Capitalisn’t: The Economic Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood

Jonathan Haidt: TikTok is arguably the worst consumer product in human history. TikTok is sucking up more human attention than any other company ever has, and what does it return? A negative experience, on average. The people who use it don’t even like it.

Bethany: I’m Bethany McLean.

Phil Donahue: Did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed’s a good idea?

Luigi: And I’m Luigi Zingales.

Bernie Sanders: We have socialism for the very rich, rugged individualism for the poor.

Bethany: This is Capitalisn’t, a podcast about what is working in capitalism.

Milton Friedman: First of all, tell me, is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed?

Luigi: And, most importantly, what isn’t.

Warren Buffett: We ought to do better by the people that get left behind. I don’t think we should kill the capitalist system in the process.

Bethany: There is a book that has taken the world by storm. You’ve probably heard all about it already: Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. Haidt has made media appearances everywhere, from Oprah to Joe Rogan to The Daily Show to Bill Maher, Christiane Amanpour, 60 Minutes, you name it.

Luigi: Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU, and he lays out a case in which social media is the cause of the skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression, which have gone up at a dramatic clip.

Some 57 percent of female high-school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in 2021, up from 33 percent a decade ago, according to a biannual survey released last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Among teenage boys, feelings of hopelessness rose from 21 percent to 29 percent. It’s less pronounced, but it’s still present.

Bethany: Haidt is obviously not alone in blaming social media. In 2023, the US Surgeon General issued an advisory—a format reserved for public-health issues that demand the nation’s immediate attention.

Speaker 8: The US Surgeon General is calling on Congress to require a warning label on all social-media platforms.

Bethany: “Nearly every teenager in America uses social media”, the report read, “and yet, we do not have enough evidence to conclude that it’s sufficiently safe for them.”

Haidt, for his part, proposes four solutions: no social media below the age of 16; no smartphones, only flip phones before 14; phone-free schools; and more play for children in the real world.

Luigi: Haidt also makes a broader argument. He doesn’t claim that social media is the only problem. He argues that we don’t protect our children enough when they are online, but we protect them too much offline. We let them play on their phones. We don’t let them play outside.

Bethany: There are, of course, aspects of this that make Haidt an obvious guest for Capitalisn’t. If Haidt is right, then social media is an obvious capitalisn’t. If something that’s terrible for us is nonetheless generating stupendous profits, we have to, at a minimum, examine it closely.

Luigi: His book is also about how adolescents learn, and what could be more core to not just the economic function in society, but the function of society? If we have gotten that wrong, then we’re getting everything wrong. In that case, what is the optimal educational system? Is there a case for more government intervention to fix all the mistakes that parents make or that companies encourage us to make? What is the trade-off between the transmission of family values and the virtue of independence and free will?

Bethany: Here’s Jonathan Haidt to answer all of our questions and then some.

I’m instinctively inclined to agree with your argument. I have 13-year-old and 15-year-old daughters. It makes sense to me that a girl looking at unrealistic images on Instagram is going to become depressed and anxious. But your book has met with a remarkable degree of controversy. As The Wall Street Journal put it in a headline, “Managing the Blowback Has Become a Full-Time Job.”

Why do you think this is the case? Why does this topic elicit so much rancor?

Jonathan Haidt: Well, no, but the funny thing is that that headline was bizarre.

Bethany: Oh.

Jonathan Haidt: It’s not a full-time job. There’s almost no blowback. It’s astonishing. There are about six researchers who think I’m wrong, and they publish articles saying the correlations are tiny, and there’s no evidence of causation.

Yeah, we’re doing cherry-picking, but we’re the only ones who pick all the cherries. We pick every single cherry. We lay them out on a blanket with categorizations. We say: “Here are all the correlational studies, and, look, they almost all show a correlation. Here are all the longitudinal studies, and, look, they suggest a forward causation from social media to mental-health problems. Some suggest reverse, but most suggest that direction. And here are the experiments.”

This is what’s so frustrating. We’re the only ones who have said: “Here are all the experiments. Take a look.” It’s a totally normal academic debate. It’s not rancorous. We’re not yelling and screaming. We’re not insulting each other. It takes a couple of hours a week.

Journalists want to make it seem like there’s this big thing, but wherever I go, people say what you just did, parents and administrators and legislators and teachers saying: “Yes, finally, we knew this was messing up the kids. Finally, we have a diagnosis, and we have a way forward.”

The other amazing thing is, I can’t find anyone from Gen Z who disagrees with me. Gen Z sees. They’re not in denial. They really see this is messing them up.

Bethany: Why do you think people want it to be a debate?

Jonathan Haidt: Well, from what I’ve heard . . . Because I keep getting asked about a couple of studies by researchers at Oxford, I was like, “Why is everyone citing this one study?” One of the journalists told me that Meta has been sending it around.

Meta has a couple of favorite researchers, and it’s been sending around their studies to try to . . . They’re trying to amplify the other side. One reason that I get more and more confident that I’m right, every time a meta-analysis comes out or some paper is said to show that I’m wrong, you look into it, and you see they didn’t look at girls on social media. They just lumped everything together, and they didn’t find anything.

I will go into their data and say, “But, look, if you look at what’s happening to girls on social media, you always find it.” I’ve been at this now intensely since 2019, and I haven’t yet found anything that really, I think, strongly contradicts what I’m saying.

Luigi: Let me try the best piece of evidence against you that I saw. A paper by Janet Currie is claiming that the classification of “problems,” especially with girls, changed around 2010, 2012. How do you interpret your results in light of this criticism?

Jonathan Haidt: Well, first of all, you’ve got to tell me, is that one about changing standards because of Obamacare or insurance guidance? Is that in the United States?

Luigi: Yes, in the United States, yeah.

Jonathan Haidt: First of all, why did the same thing then happen in Canada and the UK and Australia and New Zealand and the Nordic . . . Why did the same thing happen? Were they all basically saying, “Hey, we should do what they’re doing in the United States?”

It doesn’t make any sense. If this was just a US thing, then I’d be very sympathetic to that because . . . OK, look, there are two points of skepticism. The extreme skeptics, some people are so skeptical, they say there’s no problem. It’s just changing diagnostic criteria: “Oh, the government changed something, so it looks like there’s a teen mental-health crisis, but there isn’t.”

Then the second one is: “OK, there’s something going wrong, but what caused it? Is it social media and smartphones?”

My argument is that it’s the loss of the play-based childhood being replaced by the phone-based childhood.

My story is not a one-factor story. I used to say it was a tragedy in two acts, but it’s actually a tragedy in three acts. Act One is we lose trust in each other, and we lose community. This is all the stuff Robert Putnam wrote about in Bowling Alone.

Act Two, because we lose trust in each other, we lose community; we therefore crack down on the play-based child. We say: “No more of that. It’s too dangerous. You’re going to stay inside all the time. Always be supervised by an adult.” As we’re doing that, this fabulous new internet comes in. The kids are like: “Oh, cool, OK, I’ll just do video games,” for the boys especially.

I reminisce about adventures with my best friend from childhood, and I wonder what my son’s generation is going to reminisce about when they’re 60 years old. “Do you remember Fortnite game number 27,362, when we were fighting off those guys from Brazil, and you were hiding behind the refrigerator, and we had to shoot . . .” Like, no, I don’t remember that game. There aren’t really adventures. There’s entertainment, but they’re not really adventures. Act Three is the arrival of the phone-based childhood.

But let’s focus now on the first skeptical argument, which is, “The kids are OK, we’re just changing diagnostic criteria.” Really? That means that everyone is wrong. With surveys done of college presidents, what is your top concern? For almost every college president, one of the top two or three was mental health.

They’re just confusing correlation for causation. There’s nothing going on. The psychiatrists, the psychologists, the teachers, everyone is wrong? All the parents . . . I have not yet met a parent who says, “Oh, no, the kids are fine.”

We need skeptics. We need devil’s advocates. I’ve written a lot about this in The Coddling of the American Mind and The Righteous Mind. The whole point of Heterodox Academy is we can’t all be on the same side in the social sciences. We have to have some political diversity. So, I welcome the skeptics.

But for those who are still saying in 2024 that there’s nothing going on, that mental health is fine, that it’s just an illusion based on changing government standards, I don’t think that’s credible.

What do you think, Luigi?

Luigi: I agree with you, but I have to play the devil’s advocate.

Jonathan Haidt: Please, give me all the criticisms you can find.

Bethany: I have a slightly different devil’s-advocate argument. Phone-based technology is probably not going away unless we get a chip in our heads that we have to turn on and off. I think about this through the lens of experience because I grew up without a TV set in the home. My parents didn’t believe in it. I have never watched TV. It didn’t click for me at all. I still don’t watch it to this day, which leaves me horribly out of it in conversations about childhood culture, which is another issue.

But my sister, when she got to college, would argue, I think, that she spent far too much time watching TV, at least initially, because she had no ability to manage it, no ability to say no to it. Doesn’t that argue for teaching kids how to manage this rather than saying no entirely? Doesn’t it also argue that different children need different things?

Jonathan Haidt: Yes, that argument makes sense for some temptations, but this isn’t a temptation in the same way. This is a social addiction. That is, why is everyone on it at age 12? Because everyone else is on it. That’s the reason.

There was a great study that came out. They surveyed college students about how much we would have to pay you to not use whichever platform you use. I think the average answer was something like $50. To get off for a month, you’d have to pay me a certain amount of money. Then they said: “Suppose everybody got off. Now, how much would we have to pay you to get off?”

The answer is, “Negative $50,” or some number. “Oh, everyone? Oh, I would love that. I would love to get everyone off.” TikTok is arguably the worst consumer product in human history because TikTok is sucking up more human attention than anything ever has.

Obviously, all of television, sure, but TikTok is sucking up more human attention than any other company ever has, and what does it return? A negative experience, on average. The people who use it don’t even like it. But because it’s a collective-action problem, it’s a social trap. They have to be on it because the disutility of being the only one not on it is worse than the disutility of spending five hours a day on it.

That, I think, is a good reason from an economics point of view to say, not that we should ban it for that reason, but something is really wrong with the market. If one of the most-used consumer products in the country is harming . . . not its customers, it’s harming its users for the benefit of its customers, which are, of course, the advertisers, something is really wrong. I would actually love to know what you guys think about the role of regulation when you have harms like this.

Luigi: I think that this is incredibly important in terms of regulation because we know the US government has introduced regulation for advertising cigarettes to teenagers. We know that advertisers are really trying to enter early in the game because they want to shape the views. Maybe we should have a general ban on advertising on any program targeted to people below 16 or 18.

Jonathan Haidt: I think that’s a good idea. I wrote the book as an American assuming that I will never get any help from Congress because we don’t have a functioning Congress in this country. On this one issue, they actually agree. This is the one bipartisan issue, because most legislators are in their 40s and 50s—well, actually, nowadays, 70s—but they almost all have children, almost all legislators have children or grandchildren, so they all see it.

So, actually, there is a reasonable chance that the Congress will pass KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act. I’m really hopeful they’ll do that. If you’re going to spend 10 hours a day online, at least this makes it less harmful.

The big thing that we really need Congress for is age verification. The way Congress wrote the law, COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act—in 1998, I think it was something around there—the question wasn’t, at what age is social media safe? Because there was no social media.

It was like, at what age can AOL take personal information from a child and use that? At what age? At what age can a kid agree to that without their parents’ knowledge or permission?

Sen. Markey—he was then Congressman Markey—said 16 seems like a reasonable age at which kids can do this. Then, various lobbyists for the tech industry pushed it down to 13 with zero enforcement.

The way the law is written, as long as Meta doesn’t know that you’re under 13, they’re fine. You can be 3. As long as you’re old enough to lie about your age, you’re on, and Meta has no responsibility. Oh, just to make sure they have no responsibility, how about we pass a special law? Let’s call it Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Let’s pass a special law so that the biggest, most powerful companies in the world, who own our children’s childhood and are directing our children off a cliff, how about if we give them a special protection that nobody can sue them? We cannot sue them for what they do to our kids. How about that?

That’s what Congress did to us in the ’90s. They set up the internet in a way that basically made it inevitable. Now, the early internet was amazing, utopian, open; there was no way to make money on it. Web 1.0, you couldn’t do transactions. It was just you put up stuff and other people find you. It was amazing.

But then, you get Web 2.0, you get the profit motive much more. You get the concentration under a few for-profit companies. That’s when everything goes to hell.

The US Congress created this problem. The US Congress seems incapable of solving it. KOSA would help, but it’s not going to be a game-changer the way age verification would.

But you know what? We’re not the only country in the world, and as Meta often points out, the United States is not . . . It’s their biggest market, I think, but it’s only a small percentage. Most of their markets are overseas. Meta has a lot less power in Britain than they do in America. Britain is acting. They’ve passed two major laws, the Age-Appropriate Design Code and the Online Harms Act, which have complicated . . . It’s a complicated rollout because they’re going to force some kinds of age verification.

They’re doing it right, I think, because it wasn’t just like, “We are going to write all the details.” No, it was like: “We’re going to direct Ofcom, the regulator, for what they need to achieve. Now, over a period of years, we’re going to work out the details.” So, Britain is acting.

I just glanced at what Macron has proposed. Macron, the French, had a commission of experts to make recommenda-tions. They’re pushing for an age of 18 for most social media, and they mean profit-driven social media. The French are acting; the EU is acting; Australia is acting. If those four jurisdictions pass serious regulations, it’s going to go global because the companies don’t want to have a different Instagram in different countries.

Luigi: But Section 230 was written at a time when Facebook was not even in the mind of Zuckerberg, so what went wrong? Why did people not update and change the liability of Section 230 as the internet changed?

Jonathan Haidt: For two reasons, I think. The obvious one is that Meta and the other companies and Google and all of them spent huge amounts of money. They have more lobbyists in Washington than many other large industries combined. These are the richest companies on Earth, and they have an awful lot of power to influence our legislature, which is corruptible in the sense that they’re all competing for money.

The other part, I believe, is that the scientific evidence has not been clear. I think that’s because a few highly publicized articles claim that there was no evidence. Now, I’m in a debate with them. I think the evidence is actually pretty strong. But as with tobacco and as with global warming, if there’s ambiguity, if we’re not sure that this is causing harm to our kids, well, it’s hard to push through a really big, draconian law that’s going to curtail some people’s access.

Ideally, if Meta did age verification, anybody who wants to sign up for an Instagram account would have to click a button, and they’d have to go through a process. Now, I think that we can get the process down to five or 10 seconds, but it will take an extra five or 10 seconds for them to age verify. But if the research isn’t crystal clear, then there’s a lot of opposition to doing that.

I’m hoping to show, you know what? The research is in. The correlational studies, the experimental studies, the quasi-experimental studies, the testimony of the kids, the testimony of the parents, the experience around the world . . .

I don’t know if you saw it just the other day. There’s an article in The New York Times, a remote Amazonian tribe, they didn’t have electricity until recently. They suddenly got Starlink. They got Elon Musk’s internet, and what happens? Nine months ago, they got it. They say the kids are watching porn. Everyone’s on their device. Everyone’s ignoring everybody. All this crazy, terrible stuff is happening within nine months.

I think now, the evidence is in, and now, it’s a lot easier to justify. And I do think we’re going to see, we are seeing . . . State legislatures are acting.

Bethany: It almost seems to me that the other part of your argument might be the harder one to fix, the safetyism. It is a feature of our increasingly unequal society where parents feel in order to keep up that they have to stuff every moment of their children’s time with educational activity. Because if you don’t emerge, if your children don’t emerge, at the very top of the pinnacle, then, oh, my goodness, they’re going to be left behind. It seems to me that it’s all caught up in these broader social issues that seem to me very, very hard to fix.

Jonathan Haidt: There are two separate things going on. One is the way our economy changed to become more competitive, and that might explain why some of these problems are worst in the Anglo countries. In America and Britain, it seems to be worse than in continental Europe, the mental-health problems.

But the other one, which I think is the bigger problem, is that we have lost trust in each other to such an extent that we’re afraid to let our kids out. The move from three television networks and all very civil, to cable TV with round-the-clock news coverage . . .

When I was writing The Coddling, I did some research on kidnapping. According to the FBI, there’s something on the order of 100 true kidnappings a year in this country, true kidnappings by a stranger. Most kidnappings are by the noncustodial parents. It’s a family dispute.

But a true kidnapping, you send your kid out for ice cream, and she’s taken away in a white van, that’s like 150 times, something in there. A quarter of them are never even reported because there are kids who don’t really have parents, no one’s looking out for them. Cable TV put those few cases—because it does happen a few times a year— front and center, in every day and every moment, what’s happening? Has anyone found little Brenda? That freaked out parents. There are changes in the news media.

There’s a really great British sociologist named Frank Furedi, who has a book called Paranoid Parenting. He’s able to show, here’s what happened in Britain. Now, Britain didn’t have the crime wave that we had. We had crazy mass killers; we had all kinds of horrible stuff in the ’70s and ’80s. There was a huge crime wave. But even still, kids all went out and played. In New York City, kids went out and played. Of course, they did. That’s what kids have to do.

But what Furedi shows is that in the ’90s, both in Britain and America, there were so many sex scandals. Some were real, like the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church, they were organizations that were covering up for these men who were abusing kids. Some were fake, like the daycare sex scandals, those were all fake. There was nothing going on there, but we freaked out. We didn’t trust other adults, and we started feeling like: “If I ever let my kid out, they’re going to be a sitting duck, a target. They’ll be abducted. They’ll be raped. Something terrible will happen.”

Luigi: I think that you are underestimating the decrease in the number of kids. My grandfather was one of 11. Two died at an early age. Another one died at age 20, and the other ones survived. If you have 11 kids, they entertain each other, so you don’t need to have the neighborhood. When you’re down to one or two, that’s much more difficult.

Jonathan Haidt: Absolutely. No, you’re absolutely right, because it’s not just the declining number of kids and the feeling of all our eggs in one basket. It is also a problem of prosperity. As any country gets richer, they care more about quality of life.

I remember when I did some of my graduate training. Actually, I was at the University of Chicago, the most intense square mile, intellectual square mile, in the country. I loved those two years at Chicago.

I spent three months in India, and at the time, there were no seat belts. No cars had seat belts. This was 1992, 1993, because it was like, “A seatbelt’s going to add a couple of bucks to the cost, so then we’re not going to do that.” But then, as you get wealthier, well, you actually do care about that, and you start caring a lot more about safety.

So, these are problems of prosperity. Once again, my answer is, yeah, we can’t just send the kids out and say, “Go entertain yourselves.” We have to be more intentional, and the sociological part, trusting our neighbors, is a damn hard problem.

Bethany: But what would you propose here, if we’re not capable, if parents aren’t capable of reducing safetyism and embracing risk and community on our own? Would you be in favor of regulation or some form of coercion to make parents do so, given the critical importance of this to our futures?

Jonathan Haidt: No, no, no, no. As an American, I would not. I was over in the UK a month ago, and in many conversations, the first topic is banning. They’re much more comfortable with bans and rules. But no, as an American, I would never want the government to do that.

But what I do want the government to do, and we talk about this in the book, is to remove things that it’s doing that are pressuring people to oversupervise. One of the worst is that Child Protective Services in every state or city, once they get involved in your life, it’s hell.

I started sending my kids out when they were 8 here in New York City, Greenwich Village. It’s a very safe neighborhood. We started sending them out to go to the store a few blocks away, go get bagels about five or six blocks away. Now, in New York City, no one’s going to actually call the cops on an 8-year-old kid, but in most of the country, they would, because no one has seen an 8-year-old kid unaccompanied since 1991. Once someone calls the cops, then the cops come, and then, they might then say: “Oh, kid, unsupervised. That’s neglect. Turn this over to Child Protective Services.”

Childhood play is also a collective-action problem or a commons dilemma because if you’re the only one sending your kid out, well, now your kid is kind of at risk because they’re the only one, and you might get sent to jail. Some parents have literally been put in jail because they let their kid out.

Whereas if you do it as a collective-action thing, and you all do it, and you go talk to the police department, you say: “Listen, here. Here’s a copy of The Anxious Generation or Free-Range Kids. We’re going to let our kids out. Is that OK with you? Don’t bust us just because . . .” and you can give them a little-kid license at letgrow.org, which I founded with Lenore Skenazy. We have a kid license. It says: “I’m not lost. My parents know I’m out. Here’s their phone number. You can call them.”

I am hopeful that there will be some private-enterprise solutions. I gave a talk in London, and a guy stood up, and he was proposing to create a network of third places. What’s a third place for kids? Imagine a place where, yeah, there’s an adult around, but there’s no supervisor, and they can spend hours there, mixed-age play, unsupervised. That, I think, would be amazing, so that’s worth trying.

We have to be more intentional to give them independence, but we cannot have our children supervised all the time. Otherwise, when they come to college, guess what? They’re not ready for college, and that’s what we saw in 2014, 2015. That’s why Greg and I wrote The Coddling of the American Mind because the students coming in 2014, 2015, were so different from those who came in 2012. They were Gen Z, whereas in 2012, they were all millennials.

Bethany: One of the things you advocate for in your book is a return to some kind of spirituality. Assuming that is a really critical part of childhood, we’re going in exactly the opposite direction. We’ve become more and more secular, although I guess you could argue that we’re not secular about things like politics, which have become our new religion. If spirituality really is an important part of all of this . . . It almost seems like none of these problems are easy to solve, but that almost seems like the most difficult one to me.

Jonathan Haidt: OK, so first, your listeners are probably like: “Wait, what the hell? What is this left turn? Haidt is recommending that we all become spiritual?” Chapter 8 of the book is titled “Spiritual Elevation and Degradation,” because I wrote the first seven chapters about what’s happening to kids. The whole book’s about what’s happening to Gen Z, what’s happening to young people.

Then, I realized: “Wait, there’s so much happening to us grownups as well. We’re not untouched by this.” My first book was The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. In 2006, I read all the wisdom literature I could, East and West, and they tell us things like: “Be slower to judge, quicker to forgive. Judge not, lest ye be judged.” They tell us: “Sit still. Close your eyes. Clear your mind. Develop the practice of clearing your mind because that will open your heart to God or to people.”

You start living your life online, on social media, and it pushes you in exactly the opposite direction. You’d better judge right now, quick, because if you don’t judge, someone is going to judge you for not judging. Oh, apologies? Forgiveness? Forget it. If you ever apologize online, you’re going to be mobbed, so don’t apologize. Oh, and stillness and silence and meditation, no, you have to keep your AirPods in all the time because there’s so much you have to take in, and you have to keep up.

Look, I’m a secular Jew. I’m an atheist. I have had spiritual experiences, but I don’t believe in God. I’m not a believer, but as a psychologist, I have come to see that when you have strong, trusting relationships, and you’re not spending all your time trying to impress people, and you are relatively tolerant and forgiving, your life goes better. You’re happier, and you’re making the world a better place.

Look at our politics. Our political life, our democratic life, is basically conducted in the center of the Roman Colosseum. The stands are full. There are millions of people, and they came to see blood. They do not want to see the gladiators kiss and make up. They want to see one chop off the arms and head of the other.

If that’s the way our democratic debate is occurring, there’s a predictable direction that our democracy is going to go in, and it’s going that way. So, yes, I chose the word spirituality, but I wouldn’t say, “Haidt says we all need to be more spiritual.” Rather, “Haidt says that the online life, the social-media and smartphone life, is pushing us in ways that feel like a kind of spiritual degradation, and so, we should all try to reverse that.”

Luigi: When you describe politics today and how social media impacts politics, I would like to ask you how social media impacts academia. What I fear social media is doing is exactly the Colosseum. When you talk about the Colosseum, I think about Twitter for academics.

You’re not really having a community of scholars finding the truth. You are scoring points in a social game. It might eventually undermine the very role that the academy has because, as Jonathan Rauch says, it is a community that decides what is truth. If we lose this community, we lose the concept of truth, and if we lose the concept of truth, there is no progress in academia.

Jonathan Haidt: That’s why I’m so alarmed about our universities. I’ll just make a controversial point, perhaps. As a few people have observed, if you just look at the political parties, one party is insane. One party, the Republican Party, is not functioning like a normal center-right party. They’re tolerating an attempt to overturn an election and then denying that there was anything wrong.

On the left, people just look at the parties, and they say: “Well, they’re the crazy ones, obviously. The Democrats have two wings. There’s a progressive wing and a more moderate wing, and who wins? It’s usually the moderates, so the Democrats are not crazy.” Well, that’s true.

But then, I talk to my conservative friends, and they say: “Well, maybe it’s not as bad as you think. But OK, yeah, there are problems, but you know what? All the institutions are controlled by the left, and they say crazy things, and they’re running them into the ground, and they’re betraying their mission.”

Actually, here, on a business or economics-oriented podcast, I’ll use the words “fiduciary duty,” a phrase I’ve become very fond of since I began teaching business ethics here at NYU Stern. I think we academics have two quasi-fiduciary duties. In our role as teachers, we have a fiduciary duty not to our students’ welfare—we’re not charged with their welfare—but to their education. We must not do something that interferes in their education.

I would say indoctrination, putting your own politics in, shaming people for being on the right, most people don’t do that, it’s not everywhere, at all, but it does happen. You talk to conservative students, it happens. That is a violation of fiduciary duty. Anyone who does that, I think, should be expelled or at least disciplined.

Then, as scholars in research universities or even teaching schools, we have a fiduciary duty to the truth. That is, we must never lie. We must never make up data. We must never twist the statistics to get the result that we want. We have the highest level of care for the truth.

That isn’t just an individual responsibility; it’s a systemic responsibility. As we have allowed ideology to play a much more powerful role in universities, if you want to yell and scream and shout down speakers, as long as you’re on the left doing it for social justice, more power to you, go ahead.

That’s what we did in 2015, and I think we’re paying for it now with the campus protests. I think the universities did not and professors did not stay true to their fiduciary duties in 2015. That’s what The Coddling of the American Mind was about, and now, we had the fiasco of that hearing in December, where the three college presidents couldn’t explain why it was wrong to say, “Death to the Jews.”

Luigi: If I may ask one last question—I know we are over time, so I apologize. But you brought up an issue that I really wanted to ask you about because I agree with you on the fiduciary duty, particularly as a scholar to the truth.

When you talked about the power of social media, you mentioned the lobbying. But early on, you mentioned that Meta is pushing some lines in research. To what extent do we have not only a problem of ideology in academia, but also a problem of money in academia that really corrupts the research and distorts the truth?

Jonathan Haidt: I think that is certainly true. In medical science, it’s a huge problem. Huge amounts of money are spent on doctors and researchers to support them, to give them vacations, and we see the results in the medical field.

Now, as a social scientist, social psychologist, I’ve always said that we have corruption in the social sciences, but it’s not primarily money. It’s primarily politics. It’s primarily that we spin our results because we’re afraid of being criticized if we’re not in harmony with the progressive ideas. But I do think that in this case, money does play a role. There are some researchers . . .

Anybody who started an Internet institute back in the early 2000s, of course, they were funded by the tech industry. Of course, they were funded by Meta. I can’t prove that this causes anything. But I think that for research coming out of internet institutes, we have to at least ask that question. Is there a conflict of interest here? I do think that’s part of the issue.

Bethany: It was interesting, Luigi, I had thought that there was more controversy about Haidt’s argument than he, at least, was willing to admit.

Luigi: First of all, in academia, you should never ask a host whether his wine is good because he’s going to tell you that it is good. This is not my area, so it’s hard for me to judge, but overall, I think he’s probably right. When you come up with something big like he did, there is always a bit of controversy.

Honestly, I think there is also a bit of marketing on the other side. If Jonathan Haidt’s views become prevalent, this will cost a lot for Facebook, TikTok, and other companies. I’m not surprised that there are the marketing departments spinning counterinformation and sending everybody articles about why Jonathan Haidt is wrong.

Bethany: I know. It made me think about some of the other topics we’ve covered on this podcast, like you don’t even know when you’re reading something where people are coming from or where some of the studies that people cite are coming from, either.

Luigi: I think it’s very important, and something I’m working on is how to make sure that the connections are properly disclosed. I have a new survey showing that people correctly downgrade evidence from people with a conflict of interest. If you don’t disclose this conflict of interest, you, to some extent, create an externality because you downgrade all research. If I don’t know who is conflicted or not, I end up not trusting anything.

Bethany: It is also really tricky as to what constitutes a conflict of interest, because if you’re trying to be impartial, and you read a piece of research that was funded by Facebook, but you don’t know it was funded by Facebook, then you don’t really have a conflict of interest, and yet, you do, because you relied upon something.

So much of this is second- and third- and fourth-hand that the end user of the information might not actually have a conflict of interest, but the conflict may go all the way back to something that started the chain.

I actually thought one thing Haidt said in our podcast that was really interesting is that if we can get everybody to agree that this is a problem, then we can start pushing through laws to fix it. Getting everybody to agree that it’s a problem is actually the battleground right now, and I think he’s right. I can’t think of an ordinary person you could voice his argument to who wouldn’t say, “Of course, that’s right.” Can you?

Luigi: No. However, I don’t know about psychologists, but certainly among economists, there is almost like an intellectual snobbery of saying: “If everybody says something, we must come up with a clever reason why that’s not true. Because if we just say what everybody says, to what extent are we experts? We need to say something unconventional and counterintuitive in order to justify how clever we are.”

In reality, when kids are involved, shouldn’t we be a little bit more conservative? Should we wait for the ultimate evidence of harm before we decide that it’s not good for kids? There are costs and benefits, but the cost might be irreversible because you can only be a teenager once in your lifetime. If those years are screwed up, probably all your life is screwed up. There is an irreversibility that makes me be very risk averse in these situations.

Bethany: We’ve let social-media companies have it exactly the other way around. We’ve let them define the terms of the battle that we have to prove to them that it’s dangerous before they’ll do anything to rein in marketing to children. It should be exactly the other way around. They should have to prove to us that it’s safe.

I guess one reason that it resonates so much for me is that my children were homeschooled for three years during the pandemic, and neither of my girls used social media at all. It was actually once they went back to school that we now have more of a problem with their phones than we did in the past.

You would think it would be exactly the other way around, that kids at home would be bored, desperate to connect with their peers on social media, and kids who were going to school would be more comfortable reading or having a play date or whatever it is.

Actually, I think it’s a very troubling part of this phenomenon that it does work exactly the other way around, that there is so much peer pressure—and he describes this phenomenon very well—to be on social media. You have to, to be part of the world as it is.

Luigi: Absolutely. You mentioned the fact that you grew up without TV. I did have TV in my house, but my parents prohibited me from watching TV in the evening until I was 14 or 15. I remember that I felt kind of inferior to my peers because they were all watching the early-evening programs, and they were talking about them at school. I was the only one left out in their conversations, and it was pretty painful.

Bethany: I guess the places where I break down a little bit with Haidt’s solutions are in the specifics around when children are allowed access to phones. Again, I think it does come back to this idea that you and I both suffered a little bit because of how we were raised.

I still, to this day, am culturally illiterate in the sense that I can’t talk about the childhood programs that everybody else watched. Whether it’s The Brady Bunch, what were some of the others? Gilligan’s Island, I don’t even know. I didn’t have a TV, and it leaves me thoroughly out to lunch, even to this date, and social media at its best can encourage kids to connect.

Then, I think there’s the other level of this, the drinking-from-a-fire-hose issue. What happens to kids who aren’t allowed access to this stuff, who then leave their parents’ home or then hit the age where society has decided they’re legally able to handle it, and they have absolutely no ability to filter it?

I was just sitting behind a kid on the plane on the way home from San Francisco the other week, and the parent took away the child’s iPad, I think because it ran out of batteries at the start of the flight, and the kid threw an absolute temper tantrum. This was a 5- or 6-year-old child, the likes of which . . . It was appalling and stunning.

But I remember seeing that same reaction with my children. They wouldn’t be relaxed and happy after a half an hour on the iPad or an hour on the iPad. They’d be stressed out and frantic and addicted and miserable if you took it away. I think that’s probably an experience that can resonate with every parent, right?

Luigi: Yes, but I have to say, I took my kids back and forth to Italy many, many times in a world without iPads, and it was more painful. I can assure you. I wish I had an iPad to distract them for the nine hours of the flight.

Bethany: Oh, my God, that’s really funny. Yeah, we’re all believers in doing the right thing for our children, maybe until you meet the reality of a long plane trip.

Luigi: There are a lot of benefits to social media. The concern is when you become the product, and after all, do we want to have a system where our children are the product that is sold? No, but that’s what it is when you have social media based on advertising, and you use children who are below 18.

I thought, actually, that Macron’s proposal sounded like a very interesting one, that you basically ban for-profit social media up to age 18, the ones who do marketing.

Bethany: I don’t know. Did you find Haidt’s overall arguments on regulation to be coherent? I guess I did when we were talking, but I’m not quite sure, then, how we get to the solutions he wants to see proposed.

I liked the idea that, actually, with the use of social media, it’s regulation that has enabled social-media companies to proliferate among our children the way they have, so, just take that away.

I still am not sure that you can get to the place he wants to go without more government involvement, and that does not seem to be the answer he wants to head toward. What did you think?

Luigi: I think that taking away the regulation that shields social-media companies seems like a no-brainer to me. Also, requiring and enforcing a higher age—maybe 16, maybe 18—to access social media seems like a no-brainer to me.

The part that I find more interesting and I would like to discuss more is, remember, it is a two-part argument. One is social media, but the other is the fact that our parenting has become too obsessive offline. Maybe it was the result of network TV, but also, liability is a big, big issue. Do you really want to be sued because you neglect your child? No.

Ironically, nobody gets sued for letting his own child watch porn online, but you are sued if you let them walk the street alone. I think there is this disconnect between the two worlds, and so, maybe one has to decide what we want in terms of education, because it’s not like the government is not interfering with education.

The fact that they sue you if you leave somebody alone up to age 12, I was shocked, because at age 12, I was traveling by myself all over Italy, basically. The fact that you couldn’t be left alone until age 12, it sounded really, really strange in this country. I think there is a disconnect between the invasiveness of one and the laissez-faire approach in the other.

Bethany: The removal of that one—we’re not going to prosecute parents who let their kids walk to school alone anymore—that would do a little bit. But I think that’s chipping away at the margins of this edifice of overprotective and overinvolved parenting that we’ve created.

I think it involves so many deeper social issues that I don’t actually see how that part is fixable, and he wants that to be fixable without any government involvement, and I just don’t know that it is. I think that whole fundamental question, then, of how far the government can go in ensuring our kids have a good childhood, does the government even know what that is, is still an open question.

Luigi: You are right. I think that a lot of the overparenting is in part due to social pressure, that you feel ashamed because, “Oh, I left my kid at home, and my friends think I’m a bad mother or a bad father.” I think that there is a lot of that going on. This stuff is not easily changed by regulation.

However, regulation often can nudge in this direction. I was reading that in Japan, they imposed by law that managers should go home at a certain time of day because there was this race of who was outdoing the other by staying at work, and as a result, nobody was going home.

By the way, nobody was having children because you cannot have children while you’re at the office. So, they decided to nudge the population to actually have more of a social life. How do you nudge them? By requiring that the boss goes home early, and then, all of a sudden, it becomes more socially acceptable, and that contributes.

I don’t know the result of this initiative, but I think that that’s what Jonathan Haidt has in mind. The change in regulation by itself is not huge, but might be a nudge in the right direction.

Bethany: Yeah, I think so, too, and I can see at very micro, individual levels how that works. For instance, when I have had teachers in my daughters’ classrooms who have said at the very start of the school year: “Don’t you dare as parents get involved in helping them with their homework. This is their time to learn how to do their homework themselves, to succeed or fail at it, and if you’re getting involved in doing it for them, I’ll be able to tell.”

But, that said, I still think there is this larger . . . It goes to the very heart of our unequal society. At every echelon of society, you have parents who are frantic about their kids getting left behind. They overparent and fill all of their kids’ days with one educational activity after another from the time they’re born until the time they go to college, all out of this desperate fear in today’s society, where the line between the 0.1 percent and everybody else is pretty dramatic.

I don’t know how you get hyperanxious parents at every level of the socioeconomic strata to go back to a world in which we don’t overparent, given this broader economic backdrop.

Luigi: I think this is a fantastic connection with the themes of our podcast. On the one hand, the more winner-take-all the economic system is, the more you tend to have that pressure. One of the advantages of trying to reduce this disproportionate inequality in outcomes is that people get less stressed, and so, they get less anxious and all the consequences that we’re describing.

Bethany: I was also thinking, and this might be a little bit out there, but I wonder if some of our hyperaggressive overparenting is also because we live in the age of engineering and of hacks where everybody wants to believe that if you just have the recipe, you can turn out a perfect human being. We’re far more willing to meddle—or believe far more in our meddling and have the time to do it—than previous generations did, who maybe were not so caught up in the idea that everything is solvable, and everything can be engineered into a state of perfection. Anyway, that’s a little bit out there, but . . .

Luigi: No, but this is related to what I was saying with Jonathan. It is also the number of kids. If you have five, six, eight kids, number one, you don’t have the time to do all the stuff. You don’t even have the time. Then, I’m sorry to say, you take more of a portfolio approach.

Bethany: Oh, my God, that might be the most economist thing you have ever said, taking a portfolio approach to your children.

Luigi: Finally, they actually learn a lot from each other. All the stuff that Jonathan was saying happens inside the house. But if you have only one child, or you have two children, and they may be distant in age, et cetera, it’s very hard for them to have these experiences, and then, it all become more complicated.

Also, as a parent, you put all your eggs in one basket, in the one child you have, and so, you overinvest in that child, and that child, of course, feels the pressure that comes with it.

Bethany: Yeah. That’s interesting because then, this whole overparenting issue is also tied into this fact that in advanced societies all around the world, people are having fewer and fewer children. Maybe the inevitable result of having fewer and fewer children is that we overparent the ones we do have.

Maybe the inevitable result of that is that we have less well-adjusted, less-functional children as a result, which is a pretty horrifying chain of causality, which I think goes back to my core issue with Haidt’s argument, which is that I’m just not sure this piece of it is as easily fixable as he wants to posit in his book that it is.

It does seem to me that if we’re going to raise healthy children, both pieces of this have to be fixed. The social-media piece has to be fixed, but the other piece has to be fixed, too. The real world of play and interaction and real childhood has to be fixed, too, and I just don’t know how you do that.

Luigi: Yeah, that’s very hard because the story that he’s telling, you let children play in a third-party room where there is a supervisor, but they don’t intervene, I can only imagine if one of those kids gets injured, the level of liability. It’s inconceivable that something bad doesn’t happen to you, so nobody wants to be in that business.

Maybe what we should do is make it easier for people to play in the street. I was in Brooklyn last weekend, and it was beautiful to see that they block certain streets, and they turn those streets into playgrounds.

Bethany: Really?

Luigi: Yeah. They had block parties, and they had a little soccer field. Now, I already felt the pain of the kids falling on the cement, but that’s a different story. But, again, about overprotecting, you learn . . . They even had a small swimming pool, an inflatable one, and they connected it with a hydrant. Of course, this is all outside of regulation. Kids can get killed in the swimming pool. But I think that that’s the kind of activities that he was describing, and we should have more of them.