The Billiard-Ball Theory of Human Nature
And its subsequent catastrophes
I was recently on the City Journal Podcast with Theodore Dalrymple and Rafael Mangual speaking about the real drivers of antisocial behavior and crime—and the growing disconnect between policymakers and the communities most affected by violence. We discussed how luxury beliefs shape public narratives around criminality, often minimizing harm while insulating decision-makers from the consequences of their ideas.
Transcript below.
Rafael Mangual: Hello and welcome to another episode of the City Journal Podcast. My name is Rafael Mangual and I am your host and I’m so happy to be joined by two wonderful colleagues. We have Tony Daniels, a.k.a. Theodore Dalrymple, which is the name I think you all probably know him best by, and of course Rob Henderson. I want to thank you both for joining me for what I expect is going to be a fantastic discussion about all sorts of things, including the role of psychology and the insights it has to offer for public policy debates. And I kind of want to start there because it seems to me like one of the biggest hurdles in policy debates, especially here in the United States, but certainly in the UK, Tony, is settling on an explanation of the circumstances in which the least fortunate among us find themselves. And it’s almost like you’re sticking your tongue onto the third rail if you start to contemplate an explanation for life outcomes like poverty or socioeconomic inequality that hinge on the individual level decisions that people make, that hinge on the exercise of individual agency. And I think in many ways, this is kind of what demarcates the line between left and right in policy debates. It’s essentially a line between people who believe that individuals are by and large responsible and authors of their own lives and people who believe that society is largely to blame. And I think these are kind of the questions that I want to explore in our talk today. And I want to start the conversation by asking kind of a broad high-level question. We’ll start with you, Rob, which is, what do you think are the most important insights that psychology has to offer us in policy debates, especially when we’re talking about things like crime and antisocial behavior?
Rob Henderson: Most of the suggestions put forth by psychologists, criminologists, and other social scientists are often unhelpful at best and actively detrimental at worst. That said, there are useful findings—bits of research you can actually learn from. Much of it is common sense, but one distinction I’ve emphasized in essays and in my first book is the difference between childhood poverty and childhood instability. Researchers consistently find little to no relationship between childhood poverty—how much money your family had growing up—and later outcomes like substance abuse, reckless behavior, drunk driving, or criminality. By contrast, they find a consistent link between childhood instability and those outcomes. Instability is measured by things like how often you moved as a child and how many romantic partners your primary caregiver had. So if you were raised by a single mom and she cycled through different boyfriends over the course of your childhood, that seems to matter, as does the day-to-day disorder and uncertainty in the household. Even when researchers control for family income, the relationship between instability and negative outcomes persists. And I think this helps clarify a big question in these debates: what actually shapes how people turn out? When people make destructive choices later in life, is it poverty, or is it something else? Instability correlates with poverty, but they’re not the same thing—and the instability piece seems to matter more. Part of the reason this gets ignored is that poverty feels legible: it’s something policymakers can “do something about.” Instability is harder to get your hands around. It’s much harder to solve with policy.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah. It seems like people are confusing the direction of the causation. I often hear it said that, well, obviously poverty causes crime because most criminals are poor. And the people who make that argument never seem to contemplate the possibility that the same kind of dispositions that lead someone to think about knocking over a liquor store at gunpoint are also not very conducive to economic success in Western society. And so poverty is an outcome of the same kind of social phenomenon. But Tony, I mean, I wonder if that rings true to you because I mean, you are someone who has spent a career as a psychiatrist working with criminal offenders and people who were experiencing a lot of the sort of social problems that often characterize the lower social classes in Western society. And it seemed to me that those experiences might have something to say about the truth of what Robert just laid out.
Tony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple): Yes. I mean, one has to be careful that you don’t give people who had an unstable childhood to get out of jail free card. There’s always that danger once you’ve got an explanation like that. But in fact, what I found was that most criminals were actually certainly at one level resistant to the idea of themselves as feathers on the wind of circumstance or as just vectors of forces. So one day of a repeat burglar came to me, it’s very difficult to get into prison for burglary in England. You have to want to be called by the police. But anyway, he said, “Do you think, doctor, I burgled because of my childhood?” And I said, “No, I’ve got absolutely nothing to do with that. “ And he was very surprised by this because he expected me to say that it was. And he said, “Well, why do I do it?” And I said, “Well, you’re lazy and you want things that you’re not prepared to work for. “ And once you got over that, actually, it was perfectly possible to talk in an honest way about his childhood, which was likely actually to have been a very bad one, but something happens between having a bad childhood and breaking into a house.
Rafael Mangual: Right, right. I mean, the bad childhood might explain a little bit about how you got to where you are, but it doesn’t excuse the decisions you made between the choices in front of me. No,
Tony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple): And in a way, he doesn’t want that to be the case because if he believes that, if he truly believes that it’s the case, he’s saying of himself, “I am not truly a human being like you.”
Rafael Mangual: Right, right. Because I mean, yeah, that’s what sort of characterizes human dignity, is our ability to make choices and exercise agency. And it reminds me, Tony, of one of your greatest essays, which is one of the first pieces I ever read in City Journal. And I’ve told this story on the podcast before and certainly in others, but in 2006, I was in a first year sociology class and I was made to take in a presentation delivered by an ex- convict who had done a significant amount of prison time after being convicted of serious drug offenses here in New York. And he went on about how the criminal justice system and society at large was racist and rigged against him and explained the entirety of all the bad things that happened to him in life. And viscerally, I pulled back for what he was saying, but I didn’t really have a vocabulary with which to push back on those ideas. And I went home and I logged onto the search engine of choice back then, which was Ask Jeeves. So I’m kind of dating myself a little bit. And I started just throwing some search terms in there and I came across your essay in City Journal entitled “The Knife Went In” and the way that you described how common it was for offenders to use the passive voice to sort of create distance between themselves and the crimes that they had committed just spoke to me. And that was kind of my first introduction into the idea that there was actually something deeper going on that explained crime and much more clearly than some very common socioeconomic phenomenon like poverty.
You both have had a great deal of exposure to anti-social behavior in different ways. I mean, Tony, through your profession, you have talked to, I think it’s fair to say tens of thousands or certainly over 10,000 criminal offenders. And Rob, I mean, your book Troubled, I mean, you talk about your own personal experiences in terms of your own exposure to anti-social behavior in a very, I think, visceral way. I mean, do you think that that’s part of what’s going on here in terms of the disconnect in some of these policy debates about populations that are experiencing some of these life outcomes like criminality, poverty, some kind of social deprivation?
Rob Henderson: A lot of people who work in policy and shape the discourse around inequality, crime, and social dysfunction are far removed from the communities most affected by these problems. They’ve spent most of their lives around generally well-meaning, responsible, polite people. So in their world, the only reason someone would harm another person is because there must be some deeper, understandable explanation—poverty, mistreatment, oppression, some kind of external force. And based on their own experience, they generalize outward: everyone must be like that. If someone commits a crime, there must be a story that makes it morally legible. That creates, I think, an overly rosy view of human nature—because they’ve mostly been surrounded by good people.
I sometimes joke that the left has a rosy and idealistic view of human nature, but left-wing art is grim and ugly. And on the right it’s the opposite: a grim view of human nature, but right-wing art tends to be inspiring, uplifting, idealistic.
But more broadly, when people live in comfort, predictability, and affluence—surrounded by educated and responsible adults—they can end up creating theories that aren’t grounded in reality. They build these abstractions about what “must” lead someone to behave badly. And it just doesn’t match what I saw growing up. It also doesn’t match a lot of what you see in research and firsthand accounts of criminals: many offenders experience real glee and excitement in exploiting people and evading law enforcement.
Rafael Mangual: That’s exactly right. I mean, I don’t think people fully appreciate, and Tony, I’m interested to hear what some of the offenders that you’ve interacted with have had to say about this. But I mean, in my experience, I mean, I’ve had both friends and family members who were serious criminals who did time, both in jail and prison. And I think people would be surprised about the joy that is derived from offending. I mean, there’s kind of an adrenaline rush, I think, that is chased by some offenders, but I mean, in a lot of ways, certain crimes are fun for individuals. There’s a sense of laughter that is infused throughout the criminal act. I mean, I’ve been in street fights, for example, where after the fight, there’s this kind of bonding experience where we all laugh and tell funny stories about what happened during the melee. And I think it actually is a motivating factor for a lot of people to participate in some of these offenses.
Tony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple): Yeah. Well, I would like ... I mean, there are two things I would like to say. The first is that actually, although it is true that many people haven’t had any contact with this world, if you have a sufficiently strong ideological lens, it can distort any amount of actual experience so that I met people who had had lots of experience, lots of psychiatrists, for example, who had had lots of experience, but nevertheless saw people through what might call the billiard ball theory of human behavior. Someone is struck by a billiard ball and that the other billiard ball goes off in a certain direction, and that’s all there is to it. So I think it’s important that people should have experience, but it’s probably not enough. And there was something else that I was going to say, but I’ve forgotten what it is actually, but ... Yeah, I’ve forgotten what I’m saying.
Rob Henderson: That’s actually helpful for me—this idea that ideology can cloud empirical observation. One thing I’ve struggled to understand is why vulnerable people—people who are most likely to be victimized—sometimes support politicians who want to loosen enforcement, reduce incarceration, or even close prisons. You’d think they would be the least receptive to policies that put more criminals back on the street. The explanation is ideological. It goes back to what I said earlier: in their minds, the only reason someone behaves badly is because they were treated unfairly, or because they’re poor. So the political response becomes less about restraint and consequences, and more about alleviating inequality—about “providing for everyone.” And many of the politicians who take the most permissive stance toward criminals tend to share that same worldview.
This goes back to Marx who claimed that once we reach a certain level of material abundance, then crime would whither away. Who would commit crime if all of their needs are met? But of course, many of those same people who believe that poverty is the cause of crime will readily acknowledge that you can be a billionaire or a CEO or some kind of rich, high status, successful person and still be a criminal. And that in fact, “those are the real criminals.”
Rafael Mangual: That’s right. I wonder if there is a kind of protective factor here to that belief system, Tony. I mean, if I believe that crime and antisocial behavior in general is just a function of some broader societal failure that we can fix, then that gives me hope. Whereas if I believe that crime and antisocial behavior is generally out of my hands to influence, then I might be victimized.
Tony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple): I think it’s very important for us to try and get across the view that if you actually say people are agents and not just victims, and of course there are people who are pure victims, there are, and we have to acknowledge that some people have a very easy passage through life and other people have a very difficult passage through life that we must acknowledge that. I think that people think that if you actually refer to the agency of people who have behaved badly, you’re actually saying to them, “Depart my sight. I’m not going to do anything for you. I detest you. I hate you. There’s no hope for you, “ and so on and so forth. And that possibly is a sign of a loss of religious understanding of sin. I’m not religious myself, but the idea that one should hate the sin, but not the sinner is almost completely gone. And so if you confront, shall we say, a drug addict with the lies he’s telling himself, you’re actually being unkind to him. That’s what the official doctrine really is. He is just evicted and he is supposed to come to me and I will cure him. I will sort everything out for him. Now this is a false bill of goods and I think it actually maintains people in their pathological behavior. So I would say on the whole, I mean, I don’t know whether Rob would agree with this, that the overall effect of criminology, sociology, psychology, and certainly psychiatry as it has turned out, has been socially disastrous because the idea is that people are just vectors of forces has actually affected people at the lowest level of society.
Rafael Mangual: What do you make of that?
Rob Henderson: It’s hard to object to that. There are good researchers within each of those disciplines who have done great work, but taken collectively, to some extent, it probably has stripped people of their agency, or at least the perception is that people no longer have agency and it’s let’s look for the root causes, abstract forces, systemic contributing factors and not what is that person doing? Why did they decide to do that and how can we prevent them from making that decision?
Rafael Mangual: Yeah. I mean, I want to talk a little bit about root causes because that is, I think, a major part of the broader debates about everything from drug policy to crime policy. There are people who think that in order to live virtuously as a policy professional, you have to address yourself to the root causes of some kind of social phenomenon that constitutes a problem. So if it’s a criminality, what are the root causes of crime? And this is of course something that I have rejected in part because my worldview essentially reflects the position that you don’t need to address the root causes to control crime. You can just control crime itself by controlling criminals and incapacitating them through arrest and prosecution and incarceration. And I think that’s a perfectly viable social program and it’s not immoral simply because it doesn’t address itself to what might be at the root of that behavior.
But when I make those arguments, I am consistently confronted with the question of, well, what do you think is at the root of crime? And I’ve spent the last year or so kind of thinking more deeply about that question. And I think that among criminals, and Tony, I’d be curious to see if this is your experience, what you see in criminal populations is an overrepresentation of the kind of cluster B personality disorders, things like antisocial personality disorder, substance use disorders, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder. And if you look at the research on those psychological disorders, which I’m getting from you both may or may not be very useful, it seems like the predictors of the development of those antisocial dispositions are rooted in early childhood trauma. Adverse childhood experiences tend to correlate strongly with the later development of antisocial dispositions. If that’s the case, which may or may not be true, and I’d be curious to what you both make of that, then is that a useful frame to think about root causes, meaning is part of what’s driving outcomes like criminality and drug addiction explainable in whole or in part by what these individuals experienced in childhood that led them on a path where they were still exercising agency in adulthood, but that agency was being exercised against a backdrop of traumatic experiences that led them or at least facilitated them going down a certain path?
Rob Henderson: My answer is yes—childhood trauma is probably a contributing factor in the development of certain personality disorders, and that can increase the propensity for crime. The problem is what happens when we treat that factor as the explanation, to the exclusion of everything else. Instead of using trauma as an explanation, people start using it as a justification. Once the idea becomes common wisdom—childhood trauma leads to crime—it can easily turn into an excuse for behavior. Even people who don’t have those disorders, or who do but still retain agency over their decisions, can point to trauma as a way of absolving themselves of responsibility. That’s always the tension with social-scientific explanations: explanation versus justification. The other thing to keep in mind is that trauma doesn’t determine outcomes in a simple way. You can have two siblings raised in the same family, exposed to similar levels of stress, adversity, and instability—and one becomes law-abiding while the other becomes a criminal. That’s hard to account for if you try to explain everything through childhood factors alone.
Tony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple): Yeah. No generalization about humans is ever going to be a hundred percent. What I came to the conclusion, I mean, this might sound corny a bit, but one of the things I noticed in the environment in which most of my patients grew up and in which most of the prisoners grew up was a radical absence of love or affection. And one, of course, there’s no final explanation. When you say root causes, how do you know when you’ve got to the root and there’s no further root or no deeper root? But one thing I noticed was that they had no affection in their lives, and one can ask why did they have no affections in their lives? And possibly this was related to the structure of family life and the relations between men and women. And the fact is that our relations have been, since the 1950s at least, been totally smashed up, usually for ideological reasons. And if you suggest what seems to me fairly commonsensical view that a stable home background with people who don’t actually detest one another and so on, and where you don’t have a kaleidoscopic cast of people in your home, that is better than the opposite. And of course, people will come and say, “Well, what about case A or case B where people have had terrible circumstances but have turned out very well?” So there are always those circumstances, but if you had to bet on it, the kind of social relations, especially between the sexes which we have created has been, in my view, disastrous. And for example, one of the things I noticed was that, I mean, there was an incredible degree of interpersonal violence, usually man against women, but sometimes woman against men. And by far, the greatest provocation of that was jealousy. Now you ask, “Where does that jealousy come from?” And then you start talking about the structural relations of families or I should say family is a strong word for the relations they add here.
Rob Henderson: Well, the elite solution to this is to eliminate jealousy. No more romantic jealousy. We can have a free society where anyone can love anyone at any moment and have a throuple, a polycule, multiple people in a relationship…In reality, it doesn’t work for most people.
Rafael Mangual: Well, of course it doesn’t work. I mean, and Tony, it sounds like what you’re getting at is what I think a lot of conservatives have been banging the drum about for decades, which is the importance of stable two-parent families. I mean, you can go back to Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the early 1960s writing about the plight of the Black family, which at the time I think about 24 percent of Black kids were being born out of wedlock.
Rob Henderson: Today, the number is higher for white children in the U.S. So when Moynihan wrote that report in the ‘60s, something like 25 percent of Black children were born out of wedlock. Today, about 30 percent of white children are born out of wedlock in the U.S.
Rafael Mangual: And almost 70 percent of Black children are born out of wedlock in the U.S. And conservators are often castigated for making this observation saying, “Well, we’re just being fuddy-duddies and imposing our Victorian morality on the masses.” But when you mentioned the word elite, it just triggered a big part of the work that you do, which is talking about the disconnect between what the elites say and how they live. And one of the reasons that we know single parent households don’t work as well as two married parent households is that single parent households are not the norm. So we can sort of juxtapose the outcomes of people who are raised in one circumstance versus another. And what you see is that even in elite circles, particularly in elite circles, because that’s where I think most of the single parent households, most of the two-parent married households are, you don’t see people living this way. And so talk a little bit about that aspect of your work because you’ve kind of coined a term that has gone viral in so many of the best ways that describes this phenomenon that I think just more people need to engage with.
Rob Henderson: These are luxury beliefs, which I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the credentialed and affluent while imposing costs on the less fortunate. A core feature is that the believer is insulated from the consequences of the belief.
A clear example is the “defund the police” movement. Surveys in 2020 and 2021 consistently showed that higher-income Americans were the most supportive of defunding the police, while lower-income Americans were the least supportive. But if you followed mainstream coverage—glossy magazines, prestigious newspapers—it was framed as a grassroots demand from overpoliced communities. That was never really true.
Even when you break it down by political orientation, it’s the same pattern: white progressives were the most enthusiastic about defunding the police, while Black and Hispanic Democrats were far less supportive.
The same disconnect shows up in discussions of the two-parent family. In 1960, across the socioeconomic spectrum, about 95 percent of American children were raised by two married biological parents. By 2005, among upper and upper-middle-class families—roughly the top 20 percent—that number fell to about 85 percent. A decline, but still a large majority. Among poor and working-class families—the bottom 30 percent—it collapsed from 95 percent to about 30 percent. That’s a massive divergence.
Robert Putnam has made this point bluntly: rich kids and poor kids increasingly grow up in two different Americas—not only economically, but in terms of family structure. In many working-class neighborhoods today, there’s a strong chance children are growing up in non-intact families.
And I think this connects to your earlier point about trauma. Nurture interacts with nature. If a child is predisposed toward impulsivity or antisocial behavior but is raised in a stable environment—with structure, predictability, supervision, and strong role models—that impulse can be contained or redirected. But place that same child in an environment marked by neglect, lack of oversight, gang activity, drugs, and broader cultural messages that deny personal responsibility, and it’s not surprising that the outcome looks very different. And none of this reduces neatly to economics alone.
You often hear people say, “The issue with single parenthood isn’t the absence of a spouse—it’s the lack of money.” But that reflects a narrow view of what parents actually provide.
There was a study about a decade ago that tried to estimate how much money you’d have to transfer to single-parent households to equalize their children’s educational and occupational outcomes with those of married-parent households. Adjusted for inflation, it would be something like $60,000 a year per family. That’s an interesting figure—but not remotely realistic as policy.
And even reading it makes the deeper point obvious: you can imagine telling a kid, “We’re going to take your dad away, but we’ll give you $60,000 a year.” No child would accept that trade. Which tells you, immediately, that parents provide far more than money.
Rafael Mangual: Right. I mean, there’s a lot to unpack there, which is interesting to me. I mean, one is this idea of luxury beliefs. And in the crime debate, I mean, it’s always been interesting to me that some of the loudest apologists for criminal behavior come from people who are not related and who are not at all proximate to the offenders themselves. Whereas within the neighborhoods where crime concentrates and within even the families of criminals, what you hear often is a lot of anger and resentment toward the offender and wish that they would be corrected by some outside force. And I wonder if that was your experience too, Tony.
Tony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple): Certainly one luxury that I suppose you’ve called as luxury belief or a kind of luxury emotion, if you like, is that quite well-off people tend to think of crime as a kind of informal social security for poor people and that actually what they’re doing is restitution rather than crime. And I always found it extremely difficult to get across to middle class people the following very simple consideration. I used to talk to the criminals in the prison and I would say to them, “Tell me what you’ve really done, not what you’ve been charged with doing, but what you’ve actually done.” And because I wasn’t part of the criminal justice system or I wasn’t going to tell anybody, they would tell me what they’d done. And they’d all done 10 up to 20 times as much as they’d ever been charged with. And the statistics in England bear this out. And so the number of crimes committed by a criminal is very, very high. Some of them had committed ... I mean, even to get into prison in Britain, you had to have committed about 20 crimes before you actually got into prison. And I found it very difficult. And I pointed out to my middle-class friends, actually the main victims of crime are the poor, they’re not the posh. I’ve not been ... I mean, only to a very minor extent have I ever been a victim of crime, but crime dominated the lives of the people who lived in very poor areas. So it seemed to me obvious that since the number of victims was very much greater than the number of perpetrators, one possible thing to do would be to incapacitate the perpetrators so that even though there are more perpetrators now than there have ever been, nevertheless, they are a minority of the population, even in the worst areas.
Rafael Mangual: There’s a famous study that out of Sweden that found, I think it was 1 percent of the Swedish population was responsible for something like 63 percent of all of the violent crime.
Tony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple): Yes. I think that it wouldn’t be quite as high as that in England, but nevertheless, it would be very high. And this seems to me so elementary a consideration that I just didn’t understand how people didn’t understand it at once.
Rob Henderson: Was there not a similar stat in New York about something like a very small percentage of the criminal offenders were responsible for most of the shoplifting arrests?
Rafael Mangual: Yeah. I mean, it was something like 300-some-odd shoplifters had generated something like 6,000 arrests for shoplifting on their own, which is, crime is a Pareto-distributed phenomenon. I mean, we see it geographically concentrated, demographically concentrated, concentrated amongst small social networks, the very prolific offenders, which is something I don’t think people fully appreciate. But I want to get back to the discussion about marriage because whether or not conservatives are right about the role of two-parent households in driving some of these outcomes may be less relevant if there is a sort of policy prescription that can help bring this about, or if there isn’t. And there’s one finding about two parent households that always fascinated me, which is yes, generally speaking, two-parent households are better than one, married parents are better than unmarried parents, but if one of the parents is antisocial in their disposition, that that can completely negate the benefits that are generally associated with marriage. And we do see a lot of intergenerational transmission of antisocial behavior. You have kids who are antisocial, it turns out their parents, or at least one of their parents is antisocial.
So in one way, marriage on its own doesn’t seem to be a solution because you still need ... There’s a part in my book that came out in 2022 where I talked a little bit about this and I gave the following example. I said, there was a line in a rap song by an artist named J. Cole that I really liked. And it begins very poignantly with “First things first, rest in peace, Uncle Phil.” Uncle Phil is a character on a popular sitcom from the 90s called The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air featuring Will Smith. And he was the search surrogate stepfather or adoptive father that he never had. He’s a sort of underprivileged youth that gets sent to live with his rich aunt and uncle. And I said, had you replaced Uncle Phil with, say, Tony Soprano, the outcomes of the children in that household would not have been nearly as good despite the fact that both parents would’ve been married and had money, but having a pro-social disposition is not something that public policy can produce on its own. So how do we get around that problem?
Rob Henderson: The problem of disintegrating families?
Rafael Mangual: Or just the fact that, I mean, you could, in some weird world, force people to get married or incentivize them to get married, but if you can’t do anything about their underlying social disposition. So is marriage really a solution or is it just a symptom of pro-social disposition, in which case ...
Rob Henderson: Marriage rates used to be much higher than they are now. And they weren’t always stratified by class. Marriage rates used to be relatively similar across the socioeconomic spectrum. Fertility patterns, too, were more similar across groups.
This is a rough way of putting it, but the freer and more permissive a society becomes, the more individual traits start to matter. If you live in a society with very little stigma around behavior—where people can live however they want—then marriage becomes something people self-select into. It ends up disproportionately attracting people who are more conscientious, more long-term oriented, and more inclined toward commitment. But in a more rigid society—where there’s a stronger “life script,” where certain relationships are praised and others are socially discouraged—most people will still follow a specific life sequence regardless of their individual traits. Even if it’s not perfectly aligned with their temperament. I don’t know how we get back to that, though.
Melissa Kearney’s book The Two-Parent Privilege is interesting on this. She has a number of thoughtful ideas. As an economist, she leans toward financial support for families. I’m not opposed to that, but I suspect the impact would be limited. The other idea she raises—and I think this might actually be more effective—is cultural: married people speaking more publicly and unapologetically about the fact that marriage is generally a good thing. There’s a lot of research showing that married people are happier than unmarried people, and they have more sex and better sex lives. And married people with children tend to be happier than married people without children. It’s the whole package.
Rafael Mangual: I will say, as someone who’s married with two kids, I am happier than I’ve ever been.
Rob Henderson: I’ve told this story before, but I once had a conversation with an editor at a well-known magazine. He mentioned they had recently run an essay by a woman who divorced her husband and started an OnlyFans account. This was probably in 2023 or 2024. For listeners who don’t know, OnlyFans is a platform where people can post sexually explicit content for paying subscribers. The magazine story was framed as a kind of liberation narrative: this woman left her husband, started OnlyFans, and the essay was essentially about how happy and “empowered” she felt. So I asked the editor: would you ever run the inverse story? A woman who shut down her OnlyFans account, met someone, got married, and was happier because of it? He said, “We would never run that story.” And that tells you a lot about the incentives—what gets applauded, what gets filtered out, and what kinds of lives cultural elites are implicitly promoting.
Rafael Mangual: Right. No, I mean, I think that’s interesting. And you talked about Melissa Kearney’s book, and she and I both spoke at a conference together last year, and we had a chance to interact a little bit. But one of the things about her book that stood out to me was that she sort of explains the dichotomy in terms of marriage rates. So the upper class, college educated people tend to be more likely to get married than non-college educated people. And part of the explanation she says for why marriage has become less common among the lower classes is that men are less marriageable. They are less attractive to mates because they’re less financially secure. They don’t have the same economic prospects that someone in that class might’ve had. And the question that really bugs me about that explanation is, but then why don’t you see as steep a drop off in childbearing within those populations?
Rob Henderson: Oh, you do?
Rafael Mangual: As steep.
Rob Henderson: Oh, not as steep.
Rafael Mangual: I mean, we still have a massive amount of kids being born to single parents. Most of those kids are being born to single parents in the lower socioeconomic strata. We know that it’s financially detrimental.
Rob Henderson: The overall fertility rate is declining. That decline is actually more concentrated among lower income women than college educated women. So it’s declined for everyone, but it’s particularly steep for lower income.
Rafael Mangual: Well, I guess the question would do the women. Why would a socioeconomic concern drive the decision not to marry, but not drive the decision not to have children?
Tony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple): I would say that, of course, a child is an existential purpose in life. So that for those people, having a child is extremely important and one can’t disregard that. And although they’re of course very bad, often very bad at bringing up their children, their children, once a child reaches the age of three or four, he’s horrible as the parents would say. So they would try again and have another child, the triumph of hope over experience. But I think for lots of women having a child is the main purpose of their existence and it doesn’t really take very much for them to get a child. So I think that’s probably the explanation. I think what we’re seeing actually is a kind of change in society from a class society into a caste society. And I think that’s something I find very worrying that the kind of dichotomy in the population and there’s not much contact between them.
But however, another thing that we must always remember is that we will never defeat antisocial behavior or crime. And in fact, Durkheim said that a crime, actually the existence of crime, he didn’t say how much crime, but existence of crime actually unites society against the criminal. That used to be the case. I’m not sure now. Yeah. But anyway, we should not expect marriage to solve all the problems because all the problems will never, never be solved. And so that’s what we must always remember. We mustn’t be utopian about this.
Rafael Mangual: Well, this actually reminds me of a conversation Rob and I were just having offline before the show started, which is ... So I was participating in a debate series at UC Berkeley a couple of years ago alongside our colleague, Heather Mac Donald, whose work is obviously fantastic. And I was on a panel with some police abolitionists and we were debating the merits and demerits of police abolition. And the entire argument of the abolitionists was that crime was just purely a function of socioeconomic deprivation and all we had to do was eliminate poverty, which we can do if we just stop spending so much money on the criminal justice system. And when it was my turn to speak, I mean, I got up and I said to the audience, I said, “I think all of you need to take a step back and really thoroughly appreciate the degree to which my opponent’s argument is driven by hubris because there’s never existed a society without crime or predation or poverty or socioeconomic inequality.” The idea that we could solve that and that the solution to that kind of dynamic can be found in a small classroom on the UC Berkeley campus just struck me as the height of hubris. I mean, what makes you think that you are going to solve a problem that has proven intractable, that has existed in every society that’s ever donned the face of the earth at any point in human history? And I think the part of what sort of explains the most important divides in our policy debates is exactly that, the level of humility. On the right, you tend to have, and I was just rereading Ed Banfield’s The Unheavenly City. And throughout that book, I was just shocked by the humility that you don’t often see among leftist academics for sure, which is that, I mean, he would consistently say, “I don’t think that there is a public policy answer to a lot of the problems that sort of describe the lower classes.” And I want to end with your takes on that. I mean, what is the capacity of social policy to improve some of these outcomes? Yeah. How confident should we be that we can legislate our way to, if not utopia, something close to it?
Rob Henderson: As you were describing your debate opponents at Berkeley—people who attribute essentially everything to poverty—I couldn’t help but wonder how they’d explain somewhere like North Korea. GDP per capita is something like $3,000 a year, yet there’s very little crime. That alone should complicate the simplistic “poverty causes crime” story. More broadly, I agree with Tony: there will always be some level of crime and disorder. The real question is how much. And we’ve seen dramatic shifts. Think about the explosion in violent crime in the United States in the 1960s—after the introduction of more generous state benefits, welfare programs, cash transfers, and so on. I also remember reading striking data from Scandinavian countries: their modern welfare states weren’t fully implemented until the 1960s, and after those benefits expanded, theft, burglary, and shoplifting rose sharply. So I don’t think economic policy can “solve” crime. Culture matters more—social norms, role models, and what influential people and institutions signal as admirable or acceptable. Elites shape what kinds of lives people aspire to, and what behavior gets excused or condemned. Policy, in that sense, is limited. And in some cases, it can actually increase disorder and crime. What’s less clear is how much it can meaningfully reduce it.
Tony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple): I think the criminal justice system could play some kind of part.
Rafael Mangual: Sure. Yeah. I mean, we can absolutely incapacitate the…
Tony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple): But I think it’s very important to bang on in a way and try and hammer it into the public’s mind because you won’t do anything until you’ve got the public on your side. For example, take the country like New Zealand. In New Zealand, in 1950, there were 200 violent crimes known to the police. And in 2000, by which time the population had doubled, there were 70,000. Now, it would be ridiculous to say that this was because of an increase in population. Or in England, if you take England, in 1938, there were 8,500 prisoners in Great Britain. And last year, I think it was, there were 87,500, but that isn’t all. For each prisoner, there were six times as many indictable crimes as there had been in 1938. So I mean, there’s a very crude measure, but this suggests that there has been a vast increase in criminality. It cannot possibly be the result of increased poverty or increased inequality because inequality was much greater in 1938 than it is now. So something else must be the explanation. And I think it’s very important to get this across to a general population which rather lazily, I suppose, accepts the notions that, especially the intellectual part of the population, that sociologists, criminologist, psychologists, psychiatrists feed them.
Rafael Mangual: I think that’s right. I mean, I really do. And I mean, Rob, you mentioned culture. It seems to me that that absolutely needs to be part of the solution. I don’t know how we change culture through policy, but it sounds like you’re kind of making a case for change through influence. And so maybe it’s a good thing that we’re living through the age of the influencer.
Rob Henderson: Well, assuming those influencers are saying the right things…
Rafael Mangual: Well that’s a whole other question, but I do think it’s important for us to be humble about what questions we actually had the answers to, how much human behavior we can change and direct. And we’re not marionettes that can just be…
Tony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple): One important step is to admit the phenomena and I think large parts of the intellectual class, if you call the intellectuals a class, have not accepted the existence of these phenomena.
Rafael Mangual: Well, I think that’s exactly right. And on that bit of wisdom, I think we will call it a show. I want to thank you both, especially you, Tony, for joining us from jolly old England, which I think is what, six hours ahead. So we really appreciate you taking the time to you all watching and listening. We really appreciate you as our audience members. As always, please do not forget to hit that like and subscribe button, leave us a comment, ask us a question. We’ve been loving all the interaction and we look forward to bringing you another great episode of the City Journal Podcast next week. Until then, we’ll see you soon.
Originally published in City Journal under the title “Who We Are: Psychology, Behavior, and Society.”