world in different ways got rid of their tribal structure and instituted a single ruler with a sort of state bureaucracy. In Europe, it was done by the church. So the early Europeans were all tribal. And in those days, it was often quite hard to produce a male heir because people died very young.

29:19So you very much needed to keep the wealth inside the tribe. So there were stratagems for, like, adoption or marrying your cousin, for keeping wealth inside the tribe. So the church came along and said, no, all that is incestuous and absolutely forbidden. And so when people were on their deathbeds, the church would say, well, you should leave all your money to the poor, meaning the church. And the church became fantastically wealthy. At one stage, it owned like half of Germany and a third of France. But the net result of this policy was that the tribes lost all their money and just disappeared.

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33:13Well, these basic instincts don't go away. They just get sort of modulated. So tribalism no longer exists. If you asked an American what his tribe was, unless he was an American Indian, he would have no idea what you meant. But you can still see tribalism operate in the form of nepotism. So people will do anything to help their families, give them a leg up. And wherever possible, people will arrange as much of their wealth as possible goes to their surviving relatives so that they maximize the number of children they put in the next generation.

33:51Francis Foster:Well, it's interesting because there are clearly some pretty healthy adaptations to fill these voids. For example, it's not just Americans, as you well know. British people are very tribal about sport as well. But that seems like one way of channeling those instincts that's quite healthy. What's interesting is, I think, perhaps due to social media, but maybe due to other things, and I'd be curious to hear your opinion, politics has now become very, very tribal in the way that I just don't feel it was 20 years ago. You mean based on race or just based on ideology? Just based on ideology. Like people now treat their political party as their football team.

34:31Francis Foster:Whereas it felt to me like in the late 90s, early 2000s, yeah, people had some kind of political allegiance. But it's in the same way that like if you're a fan of the Green Bay Packers, you're not going to hate Patriots fans. It was like, well, look, I'm a Democrat, he's a Republican, but we sort of are going to be able to get on. Now it's become tribal in the sense of like, this is warfare almost, is what it feels like to me. Yeah, I think tribalism can sort of break out in almost any context because it's so inbuilt in our systems. You embrace your friends and you hate or despise or kill your enemies.

35:12and tribalism itself hasn't really gone away. It's just been transformed into the nation state. So the nation state, I think, has emerged as the most effective way for humans to organize themselves. And yet it really is just an extended tribe. It's got everything except kinship. And what it has is, and kinship is the glue of tribes. A nation state has various surrogates, like people usually have a common language, a common religion, a common ethnicity, a common sort of founding narrative of how their nation came to be. And these things are very effective because nations are so effective. Their problem often is not that they're too weak, but they're too strong.

35:59So they will make war against their neighbors. I definitely think that nations are the best way we have yet evolved of organizing ourselves. And it seems to me a great shame that the sinews of nationhood are often ignored or rejected or repudiated, particularly by the left. So this is a particularly serious problem, I would think, for the U.S. because many countries are sort of natural nations and they have a little Scandinavian democracies. They all speak the same language, they have the same religion, they have contiguous borders. So the US used to be like that when it was primarily settled by English Protestants very early on.

36:53Because of its wonderfully flexible constitution, It was then able to embrace lots of other nations, mostly Christian nations, mostly Europeans, while retaining its cohesiveness. But if you look at it now, many of the sinews of nationhood are fading. Americans used to be very religious. They're not so religious now. They're following Europe in that pattern. the ethnicity is quite mixed and changing. It's sort of stable at the moment, but you never know how long that's going to last for. There used to be a common language, but now there's sort of Spanish-speaking enclaves that resist adopting English.

37:46You have to ask, well, what is it that holds Americans together? It seems to be money right now. I see prosperity. Prosperity holds everyone together. No need to rock the boat if everyone is reasonably prosperous, as at least in relative terms they are. But if that should fade for any reason, what would happen? I don't know. I don't see the natural bonds of a nation state being so cohesive that one needn't worry about them. I think we should start to worry about them.

38:18Francis Foster:Yeah, well, it makes a lot of sense. Although, interestingly, I would have thought in many ways, Europe is in a worse place in relation to all of this, because at least in America, you have a history of immigration. It's kind of understood that this is a nation of people who've come from different parts of the world, different cultures, who've come here and bought into the American dream, which, as you say, is kind of prosperous. I mean, the American dream is we all get to come here and be prosperous, effectively, right, if you boil it down to its basics. um whereas in europe and i said this is someone who myself immigrated to europe from outside you had a society which was very monocultural very cohesive in terms of all the things that you talk about language ethnicity etc that now doesn't even have any structure to explain what a nation state is because it used to be based on common heritage and common culture and common religion.

39:18Francis Foster:So now you have lots and lots of people come from other parts of the world who do not buy into that, but they also don't have any story that they tell that they are being told or their children are being told at school. They don't stand for the national anthem. They don't salute the flag, whatever it is that Americans are taught to do. And that seems to me like an even bigger challenge, I would argue. Yeah, I think Europe has definitely mishandled immigration. And as you say, the American rule was to integrate everyone. And it worked. I think it still works. Whereas in Europe, I think there's been a general failure of integration.

39:57You have large Muslim communities, and there's nothing wrong with Islam, but here you have a community that doesn't buy into the current ethos. So religion is extremely important in sort of shaping a nation and interpersonal relations. And these large Muslim enclaves, I think, are not well integrated, are not well happy. They're too large for the country to handle easily. I think the thing about immigration is it needs to be done on a sort of more on a trickle basis than a sort of great big flow, because otherwise you don't give people time to adjust. Immigrants become threatening if people think they're taking their jobs or all the usual sort of anti-immigrant feelings that are always latent will get stirred up the larger the immigrant population is.

40:55Francis Foster:And what is the biological and evolutionary source of those concerns? Well, it's simply sort of the inside-outside dichotomy. I mean, Anyone who's not like you is an outsider. So the best kind of person is someone sort of related to you, because you know you can trust them. But the more people become... You haven't met my family. The more people become sort of different, sort of different religion, different language, different ethnicity, the harder it is to establish the bond of trust, which is the essential glue of human societies. But you talked about culture being a very powerful force. Are there not cultural adaptations that can help us overcome these things?

41:41Francis Foster:Or is it just something that you feel that's one of the load-bearing walls of human society? No, I think there are cultural adaptations. And there are multiracial societies that work very well. Now, Singapore leaps to mind. But I think you have to recognize that you have one ethnicity, the Chinese, that essentially are in control. I have to be careful in phrasing this but it's definitely one doesn't want a situation in which any one ethnicity claims to be superior to others but it's also the case that if you have one ethnicity able to govern then that ethnicity can make things safe for everyone else and you don't have vicious intercommunal warfare as you do for example in multi-ethnic states like Afghanistan or Lebanon.

42:38So states work best when you have a dominant ethnicity that treats everyone justly, which is the case in the US and in many European countries. Nicholas, it seems to me that our elites are the people in charge, the politicians. They have become more and more alienated from the very things that make us human. are the fact that we have tribalism clearly imprinted into us. We are tribal creatures. Yet they don't seem to understand that if you import millions of people into a particular country, that's going to have a profound destabilizing effect, even if every single person who comes in is a net positive to society.

43:28Francis Foster:Which they're not. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is one of the big problems of not taking human nature seriously and not accepting the fact that we have certain behaviors written into our genome by evolution because of our survival value. So acting like a member of a tribe is one of them. So if you ignore that as a politician, then you're going to run into trouble. If you say, well, all people are alike, all people are equal or should be equal, and what we want is a global society with no national borders and everyone loving each other. That's fine, but our nation won't let us operate a society like that.

44:12We need to live in sort of smaller, definable systems such as a nation. we're not ready for one global society because there's no way of organising it that is written into our genome. And it also shows a fundamental ignorance of history because if you look at history, it doesn't matter what period of history, it's mainly defined by wars. Yes, that's right. Pursuant to the fact that our instinct is entirely warlike. I mean, we have genocide written into our genes, and we chimpanzees are the only species smart enough to figure out that the way to sort of finally solve the problem of the enemy is to eliminate him.

44:58So we are basically genocidal. But this is another example, I think, where culture has successfully sort of curbed and restrained our influence. And it does so on quite a wide level. If you think of the Westphalian peace that ended the religious wars in Europe, and there are schemes that have succeeded it. The Congress of Vienna, again, re-established peace after Napoleon's wars. You had the Pax Britannica that kept European countries from war. And since the Second World War, we've essentially had the Pax Americana. so America doesn't really like playing this role but it really helps to have someone who polices a sort of world order in which states accept they do not fight each other or invade each other's countries.

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47:17Use code TRIG to get a free gift with your journey pack. Head to tryfume.com and use code TRIG. That site again is T-R-Y-F-U-M.com and use code TRIG to claim your free gift today. But it also strikes me that we've become arrogant about human nature because it really does appear that we've kind of been lulled into this false sense of suspicion that, well, the last couple of years have certainly disproved this. But, you know, there was, you know, we found a way to transcend war. There's going to be no war if we trade with each other. You know, we're more enlightened now. We have diplomacy. and you go, yeah, but deep down, we're just, you know, primates.

48:05You know, we're glorified chimpanzees. All right, we've got, we can express ourselves a little bit more articulately and, you know, we're not going to start flinging excrement at each other, but we're not that far away, are we? No, we're not. You're right. We are basically primates, but there's a reason for a little more optimism than you suggest. Sorry, I've just, I've come from South London. And over the big sweep of history, we've become less violent. I mean, within societies, we don't treat each other so horribly cruelly as we used to. We didn't have public hangings or debtors' prisons or child labor.

48:45So the level of violence within societies has gone down. I don't think anyone really knows why. There could be a genetic explanation, which is simply that people who are very violent are ostracized. People don't want them around. And maybe people who are very violent have less children than people who are peacefully inclined. Looking outside societies, we have far fewer wars than we used to have. Or rather, we have far fewer men as a proportion of the population killed in wars. I mean, in primitive societies, people used to go to war every day. I mean, they didn't have mass casualties, But if you lost one guy a week, then pretty soon, men over the course of their lives, I think it was like a 30 % chance of dying in battle, in hunter-gatherer societies.

49:39So our chances of dying in battle, thankfully, are very small. And it appears that we kind of need this balance, don't we, when we're talking about the human being and our societies. On the one hand, we need to be pragmatic and accept that we're tribal and we still have these instincts and impulses to go to war, for example, for resources. We're still hierarchical in nature, but we still need perhaps that progressive element, which is, look, we're not as violent as we used to be. We're not, maybe not as tribal as we used to be. So we can work on the human being whilst also accepting that there's going to be some fundamental aspects of our biology that can never be changed.

50:23Yeah, I think that's exactly right. We should understand and acknowledge what is there and sort of work with it rather than against it.

50:31Francis Foster:And what does that look like in our society today? What would that look like in terms of changes to how we think about things? I think there are two big ways in which we are running into trouble. One is the fertility crisis. We have undermined the human family and the way evolution organized it to produce, nurture, and raise children. And it's been, for a good reason, it was sort of to free women from all the duties of the home and looking after children. And it's true, looking after children is a great chore. And whatever joy they may be, it requires a lot of effort to bring them up. And many women are deciding not to do it.

51:19fine, but that road does lead to extinction. And it's very hard to reverse. And you might think it's easy to make more babies if more babies were needed. But in fact, many governments have had strong pro-natalist policies. The Soviet Union for most of its existence had strong pro-natalist policies, banned abortion and contraceptives. And nothing that any government has found has reversed this trend with one exception, which is the former Soviet Republic of Georgia that has an archbishop. He's called Elia II. And he announced that for any couple married in the Orthodox Church and had two children, had a third child, he personally would baptize it and be its godfather.

52:14He said this in 2005. And the next year, the birth rate took off like a rocket. Everyone started having children. This is the only known example of a government policy that has reversed the declining birth rate.

52:30Francis Foster:That's really interesting. I've been to Georgia a number of times. People in Georgia are very, they're not aggressively religious, but they're very faithful. And it's a big part of their lives. I imagine in America that would be like, I don't know, LeBron James sending you a sign something for every third child. That might work. You know, something like that. This is a question that we've dealt with a lot on the show. We've interviewed all sorts of people about the fertility crisis. And there are different perspectives on it. Young people like us, well, what? No, no, young. We're young. We're young.

53:04Francis Foster:We used to be young. There was a time when we could say young people like us. But people of our generation and below will say housing is so expensive. We're sitting here in New York. You look around at the property prices here. As a young person, you know, someone under 30, like you are so screwed unless you've got millionaire parents. So how are you going to pair up and have kids if you are living four to a tiny apartment and you're spending 50 % of your income on rent? There are other people who will say, well, as society declines in religiosity, people have fewer children. There are other people who will say, Louise Perry, for example, who we've had on the show a couple of times, she wrote a book called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, in which she basically said, look, once you invent the abortion pill and washing machines and all this other stuff, women are free and they go into the workplace, which might be great, but then they don't have kids and your book's just falling over.

53:59Francis Foster:Then this is the inevitable product of this. There are other people who say it's actually the education of women. that caused it. Like, all of these things are going on, and that's maybe why it's so hard to turn around. But is it your thesis of fundamentally, sounds like a weird question to ask, but I think it's worth asking if it's true. If women participate in the labor force more, this is the inevitable consequence, rightly or wrongly? Well, all those things you mentioned are definitely important factors. I think that the most important way of looking at this problem is that the one thing that in one country after another correlates with the fertility rate is what women want, is the number of children women in each country say they want.

54:46So that is a perfect correlation. So that, it seems to me, is the sort of place to start looking for answers. And that is something that's very hard to change. I mean, women are not taking this decision lightly, I assume. But for all the reasons in any society, this is what they decide. And I don't know how, no one knows how you make them change their minds on this.

55:15Francis Foster:Well, I'm not sure you can. I've tried to change many women's minds. It's never happened. But the reason I think it's maybe some optimism, like a lot of people I talk to now are sort of going, oh, right, we're like, we should do this. We should have kids, men and women. And so there will be, you know, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, maybe on the one hand. On the other hand, I worry about, you know, there was this myth of like runaway climate change for a long time. It's like runaway infertility or lack of fertility, because if you're not constantly surrounded by young children, you get further and further distance from that experience.

55:51Francis Foster:And then you just look on Instagram and you see yet another parent complaining about how hard it is. And what you don't know is, well, actually being a parent is great, but also very, very hard. So yeah, you go on Instagram to complain about it, but you've got all these moments and days and weeks of joy that stays in the background. So I just wonder how all of this is ultimately going to get resolved. But I guess we'll find out. Yeah, if people start to recognize it as a true crisis, which I think is the problem is it's a slow-moving crisis and we're not going to go extinct tomorrow. It's just that things will get steadily worse.

56:28We'll have an ever-dwindling workforce supporting an ever-larger group of old people and we won't be able to have the soldiers to defend our borders. it's a very slippery slope and very insidious to recover from.

56:46Francis Foster:Yeah, the thing is, I don't think people are ever going to have kids to save the country. No. I think what people might discover, and we've had lots of conversations on this trip around the US with people, women in particular, our generation, sort of late 30s, early 40s, who just, they feel like they've missed out on something important. And I think as we move forward in society, people increasingly lack meaning and purpose in their lives. That might be actually the reason that people do think about this differently over time. Right, that's very interesting. Might be. Or we could be completely screwed.

57:24Well, this, of course, is the purpose that evolution has created for us, to breed and have children. I mean, we don't like to admit it. We look in our culture for all other kinds of purposes. But this is the root purpose.

57:37Francis Foster:But the thing is, it's hardwired into us. So when you, like I have a three-year-old, when you have kids, like all these little things that have been built into us for millennia, activate that, and this is really the core of your book. That's what you're really saying is all of this, all of our politics, it goes back to the basic fundamental instinct, which is to have children and to have them live into adulthood and to reproduce. And the way we think about everything ultimately boils down to that original source. Isn't that right? That's exactly right. That's a very good thing, I would think, for politicians to focus on.

58:10They should try and make each stage of life easier for people who are having children. As you mentioned, reducing the cost of education would be a very good thing to do, and housing and so forth. There are lots of tweaks you can make. None of them have worked in the past, maybe because they haven't been applied in a wholesale and systematic way. But if this were recognised as an important function of government, then we might be able to turn it around. And we talk about genetics, the origin of politics. There's been a discussion that's been happening online, which I'd love to get your opinion on, which is ever since women have got the vote, we tend to vote for as a nation or as a society for more left-leaning politicians, more left-leaning parties.

59:00Is that something that you would agree with broadly or do you think it's far more complex than Reddit would like to appear? I don't have any empirical data. I don't know if women do in fact vote more often to the left.

59:14Francis Foster:It's not women. That was much cruder than I think. I think married women and unmarried young women vote very, very differently. And men, too. I think it's much more about that. I think people become more conservative as they have something to protect, which comes back to the conversation we were having. I was wondering, we always are extra interested in people who seem sensible but have been embroiled in some sort of controversy or been cancelled or whatever, because that was an area that really I found very interesting but also confusing for a long time. And you had that with the previous book, did you not?

59:52My book on the evolution of race was attacked by a bunch of geneticists. They didn't find any error in the book. So I didn't pay any particularly serious attention to them. It did make no harm because the book had already been out for a year and a half by that stage. It may have increased sales a little. And I retired from the Times, so there were no repercussions at work since I didn't have any work.

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1:01:46First pair comes with a full money back guarantee, so there's no reason not to try them. Sheath.com. Once you sheath, you won't go back. Sheath.com. Introducing Meta Glasses. Hey, Meta. Any last minute tables for two tonight? Sure. There's a great Italian restaurant 15 minutes away. Hey, Meta. Where's the nearest flower shop? Five minutes away, straight down Broadway, past the bodega. Their lilies are trending on Instagram. Just saying. Hey Meta, am I forgetting anything else? How about setting a calendar reminder for next year? Meta Glasses, available in more than 20 styles. Well, the central argument was simply that if you're interested in human evolution, nothing is more fascinating than seeing how the population adapts to different localities.

1:02:39as it spreads out from Africa, as any species will. So the book gave you a biological explanation of race, sometimes in very great detail, which was then becoming possible. Like, for example, we know that both Chinese and Europeans have pale skin, but they do so for entirely different genetic reasons. There's one set of genes that produces pale skin in Europeans center and a mostly different set that produces pale skin in Chinese. So, you know, if you look at all these genes, often you can sort of tell their history when they sort of develop. So you can sort of put a date on when we acquired pale skin and blue eyes.

1:03:23Just from the point of view of natural history, which was really all my book was concerned about, I had no interest in the politics of race and didn't touch it. And all this was, you know, my job at the time was to cover the human genome. So this was one of the first, these were one of the first results that came flowing out of the human genome, how, you know, the different, the different variations on the genome that have occurred throughout history. So that's when I started writing it up. Also, because I found that academics were petrified of discussing these fascinating results. There's a great taboo in talking about race.

1:04:03Well, here we were generating all this information. You shouldn't someone report to the public what it says. So that was the only motivation of my book. It was just a sort of straight, as I viewed it, it was just a straightforward science book saying, this is what we know. However, it's remained unique in the field because no one has since dared write about it. There's a complete taboo on saying anything about race. And the reason it annoyed people was that it went to the heart of the left's position, which is that there is no biological basis to race, or indeed to sex. Both race and sex are cultural concepts, not biological in the view of the left.

1:04:51So this is a profoundly evolutionary, utterly nutty position. But my book was a direct challenge to it because it said, well, here is the biological basis of race. And down to the nearest nucleotide, this is why Chinese are different from Europeans.

1:05:06Francis Foster:Do you think that it's not? I wonder if it's just that, because I understand your argument. You know, if the political worldview that you advocate for relies on pretending there are no differences between population groups, then it's very advantageous to you to shut down any evidence to the contrary. But do you think there's also quite a reasonable concern based on history that quite on the number of occasions in the last 150 years, but probably prior to that as well, people have come along and said, well, the science says that this group of people is superior to that group of people. Therefore, here's a bunch of discriminatory policies that often lead to very, very negative and unpleasant outcomes.

1:05:48Francis Foster:and then we later learn actually that wasn't scientifically accurate at all. We have a new theory that explains certain things that people were claiming at the time. That's certainly a real danger. But what do you do about it? You just suppress the scientific knowledge you're gaining. Surely what you should try and do is let everyone know what the science says so that people can then make informed views as to what implications they should draw from it. I mean, just because we have races that differ in various aspects, that gives you no basis of saying one race is superior to another. Is that really true, though?

1:06:29Francis Foster:Because if you say black people are better at basketball, I mean, they are superior at basketball. So if you make claims about other metrics that determine people's success in various aspects of life, you can very easily see how when you get to things like intelligence or other things, it becomes very easy to use that as a discriminatory piece of information. And there are lots of people who would. Well, it's true. And Tibetans are adapted to living at high altitudes. So you can say Tibetans are genetically better than lowlanders are living at high altitudes. But it's a pretty useless observation.

1:07:09The thing is, you can't prevent people going around making claims like this. But should that mean you don't discuss these things at all, I think you can get into difficulties if you don't discuss racial differences that may be relevant in some aspects of social policy. What do you mean by that, Nicholas? Well, I don't want to get too far into this because I'm really not an expert in the politics of race and have no real interest in it. But I assume, for example, if you look at education, it's very important to give everyone the best educational experience you can so that everyone has a sort of fair chance of living digital life.

1:07:57Now, if some people are less educable than others, you surely need to recognize that and give them a different and appropriate treatment to the ones who are more easily educable. Now, this lack of educability can come from a lot of causes, many of them environmental. You have parents who don't make the kids do the homework, who neglect the kids, kids live in poverty, and so on and so forth. And that can be a genetic element. It doesn't really matter. You've still got two groups, say, that require different treatment if you are going to make the best use of your educational facilities.

1:08:40Francis Foster:Yeah, I can see why this is controversial. I think the thing that will worry people, and will worry particularly black people in the US and in the UK, but more so in the US, is, look, you know, if we start pointing out racial differences, we've fought long and hard to get equality. And this is just going to be used as a cudgel to beat us with. So that's a legitimate fear. But surely if you look at the history of civil rights in the US, the trend has gone the other way. The Voting Rights Act enfranchised everyone. And discrimination, it may not be a thing of the past, but it's a certain you can't discriminate in public in any way.

1:09:24So in fact, Americans have done everything a government reasonably can to lift up its black population and give them an equal chance and equal opportunities. It hasn't done so perfectly, but at least you can point to all the efforts it has made. I'm starting with the civil war to end slavery. So it doesn't necessarily mean that people are going to make the most divisive possible use of this information.

1:09:51Francis Foster:Yeah, I guess all I'm saying is I think I can see why people are very touchy about the subject. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, listen, it's been great having you on the show. We're going to ask you some questions from our supporters in a second. But before we do, the last question we always ask is, what's the one thing we're not talking about that you think we really should be as a society? I think the thing we should have talked about if we had time was the very deep problem of inequality. So inequality is very destabilizing society. But if you have an open society, merit-based, particularly in this era of very fast technological advance, very enormous fortunes get made overnight, you are going to have a lot of inequality and you have to find some way of making that acceptable to a population.

1:10:40Francis Foster:Well, we have time actually, so if you want to delve further into that, we definitely can. Are you talking about, for example, we've just come from San Francisco, talking to people there who work in the AI field, it is very clear to me that even though there's very high levels of inequality in Western countries already, we ain't seen nothing yet. I mean, over time, the majority of new wealth will be created in one small area of one small city, effectively. That has got to be a recipe, A, for disaster, but B, then also, you know, I was sort of saying to one of these guys I was only half joking.

1:11:21Francis Foster:Like, you know, I wrote a whole book about how communism is evil, but like we might need it if this carries on. Well, we might need a universal basic income if people get put out of jobs, which is not yet clear. I think one aspect of inequality that is important to keep in mind is that you shouldn't really mind if Bill Gates is a lot richer than you or I are. The question is, do we have enough to eat? And, you know, almost everyone in this country has enough to eat. They have a roof over their heads. Most of them have iPhones. So why does inequality matter? Well, hold on a second. You are someone who's an expert in evolution.

1:12:00Francis Foster:You know why it matters, because human beings don't operate on an absolute basis. They operate on a comparative basis. Yeah, that's absolutely right. So why do we want status? Status is important to people because it gives you a bit of claim on society's resources. especially in early days when people were living on the edge of starvation. So if you were a big cheese in a small society, you were more likely to survive than if you had very low status. So this, I think, is the reason why inequality is so jarring to us. There isn't really a good logical reason in a country that has a decent welfare system why we should be bothered about inequality.

1:12:45It's our inherent yearning for status and feeling that we're diminishing our chances of survival if we don't have it. Another aspect of inequality, I think, which I have a chapter on in the book, is that it's much harder to get rid of than you might think for purely genetic reasons. and that is that human societies, I think, are much more mobile, have been much more mobile in the past than we imagine. So even in aristocratic societies, the aristocrats, half of them would die in battle every generation. So how did they fulfill their ranks? Well, it was sort of rich commoners could buy a title or marry a duke's daughter.

1:13:34And so there was new blood constantly infusing into the aristocracy. So there's a fascinating series of papers by an economist called Gregory Clark, in which he measures mobility in English societies over the centuries. And it's very slow. The people at the top do gradually descend in the social scale, presumably because whatever merit got them to the top is sort of diluted genetically. But the societies are pretty much stable. His basis for this is he follows people who attended Oxford and Cambridge, which were the only places you could educate them then. And he looks at people with very rare surnames who, because the surnames are so rare, they're very likely to be related to each other.

1:14:25So he'll look at the sort of shuffle doors in the 13th century attending Oxford. and lo and behold, in the 17th century, the shuffle doors are still there. So this is a family that sort of kept itself at the top. So if that is the case, if our societies are in fact stratified by some kind of genetic merit to a much greater extent than we recognize, then it's going to be very hard to sort of shuffle them up short of war or revolution. Do you think also part of the problem that America is facing is in a society that is as consumerist as this one and with social media, you judge essentially your status on the acquirement of material possessions?

1:15:12So if you are constantly comparing yourself to other people, that's going to put you in a place of resentment and anger, which will then lead to destructive impulses and behaviors.

1:15:22Francis Foster:Right. Well, and your point about social media is so important as well, because 100 years ago, you couldn't go inside the Rockefeller mansion and have a good look around. Now you just open your phone and you're right there. Right. And if you're rich, I guess you're so pleased that you don't hide your wealth. You constantly see the rich competing with each other in terms of the size of their yacht or whatever it is. So their wealth is not hidden from the lower orders. Well, if you're a billionaire watching this, put your yacht in the hangar. or whatever. There's probably a different word for a boat hanger.

1:15:55Francis Foster:I don't know. Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where we're going to ask Nicholas your question. Is there any evidence that our ways of thinking about politics and other social issues is linked to how much genetically we have of other hominid species, such as Neanderthals within us?

1:16:48Francis Foster:We'll be right back.

1:16:52Francis Foster:a month, even unlimited. That's it. Happy ending. Zero tears. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms.