David Goodhart is a journalist, author and think tanker, and currently head of the demography unit at the Policy Exchange think tank. His latest book is The Care Dilemma: Freedom, Family and Fertility.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and David Goodhart discuss why the triumphalist worldview of the early 2000s has collapsed, how the “anywhere” versus “somewhere” divide explains contemporary populism, and whether meritocracy is creating an insulated professional class that damages the communities it leaves behind.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I have been thinking for the last few months about the different ways in which the worldview that I had—and that I think the political mainstream had in the year 2000, when I was 18 and went to university—has started to come apart, to fall apart. Part of that is the belief that nationalism was the ideology of the 20th century and would not have much impact on the 21st century.
There is also the assumption that the arc of justice is long but would bend toward justice, especially on questions of civil rights, and the idea that cranks would object to significant levels of immigration but would not prevail. At the heart of it, I think, are some of the concerns you have written about over the course of your last three books: the slightly triumphalist idea of a global, educated, rising middle and upper-middle class, for whom access to good degrees and educational opportunities would pave the way to a future that is better for them and better for their societies as well.
What happened to those assumptions? Why did that broad idea feel so natural until quite recently in our politics, and why has it, as you would argue, now been proven wrong in many ways?
David Goodhart: I wrote this book in 2017, The Road to Somewhere, that talked about the value divide—the education-based value divide is between the people I call the “anywheres” and the people I call the “somewheres.” These are real. The book was based on the UK, but I think it has application to all rich countries. I invented the labels, not the worldviews—they are there in the British Social Attitudes surveys and other sources.
The anywhere–somewhere value divide clearly contributed enormously to both the Brexit vote in 2016 in the UK and Trump’s first election in that same year, and indeed his reelection. The anywhere worldview, as you implied, is that of the highly educated, people comfortable with mobility, partly because they have often experienced it by attending residential universities. They are part of a world where change is something they can take in stride. Openness and autonomy come naturally because of their experiences as mobile graduates. It leans toward a natural kind of liberalism. Of course, they then go on into jobs that pay them well and confer high status.
It is a basic psychological point, isn’t it? The more secure you are, the more open and liberal-minded you are likely to be, and vice versa. The somewhere grouping is larger but less influential. These are people who tended to be less well educated, more rooted, and whose identities were often much more connected to place and group, making them more susceptible to being discomforted by social change, in contrast to the anywheres who are more adapted to it. That had been brewing beneath the surface for 20 or 30 years, probably since the late 1980s or early 1990s, and the inchoate somewhere pushback erupted in 2016.
Populism itself is a revolt of the somewheres against the overdomination of the anywhere worldview. I want to be clear that both worldviews, in their mainstream form, are perfectly decent. It is not as binary as the distinction might imply. If you read the book, you will see there are many different kinds of anywheres. There is an extreme version. One of the experiences that prompted me to write the book came in 2011, when I went to an Oxford College dinner. I found myself sitting between the two most powerful non-elected people in the UK at the time: the head of the British Civil Service, Gus O’Donnell, and the head of the BBC, Mark Thompson, who went on to manage The New York Times.
I was chatting with Gus O’Donnell and told him I was writing a book about immigration—I later published The British Dream in 2013 about the successes and failures of postwar immigration. Gus O’Donnell said to me, “When I was at the Treasury as the chief civil servant, I used to argue for the most open door possible. I think it is my job to maximize global welfare, not national welfare.” I am reasonably liberal-minded, but I thought, coming from the head of the national civil service, this was extraordinary. I turned to Mark Thompson and said, “Did you just hear what Gus O’Donnell said—the head of the national civil service said it was his job to maximize global welfare?” And Mark Thompson said, “Well, I agree with him.”
That impelled me to write The Road to Somewhere. Mark Thompson and Gus O’Donnell are not representative of all anywheres—anywheres are 25–30% of the population, while somewheres are closer to 45–50%. There is a range, and that was an extreme anywhere position. The problem is not the anywhere worldview itself but its overdomination. The so-called “uniparty,” whether center-left or center-right, has generally followed the same path: pro-globalization, pro-expansion of higher education (while neglecting apprenticeships and technical education), prioritizing managerial, professional, and financial jobs, and being indifferent to deindustrialization, immigration, and national sovereignty.
That worldview has produced a set of policies that tended to benefit the anywhere class. They have validity in their own right, but there has also been a degree of self-interest behind them. The somewhere pushback would promote a very different set of policies.
Mounk: So tell me a little bit more about this distinction. I think the distinction between anywheres and somewheres is really evocative, and I do recognize something in it that I think is true. I probably count as an anywhere—someone who has lived in many different countries, and so on. But I wonder how many anywheres there really are. It may be one of those situations where there are a lot of weak anywheres, but not that many strong anywheres.
Yes, there are people who will move abroad at the drop of a hat—to Japan, the United States, or France—for academic opportunities, for studies, or for certain job opportunities. But how many people like that are there really? How many are not firmly rooted in a national community and, in many ways, in a local community? If you look at the United States, levels of geographic mobility are actually much lower than they used to be in the past.
Goodhart: Yeah, absolutely. This is one of the points I was making with the Gus O’Donnell quote—that there are varieties of anywheres and varieties of somewheres. When I was doing the work on the UK and looking at the British Social Attitudes surveys, I estimated that the mainstream anywhere worldview was fairly large at 25–30% of the population, with many of them holding much milder versions of the anywhere worldview than the Gus O’Donnell one I quoted.
I also talked about an in-betweener group—about 25% of the population—who held significant elements of both worldviews, and then a more core somewhere group of perhaps 40–45%. So yes, you are right. Of course, somewheres and anywheres often agree on a wide range of subjects. On many of the old left–right issues—size of the state, market versus state, levels of public spending, redistribution, and so on—anywheres and somewheres can fall on both sides. They would obviously agree on many basic things: everybody wants the government to be uncorrupt and efficient, and the health services to work well. There is plenty of overlap in our politics.
But I do think one of the problems, and one of the reasons why politics is more difficult now than it used to be, is that when politics was primarily socioeconomic it was easier to reach compromises. It is easier to split the difference on issues like public spending or redistribution. When it comes to issues of identity, immigration, and national sovereignty, it is much harder to compromise.
I should also say, I am not in favor of the overdominant somewhere rule. Although my book was seen as a kind of moderate defense of populism—a defense of the somewheres in light of the overdomination of the anywhere worldview—what we absolutely do not want is for overdominant anywhere rule simply to be replaced by overdominant somewhere rule.
Mounk: Would you say that something like Donald Trump is the over dominance of the somewhere?
Goodhart: Yeah, “I am your revenge” is exactly the opposite of “we need to find a new balance between anywheres and somewheres.” We need a better balance between the two worldviews. We need a new generation of politicians, who I think have yet to emerge. They could come, using the old categories, from either the center-left or the center-right, who can find a balance—a bridge, if you like—between the two worldviews.
Mounk: How similar or different is your view to that of Michael Lind, who would argue that the problem is that a broader professional managerial class has come to be dominant in Anglo-Saxon societies and perhaps some Western European societies as well? This professional managerial class is educated at a similar set of elite institutions that inculcate in them particular values. Institutions that were meant to be politically neutral—whether a public broadcasting service like the BBC in the United Kingdom, a national radio station like NPR in the United States, universities themselves, courts, or even some corporations—start to reflect the background assumptions that this broader social milieu has come to hold about the world.
These institutions slowly erode their own legitimacy because that legitimacy was premised on being guided by longstanding principles like neutrality or the investigative, skeptical ethos of traditional journalism. They now appear to be firmly on one side of the most salient political divide, which increasingly separates the professional managerial class and its values and interests from the rest of society. Do you see your framing as similar, complementary, or in conflict with this?
Goodhart: I think he is using different language to describe something relatively similar. Mike is a friend of mine. Indeed, I introduced him to British audiences when I was editing Prospect magazine a few years ago. I am a fan. I think the movement to the left of the professional class is one of the key shifts that really took off in the 1980s. There is an old saying from that period, and I think this applies to the United States as well as the UK, that the right won the economic argument—perhaps even the economic–political argument, since it tended to win elections—while the left was gradually winning the social and cultural argument. I think we have seen the truth of that over the last few decades.
I think this is one of the most significant political factors, and it relates to my argument about the overdomination of the anywhere worldview. The most significant political fact is the movement to the left of the professional class, and large swathes of the middle. What we even think of as the middle class has changed. Today we tend to think of a professional—an accountant, a lawyer, a medic of some kind. Forty or fifty years ago, a middle-class person was often a shopkeeper or a businessperson. They would still have been classified as middle class, of course.
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The expansion of higher education, which happened in Europe a little later than in the United States, has had a profound impact. As recently as the 1990s, more than half of people in the professional managerial class in the UK did not have a university degree. They would have had professional qualifications acquired while working. The fact that you now have that long period of three or four years in a separate institution—moving away from your hometown, your family, and the people you grew up with—means that you are inculcated into a different worldview in many cases. Not everyone who goes to university is on the liberal left, but for historical reasons universities exist partly to challenge tradition and authority. There is therefore an institutional bias toward liberalism in those places.
We have now seen this play out in the “long march through the institutions,” and liberal-inclined professionals dominate our society.
Mounk: Yeah, this is something I have long been ambivalent about with universities and with the idea of meritocracy more broadly. Obviously, I think meritocracy is incredibly important, and I am skeptical of some of the easy dismissals of meritocracy. I always find that writers who say that meritocracy is unimportant or troublesome should go to places in the world where there generally is no meritocracy and see both what that does to people’s aspirations and to the ability of those countries to achieve economic growth and deliver on basic goods. When the alternative to meritocracy is in place—being hired because you are somebody’s relative or because you bribed someone—that is a lot worse than the meritocratic ethos that thankfully exists in much of the West.
I do also agree that at the moment we have elements of fake meritocracy, where people believe they deserve everything even if they attained their positions through significant social or other advantages, and this contributes to the formation of an insulated meritocratic class. That brings us to universities and the role they play. Of course, it is good for elite universities to look as broadly as possible, to find people from disadvantaged backgrounds, to give them good degrees, and hopefully propel them into the meritocratic class. That is part of the point: to give them the ability to hold positions of influence and responsibility in society.
The side effect, however, is that every year universities go into deprived communities and take the top 10, 5, or 2 percent of the most talented 18-year-olds. They carry them off to a lovely college campus where they make friends with the children of great families, with their talents and connections—and they never go back. Perhaps they return for Christmas, or for Thanksgiving in the United States. Perhaps they draw on the story of triumph out of adversity for “social justice points” in the language of the new professional managerial class. But most likely, they are being taken out of the very communities that most need their talents.
I think this is the terrible dilemma at the heart of meritocracy, and it is difficult to know what to do about it.
Goodhart: That is an interesting point. I think we have seen a merger of traditional financial and economic elites with, as it were, the meritocratic elites. Often the traditional elites themselves have to pass the exams, but they benefit from private education, tutors, or other forms of help. There is a merger between those heavily assisted people from traditionally privileged backgrounds and the new privileged who have earned their way. It is one of the ways in which the elites legitimize their continuing rule through the concept of meritocracy.
Of course, we are all meritocrats in the basic sense. We want the most able people in the appropriate jobs, particularly at the top of society. Nobody wants to be operated on by someone who failed their surgery exams. As one wag put it, of course we want the clever guy in charge. That is automatic. But when the clever guy’s child and grandchild are also in charge, we think something is not working.
Mounk: I have two thoughts about meritocracy, which I guess are somewhat controversial, the second probably more than the first. The first is that I wonder whether we have overstated and exaggerated how much social mobility we have had. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the ranks of the middle class hugely expanded. If you were at the 50th percentile of German, British, or American society in 1930, you were a manual worker. Probably if you were at the 70th percentile in those decades, you were also a manual worker.
By the year 2000, if you were at the 50th percentile, you were a white-collar worker with a high school diploma or perhaps an associate’s degree. If you were at the 70th percentile, you probably had a college degree and were a white-collar worker. The experience of being at the same level of society was completely transformed over those decades. That does not mean there was so much movement from the bottom to the top, though that also existed. It was never the main motor of the feeling of social mobility. That kind of mobility is much harder because, by definition, for someone to move from the bottom to the top, someone else must move from the top to the bottom. There are losers, and losers are always hard in politics. Incumbents work very hard to avoid losing.
The second point is that there may have been a one-time window for a huge amount of social mobility because of background conditions. It is relatively uncontroversial that there is some amount of heritability of intelligence at the individual level. This has nothing to do with groups. Simply, the child of two exceptionally intelligent parents is likely to experience some reversion to the mean but still be more intelligent than the average member of the population. In the past, when opportunities for mobility were so limited, there was a tremendous amount of talent at every level of social station. In this more open moment of genuine social mobility, much of that talent has already been sorted.
There is also much more assortative mating now. People are more likely to marry partners at a similar level of socioeconomic achievement. Put these factors together and you would expect somewhat lower levels of social mobility. At the same time, there is no longer a similar expansion of white-collar jobs. A huge share of the population already works in white-collar jobs, and there is a limit to how quickly that can expand. Some of the natural motors of social mobility have not disappeared but have attenuated.
The combination of these factors means that the promise of social mobility—that if we send enough people to college, everybody will be better off and will have the social values of the anywheres—has proven to be a chimera.
Goodhart: Of course, that is the most controversial thought, which is that we have already redistributed ourselves according to ability and that many of the people at the top are the people who should be there. I think you are quite right that we had a huge expansion in the United States and the UK in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, with a huge expansion of white-collar employment, professional employment, education, and health services. There was “more room at the top,” as the sociologists say, and people rose.
On the contrary, I think our societies have been much more socially mobile than they are usually given credit for. It is true that mobility has slowed to some extent, and what we attribute that to differs. The pessimistic argument is that the sorting has already taken place. The more optimistic argument is that there is simply less room at the top, and people are very good at preserving their position in the social hierarchy.
One of the arguments in my book following The Road to Somewhere, which was called Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century, was directed in part against people like Michael Young and Michael Sandel. My argument was not against meritocracy itself but against the definition of merit in meritocracy, which has been far too focused on a certain kind of human aptitude: the exam-passing, analytical-intelligence kind. We may have gone as far as we can in assigning those roles fairly.
What we need to do now is recognize that, yes, clever people are needed to solve the world’s problems—climate change, for example—but we have overvalued cognitive skills. There is a long tail of people in the knowledge economy who contribute no more than those who work with their hands or their hearts. The use of emotional intelligence in care jobs, for example—being able to bathe someone or help an elderly person dress in a way that is respectful—is an extremely skillful emotional and physical act. Yet people who do that work tend to earn minimum wages.
I argued for a shift in status away from cognitive intelligence toward practical and emotional intelligence, at least in the long term. It is difficult to think of practical ways this could be promoted, but I think that is the direction of travel we should consider.
Mounk: One of the interesting things about that is that, in a sense, I would say we reward and value manual skills a lot in our society. You can actually be a plumber and work hard and make a really good income. The problem with plumbers, both in the United States and the United Kingdom, is not that they are not making a good amount of money. There are many trade jobs where you can leave high school at 18 and, if you are talented and hardworking, train in a particular skill needed in a relatively high-tech industry. In the United States, you can make six figures in your early or mid-20s.
So it is not the case that we generally undervalue manual skills or manual labor, though in some cases that does happen. The problem seems to be one of cultural recognition. Even if you are doing highly skilled work that helps a company be productive and make a real contribution, when you go to your local bar or a party and the person next to you says they are a lawyer, and another says they are a teacher, and you say you are a plumber or have a specialized skill in a craft, you probably feel like the odd one out—the “loser,” so to speak, in that round.
What is interesting is that I recognize what he is saying. I think you are right about that point. But it is not necessarily a question of money. It is a question of cultural respect and recognition.
Goodhart: Yeah, I think there is interesting evidence for this from dating apps. People in relatively low-level knowledge economy jobs are doing better on dating apps than people in very highly paid blue-collar jobs. So maybe we have a problem with a kind of female selection bias here.
Mounk: With some amount of social pressure, it is certainly out of fashion nowadays to judge people for who they date, except on two dimensions. One is age gaps, which have become much more moralized than they used to be. The second is educational gaps.
That can be the case for the male lawyer who marries a woman without a great degree, and he may be accused of dating a “bimbo.” But it also works the other way around. If you are a young professional woman in your 20s in New York and you date a firefighter or a plumber, there might be an initial reaction of “he’s hot” or something like that. But quite quickly there would likely be judgment from your social circle: do you have anything to talk about? How can you stand spending time with somebody who would not have anything to say? Those assumptions, I think, would quickly come to the surface in many social circles.
Goodhart: I argued in Head, Hand, Heart that we are reaching “peak head.” But I have not seen much evidence yet for a better spread of the kind of status we have been talking about. I do think sometimes these things continue in a half-life for decades after they have ceased to be economically or even culturally valuable.
The kind of biases we have been discussing—the anywhere worldview bias—hold that the successful person is someone who, from whatever background, does well at school, goes to an Ivy League university, and has a high-status professional job. That is the model for society, and that is what everyone should aspire to. In earlier decades—the 1930s or 1950s—there were many little ladders up. There were opportunities for social mobility. Then we moved into a hegemonic period of higher education, where there was one big ladder up: do well at school, get onto the college track, and climb that single ladder. I hope we can move back to a world of many ladders, with a better spread of cultural value across head, hand, and heart.
One of my fears, though, is social media. There used to be the relative deprivation thesis, from a British sociologist who wrote a book in the 1950s or 1960s called Relative Deprivation. The idea was that people judged themselves against those a few rungs above or below them on the social ladder. That is why many were not dissatisfied with ordinary lives, since they compared themselves only to neighbors or people in the next street. But the open, transparent world introduced first by television and now magnified by social media means that everyone compares themselves to the most beautiful or the cleverest people on the planet. That is damaging for mental health and contributes to demoralization, particularly for the 50% of people who are left out.
This connects to Tony Blair’s famous 1999 speech that 50% of school leavers in the UK should go to university. An extraordinary statement, and clearly nobody helping him write that speech thought for one moment that their own children would not be in the 50%. There has often been this anywhere lack of empathy, or assumption that everybody is like them. That creates two problems. First, the 50% who do not go to university feel like demoralized second-class citizens. Second, even those who do go to university often find there are too few higher professional jobs, since the number of graduates has risen far faster than the number of such jobs.
The result is two sets of dissatisfied people: those who never went to college, and those who did but are stuck in low-paying, back-office jobs. This is the “elite overproduction” problem.
Mounk: I like this idea of “peak white-collar jobs” or “peak college-educated dominance.” We have seen some early signs over the last years that incomes at the top end of the distribution have stagnated, while incomes at the bottom have grown more quickly. We have also seen that some people with college degrees are finding it harder to get jobs, either because the skill level of the marginal extra person who has gone to college in the last 10 or 20 years does not always justify high wages, or because of structural changes. Even graduates of coding programs at elite universities are suddenly finding it hard to secure jobs.
That relates to artificial intelligence. Ten years ago, when people talked about AI, they often focused on drivers being displaced. That is coming, when you look at Waymo’s rapid increase in miles driven and its astonishing safety record. It is clear we will see more self-driving cars, which is likely to be a good thing for humanity, even just in terms of reducing deaths. But because the main advance of AI so far has been with GPTs—with chatbots rather than embodied robots—it now looks as though white-collar jobs are at much greater risk, and faster, than blue-collar jobs.
There is a theory, whose name escapes me, that the hardest things for AI to do are those that took evolution the longest to create. Those are our motor skills and our vision—things we think of as basic because all humans can do them, and many animals can as well. What is easier for AI to replicate are the abilities at the very end of evolutionary history, the “cherry on top,” which has a shorter evolutionary past.
So the spread of AI, at least in its first phase, may decimate white-collar jobs—HR jobs, for example, or many other contexts that can suddenly be handled by GPT agents. Blue-collar jobs, however, remain in demand because embodied AI is still lagging. Is AI another contributing factor to “peak white-collar” or “peak college graduate?”
Goodhart: Yeah, I hope so. AI is now coming for the lower end of the cognitive class in a way that automation came for factory work and blue-collar work many decades ago. I talked about the future being in coding and caring. Coding is now done effectively by AI, so it may turn out to be only caring. These developments are all pushing toward a better balance between head, hand, and heart capabilities.
It will be fascinating to see where we end up in terms of the revaluing of emotional labor and care, because that work has historically been associated with women and often done for free in the home. Care produces positive externalities for society that are very hard for the carer—whether in the domestic realm or the public economy—to capture.
This was once a problem solved by limiting women’s opportunities and forcing them into care jobs. Now that those constraints have largely been removed, society has to rethink how to provide enough of the care that we say we want—for old people, for young people, for those having babies and for those looking after them.
This is one of the issues I wrote about in what I call the Anywhere Trilogy, in my book The Care Dilemma: Freedom, Family and Fertility. It is about rebalancing the tension between freedom for men and women—particularly for women over recent decades—not to be defined only as a mother or housewife, and to have financial autonomy. The question is how to preserve those freedoms while also ensuring enough investment in care. We are not there yet.
Mounk: Tell us about how the status of care work has transformed in our society over the last decades and why we are now at an impasse with it. As you were saying, there was one unjust but coherent solution until about the 1960s, which was that half of humanity was not invited into the workplace except in very particular roles or in time-limited ways. They were the ones who provided the care work. It was women who raised children and looked after elderly relatives. Since they were excluded from the workplace, there was plenty of that work to go around. There were also certain kinds of institutions for people who fell between the cracks. But the biggest component of the solution was that women did the care work.
For a number of decades, we were somewhere in between. As women entered the workplace in greater numbers, while older conservative norms still held, society had a mix of different models. Increasingly, though, it looks as if we are in a more feminized world. I am struck by the fact that, in what I think is a normative scandal that virtually nobody talks about, American universities now discriminate against women in admissions. At the same level of achievement, there are so many fewer men that women need much better grades and records to gain entry into the Ivy League or other top schools. Universities are worried about gender ratios—whether because of institutional preference or student preference—and they tilt toward admitting men. That shows both the success of women in the knowledge economy and the crisis it creates for the care system.
So what is the solution? Is it a complete professionalization of the care system, so that more and more forms of care are monetized and brought into the market, with welfare state institutions helping to finance them for those in need? Is it robots and AI that will solve the problem in 20 or 30 years? Or is it a change in social norms, so that more people—perhaps more men and, more likely, more women—go back into caring vocations, paid or unpaid?
How do we meet the evident need for care in our society in a way that avoids the current gaps and also avoids the injustices and exclusions that women suffered in the past?
Goodhart: I think it undoubtedly requires men to step up more in the care domain. They are actually stepping up more than they are often given credit for, at least in the UK. In the last 20 or 30 years, the distribution of domestic labor has shifted from about 70% female and 30% male to something closer to 55–45, even in more educated households.
I also think it is a matter of shifting social norms. What has happened is a kind of feminization. Various institutions have become heavily feminized—education at all levels, from primary through higher education, is dominated by women. The health sector is increasingly dominated as more women move into professional medical jobs, while they have historically dominated nursing. Many hospitals are 80–85% women. Publishing is also very female-dominated. More institutions are becoming female-dominated.
What we have experienced so far, and what may change, is what one might call a kind of “male-default feminism.” The structures of status have not changed. Both men and women are equally status-seeking, and when all the status remains in the public realm of professional jobs—the anywhere public realm—women will compete equally with men there, which is fair enough. But we have not had a form of feminism that has raised the status of traditionally female areas of life.
In my book, I argue that we are not feminized enough in some respects. We have not adapted GDP, even though politicians are slaves to GDP when making economic policy. GDP fails to capture much of the productive work done in the home. Family policy is essentially childcare policy, aimed at making it possible for both parents to spend less time in the family and compete equally in the public realm.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, a prominent American feminist who worked for Hillary Clinton and now runs the New America think tank, put it well. She said: “My generation of feminists was raised to think the competitive work our fathers did was much more important than the caring work our mothers did. Women first had to gain power and independence by emulating men, but as we attain that power, we must not automatically accept the traditional man’s view, actually the view of a minority of men, about all classes.”
That is wise, and it highlights one of the biggest gaps between the political class and ordinary opinion in both the UK and the United States. Nobody wants to go back to the 1950s. In the British Social Attitudes Survey, when people are asked if they agree with the statement “a man should go out to work and a woman should stay at home and look after the home and children,” only 6 or 7% agree. But when asked what the ideal form of childcare is for preschool children, only about 8 or 9% say both parents working full time.
People would actually like more support for one parent to stay at home when children are very young. That is not yet seen as desirable by the political class, but it would be extremely popular if it were made easier to afford. One reason families are in such a mess is that nearly half of children in the UK are not living with both biological parents at age 14. The situation is probably even worse in America.
Mounk: I’m going to read you a couple of messages from my excellent producer, Leo, who is very much enjoying the conversation. She is saying: Yet most managers are men even in feminized industries. We’re not really feminized enough until there’s quality, affordable childcare for all. Perhaps it’s not really surprising that we don’t value feminists or women’s work.
So how do we balance those concerns? On the one hand, young women are doing much better than young men. At this point, about 60% of recent college graduates in the United States are women, which is astonishing. On the other hand, it is still true that at more senior levels women often drop out of the workplace.
I heard secondhand—so I will not name the school—remarks from a dean of a major business school in the United States who said that five years out from graduation, half of the women who graduate from this business school end up out of the workplace. They often marry very successful and affluent men from similar backgrounds. Once they have kids, they decide to stay at home. Perhaps that is good for raising children and has advantages, but it also replicates a world in which, at the highest levels, the managers—even in workplaces that might be 60–65% women—may continue to be men.
So is there a way of fighting for the interests of both men and women that is not rivalrous? Or are we inevitably going to end up with some amount of rivalry between those interests?
Goodhart: Well, I don’t think this is so much about men versus women. I think it is about listening to all kinds of women. The British sociologist Catherine Hakim conducted a survey of adult British women in which she found that 20% were very work-focused—mainly educated, professional, career-oriented, often wanting families as well. Another 20% were very family-focused. The remaining 60% were what she called “adaptive,” meaning they wanted both decent jobs and families but were prepared to put family first when children were very young and to put careers on hold if necessary.
To the extent that we have family policy or a debate about family in the UK or the United States, it tends to be dominated by the 20%—the very career-focused women. That is fine up to a point, and huge strides have been made in terms of equality. In the UK, 47% of all public appointments are now held by women, and 40% of MPs are women. Large areas of the economy, including medical schools and law schools, are now dominated by women. In that respect, we have done well.
I do not think we should be pursuing the rigid ideal of 50–50 everywhere. Feminists 20 or 30 years ago might have argued that men and women are not only equal but essentially the same. You no longer hear that from mainstream feminists. For example, Helen Lewis and Caroline Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women, do not make that claim. The debates around trans issues and the defense of women-only spaces have reinforced the idea that men and women are different in important respects.
We should respect motherhood and value family more, rather than insisting that everyone leave the home as quickly as possible to join the GDP economy.
Mounk: I have two thoughts about this. One is from a sociology paper that I read about 15 years ago. These things may have changed somewhat, but I found it quite striking at the time. It looked at different gender norms and expectations about motherhood in Southern Europe, Western Europe, and Northern Europe.
In Southern Europe and places like Italy at the time, the expectation was that, yes, as a woman you should work, but once you have children, you should probably stay at home with the child. That is very constraining on the choices that women could make. It helps to explain the incredibly low fertility rate in those countries because many women feel like they have to choose between work and having children. A number of them choose not to have children. But at least there is a coherent way of living up to the norms, which is to say that if you have kids and stay at home, society sees you as having done the right thing.
There are some countries like Northern Europe and Scandinavia, which have a genuinely permissive set of attitudes that tell people, do whatever you want. Have kids, don’t have kids. If you have kids, stay at home, go to work. We’re going to try to make any of those models work. It’s really up to you. It’s genuinely your choice. That, of course, seems like the right approach to me.
There is also a set of countries, including Germany and Austria, which have norms where you basically can’t win either way. The idea is that if you don’t have kids, then you’re a childless woman and there’s something wrong with you. If you do have kids and continue to work, then you are a Rabenmutter—a raven mom—who isn’t really looking after her kids in the way that she should. If you have kids and stay at home, then you’re a weird housewife who doesn’t really have full social respect, because to be a modern woman, you need to be in the workplace. If you’ve taken yourself out of work, there’s something wrong with you.
So there is a set of inconsistent gender norms in such a way that whatever you do, you’re going to end up having judgment passed on you. That is, I think, an interesting point. The other point relating to this is about places like Scandinavia. Alice Evans talked about that when she was on the podcast. It’s quite a well-known finding now that has been replicated in a number of studies, and that’s the global gender paradox.
You would think that women choose, for example, “male-coded” professions where there’s more gender equality—that women in Sweden are more likely to end up being doctors or engineers than women in Iraq or in other more patriarchal societies. But what actually happens is the opposite: the more gender-equal a society is, the more women tend to cluster in professions that have often been thought of as rather feminized.
That seems to indicate that genuine choice is not going to lead to what my mother’s generation—my mother was a conductor, a musician in a generation where there were not many, and a single mother in a generation where that was not true of many people—may have expected. Once we have genuine equality, you’re going to have 50% of conductors be women, and women will be in the workplace as much as men, and very few women will choose to stay at home.
It’s not clear that if we generally give people more choice, that will be the outcome. It obviously will be the outcome for some, like my mother, who I think would always have chosen to do those things, but it’s not going to be the answer for others.
Goodhart: All the opinion polls in the UK say that women, when asked, would work less if they could afford to. Their ideal arrangement is that they would work far less or not at all in the first few years of their children’s lives and not hand their child over to a nursery at the age of six months or nine months. There is a fair amount of evidence to suggest that it is also not good for the child to start at such a young age.
Clearly, we need, in order for it to be possible for women to combine family and career—we have not got there yet. We have made quite a lot of progress towards better, particularly in Europe, less so in America, maternity arrangements and better support at work. But we need to go even further, I think, and have almost as an assumption that in the reproductive years, women and men will have a bias towards part-time work.
We need a culture of part-time work for people when they are at their most reproductively able. One of the optimistic things here is that these are bridging issues between liberals and conservatives. If we assume, for the sake of argument—it is not really true, but the idea of “strong families” and “higher fertility” are coded as conservative ideas—but actually, to have strong, stable families, you need liberal means. You need a generous family policy that makes it possible for one parent—probably usually the mother, but maybe increasingly the father as women start to earn more than men in many households—to be the stay-at-home parent in those years.
We need a policy that makes that possible. We need a more equal distribution of domestic labor between men and women in the household. We also need more well-paid, decent jobs for non-college-educated men, which makes them a better prospect for women to settle down with and have children with.
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