Ep. 388: What’s Worrying Jon Haidt Now? + Should You Buy a Landline? (Cal just did…)

Two years ago, the NYU social scientist Jonathan Haidt exploded into the public conversation with the publication of his book, The Anxious Generation. This book argued that smartphones had helped trigger a mental health epidemic in kids and teenagers. Now, this book was a massive bestseller. It sold over a million copies by the 2024 and many more since. Now, The Anxious Generation was a hit in large part because Haidt was giving data to back up something that most parents already felt intuitively. They saw what happened to their own kids when they got their hands on their phones. They knew that it was a problem, and John Haidt had the receipts to prove that they were right. Not everyone, however, immediately embraced Haidt's message. Many elite journalists and academics were suspicious. They thought his message was too simple and it was too neat, and that it diverted attention from the types of harms like, structural racism and economic inequality that they were more interested in highlighting. A dismissive review of the anxious generation that appeared in the journal Nature, for example, claimed that Height's argument was, quote, not supported by science, end quote, and then warned that, quote, rising hysteria could distract us from tackling the real causes, end quote. But these critics had a problem. Haidt knew what he was talking about. Starting in 2019, he began constructing with the help of the demographer, Jean Twenge and the researcher, Zach Rausch, a massive annotated bibliography of every serious paper published about the impact of phones on teens. In fact, I'll load this bibliography on the screen right now for people who are watching instead of just listening. What I'm showing you right now, this is just a table of contents of all the different studies that are in here. These are all just categories of studies. And if you look in here a little bit closer, you'll see, they're summarizing for all these studies. They'll have a summary of what's going on. They'll have the abstract. They'll have comments, reactions to the studies, reactions to people responding to it, key graph from within it, etcetera. What I'm trying to say here is Haidt had become one of the world's experts on this research literature. So he wasn't just going with his gut when he wrote The Anxious Generation. The harms he described were very carefully and in a nuanced fashion being measured by real researchers. Now here's the thing. Soon after the anxious generation came out, it became harder and harder to ignore the reality that Heights seemed like he was right. One of the clearest validations was when last year, many schools began banning phones, and they saw immediate positive improvements, not just in learning, but in their kids' social interactions and in their mental health. So we are currently arriving at a moment in which John Haidt, for all intents and purposes, has been vindicated. Perhaps nothing captures us more clearly than, the following tweet …