Jonathan Haidt: prediction

Transcript context

…You’re saying the COVID school shutdowns were not a good natural experiment for kids having less face time with each other? I would say it is. It would be hard to design a better natural experiment. It’s truly exogenous. Well, yes, but you’re changing so many other things. Also, a part of the story here is that American schools, in particular, are depressogenic. That is, when you look at the suicide rate, there’s a big increase. My colleague Peter Gray, a play researcher, has pointed this out over and over again. The suicide rate goes down substantially in the summer. I’m not sure about Christmas vacation, but the point is, it’s very clear: Every year, as soon as kids go back to school, the suicide rate goes up. It’s not as though school is making kids happy because we do school really badly. Yes, they’re freed from school, but so much changes. For some kids, once they were out of school, they actually could see their friends more — some kids. Other kids were more isolated. I think we’d want to look at what happened to the kids who are stuck in their room alone. I bet those kids went down. And what happened to the kids who are out of school, and they have siblings, they have friends in the neighborhood, and they saw them more. So, it’s not a clean experiment. Let me step back a bit and ask you a very long-run historical question. It seems to me that European culture and society, maybe starting around 1900 — it becomes more neurotic, more depressive, more negative, more hostile. Why did that happen?…

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