Jim Penman argues real wages stopped growing not because of technology or globalization, but because affluence and easy access to sex, drugs, and high-stimulus entertainment have made young men dopamine-insensitive, killing their appetite for routine work. The result: fewer people in the labor force, rising mental illness, and fewer births.
Hi, I'm Jim Penman. I'm a businessman who's funded a research institute into, amongst other things, the birth rate crisis. Why are birth rates dropping? I've written previous books including Epigenetics and Character and Biohistory, about to release Birth Rate Crisis. Okay, what we see from this chart is that productivity has gone up quite a lot, obviously, over the last century, and particularly since the Second World War. But, and for a while, real wages kept pace. But lately, they are leveling out. There's no longer an increase. Now, why is this happening? You look at the developments in terms of IT and so forth. They've gone dramatically forward. And you've got internationalization, and you could buy from other countries and stuff. So these things should all be increasing people's wealth. Why is it that real wages are not increasing as they used to? Now, the reason behind this is that there's a change in character in the general population. apart from possibly the very, very most skilled people, which makes people less interested in work. What we've got is a decline in the work ethic. There's more and more people who are not working and not wanting to work, who are out of the workforce, who are living— more and more people are in that situation, especially young men. And why is this happening? It's actually the same character changes that is causing an increase in mental illness and a decline in birth rate. And what it's the result of is that people's brains are becoming insensitive to dopamine. This is a result of what's going on in society with the wealth, the affluence, the sex, the drugs, the alcohol, all these sort of things that are making people's brains less sensitive to dopamine. When your brain is less sensitive to dopamine, you want big surges like video games or travel or excitement or big crowds or parties. That's all very attractive. Things like family and also routine work are less attractive. So there's a change in character caused by dopamine sensitivity that is causing people to be less interested in work, less want to work, less want to put their heart and soul into their work. And as a result of that, wages are stagnating. And if this continues, which it will, we'll actually find the work ethic going down further and further. As it is, it's even more marked among young people. And as that happens, the level of productivity will start to drop eventually too.
Rising mental illness and falling birth rates have the same cause, it is this.....
