Jonathan Haidt: evaluation

Transcript context

…Let me start with some nonbook questions, though they’re related. Who makes for better parents, left wingers or right wingers? Right wingers. There’s a lot of data on this. There’s long been a slight gap where conservatives are a little happier than liberals, and it’s not clear why. Is that parenting? Who knows? But what I found in doing the research for the book is that the gap between left and right became a chasm after 2012. We’ll get to the reasons why that is, but the bottom line is, when kids are rooted in communities, they don’t get washed out to sea by the phone-based childhood, by living by the virtual world. Over and over again, whether we look at left-right or whether we look at religion, what we find is that it’s the secular kids and the liberal kids who got washed out to sea, got really depressed after 2012, and much less effect on the conservative and religious kids because, I think, they’re more rooted. Now, if parenting is the most important thing, which you seem at many times to believe, why aren’t you just a right winger? Because right wingers, according to you, get that right. It would be your community, right? You’re talking about community. Embrace that community.…

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