3852 The Welfare Trait | Adam Perkins and Stefan Molyneux
"The welfare state has a problem: each generation living under its protection has lower work motivation than the previous one. In order to fix this problem we need to understand its causes, lest the welfare state ends up undermining its own economic and social foundations.""In The Welfare Trait, award-winning personality researcher Dr Adam Perkins argues that welfare-induced personality mis-development is a significant part of the problem. In support of his theory, Dr Perkins presents data showing that the welfare state can boost the number of children born into disadvantaged households, and that childhood disadvantage promotes the development of an employment-resistant personality profile, characterised by aggressive, antisocial and rule-breaking tendencies.""The book concludes by recommending that policy should be altered so that the welfare state no longer increases the number of children born into disadvantaged households. It suggests that, without this change, the welfare state will erode the nation's work ethic by increasing the proportion of individuals in the population who possess an employment-resistant personality profile, due to exposure to the environmental influence of disadvantage in childhood."Dr. Adam Perkins is a Lecturer in the Neurobiology of Personality at King's College London and the author of “The Welfare Trait: How State Benefits Affect Personality.”Book: http://www.fdrurl.com/welfare-traitTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/adamperkinsphdYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well. Here with Dr.
Adam Perkins. For those watching the video, we don't look entirely dissimilar.
He's the one on the left. So he is a lecturer in the neurobiology of personality at King's College London and the author of the highly, well, at least for me, highly recommended book called The Welfare Trade, How State Benefits Affect Personality.
And I recommend that you follow Dr.
Perkins on twitter.com slash adamperkinsphd.
Dr. Perkins, thank you so much for taking the time today.
You're welcome. It's a pleasure to be here.
I wanted to start with a little bit of backstory.
Those who have achieved significant degrees of education, professional success, academic success and so on, are generally, and maybe it comes with a fairly plummy accent, but are fairly generally perceived to be being ejected from the blue bloods of the middle to upper classes.
And you have a section in the book where you talk about how Tough it is for people who don't live around poverty, who haven't had no experience with manual labor, who haven't spent much time around the poor.
It's really hard for them to kind of understand what's going on.
And I come from a fairly impoverished background myself.
So when I think about the welfare state, talk about the welfare state, it comes from significant experience growing up in that kind of environment.
I wonder if you could help people understand some of the non-academic time you spent in the world and how you think it may have informed your approach to this topic.
Yes, so I started out by doing a bachelor's degree in biology at Cardiff University and graduated in the sort of early 90s, which was a time when the graduate recruitment went down, let's say. But I didn't really apply myself quite as well as I could have done, to be honest.
But it was a tough time.
It was a tough time economically.
When my buddies were off doing summer placements at pharma companies on my biology course, I was just loafing around.
I wasn't really building up my resume as much as I could.
So when I graduated, I applied for a lot of graduate-level jobs, but there was just nothing viable came along.
So I ended up just trickling down the economic pyramid.
And ended up working in a warehouse for two and a half years, doing quality control.
So a truck would turn up with 20,000 t-shirts on it, and I'd have to count them and then barcode them.
The really interesting thing about this kind of basic laboring work is that it affects relativity.
So you go to work at, say, 8.30 in the morning, and one of these trucks turns up, and then you check it, and then you think, God, that must be lunchtime, and you look at your clock, and it's only 9.30.
And then another truck turns up, and you do that next truck, and you think, it must be lunchtime by now, but it's still only 10.30, and it just goes on like that.
So eight hours in a warehouse feels like a week.
And so I did this for two and a half years and I saved up money and I was becoming more and more interested in behavior, human behavior.
So I had a good background scientifically in understanding behavior in general.
But I became more interested in, you know, what makes us tick?
Why do some of us behave differently to others, even people with similar intelligence levels?
Okay, so you can have two people Similarly high IQ, let's say, but one of them has an altruistic personality and they become a doctor, let's say, and another one has a sort of antisocial personality.
So despite having the same level of IQ, their paths may diverge and the other person may become a criminal mastermind or something.
And this is the kind of sort of stereotypes that you pick up.
And so I became interested in finding out why What's going on here?
And it turned out that there was an MSc course available at Goldsmiths College, which allowed people who didn't have a psychology degree as a first degree to study psychological measurement.
Because as you know, if you can't measure something, it's pretty hard to talk about it.
I think it was Lord Kelvin who said that.
A great physicist.
He said, if something exists, you must be able to measure it, or words to that effect.
So anyhow, I saved up money and lived on baked beans and some cereal.
I lost a lot of weight. Eventually, I saved up enough money to pay for a master's degree.
I did that, and then off the back of that, I got several Jobs as a research assistant, but they weren't continuous.
I don't know if you've ever done short-term contract work in a research context.
You often can't get the contracts to match up.
So then it was in and out of work for a long time.
I'd get three months of work and then I'd be on the dole or doing data entry.
I spent all in all, from my bachelor's degree to the start of my PhD, I spent about 10 years in and out of gainful employment.
Eventually, I got enough wherewithal and funds to start a PhD.
And this was specifically on the biological basis of personality.
So my PhD was the kind of perfect way of combining my interest in biology with my interest in human behavior.
So it was on the biological basis of personality.
So it was aimed at understanding why some people are more prone to anxiety than others.
So it's easy enough.
I mean, you can probably look around your friends and family and just say, oh, yeah, he's a warrior.
She's not. That's easy.
It's kind of like stamp collecting.
You can just pigeonhole your friends quite accurately.
And yourself, you can tell it yourself if you're a warrior.
But the really big question is why?
What's going on here?
What are the causal factors?
And so my PhD was looking at the biological basis of anxiety proneness.
And the main theory is that it's to do with threat sensitivity.
So, people who are exceptionally worry-prone or anxious have a magnified perception of threat.
And this comes from the work of a genius called Jeffrey Gray.
He was the first person to explain worrying in an evolutionary context.
He just said, the more sensitive you are to threat, The more you experience worries.
You might see a pussycat, but you perceive it as a tiger.
You've got this magnified perception of what is dangerous.
Of course, if you've got this perception, then as you walk around your daily life, you just get bombarded with what you see as pretty serious threats.
It's no surprise that your anxiety levels are through the roof.
It became a very interesting career for me, and as a result, I don't know if you've probably seen this yourself, if you're interested in something, you tend to get quite good at it.
And so I really kind of threw myself into this and managed to get some good publications and also become a lecturer in the Neurobiology Personality at King's College London, which is It's at what's called the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience which is I think one or two in the world in that field.
It's kind of level pegging with Harvard most of the time because we specialize in this.
It's a research institute that doesn't have undergraduate students.
We just specialize in post-graduates.
So it's quite a high level environment and very stimulating one.
I get a chance to really explore things that if I was in an ordinary university job, I wouldn't do.
Kings are very good. They give you a lot of freedom to explore topics that other universities might not let you.
Well, and I wanted to give some sort of sense of background, Dr.
Perkins, because If you grow up in a fairly well-to-do and opportunity-rich environment, then you have a lot of choice and the jobs that you kind of get tend to be pretty engaging, kind of fun, kind of enjoyable, you know, spiritually and intellectually enriching and so on.
I mean, I had a friend when I was in high school.
He came from a pretty well-to-do family.
And he spent his summer sitting by his family's pool reading economics.
And this, of course, then became his gig.
Now, he did have a job at a computer store.
But this is back when computers were so rare that we all envied him for that.
You know, whereas I had, you know, jobs from the age of 10.
And I had three jobs cleaning offices.
And I ended up being a gold panner and prospector up north, a lot of menial labor and so on.
Now, if you grow up in a fairly plummy environment, the welfare state remains somewhat incomprehensible to you because work is generally more fun than leisure.
If you're smart and if you have a lot of opportunities, your mind is restless and you want things to do.
And so, in a sense, forced idleness would be a kind of Dantean hell for you.
A soft Dantean hell, not a lot of fire, but it would still kind of drive you crazy.
And it's hard for people who haven't had...
Oh, I remember when digital watches first came in, I was working in a hardware store, which is not always the most exciting thing, especially if it's a slow hardware store.
We'd swarm people like, oh, do you want some paint mixed?
Oh, can I cut your keys?
Anything. Because you're sitting there looking at a digital watch.
I remember I'd work from 5.30 to 9.30, and I was 7.47, where it's like the midpoint, where it's like, oh man, almost another two hours to go.
It's really boring. And if you have the opportunity to not work...
When you have those kinds of jobs, man, it seems pretty tempting.
Whereas, of course, you go to your average person who's an executive or an academic and you say, well, I could pay you much less than you're making now to sit around and stare at the walls all day.
They'd say, God, no, how much do I have to pay to never experience that?
It's a great point. If I was still in the warehouse, I would happily quit and just go on welfare.
Because at least my time is my own.
Well, and it's boring, and also you tend to be around people who are kind of stuck in those professions.
It's not like you have a lot of enlightening and erudite conversations with the other people working menial labor, to stereotype just a little bit.
So I just... I've noticed that people who have some skepticism towards the welfare state usually, and it seems to be dose-dependent, are those who actually have some direct experience of or participation in the welfare state.
The people who view it from a great distance as a giant machinery of saving the poor from starving in the streets without any direct experience of it tend to be far more pro.
You know, like the garbage dump doesn't smell so bad when you're 100 miles away kind of thing.
Yeah, as the Americans say, they don't have any skin in the game.
You know, it's a great phrase.
And And yeah, one really fascinating thing is that most of my colleagues in this clothing warehouse were foreign.
This was back in the 90s.
This was before the great European open borders thing.
And yet still, I worked with people from Barbados, from the Gambia, from France, from New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and so on.
And I asked the foreman about this Because I just came from the middle of nowhere down in Tevin, like a tiny village in the sticks.
And I asked the foreman, why was this?
And he said, well, every now and again, the local job center would send people, indigenous British people, to come and work in the warehouse.
And they just didn't stick it.
They were only doing it to tick the box.
To say they tried a job, and then they just didn't bother turning up, and then they could go back on the dole.
Well, this is a funny thing, and you point out in the book, which I promise we'll get to.
I just really want people to understand where we're coming from, conceptually or historically.
But you point out in the book, and this is the case with a lot of European nations, that there was this perception of massive labor shortage after the Second World War, and therefore, you know, we need to get a lot of people coming in from other countries because there's this labor shortage.
But as you point out, in the origins of the welfare state in the 40s in the West, and it It came in at different levels at different times at different places.
But you do create this hollowing out at the bottom of the labor pool, which is exactly where the poor people need to start climbing up the ladder, right?
I mean, if you come from a broke family or a poor family, you need those low-rent jobs so you can begin that slow climb up into the middle class.
But it hollows out. It wasn't that there was a labor shortage particularly.
What happened was because there was a welfare state, there were a whole bunch of people who didn't want to work those jobs that needed to get done.
So you needed to import people to whom it was a step up.
Exactly. We're starting to touch on now the perverse incentives of the welfare state.
So, yeah, if you're a journalist or a lawyer or a surgeon, someone with a very dynamic, well-rewarded, interesting job, it is hard to imagine quitting to go on the dole because your incentives to keep working, it's not just money, it's also prestige and so forth.
If you're working in a warehouse, Why bother?
You could spend your whole life lifting boxes and die, and there would be no trace of your existence.
Well, and the other thing too, if you're a professional and you quit to go on the dole, everyone's going to look at you as a fool.
And this changed from when I was a kid.
I grew up in London.
I was born in 66. So this changed over time.
But if you were...
And a citizen, and you get a job rather than taking dole, you kind of look at it as an idiot.
Like, why would you bother?
That's just masochistic.
So it's a step down in prestige to not have a job if you're middle class and above, but for lower class, to get a job, people look at you like an idiot, and there's actually a loss of prestige in some ways socially.
And the key point is that we're just looking at rational behavior here.
Nobody should be blamed for Opting out of work if it's back-breaking, horrible, cold.
I used to get home and my fingers would be bleeding because the cardboard sucks the moisture out of your fingers if you're lifting boxes all day.
So the skin would just split like a melon.
I'd get home and I'd touch something and there'd just be blood on it.
When you've got that kind of work or life, It's perfectly rational to take an easier option.
We shouldn't blame anybody.
The only blame is on the system and the people who come up with the system.
As you already said, in the final coda, the final chapter of the book, I then try and speculate about how do we end up with these unfortunate systems.
I think it is because Primarily, most of these policies are devised by people who are just out of touch.
They're living in a bubble.
If you're living, like you've already said, in a rewarding job, in an affluent environment, you don't see any of the downsides of generous love.
A good example was a couple of years ago the Tories introduced the benefit cap.
Did you hear about the benefit cap?
They introduced it at £26,000.
That's tax-free.
To actually earn that, you'd have to have an income of something like £35,000 a year.
So why not? But the point is, this benefit cap of £26,000, to the people who devised it, that's probably their Annual delicatessen bill.
Well, they would generally live in places where that may only be your rent, let alone everything else.
Yeah, if you live in Hampstead and you've got a butler and all this kind of stuff like a lot of these politicians have, then £26,000 doesn't seem very much.
But after I started my PhD and I've worked as a postdoc and then as a lecturer, I've only just broken that barrier.
After 10 years of academic work, I've only just exceeded the benefit cap in terms of my take-home pay.
And you're taxed, right?
In America, it's called the welfare cliff, which is how much you actually have to earn in the free market, so to speak, to make up for all the benefits.
And for a woman, especially a woman with children, it's $60,000, $65,000, sometimes even $70,000.
And that's a huge gap and all of that.
So to start building the bricks, and I... You know, these are always delicate interviews because I never want to just reproduce the book because I want people to buy the book and you really need to buy this book and read this book.
But I do want people to understand the general thesis.
And in order to do that, and I was reminded of your sort of threat sensitivity.
A friend of mine had kids many years ago, many years ago, when they were babies.
His first baby, I was over helping them tidy up and I'm vacuuming away.
You know, one of these loud satanic vacuum cleaners that sounds like it's just about to suck up half the universe.
And his first daughter...
over and touch the vacuum cleaner and clap and and look at the lights and would be excited and thrilled and and so i remember when he had his second baby for some obscure reason i was actually over there vacuuming again and i turned on the vacuum cleaner and she screamed and tried as hard as she possibly could to scurry to the furthest possible distance in a fairly small flat away from the vacuum cleaner and the same genetics in general i mean I mean, obviously 50-50, but same environment.
And there are genetic essences or bases to the personality.
And we want to make sure that people stay ambivalent on this because the numbers are uncertain.
I know for intelligence, especially when you're an adult, it's sort of 60% to 80% is genetic.
30 to 40% for some of the big five characteristics of personality.
There are genetic components to personality.
And the only people who deny this are people who just haven't paid attention if they've had more than one child, because you just get what you get.
So I wonder if you could help people understand, because we're going to make a big case with the welfare state and genetics, what this current state of the science is and the understanding is about genetic basis for personality traits.
So personality is divided up into five slices and this doesn't mean that there's only five slices and it doesn't mean that the models which have more than five slices or less are inferior.
It just means that for everyday kind of practical purposes, five dimensions of personality are what we work with.
So we have extroversion, eroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness.
And what you've just described with your friends' babies showing very different reactions to the vacuum cleaner, those are related to extroversion and neuroticism.
So those are what we call temperament dimensions.
So in the jargon of personality research, the temperament dimensions, they measure Quite basic individual differences in emotionality, really, and sociability.
The kind of things you can already see in a very young child.
So some babies, more or less, as soon as they're born, they're scaredy cats.
They're just afraid of vacuum cleaners.
Other babies are chilled, relaxed, hardly ever cry.
Other babies are sociable and laugh, bubbly, and others are just sort of Silent and so we're already seeing very early on these individual differences in neuroticism which is the tendency to experience negative emotion or anxiety and And extroversion, which is individual differences in sociability mainly.
And also, I just wanted to point out as well, because the moment you start slicing and dicing personalities, people automatically want to characterize them into good or bad, positive or negative.
Now, for society as a whole, evolutionarily speaking, we need all these dimensions.
Like, if everybody's just completely Pollyanna and never experiences a negative emotion, then society doesn't have any sort of canaries in the coal mine and If everyone's truly dour and negative, then society can't produce anything fun and positive.
So I just think it's important to remember, because people will start thinking about this with regards to themselves, if they're anything like me when I first learned about these things.
These are not good or bad.
They certainly have no moral dimension.
And there may be certain aspects we prefer, but they often will come at some kind of cost.
So it's just important to remember that all of these things can be positive in moderation.
Well, exactly. One of the things I was doing recently, I was on your side of the pond in New York, I'm doing a little kind of mini symposium on personality.
And one of the things I tried to put across was that we're not trying to cure anxiety, okay?
Anxiety is useful.
It keeps you safe at medium level.
So if you're walking home late at night and there's a dark alleyway, it's good to have a bit of anxiety about that alleyway because it'll mean you don't go down there.
You know, you stay on the main road even though it's further to walk.
You stay on the main road so you don't get mugged.
Churchill had anxiety.
Chamberlain had optimism in the 1930s.
It's important to remember that.
I've got a paper mentioning Churchill.
In the early 1930s, he was already seeing the danger presented by the Nazis.
When all his equally clever and well-educated peers in Germany We're just saying, oh, that Hitler, he's just a funny little man.
He just wears those funny hats.
Well, and Churchill, of course, suffered from depression his whole life off and on.
He called it his black dog, as everyone knows.
And so the fact that he had this sort of pessimistic, sour, negative attitude could have potentially saved tens of millions of lives.
So if he'd been cured, we might be living in an entirely different world.
Exactly. So what we see is personality scores have a form of sort of bell curve.
So most of us are somewhere around the middle, and then there's a sort of tail either side.
And that average level of, let's say, neuroticism, anxiety-proneness, whatever you want to call it, that's probably the level that our ancestors sort of were tuned to by natural selection.
So back in the day, because most of our existence has been living in small groups in a hunter-gatherer environment, We had a lot of danger around, a lot of major threats like bugs and predators.
There was no medicine. So if you look at the scores on our personality questionnaire, you're kind of having a window back into history, into prehistory, into what our ancestors found useful or what was useful for them.
So if you were a caveman and you were way, way over here, you were low on And nobody will want to have children with you because you're too much of a warrior and you're not romantic.
Can't bring home the bacon, you know.
So when we do these personality questionnaires, they're actually measuring something quite deep that goes way back into our evolutionary history.
Have you tried my personality questionnaire?
No, I have the link to it below, and I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to it before, but I will put the link to it below and I'll do it afterwards because I am curious.
Yeah, if you have a go at it, what it does is it develops quite a detailed profile Which it sets your scores in relation to the mean.
Okay? So it says, okay, you're significantly higher or lower than the mean.
And then it gives you a little kind of summary, sort of some tips on your strengths and your weaknesses relative to the average.
And so we can see this gives us a much more healthy picture of personality.
It just says some of us differ, but there's different situations when you can benefit.
So... A friend of mine, he actually did some sports psychology with a famous soccer team, Aston Villa, and he gave them a personality questionnaire and he found there was a gradient from back to front on neuroticism.
So the defenders had high neuroticism, the midfielders had medium, and then the strikers had almost none.
So you can see how even within a football team, it's actually Different positions benefit from different levels of neurologism.
So, if you're a striker, you don't want to be worrying about anything as you're running up to kick the ball in a World Cup final in a penalty kick.
You know, the less you've got going through your head, the better.
The more reflexive and robot-like you are, the better.
If you're a defender, you have to anticipate risk.
So, you know, you...
You're very vigilant.
You're looking closely at the attacking players from the opposition side.
You're trying to judge which way they're going to hit the ball and so forth.
So that kind of setting gives us a microcosm of the personality world.
And what it says is that for most of us, an average level is suitable for most situations.
But there's some situations where being high or low is an advantage.
And it's It's really very difficult to say that there is a bad personality.
I wouldn't use those terms.
I just say different strokes make different folks.
We have different strengths, different weaknesses, and life is so complex that even a very, very shy person, let's say, can still find a rewarding job and a rewarding situation.
Likewise, an extremely outgoing person can.
The real crux of the matter is that when we look at conscientiousness and agreeableness, because these are more challenging to view in a workplace context.
The whole sort of basis of the book is saying that, okay, in most jobs, you need to be reliable.
You need to turn up when you're supposed to turn up.
And then when you turn up, You have to sort of get on with people.
So this is why if you have somebody who scores low on conscientiousness, they're not reliable, they don't turn up when they should, they don't follow procedures, and they're also low on agreeableness.
So even when they do turn up, they're difficult and they're a nightmare to work with.
Then if you have those two combinations, In one person, then you end up with what's called the employment-resistant personality profile.
And this caused a lot of outrage because people said, oh, you're just demonizing.
You're demonizing unemployed people, you know.
And well, I'm not because, firstly, we don't choose our personalities.
Personality is something that happens to us.
It's like our shoe size.
You don't blame someone for having big feet or small feet, do we?
So it's nonsense to say that we're blaming anybody for having an unreliable, uncooperative personality program.
All it means is that in the world of work, these people are likely to get fired at a higher rate.
Well, and this is the part that drives me crazy.
And trying to sort of help people understand it from a personal perspective, I worked because I needed the money.
And there were times when I really, really didn't want to work.
I'm a teenager. I want to go have fun.
There are times when I really didn't want to work.
And there are times when I really disagreed with my boss and I thought he was a jerk and so on.
But I had to tamp that down.
I had to be sanded.
My rough edges, in a sense, had to be sanded against economic necessity.
So I do think that there's modifications.
And we're not saying that this is all purely deterministic, of course.
There are modifications, but the welfare state intervenes and prevents the sanding down to some degree of those abrasive personality traits.
What it does is it tweaks the incentives.
So things like being reliable and cooperative, they are influenced by motivation.
So we have a kind of inherent baseline tendency, but then In the book, one of the things I talk about is, imagine a thought experiment.
Imagine there's a 10 kilogram bag of rice.
I say, Stefan, here's this 10 kilogram bag of rice.
If you count it accurately, if you count all the grains in that bag of rice, I'll give you a dollar.
Most people just wouldn't bother.
In that context, because of that particular I was going to say you'd have to be really hungry to do it, but then you just eat the rice.
But sorry, go ahead. Now, but imagine exactly the same situation.
I said, Stefan, if you count the grains of rice in this bag accurately, I'll pay you $10 million.
Okay? Suddenly, you'll spend two weeks counting them.
You'll line them up in little groups of 10.
And you'll spend as long as it takes.
You'll become seemingly more conscientious.
So, now the kicker is that if you score really high on conscientiousness, then you'll count the grains accurately just for the dollar.
Right. Because that's what it means to be highly conscientious.
And how people understand just how foundational to your life success conscientiousness is.
Because that is something under our control to some degree.
We can focus and weigh the benefits and costs and so on.
But even more so than IQ, which is to a large degree genetic, and even more so than a lot of other factors beyond the control, conscientiousness seems to be the big giant lever.
Like, if you can choose one thing to be good at in your life, I think conscientious is the one you'd want to take.
So the way to view it, isn't it, it's a trait, it's what we call a trait-situation interaction.
So the lower you score on conscientiousness, the bigger the incentive you require in order to be like a trooper, right?
Yeah. Even psychopaths.
Psychopaths are the most extreme.
It's a clinical diagnosis.
A psychopath is the most extreme form of somebody with very low levels of conscientiousness and agreeableness.
They are spectacularly unreliable.
They're spectacularly uncooperative.
But if the motivational levers are flicked in the right direction, They can become cooperative.
And charming. I mean, if you have something that they want, they can charm the bark of a tree.
Totally. So they can, for whatever reason, when their levers are flicked, they can become very reliable, very charming, very agreeable, super, while they're setting you up to be conned.
Say somebody recognizes Stefan, he's a successful, wealthy guy, I'm going to con him.
So they worm their way into your inner circle, charming everybody.
And then when the corn goes down, they show their true nature.
So when you're begging, you're begging them to give your life savings back.
They're like stone.
And a great example of this was actually in the States recently.
There was a A German guy who was impersonating one of the Rockefellers.
Right, right. You might have heard this.
Christian Gerhardt's writer.
So he just turned up.
Back in the 80s, he turned up as a teenager in Connecticut or somewhere like that.
And he just appeared at a local high school pretending to be an exchange student.
And a local family took him in.
You know, he charmed. He was...
Niceness personified. They took him in.
He didn't do anything.
He just lay around on the couch watching television.
Anyhow, one day he was the only one at home.
The family had a little daughter who was just sort of at elementary school, about seven years old, and it was a snowstorm.
So she walked home from school.
She always walked home from school. She came home this day and all the doors were locked.
She couldn't get in. So she went around the side of the house and there was Christian watching TV on the couch.
So she waved to him and banged on the windows.
And he couldn't be bothered to get off the couch.
He just sat there and watched her freeze.
And luckily the mum came back from work and found this little girl almost dead from hypothermia.
Christian was just sitting there watching his favorite taxi or whatever he was watching at the time, his favorite TV show, because he literally couldn't be bothered to get off the couch to open.
And this was a family who had taken him in.
And anyway, he went on to a spectacular career as a con man where he pretended to be one of the Rockefellers and he ended up murdering some people for their money or whatever.
But the point was, despite his Very low levels of agreeableness, as shown by this.
He wasn't even willing to open a door to let a young girl in.
Very low levels of conscientiousness didn't work.
He could put it on when the motivational levers were flicked.
So that's an extreme case.
And we don't want to think that even those of us who are relatively low on conscientiousness and agreeableness, we're not comparable to him.
But it's a bit like Darwin When he went to the Galapagos, he saw these kind of extreme cases of evolution, these extreme cases of natural selection.
And so that allowed him to sort of see the patterns in an easier way.
And it's a bit like that.
So if you want to look at personality, if you look at extreme cases, it helps you to see the patterns that affect all of us.
Because these individuals are just more – they're more extreme.
Well, and civilization can be seen as a big process of domesticating the wild and savage human animal.
And let's start with a couple of examples.
And the reason I'm sort of taking a bit of a slow circle into this is because I know that there are these live wires that people get shocked by when we get to the actual information.
But I want to build the case fairly carefully.
Let's talk – Rats and foxes.
Mice and foxes.
Because this idea that there is selective breeding for personality traits is, of course, shocking to human beings.
And everybody immediately goes to Nazis and eugenics.
Farmers, of course, livestock managers have been doing this literally for thousands of years.
Why do we have dogs? Because nice wild dogs were bred together until the point that they became neotenized.
They retained animals. Playful, childlike or puppy-like qualities into adulthood.
Same thing with cats. You took wild, feral cats.
You bred the nicest ones. And then same thing with sheep and cows.
We view sheep as docile, sort of very shy creatures, but the wild sheep are pretty feisty.
Yeah, they are the mountainside jerks of the animal kingdom.
They'll push you over the edge as soon as look at you.
And so there have been – so that's sort of the big general experiment.
But as you pointed out with anxiety with regards to – you know, I feel it's never a complete show unless we can include mice droppings in it.
It's always what we try and organize our shows around.
I wonder if you could talk about some of the experiments.
There's the Russian guy with the foxes and there's the experiments with panicked mice and droppings and so on.
And what came out of those?
So my institution, the Institute of Psychiatry, back in the 60s, there was a tremendous research effort headed by Hans Isaac.
Hans Isaac was the guy who first discovered the dimensions of personality.
He's a great figurehead in personality.
Anyhow, one of his PhD students, Broadhurst, he was interested in the Genetic origins of personality.
So what he started doing was he put rats in an open field, which is a large, about a meter or a yard circle, which is white.
And the rodents don't like being in open fields.
It's scary for them because they could be easily seen by a hawk or something, and it's brightly lit.
So the animals would defecate with fear because Rodents defecate a lot.
But the more afraid they are, the more they defecate.
So he just counted the pellets.
He counted the pellets.
And so he then bred the high defecators with each other and the low defecators with each other.
And within a few generations he produced what was known as the Maudsley Reactive Rats.
So my institution, the Institute of Psychiatry, started out as the research wing of the Maudsley Hospital, which is a famous psychiatric hospital.
So these became known as the Maudsley Reactive Rats.
And the really interesting thing is that they didn't just react extremely in this particular experimental setting.
They also showed signs of anxiety in every other context as well, every other test of anxiety they scored high on.
So what he'd done here is he'd changed the personality of these rodents.
And that's just in a few generations.
And this is one thing.
You know, when I was growing up, evolution was like glacial in its progress.
At least that's the way it was portrayed to me.
That may have not been, of course, where the Karaget research was.
But it was considered to be, oh, well, you know, there are people who live in the top of the mountains in Tibet.
And over 5,000 years, they have developed, you know, the capacity to process rarefied oxygen better.
But we're talking two or three generations producing a fundamental fork in rat personalities and rat reactivity to stimuli.
And that's incredibly rapid when it comes to personality.
Sure, if you want to try and grow a guy with a unicorn horn or a third eye or something like that, yeah, that's going to take quite a bit of while.
But as far as personality goes, the changes can be extraordinarily rapid under the right incentives and disincentives.
I think it was something, if I recall right, it was something like the two lions had diverged fully by ten generations.
So they didn't diverge anymore.
They just sort of, they'd kind of maxed out after about ten generations.
And then on the other side of the world, I think it was Siberia, the Russians did a breeding experiment with silver foxes.
So these were already A little bit domesticated.
So they weren't wild foxes.
They were from fur farms.
Because if you take totally wild foxes and cage them, they just die.
They just die of anxiety.
They can't cope with being...
The great predators...
I mean, this is why you don't see great white sharks in captivity, because they just die.
Exactly. So what they did is they took 100 foxes or whatever it was from some fur farms...
And then they bred the most friendly ones and the most aggressive ones together.
So within, again, ten generations or whatever it is, they ended up with foxes that were so aggressive that they would just throw themselves at the bars of the cage trying to attack the researcher.
Other foxes, the friendly ones, they would actually sort of lick the researcher's hands like a puppy, trying to sort of Be nice to the researchers.
So, again, these are two different species.
So, the really interesting thing is it shows that this genetic basis of personality is generalizable across species.
Okay, so it's not just something that you only get in rats.
You know, foxes and rats are not very similar.
And yet you're getting the same kind of...
And indeed, it's no surprise because farmers have been doing this for millennia, like you already said.
So all they're doing is they're kind of formalizing what farmers have done for many, many years.
And the key thing is these are temperamental aspects of personality.
So they're a bit more similar to the aspects of personality that you observed in your friend's children when you were vacuum cleaning.
They're quite almost sort of Primitive aspects of personality.
When we're talking about conscientiousness and agreeableness, we have to think a little bit differently.
So these are also genetic, they're also heritable.
So we start out with a heritable sort of basis that's either amplified or muted by our Oh yeah, so sorry, just to throw the complexity map in front of people, and I want to talk in a sec about the womb transplanting of the certain animals and the effects, which was an incredible part of the book.
So of course, yeah, we have the pure genetics, right?
And then we have the womb environment, we have the shared environment after, shared with siblings environment after birth, we have the non-shared environment, social and peer and so on, culture as a whole, religion...
And then we also have, oh, just to make it even more complex, we have biofeedback epigenetics, right?
So this is the genes affecting the environment, which in turn reflect back on affecting the genes that can be turned on and off.
So, of course, when I was a kid, you know, you get your genetics and then, you know, you have your environment.
The genetics are in your body, the environment's in your head.
And that's about it.
But your environment was not perceived to be passed on along to your children.
Environmental effects would not be passed along to your children.
Any more than, you know, if I have a scar on my hand, my daughter's not going to be born with a scar on her hand.
But that seems to be changing now under the more recent research that life events can be transmitted genetically through epigenetics to your children.
Epigenetics has kind of had its day almost now.
There's a bit of What we're seeing is a bit more pushback.
So scientists are just as vulnerable to fashion as anyone else.
We're not some sort of...
Although we dress badly...
Let's just say intellectual fashion.
Let's just put it that way. We don't dress, honestly.
But we are vulnerable to fashion just like anyone else.
So things come along.
They become fashionable. Everybody goes crazy about them.
And then they don't really stand the test of time as well as the first thought.
So the... What seems to be the case is that environmental experiences can affect gene expression and they maybe can be making small changes which are passed on but those changes don't seem to last.
So they don't They don't really last, and they kind of just peter out.
Sorry, do you mean they peter out generation to generation?
Like if I'm a fraidy cat and my environment makes me more of a fraidy cat, my daughter may be somewhat more of a fraidy cat, but hers will be less, it sort of tails off?
Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's a fast-moving field, so next year there'll be a new opinion, you know.
But certainly my impression was that epigenetics, about 10 years ago, it became very, very sexy.
Very fashionable. And of course, people who've got a kind of ideological sort of aversion to traditional genetics, they wanted to jump on this because it shows that, you know, if you have an abusive childhood, then it changes your genes so your genes can then be passed on.
And it sort of helped to explain these kind of societal things a bit more.
But my understanding is that Epigenetics now, the gloss has come off a bit.
And I'm sure there's some good aspects to it, but it's not a huge factor.
So we're just basically back to the genetic variants that we have from our parents, the non-shared environment, and then the shared environment.
And these things combine together to influence us.
And so when it comes to conscientiousness and agreeableness, so these are the slightly more complex aspects of personality and we call them character.
So if you have extroversion and neuroticism, these are temperament.
So these are kind of basic baby level things.
So you can see a baby who's highly anxious, a baby who's sociable, but then you don't see a baby who's conscientious.
Or cooperative.
Babies, when they're born, don't tend to be that cooperative, from what I understand.
So these are more human-level traits, I would say.
And the best idea, the best model I've come across for understanding these is David Licken's model of socialization.
So socialization is the process by which we acquire the norms of our culture.
For example, You go out to work.
If you come from a culture where people work, if you become well socialized, you just have a work ethic.
You go out to work. So David Licken's model, which is quite a clever one, he argued that your level of socialization is related to your dose of genes for being easy to socialize, and then your parental or your upbringing.
So, if you imagine that bell curve again, right?
So there's many thousands of genes that contribute towards our personality.
It's not like there's one gene for being conscientious.
It's like height. There's many, many thousands of genes, each contributing a tiny amount.
I just wanted to point out it's a bit of a bummer that there isn't.
I just wanted to mention, it'd be nice if there were switches, we'd have a little more options.
But yes, it's an ecosystem of genetics that produces a bunch of hands.
So there's no particular solution to this stuff coming up, but go ahead.
Exactly, that's right. So Lickin's model is basically saying that some of us just happen to be born with a high dose of genes For being easy to socialize, you know?
And you've probably met people who've had tremendously adverse upbringings, you know, awful stories of abuse, neglect, and yet they've still turned out to be solid citizens.
The indestructibles, right?
And if I remember the numbers, it's 16 and 16 on either end of the bell curve and then the bell in the middle, right?
That's right. So 16% of people are significantly above average.
They've got a significantly higher dose than average of the genes for being easy to socialize.
So these are the sort of super normal people.
They've had a terrible start in life, but they somehow find a way to becoming conscientious and agreeable.
And at the other end of the scale, you have 16% of people who are They've got an extremely low dose of genes for being easy to socialize.
So Licken calls these people psychopaths.
Okay, so these people are essentially...
Sorry to interrupt. Because my understanding is that psychopathy is in the low single digits.
So 16% seems very, very high.
And this, of course, can be blunted by experience to some degree, right?
I mean, you can socialize even some of these.
It's a scale.
So, 16% encompasses a lot of people.
But the further down you go, the more psychopathic people are.
But the point is, these people have just got a very, very low dose of genes for being easy to socialize.
So, they could have plenty of money, they could have very attentive parents, lots of nannies, and it makes no difference.
They still turn out to be unconscientious and disagreeable.
Edward VIII. Which, again, is not to say criminality, because when you say psychopath, of course, people think reporter, CEO, malevolent surgeon, criminal, and so on.
So disagreeableness can be helpful in society in terms of breaking you out of habits and so on.
That's right. These individuals are not necessarily serial killers.
That's an immediate thing.
No, no. They're just people who are very unreliable, very disagreeable.
They're really extreme cases.
And he would call these people psychopaths.
Then, in the middle, there's 68% of people who've just got an average dose of genes for being easy to socialize.
So we're the kind of easily swayed kids.
So we just blow, we blow whichever way the wind goes.
So if we happen to land in our nurturing, advantaged households, then we'll turn out to be a solid citizen.
If we happen to land in a Abusive, neglectful household will become what Licken calls a sociopath.
So his view of a sociopath is somebody who's just got an average dose of genes.
So they're just average, genetically, but they've been abused and neglected.
So they've acquired antisocial tendencies.
That's his view.
Whereas a psychopath is someone whose antisocial tendencies just come from a really extreme genetic tendency rather than neglect.
So this explains, like I've said, you may have met people who are antisocial, but they come from a privileged background.
There's a proportion of these people, but there's not many of them compared to the 68% of people who are in the middle.
So these are the kids who we want to worry about.
Well, and the socioeconomic status is important when it comes to gene expression, as you point out in the book, because the kids in the middle class and above, it's the genetics rather than the environment that tends to take sway because they are supported in what they do, at least financially.
They have much more scope to express their abilities, and therefore the genetics are going to give you a wider range of outcomes than among poor kids who are kind of struggling on the, you know, backload of bricks of their environment.
So Licken says that the In disadvantaged households, the inputs are much more uneven.
So, some kids in disadvantaged households get taught to play a musical instrument, but some don't.
Some kids in disadvantaged households get access to a computer, some don't.
Some get taught to read, some don't.
So, what he said is you've just got this much greater environmental variation amongst disadvantaged households, which allows All sorts of strange environmental effects to happen.
Once you get into a more privileged household, different middle-class households can have different emphasis.
You've probably encountered middle-class households where the whole family is crazy about horse riding or music.
They play string quartets in the evening or whatever.
But the point is, even though these families may have a slight emphasis on horse riding, For music, all the kids still get pretty reasonable levels of input from their parents.
Yeah, if kids get enough to eat, their height is going to be more determined by genetics than if they don't get enough to eat.
That's a perfect...
I wish I'd put that one in the book.
That's a good one. So this is a great model, and it explains a lot.
It explains a lot of these differences.
So when we look at this model in the context of the welfare policies, so if we have a welfare policy that sets up perverse incentives for extra births into disadvantaged households, then by definition most of those kids born are going to be genetically average because of this Belker thing.
Most of the kids born into these households are going to be genetically average.
They're just going to be born because The government offers their parents extra money for having more kids.
So they're going to be suffering neglect.
And so because they're average, the neglect is just going to push them over towards the antisocial side rather than the solid citizen side.
And that's the crux of it. It's just a question.
Do we want a welfare state that causes kids to Right now, okay, so this is where I think it's actually a very serious of simple syllogisms,
very well argued in the book and with lots of examples, but it's sort of the, it's Socratic in its essence, you know, if, and I think we have to accept that there are personality traits that contribute to this employment-resistant personality that are genetic, and also that can be stimulated negatively in terms of work opportunities by the environment.
So if there are work-resistant personality structures that are genetic, and if the welfare state causes people who have this tendency to have more children than on average, then we are growing the population of workplace-resistant personalities, both environmentally and genetically.
And so the effect of the welfare state, you can't ever solve the problem.
Because, and this is, it chimes in with the data, right?
In the post-war period, at least in America and in other places as well, it was a very clear step down in terms of the number of people who were poor were declining by about one percentage point every year.
And with You know, you get down to that 16%, it gets hard to lower it down because you have these workplaces.
But if you have no welfare state, then they'll find ways, at least a lot of them will find ways to get a job and sand down more of the rough edges of their personality.
But you can't solve the problem because if you give money to people with employment-resistant genetic tendencies, then they will have more children at, to some degree, at the expense because whatever you subsidize, you increase, and whatever you tax, you decrease.
So you're taking money from productive citizens and giving them to work-resistant personality structures that have a genetic component.
You're going to get more and more of those people and create a permanent underclass, so to agree, that's going to expand.
And this accords with the fact that despite having poured untold trillions of dollars into the poor, we're kind of at the same numbers that we were in 1965 as a proportion of the population.
Sorry to sort of race through that, but I really want people to understand that these are the scientific facts as far as can be established that are underpinning the challenges that we really need to figure out with regards to these programs.
Yeah.
The bottom line is that if you have a welfare state that creates perverse incentives for extra kids to be born into these disadvantaged households, then it becomes like a self-expanding problem.
The kids are going to suffer neglect because personality generalizes across situations.
So if you're the kind of person who's not conscientious enough To go out to work, you're not going to be conscientious enough to pay your kids attention.
You're just going to neglect them.
And the real key data, and as you've probably seen in the book, there's some randomized controlled trials which were run Back in the 60s, in the US, there was a thing called Head Start.
It probably still exists.
No, I think it's been, because it was $100 billion and it turned out not to be able to budge the scores of kids in the long term, so I think it's been pulled back some.
So, they wanted to see, yeah, they wanted to do a randomized control trial.
Randomized control trial is the gold standard of testing causality, because you just take, you take a population of disadvantaged children, you randomly split them, Into two groups.
One group gets intensive preschool tutoring.
So this is kind of like in loco parentis tutoring.
It's like the same sort of things that a conscientious parent would do.
The other group doesn't get anything.
And then these two groups of kids are followed up over their lives.
So this started in the 60s and these kids are now, the early cohorts are now in their late 40s, 50s.
And what they find is there's no change in IQ. There's no lasting change.
So IQ doesn't budge. But the kids who have the tutoring do have better life outcomes.
So this means the kids who didn't get the tutoring are being damaged.
So they're being neglected.
They're not getting the input in those early years that they need to socialize them to Have a cooperative, reliable personality.
And we're talking significant interventions in particular from the age of three to five.
You know, our personalities are like clay when we're young, but they harden pretty considerably in the kiln of time.
Certainly by the time kids get to school at the age of five, you've got this great analogy that if your cake is missing some eggs and you bake the cake and you say, oh, I forgot to put the two eggs in and then you crack two eggs on top, it's not like you get a better cake, you just get another mess.
And so by the time the kids get to school at the age of five, you have to intervene significantly and extensively and intensively from about the age of three to five.
Maybe earlier would help too, I don't know.
But that is the amount of investment that's required.
Following these early studies, there was some other studies where they looked at from birth.
And so if you catch the kids at birth and you give them this kind of intensive sort of in loco parentis help, So when it's a newborn baby, it's a matter of talking to the baby, interacting, making eye contact, this sort of thing, which they're not getting. Because in many cases, these babies are born to children.
They're born to 13-year-old girls, you know.
Or drug addicts or prostitutes or people who just don't have the emotional capacity or time capacity to deal with them.
They're not getting that...
So they start off by giving them eye contact, playing with them, and then once they get to the 2, 3, 4, 5, then they start doing plan-do-review.
So they sit down with the child, they plan what they're going to do for the day, then the child does it, and then at the end of the day, they review what they've done.
So it's a bit like what a conscientious parent would do.
Many conscientious parents, they kind of have this...
Plan, do, review, approach to their child rearing.
And they would also get training in conflict resolution.
So if one child wanted to play with a toy and another child wanted to play with the same toy, they wouldn't just fight over it.
They'd negotiate a sharing agreement.
So again, that hits the sort of, the kind of agreeableness, agreeableness, cooperation.
It's teaching children to cooperate.
And so that is...
Just, again, exactly what you do as a parent.
And James Heckman, the great Nobel laureate, James Heckman, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics, he spent decades studying these interventions.
He's a big supporter of early childhood interventions.
And he actually tracked down some of the original tutors.
They tracked them down recently.
So these were the people who did the tutoring back in the 60s and 70s.
And they asked them, they said, what did you do?
And they said, we just did what we did with our own kids.
That's all. So you can get a sense of just how important conscientiousness is for parenting.
So if you're encouraging people who are relatively less conscientious to have more kids, those kids have a higher risk of suffering neglect.
And the key point is, when they did these studies, There was no financial change.
The families where the kids got the tutoring, it's not like they got a million dollars or something in terms of affluence.
They just had the same. The kids who weren't tutored didn't get any money either.
There was no financial intervention at all.
Poverty no doubt affects our upbringing, of course, but it's not the only factor.
And so what these studies show is that parental inattention is the active ingredient.
So these are parents who just ignore their kids pretty much.
Well, and I just want to read a paragraph from the book, which I've sort of, I kind of heard it in passing.
But I really sort of pause on this and this sort of inattention.
So you wrote, children from professional families heard an average of 2,153 words per hour compared to an average of 1,251 words per hour for working class children and 616 words per hour for the children of welfare claimants.
Now, the children of welfare claimants, the mom's home.
I mean, most times it's the mom, right?
Occasionally it's the dad. But the mom is home, and they are getting a little more than a third.
Of the language. And this has, of course, in fact, what do we say to kids?
Use your words, not your fists.
Well, you've got to have those words in order to be able to use them.
You say, at three years of age, children in the professional families possessed a cumulative vocabulary of approximately 1,100 words compared to 750 words for children from working class families and 500 words for children from welfare recipient families.
That seems to be very dose-dependent and the life trajectory of people who lack eloquence is not often very positive.
It's a tragic irony.
Like you said, the mums who've got the most time, on average, are spending the least time on their kids.
If we have a government policy, if some guy in government dreams up a policy That's encouraging extra births into these disadvantaged families.
It's kind of like state-sponsored child abuse.
Now, let's talk about the causality, though, because, of course, you know, the old – I can see the comments already in my brain because I've been doing this for like a decade.
I can see the comments in my brain. Correlation doesn't equal causation and so on, right?
So let's talk about some of the – I know that they started in the 90s when the U.S. restricted welfare and the government, U.K. government expanded it like 50 percent in certain areas.
How do we untangle the causality when it comes to increased welfare versus increased birth or leading to increased births?
Yeah, so I think a groundbreaking study was done in the States in the sort of era when Bill Clinton signed a Personal Responsibility Act.
Right. So that would have been, what, 96?
I think it was 96. And so this act was designed to reduce the incentives for extra births into disadvantaged families.
Very farsighted, you know, really ahead of the game.
And But the implementation of these rules was not simultaneous.
The different states had different implementations.
So this sets up a kind of natural experiment.
It's similar to when they banned lead and gasoline in America.
The states did it at different levels, which made it easier to track the effects on things like criminality down the road.
The federal structure of the USA actually became a major scientific advantage.
So what these scientists did is they compared generosity with births, and they found that where the generosity was reduced, there seemed to be a reduction in births.
And the motivation was actually nothing to do with Welfare, generosity.
It was more to do with the debate on contraception versus abortion.
So I think at the time, I mean, I wasn't around then at the time, but I think the key debate was, okay, if you're reducing the generosity of benefits, is that encouraging extra abortions?
Because, you know, people get pregnant and then they They think, oh God, no, no, I can't afford to have a child now because the government have reduced the generosity, so I'm going to have an abortion.
But what they found was there was no change in abortions.
It was actually achieved through increased use of contraception.
So again, this shows the rationality.
So we keep coming back to a rational decision-making process where people are just weighing up the financial pros and cons.
And if they get free money, By having a kid, they will.
If the financial incentives go down, they'll just use a condom.
Well, and of course, also, if they're not particularly investing in their child, then the labor that is required to get this free money is far less.
So they're earning more per hour of child-rearing because they're doing so little of it relative to what they're getting in an income.
That's right. And another key aspect of the conscientiousness is that you plan ahead.
So if you're... A person who scores low on conscientiousness, you don't tend to think ahead.
So you're more sort of short-termist.
Your worldview is kind of short-term.
So you're more focused on the extra few hundred dollars that you get per month than the 18 years of hard work in raising the child because you're not conscientious.
So you don't think about it.
Now, also, and we know as well, at least it's fairly easy to make the causality claim in that the welfare benefits go up and then the birth rate changes and then the welfare benefits go down.
So the cause and effect seems fairly clear that way.
Plus, of course, there have been interviews conducted with women in their fertility decisions where they say, well, yeah.
It's driven by the money that I can get a hold of or not.
So if you have that kind of domino effect, plus the interviews, I think then claiming that the old correlation doesn't imply causation, I think becomes a bit of a thin argument when you have that amount of evidence on your side.
Yeah. And there's multiple factors operating here.
So people's reproductive choices are not all about money, of course.
But all we're saying is that Benefit generosity is one factor that does seem to be significant.
So if it does turn out, as seems to be the case, that being neglected causes personality damage, as these randomized control trials show, then you have to start asking questions about these policies.
People just need to ask, is this what they want?
Well, this is the thing that I mean, a lot of people on the left are really troubled by sort of rising inequality in economic outcomes is the most easily measurable in terms of income, that there is a sort of hollowing out of the middle class and an increase, sort of an inverse bell curve in terms of where people are ending up.
And it seems to me that what happens partly as the result of the welfare state is you segregate genetics to high-functioning and low-functioning clusters within society.
And this is another reason why you can't solve the problem.
Because who is it who's most likely to have a child with a woman who's on welfare who may have two other kids by two other guys?
Well, it's somebody low on conscientiousness, somebody low on agreeableness, somebody who is really going to think of the consequences, somebody who doesn't necessarily want to choose an ideal mother for their own children, but are selected, as you talk about in the book, just kind of want to get their rocks off and keep moving.
So you do end up with this aggregation of genetic clusters around these employment resistance personalities, and you're creating almost a second country within the country that is not part of the major ethos of the country, which are developed around the need for being a productive citizen, a good member of society, somebody who gets up and goes to work.
You are creating these two widening gaps within society.
And of course, as you end up with more of these kids being born into these dysfunctional households, there's a drive for more welfare, which creates more of these kids.
I don't see how the end of this vicious cycle doesn't end up with some late Roman era sort of collapse versus, you know, we're going to have to land this thing one way or another.
It's either going to be wheels up or it's going to be wheels down, but it does not seem at all to me to be sustainable.
Sorry for that rant. I hope that you can extract some sort of useful question out of that.
That's the whole point of the book is to call attention to people about this topic because until now there hasn't been a book on personality and the welfare state.
And I'm not saying that this book is the final word.
This is just a sort of alarm call.
It's like a canary in a coal mine sort of thing that, hang on, Maybe something's going wrong here because we know that neglect damages personality.
We know that badly thought out welfare policies can increase the number of births into neglectful households.
So you don't have to be a genius to see the end result.
You're going to have extra kids who get damaged and it's not their fault.
So these kids didn't ask to be born.
They're just being born in response to these flawed Government policies, in my view.
And I'm sure some aspects of the argument I'm sure I haven't looked into in enough detail.
Some other aspects maybe I've looked into them in too much detail.
But the point is we need to start thinking about this because, as you've said, The plane is going to come down, and you might as well come down with your wheels down.
The nosedive never ends up well.
I just wanted to touch on two final topics.
One is this issue of cost.
You know, and it's funny because there's that old phrase about dry calculations of mutual utility and so on.
You can't reduce everything to dollars and cents.
However, the welfare state is about dollars and cents.
So when something starts with the reallocation of scarce resources, since all resources are scarce, I think it's fair to look at costs and benefits.
You've done some calculations.
The only thing that I would suggest is missing is, you know, where the kids are dysfunctional.
They cost this and this much in terms of incarceration and dysfunction and problems and addictions and abuse and so on.
And that's the hole that is dug in.
The opportunity costs of productive people who might actually be contributing to society in terms of creating jobs, paying taxes and so on.
It's a little bit absent from your calculations.
But yeah, give people a sense of what the cost is for society.
So the... I've done a few basic calculations which show that per head, the troubled individuals with this employment-resistant personality will tend to cost about 20 times as much over their lifetime to the taxpayer.
The average person costs, say, £2,000.
Then maybe 40,000 or something like that.
Depends on the particular calculation.
But there's been a really great paper that's come out.
Oh yeah, give us a link. If you can read that, give us a link.
And just in case for people who are listening on the podcast, they can then do a search, if you can read the title.
It's called Childhood Forecasting of a Small Segment of the Population with Large Economic Burden.
And it's done in the Dunedin cohort.
So this is a big study that I quote in the book, where every kid...
Who was born in the New Zealand city of Dunedin in 1972.
Those kids have been followed.
So they've studied these children.
And Dunedin is a city with not much turnover of population.
So most of the people who are in Dunedin stay there.
So these people can be followed.
So there's about a thousand of these kids.
And they've been followed through...
Through their lives and they measured things like IQ, personality, neglect, socioeconomic level.
These were all measured when the kids were very young and they followed them up and they found this.
It shows a small proportion of the population accounts for a lion's share of the social costs such as crime, welfare dependence and health care needs as adults.
So, one-fifth of the study cohort accounted for 81% of criminal convictions.
There's that 80-20 rule, eh?
It just seems to be so common.
Pareto principle. They accounted for 77% of fatherless child rearing.
So, you're starting to see a cycle of disadvantage.
So, the disadvantaged kids, they then neglect their kids.
Who neglect their kids, who neglect their kids.
It just goes like this. The fifth of the group also consumed three quarters of drug prescriptions.
Well, the ill health that comes out of dysfunctional childhoods, I've got a whole interview with Dr.
Vincent Felitti. I've got a whole website called bombandthebrain.com.
I'm not saying you're advocating it or anything like that, but the negative health outcomes of abused childhoods is something that really needs to be more strongly recognized.
And you can look at the ACE study, the Adverse Childhood Experience study and so on.
It's really, really important.
The health costs are extraordinarily high.
Oh, absolutely. And this small number of people also accounted for two-thirds of welfare benefits, and more than half the hospital nights, and cigarettes smoked.
So what we're seeing is this population, which are marked out by low levels of conscientiousness and agreeableness, low levels of IQ, childhood neglect, and also low socioeconomic status.
So this 20% are treading Heavily on society.
And so where's the sense?
Where's the sense in providing welfare policies that actually set up these perverse incentives so they have more kids who are then going to be...
And the really interesting thing is this is one of the things that didn't make it into the paper, but it was presented by one of the...
Terry Moffat, who's the lead professor.
She's the researcher. And what she looked at was The interactions between the participants and their own kids.
So they're now, they were born in 1972, so they're now about 44, 45.
So they've got children of their own.
So they found that the participants with low self-control, as measured in childhood, were less warm, sensitive, and stimulating parents with their own children.
So again, this toxic cycle So the neglected kids become damaged in their own personalities and then they neglect their own kids.
They're just not... And there's a gradient.
You can see the gradient there.
So they measured self-control.
This is measured at childhood of the parents.
And then this is their warmth with their kids.
So there's a clear gradient there.
So I recommend anyone who wants to know the latest...
Sort of findings. This is probably one of the most important studies of the last 10 years, I would say.
Well, we'll see if we can try and get that author on.
Let's just close off with criticisms or objections to the work that you've done.
Now, I'm certainly no expert in the field and some of it seems to have been… It's upsetting to me.
These facts hurt my feelings.
I mean, that's a bit of an exaggeration.
But what are some of the major criticisms that you've received regarding the work and what would your response be to those?
I know that's a big topic, but if you just could pick the top few because, you know, we do want to see the balance for you.
So I had an article come out recently which actually details these.
It's called The Welfare Trait, Hans-Eysenck, Personality and Social Issues, right?
Because Hans-Eysenck His philosophy, he was the father of personality research.
His philosophy was that we should use discoveries from personality research to provide insights for societal problems.
You can use it in education, psychiatric situations, criminality.
Personality is like a kind of Swiss army knife.
It has many applications.
So one of the criticisms was Personality researchers shouldn't be allowed to comment on the welfare state.
Really? Yeah, it's off-limits.
So that means that geneticists can't talk about cousin marriage and its effects.
Okay. Oh, sure. Let's just fly completely blind with no scientific expertise whatsoever, because Lord knows politicians are always thinking about the long term.
Well, that was one of the themes.
Another one was to do with this issue of Welfare policy causing extra births.
So I quoted, for example, that paper in the US where they compared different states with different levels of generosity with a different number of births.
I also used a study from the UK by Mike Brewer and colleagues because in the early 2000s, generosity of child-related benefits in the UK was increased by about 50%.
A massive hike when Tony Blair came in.
And that was followed by a rise in the number of births by about 15%.
Okay, so now my focus is disadvantaged households.
And Mike said basically that the 15% firstly was too high.
He said it's more like 13%.
Okay. Even if that's a given, it doesn't change your thesis in any fundamental way.
That's right. And he admitted that extra births did occur, but he said my estimate, because I estimated 14,000 extra births a year, and he said he thinks my estimate was too high.
So I contacted him on Twitter, and I asked, okay, can you come up with a more accurate estimate?
You know, I accept my estimate is crude.
He called it a back-of-the-envelope estimate.
I said, yeah, it is.
It's the back of the envelope. But he refused.
He said... He wouldn't provide an alternative number while criticizing yours.
He said...
This is what he said. I've explained why I don't agree with how Adam Perkins used my figures.
I don't need to provide a counterestimate.
And a counterestimate would not be a simple matter of back of the envelope sums.
It would need a new analysis.
So, you know...
If anyone else can provide a better estimate, I'd be delighted.
But until they do, then I'm just going to stick with 14,000 per year.
And another thing, because basically most of the effect of Mike's calculations was shown to be in households where someone's working at least 16 hours, right?
So that doesn't fit too well with the notion of disadvantage.
So these are low-income families, but someone's working.
And actually, I looked into the data, and the results are only significant for households where there's also low education levels.
So they would have fewer opportunities in the market to match what the welfare would provide.
That's right. So what I'm saying is the families which showed these extra births, I reckon, they're disadvantaged because they're low-income families.
Low education and their work records are not great.
Now, someone else might say, oh no, those are advantaged families.
But as far as I'm concerned, these data do show that extra births happened in disadvantaged households because of the government policy.
Right. Well, I really want to recommend this book.
By the way, it's really well written for the layperson.
And that's not an easy feat to do with this kind.
It's engaging, it's enjoyable to read, it's clear, and that's no small feat, sort of from one writer to another.
Well done with that. Really thank you for your time today.
