>> good evening and welcome to the american enterprise institute. my name is christopher's philia. i am a senior fellow here at

aei. our dream lecture series, the fourth installment, this series seeks to revitalize our nation's or institutions -- core institutions and values by inviting prominent writers and thinkers to address some significant all troll and social issues facing the united states. as we approach the 250th anniversary of america's founding, these are an opportunity to ask how healthy are our national institutions, our foundational suppose, and our citizens? what threats do they face in what form are they available? in a variety of featured speakers, the american dream lecturers continue the aei bradley series, which for decades enriched high-profile lecturers about state of american politics and culture.

when you entered coming may have seen flyers listing the events we've held so far. i hope you took one to bring home. they make a perfect party gift. [laughter] they list some of the events we've had and some events to come. for some of you watching via livestream come on may 7, we are having ruth weiss here to speak about anti-semitism, followed by a conversation with aei's matthew kime eddie. in 20 12, mark zuckerberg announced he hoped facebook would "rewire the way people spread and consume information." as well as transform "many of our core institutions and industries." a developer that recently made that hope possible was the rise of the smartphone which helped

us not only check up on our high school friend of these -- frenemies from the palm of our hand but also share pictures, play games, in short, the distracted from the rest of the world around us. for many of the social media platforms and technological products created, they were more than just the spread and consumption of information. in 2008, nicholas carr asked, stupid? by the mid-2010's, it was worth asking, are small phones and social media making us antisocial yucca are they disconnecting us from our communities? are they making us depressed, exacerbating problems from childhood that have been generations in the making?

are they pulling us downward instead of elevating us? what does this mean for our social institutions? and how can a people cohere and participate in public life? we are fortunate to have with us today dr. jonathan haidt. dr. haidt is the professor at the new york university stern school of business, the author of such books as "the happiness hypothesis," and the new york times bestsellers "the anxious generation: how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness " and "the coddling of the american mind," co-authored with greg. and most recently, of course, "the anxious generation: how the great rewiring of childhood is

causing an epidemic of mental illness. " since 2019, we have been studying social media to the rise of the political dysfunction viewed he's written more than 100 articles, cited more than 100 times. in 2019, he was inducted into the american academy of arts and sciences, and he has given four tech talks and now even more impressively, he is here for his first american dream lecture at aei. in his latest book, "the anxious generation," he looked at the playbook in the 1980's paired with the more recent rise of the cell phone childhood, causing a decline in teen mental health as well as spiritual degradation. he also provided suggestions for how families and policymakers can alleviate these problems. along the way, he offers insights into childhood, human

nature, and psychological developer that are so radiant, it could be dangerous to look directly into them. we are fortunate to have him here today to discuss how some of the phenomenon he has tracks influence not only our mental health but also our spiritual life. he will deliver opening remarks on the harms caused by social media for about 20, 25 minutes, and that he will be joined on stage for a discussion with dr. christine rosen, a senior fellow here at aei, focusing on american history, society, cultural, technology, and feminism. she's also a columnist for "commentary magazine," and one of the cohosts for the podcast, advanced studies and culture, and a senior editor in an advisory position at the new atlantis. she's the author or co-author of many books and book chapters in

this fall, she will publish "the extinction of experiments," which investigates the cultural and emotional shift that accompanies our embrace of technology, in other words, the ideal interlock for dr. haidt. we will turn to audience questions, afterwards i hope you will join us for deep conversations in our adjoining gallery. it looks like there are a few copies of dr. haidt's book left. i don't want to stampede, so don't get them now, but after the talk, you are welcome. ladies and gentlemen, please put down your phone and put your hands together for dr. haidt. [applause] dr. haidt: thank you so much, chris.

you really set up a perfect talk for me today. the book came out two weeks ago, and i've been giving versions of the same talk pretty much everywhere, but today, i decided to do something pretty much different, how my ties to aei through 2007 have actually influenced me and helped me to get where i am today. peace of the story as i was a professor at the university of virginia for many years. during that time, my first book was called "the happiness hypothesis," and when arthur published his book on happiness, he invited me to aei. i said ok, i'm in new territory, but how bad could it be? [laughter] again, i came up, i was treated really well, the conversations were great, i got to know arthur, and we were friends over

the years. but that was 2006 or 2007, right around when i started working on my book "the righteous mind," which is about psychology, where we polarize, why are we so divided by politics? and it began a period of trying to understand conservatives and lay them out honestly in the book. it really opened my mind to not being a partisan anything. where are the good ideas, let's look for good ideas all over and see what we can do with them. a lot of materials i have not shown before here in this 25-minute talk. first, i can summarize the whole book in two different ways. the first is, the basic argument is a play-based childhood, which is what we've had for millions of years, faded out gradually in

this country between 1980 and 2010, and all of a sudden, in the blink of an item of the phone-based childhood swept in between 2010 and 2015. that, i think, is what did it. i think it pushed gen z over the edge. we also protected our children in the real world where they need huge amounts of various experience can and we have under protected them online, but there are no protections of any kind for children. let me show you an indirect way to get there. so when i began thinking about "the righteous mind," i began to teach a course in psychology at the university of virginia in 2004, and i was in new york city at the time at university of virginia, and there was a big, thick book that that "conservatism" on the spine, and

i pulled it off. i started reading the introduction to the book. the introduction was so clear and so powerful as a set of ideas that made sense to me as a social scientist, that i had to sit there on the floor and read it. i did buy the book and walk out with it, and i did teach it. some ideas that got me right away, the psychological differences of left and right, what is conservative thought? liberals typically view with suspicion penalties imposed by the institution. conservatives protect the authority of existing institutions, because they believe human society cannot

flourish without them. he says the restraints imposed by institutions are necessary to constrain and guide human passion, and i'm paraphrasing what he says a moment later, the famous quote from edmund burke, that the restraints on men as well as their liberties ought to be reckoned by their rights. at the time, i was a 43-year-old political liberal, but it was a surprising statement, a provocative statement, so i was thinking about that. this way of thinking influenced me in writing "the righteous mind," in which, in chapter eight, why conservatives have an advantage in american politics, they seem to know some things about the moral taste buds, the moral buttons of american voters that the democrats often fail to realize. the idea of society based on the

writings of john stuart mills, where all individuals are equal, all should be left to form relationships as they please. that sounded really good to me at the time to to the extent i say i am a liberal, it is in this sense, a john stuart mill liberal. i wanted to contrast that with what i found resonating, i've a social conservative, not too much economic service, to which i appealed to my favorite social kind, to contrast of millions of society, imagine a society not an agreement of an individual but something that emerged organically over time, as people found a way of living together, suppressing each other's selfishness, so i suggest that emile durkheim, because he suggests in the magnificent book "suicide," which i've read in graduate school, he wrote men

cannot submit to higher aims but seen nothing above him to which he belongs, to free himself of all social pressure but abandon himself and demoralize himself. so these ideas and putting out there now, i will come back in about 10 minutes, because i think they really solve a mystery from a puzzle that i'm going to put to you right now. this is the outline of my standard book talk i've been giving over the past couple of months. i don't have time to give most of it, but what i want to show you is where there is a gap. i need a section 3.5 on the weakening community institutions. my theory is a two-part theory, loss of the play-based childhood, birth of the phone post childhood, but this draconian binding stuff, i'm now realizing there may be a third, equally important feature of what happened to all of us with

devastating effects on young people. let me explain this. i'm going to show you now what has happened to americans born after 1995. raise your hand if you are a gnc, born after 1995? ok, great, keep me honest. if you have objections come if you think i've got something wrong, please tell me, because that is how i get better. here's just basic stats, representative data from american colleges. in 2012, all of the college students are millennials, and as gen z comes in, psychological disorders go up the most. th biggest difference between gen z and millennials is gen z has higher rates of anxiety disorders, depression. from different data, we can see that the increase of especially

anxiety and depression. what i want to show you is in all of these graphs, if you stop your data collection in 2010, you see nothing, no trend before that. if you go past 2010, college students, again, 2010, they are millennials, but as college students become gen z, rates of anxiety and depression go away, way up. now, it is just gen z. there used to be a small difference between age groups, it's not like the world is changing, it's really gen z and some label lineal -- late millennials that are getting hit by this. and it is gender. girls and women on the top, and what we see -- now, to be clear, the boys are also getting more depressed and anxious. we are starting at much lower rates, but relatively speaking,

they are also getting, you know, 1.5 times more depressed. . and interesting feature of this graph, because the 2022 data came in just a month ago, so i added it to the graph to see that covid actually did not do much. that is, depression and anxiety was all baked in by 2019. basically the trendline was unaffected by covid. and some people have challenged me, saying oh, this is just, you know, changing diagnostic criteria. is sally patel here? sally is a wonderful psychiatrist to read the book and gave me amazing comments on the book. in any case, you know, she has been concerned about concept cream and molding definitions, and certainly it happens some people say oh, the kids are all right, this is a moral panic,

it's just young people are more likely to admit it, and that is a good thing. if that were true, it would not show up in behavior, it would only show up and sell for wording. this is technically emergency room visits. teens take into emergency room for nonfatal self-harm, this is younger teens, the most dramatic increases. girls at 180%. 10-year-old, 14-year-old girls used to not cut themselves in this country. they cut themselves at the way older girls did 20 years ago. once again, 10-year-old to 14-year-olds had very low suicide rates, but once we go through this period, they go way, way up, and astonishing 67% increase in a single year, between 2011 and 2013, as if something happened the 2012.

it is exactly the same pattern, self-harm, hospitalizations, medical records and the u.k., here's canadian data. this is different, high is good you see the youngest woman used to be the happiest. this is actually a fairly universal pattern called the u- shaped curve of happiness. the happiest people have always been young adult, late teens and early 20's, and people in their 60's and 70's. they are the happiest people. people in their 40's, 50's have the heaviest burdens, and this is roll over the world. i got a paper from blanche flower showing that in 27 countries, the u-shaped curve is over, because young people are now the least happy all over the world. and now i want to bring in a

really interesting twist on the data is going to really link up with what i was telling you before. so it turns out that it is not hitting conservatives the same way. these are some researchers who took this, monitoring the future study. sometimes i think i'm no good at all or my life has no purpose. so there's really something about despair. what we see here is there's a very small difference between liberals and conservatives, from 2010 did this has long been known, debated, but conservatives are happiness, that is one of the points about this book, on happiness. so that is one of the points was that this finding, liberals are little more neurotic, a little bit more creative, little bit less conscientious, so there are some personality differences

that, you know, i can walk into a room i know that this is not a left-wing group, because the men are wearing jackets, this would not happen in a left-wing organization. these things have long been known, but they used to be pretty small, until 2010. here's what happened. everybody is up, but the liberal girls and boys go up, and the liberal girls go up the fastest. pew has a panel they've done recently, in april of 2020, covid, we are all concerned. the question was, has a doctor or health care provider ever told you you had a mental health condition? what we see here is a two way

reaction, and you can see that there is an age gradient, that young people are more likely to be told they have a mental health condition from elderly people, even though they have been alive much longer, there have been more diagnosis in recent decades. so you see two factors there that matter. but the data for liberals, the study difference, we see a three-way attraction. we see younger liberals are more likely to say yes than moderates or conservatives. we see that the male-female difference is larger among liberals, and we see young women, young white women, who favor on the left, the majority of them said they have a mental health condition. so something is going on that really affected girls after 2010. the difference before 2010 was

small. why is this happening? at the same time, right here on 2012, 2013 come in many countries, the biggest impact on young girls and liberals, what is going on? i believe that my book offers the only theory that can explain it. people tell me oh, it may have been the great, global financial crisis in 2008, which then hit the young girl's heart is in every country, even in canada? it does not make any sense. there is no alternative that works around the world. i think that this is the theory that explains it, especially if i add the first factor that i'm presenting to you today, the weakening of communities and institutions. now, let me just show you very briefly, this is the really easy and fun way to illustrate how quickly childhoods changed. so i want you to all think about

the age at which you were given freedom, you could walk out the door, say goodbye to your parents, you are on your bicycle, you walk to a friend's house, no adult supervision. if that was you in first grade coming a number is 6. if that was not you until seventh grade, your number is 12. look at the age you were let out. first, only raise your hand if you were born before, let's say, 1984. ok, so you are all gen x, older millennials, and baby boomers like me. yell out your number, just the older people, ok. >> 8. >> 6. >> 8. dr. haidt: ok, so 6 to 8, if you were not let out by fourth grade, someone is going to call your family. what are they doing to that kid? he can't come out to play?

[laughter] now let's do gen z. and also, parents, raise your hand if you are parents of gen z, if you have gen z kids. think about the age of your kid, just real gen z folks, get ready to yell your number as you pointed out -- as i point it out. this is what i always find. look at the difference. those who grew up in the crime wave, when there were drunk drivers, and some of them were us -- that is just what we did. [laughter] life was kind of dangerous. but everyone without. it was just normal. and then in the 1990's, crime plummets.

in any case, the point is, life in the 1990's got really safe, we've got mothers against drunk drivers, and we said you know what? were not going to let our kids out. they will get abducted. we can't let our kids out. so that is just to show you just how radically childhood has changed. we locked up our kids. we did not give them freedom. and it is sad, the american experiment is an experiment in self-governance. can we govern ourselves to that extent? that is the big question. kids learn to be self-governing on the playground, by having games and conflicts and adjudication of those conflicts, and we decide in the 1990's, the more of that. we are not going to let young people participate in democracy.

we are just going to protect them all the time. so that was bad enough, but strangely, the rates of mental illness did not really rise with a millennials. it is actually pretty good. they don't get more depressed and anxious. in a way, we were sort of weakening young people, and then the phones, the phone-based childhood comes in, and that is when all hell breaks loose. there were two very discrete waves of technology. the first one, the pc, you cannot do that much with it. the internet comes in, and it is very slow, you put your phone on income and it makes some noise, but it is very slow. that affected a lot of millennials, because a lot of millennials, got on aol.

remember that from the 1990's. many people thought, i've got power. this is incredible. then we get into the 21st century, and all these apps are coming out. so the first wave was amazing. . it is the second wave, though, that is so different, social media, 2003, 2004, with myspace and facebook. then you pair it with a smart phone, and all of a sudden you have young people who don't sit on their parents computer to go on aol, they have the entire internet in their pocket all the time, even on the school bus, even in the lunchroom. they have an instrument in their hand all the time. and so this is what i am calling the great rewiring of childhood. "the little rascals," i used to watch that when i was a kid, what life was like even up to the 1980's, where you could ride around town.

it was a thing that was totally normal. and this is what it has become. if you are a boy, you cannot go to your friend's house, you have to go home alone to your house to get your headset, your controller come into play video games with your friends. you have to be alone. if you're a girl, you are posting on social media, lighting and wondering why they are not liking yours. this is another data set, the average amount of time that americans spend obviously the 15-24-year-olds spend a lot of time because they are not married, that don't have jobs, they spend a lot of time with friends. until we get into the 2010s, and look what happens.

it plummets for young people only, not for older people at all. and look at this, during the time of covid lockdown. >> we are having some audio issues with this program and we hope to have the problem resolved very soon. we will be back very soon. >> earlier today, the u.s. ambassador to japan and others premiered the official visit to the united states. you can see the event tonight a 9:00 eastern on c-span, c-span now, our free mobile video app, or online at c-span.org. >> this week is the opening of the impeachment trial of homeland security secretary alejandro mayorkas, only the second cabinet member in u.s.

history to be impeached by the house. when, house impeachment managers that by homeland security committee chair mark green delivers the two articles of impeachment to the senate. refusing to comply with immigration laws and breach of public trust. patty murray presides over the trial. sent minority leader mitch mcconnell says the chambers expected to vote on whether to dismiss or kill the impeachment charges. live coverage wednesday on c-span2, on c-span now, our free mobile video app, and online at c-span.org. >> former president donald trump announced via the social media platform through social that he is declining to endorse national limits on aboron, leaving the issue in the hands of the states. former vice president mike pence was critical of mr. trump's announcement. his statement reads in part, president trump's retreat on the right to life is a slap in the face to the millions of pro-life

americans who voted for him i 2016 and 2020. by nominating nomination of conservative justices, it gave the pro-life movement the opportunity to compassionately support women and uorn children. former president trump's announcement comes after his campgn floated the idea of a 15 week abortion ban earlier this year. >> c-span is your unfiltered view of government. we are funded by these television companies and more, including buckeye broadband. ♪ >> buckeye broadband supports c-span as a public serce, along with these other tele