Plain English with Derek Thompson - Curiosity Corner: Monkeypox Myths, Millennial Facts, and Overpopulation Fears

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

In our second "Curiosity Corner" mailbag, Derek takes your burning questions. He breaks down the myths around how monkeypox spreads, and blasts public health officials for not being more specific about who is most affected. He explains how, while millennials face an affordability crisis in developed countries, they might not want to trade their global generation for any previous period in history. And he answers a listener who asks whether we should fear population collapse more than we fear overpopulation. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. You can find us on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_ Host: Derek Thompson Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Today, we've got CuriosityCornorner Mailbag. Number two, you had questions about monkeypox and millennial facts and overpopulation versus underpopulation fears, and we have answers for you. Thank you so, so much for sending all of these questions. It's a huge honor to see all these people that are listening to the show and engaging with the show and really understand what I think this show is about, that we're trying to to, yes, have some episodes that are pivoting very directly off of the news cycle and some episodes that just have absolutely nothing to do with the new cycle, that are just things

that I'm interested in, things like the future of science and technology, what's happening to music and pop culture. You guys get it, and it's just beautiful to see these emails. So please keep them coming. I'm sorry, of course, if you can't get to everyone's email. So what Devin and I try to do here is answer questions where we're getting a lot of emails around into the same subject, thinking that those are going to be the most relevant to the audience. So, yeah, we got monkeypox, we got millennials, we got overpopulation. Thanks, as always, for writing. I'm Derek Thompson, and this is plain English.

Let's start with the mailbag. Devin, what do you got? Okay, Derek, we got a lot of questions from listeners about monkeypox. Here's Jacob from Washington. He writes, hi Derek and Devin, I was wondering if you would be able to do an episode on Monkeypox. There seems to be a lot of confusion about how serious the threat is and what we can do to prevent another COVID-type situation. Jacob, thank you for this question. Monkeypox is a very serious disease, but the relatively good news here is about severity and contagiousness.

So monkeypox spreads much less easily than COVID, and the number of the number of deaths remains pretty muted. So the World Health Organization's latest dashboard shows records of 26,000 cases worldwide compared to eight deaths. That's one death in every 3,200 cases. That's pretty low. It's much lower than the reported case fatality rate of COVID. And it's much, much lower than the fatality rate that we saw from Monkeypox in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1980s during an outbreak there. The fatality rate there was about 1 in 10. So 1 in 10, deaths, so one death in every 10 monkeypox cases in Congo in the 1980s, one death in every 3,200 cases in the world today. I don't think we have a full or perfect explanation of why the fatality rate

is that low. It might be about case measurement or health care access, something to do with the strain, maybe all three. But we have a good news, bad news situation here. The bad news is that monkeypox is a serious, serious disease, the good news is that the global fatality rate is for now pretty low. Let's talk a little bit, though, about how it spreads and where it's spreading right now. So today, if you're listening to this show from the U.S., the U.S., the U.K., Europe, another OECD country, another developed country, the vast majority of cases around you are among men who have sex with men. And again, going back to the World Health Organization's data, of the cases where we know the sex, 99% are male. And of the cases where we know the sexual orientation,

98% are men who sleep with men. And in terms of the mechanics of the transmission of this disease, right, there's these rumors that monkeypox is spreading through the air, that it's aerosolized, so to speak, just like COVID. This seems to be mostly bullshit. Everything we know today suggests that Monkeypox spreads most efficiently from prolonged skin-to-skin contact, prolonged skin-to-skin contact. And so you think, okay, what kind of activities involve prolonged skin-to-skin contact? Business conferences? Not really.

Bars? Nope. Sex? You bet. So that's why the contagion profile of this disease, I think, looks so different than COVID, which, of course, spreads very efficiently through the air at places like conferences at bars. there's also, by the way, some evidence that monkeypox, the virus itself can live in semen, and that might also go a little bit of the way toward explaining why 98% of the cases seem to be among

men having sex with men. Now, there are public health officials or public commentators who've argued that it's homophobic to say this disease mostly affects men who have sex with men. The idea, I think, is that it's stigmatizing to have people think of monkey pox like it's a gay disease. I can't tell you how absurd and profoundly unhelpful I find this argument. It is not bigoted to say strictly true things about a disease. It is not bigoted to just say the truth. Think about COVID. COVID has been, still is, much more dangerous for very old people than it is for children.

It's not agist to say that. Can you imagine if in the early innings of nursing home deaths in America that public health commentators said we shouldn't talk about all the nursing home deaths because it might stigmatize old people. Like what? That's ridiculous. You defeat diseases with knowledge. You defeat disease with knowledge.

You convert the knowledge into action, right? Like reduce the frequency of orgies in areas with lots of monkeypox. Or you convert it into technology like monkeypox vaccine. and medicines. But you have to start either way with finding the truth and telling people the truth. That's what public health is. And speaking of the truth, monkeypox is not a gay disease. Monkeypox is not a gay disease. It's not a helpful way to think about this. It's actually a nonsensical way to think about it. Like what does it even mean for a disease to be gay? It doesn't make any sense. Just tell the truth. This virus spreads most efficiently through

prolonged skin-to-skin contact, and it is currently circulating overwhelmingly within the community of men having sex with men. That's it. That's the full truth. And from that full truth, by the way, I think you can easily derive other useful truths, right? So just because a disease is currently spreading in one group doesn't mean it's impossible for other groups to get it. I mean, most obvious example here is HIV and AIDS. In the 1980s, in the early 1980s, what later became known as HIV was called a gay cancer, a gay cancer, because it presented to some doctors like a kind of cancer, and it circulated overwhelmingly within gay communities. But it makes no sense to think of HIV as a gay cancer or a gay disease in the biggest picture. Today, in sub-Saharan Africa,

HIV is mostly spread through male-female sex, through straight sex. In fact, women in sub-Saharan Africa, account for more than 50% of infected adults. So what we thought was a gay cancer with HIV and AIDS turned out to be neither gay nor a cancer. So the last thing I want to say about monkeypox is how disappointing it has been to see America replay so many of the mistakes of COVID, like in hyperspeed.

You would have thought that going through a multi-year pandemic would make us more sensitive to the importance of pandemic preparedness, you know, more flexible about building supply for therapeutics, more expert at public health communications. This is clearly not the case, right? The public health communications, as I've said, has been surprisingly unwilling to state the blunt truths about the demographic that accounts for 98% of this disease as victims, right? It's been, I think, reluctant to be honest about who is getting sick for fear of stigmatizing gay men, when, in fact, no, gay men need to know

they are the group within which this disease is spreading most efficiently. That's a really important piece information. When it comes to regulations, the situation is just as absurd. So if you look, if you think back to 2020, the U.S. fell woefully behind in testing capacity because the CDC and the FDA wouldn't rapidly approve working tests from other states and other countries. This is happening again. The Biden administration has for the last few weeks refused to accept hundreds of thousands of doses of monkeypox from places like Denmark because the FDA couldn't do a timely inspection of the plant. Well, European authorities did do a timely inspection of the plant, and they approved the product

for use. If you listen to our episode about baby formula, you might be getting deja vu. There's a lot of perfectly healthy baby formula that European countries are happy to export to the U.S. except the FDA has said, no, it's illegal, because we haven't sent our FDA-approved officials, our FDA hired officials over there to whatever, Amsterdam, in order to check out the baby formula. Same thing now with a monkeypox vaccine. This is not the way that you do crises, though. This is the opposite. When you're in a crisis, you want to have, think of it as a countercyclical regulatory policy. When crisis goes up, regulations go down because it's all about

speed. It's all about speed responding to an exponentially spreading virus. You sometimes need to relax regulations. Okay, last last thing on monkeypox. After 9-11, the U.S. spent $1 trillion on war and security, and we created an entirely new government department for homeland security. COVID has now killed 100 times as many people as 9-11. What have we done? I'm not saying we need to, like, you know, invade some country in order to, you know, punish them for COVID. No, what have we done in the homeland?

What departments have we built? What laws have we passed? What infrastructure or state capacity have we constructed? What have we learned? This has been a theme of my writing more than of my podcasting the last few months, but the U.S. is really pathetic in this century, at outcome-based policy. We do a lot of talking about problems

and not a lot of common sense solving them. We just had the mother of all problems visit us in the last few years. And the fact that our virus preparedness institutions are still this pathetic, it's pretty depressing. Okay, here is one from Jimmy. He writes, I'm a millennial. I always see things about how millennials got a bad deal with student loans. I have these.

have less income compared to other generations at the same ages, housing isn't affordable, and so on. I'd love to hear the advantages my generation has when compared to others. Jimmy, thank you. I love this question. Let me start with the to be sure paragraph. To be sure, millennials have gotten completely hosed in a few very important ways. Millions of them graduated into a shit labor market in the late 2000s and early 2010s, after the global financial crisis. Millions of them paid out the nose for college and have been burdened with historic, just completely unprecedented levels of student debt. And a lot of them started looking to buy a house after the 2010s, which is a decade when home building per capita fell to its lowest

rate and recorded history. So they've basically been besieged by this avalanche of affordability crisis. Just like one affordability crisis after another. Education, work, housing, that sucks. But if you're looking for silver linings, I don't think it's very hard to find them, especially when you're willing to look globally and within the realm of moral progress. And so, I mean, ethically speaking, I think there's, you know, nothing more valuable about a millennial life in Brooklyn than a millennial life in Bangladesh. So let's start with a global picture. In the global picture, according to most of the statistics that we have, including those from the World Health Organization, Worldwide, there's never been a generation in recorded history

with a lower share of infant mortality, with a lower share of deep poverty, or a longer average lifespan, or a larger global middle class. Like, sometimes when you point out these sort of global elements of progress, people get a little mad. They assume that, you know, this good news is being shared in the interest of getting people to calm down

and stop complaining about the bad news. I'm not saying that. I'm saying these two things are happening at the same time, right? the affordability crisis for millennials in America is happening alongside this global progress that to me is just totally unequivocal. But there's also moral progress happening in the U.S., really important moral progress, especially if you go back to, say, the 1960s. So in the 1961, four percent of Americans approved of interracial marriage. Today, 94 percent approve of interracial marriage from four to 94. That's incredible. 30 years ago, less than 30% of Americans supported

gay marriage. Now more than 70% do. You look at something like inequality between male and female earners. In 1980, women aged 25 to 30, earned 33% less than their male counterparts. In 2020, the pay gap had shrunk to 7%. So a 37% pay gap, just 40 years ago today, it's a 7% pay gap. Now, A pay gap is a pay gap. And racism exists and sexism exists. Homophobia exists. None of these things are dead. And their eradication, in fact,

remains a really important project for civilization. But, you know, by most measures, racism, sexism, homophobia are lower today than they've been maybe in recorded history, or at least near the lowest that they've been in recorded history. That's also something that's pretty good about this generation of being alive. Finally, it's a little bit of a,

of a murkier, touchy-feely idea, but cultural abundance, choice in culture is just completely unlike anything that we've ever experienced. It is clearly a better time or an easier time to be a reader or a music listener or a movie watcher. And on this point, I don't think there's really any debate,

even if you just listened to the last episode that I did with Ted Joya about how music listening is shifting toward older music, rather than new music. But even if you're a purist who doesn't like the choice offered by digital readers, even if you hate Kindle, even if you hate the streaming platforms, I don't think you would trade this year for any other year. Because why would you give up all the things that have been created since that year that you're picking, right?

Artistic accomplishment is accumulative. It gets better every year because we've already recorded all the music and written all the books and made all the movies we've recorded in the past. And that's just that mountain keeps growing. So think about like if you traded 2022 for 1991, right, you had a time machine. You're an upset millennial. You're a mad millennial. And you say, I want to get out of 2022. I want to get back to 1991.

Okay, well, at least in the cultural domain, you're giving up Taylor Swift, right? Bye, bye, bye, bye, Kanye. bye-bye, Shanaya Twain, Radiohead, gone. Right? You do not get to experience them in 1991. You'll be giving up the Marvel movies. You'll be giving up Lord of the Rings. Michael Clayton, first Wise Club, for Pete's sake.

You realize you're giving up First Wise Club? Like, what kind of an idiot are you? It's so obvious to me that culture gets better over time because everything that's wonderful that has been created is this mountain that by sheer definition, by sheer understanding of the passage of time, that mountain cannot decline.

So returning to our problems, the biggest problem with the millennial generation, the U.S., is that we have this affordability crisis, especially in the essentials of housing and healthcare. And that's because we've made decisions at the local and national level that make it harder to build houses and harder to become a doctor

and harder to provide telemedicine. My response to this crisis of shortage and crisis of scarcity is something that I've called the abundance agenda. And maybe you come across this in previous podcasts or in my written work

at the Atlantic. I think that we need new laws and new rules and even a new national mindset that's required to increase the supply of the most important things in the economy.

We need a new philosophy of progress that combines technology and ethics to produce human abundance in housing, health care, education, energy, all of these spaces.

If you keep listening to the podcast, I think you're going to hear a lot more of these ideas in the next few months. But rounding out this answer, the 2020s have been kind of shit, I think, compared especially to what we thought they were going to look like in 2019. But there's just no frigging way.

I'm stepping into a time machine to go back to 1991. Not for the global millennial case, not for the moral progress case, and certainly not for losing. all the incredible stuff that we've done in culture in the last 20, 30 years. Okay. Tim writes, Derek,

I'm confused on what I should be more concerned about. A, overpopulation, too many people chasing too few resources, or B, population collapse. Birth rates are falling over most of the developed world, and now China and India's are as well. Given that most of the world, and to some extent capitalism itself, is set up as a Ponzi scheme,

population collapse is a significant threat to our economic future. Ooh, this is a great question. It's actually sort of three great questions nested inside of one email. So I'm going to try to disentangle those three questions. I think they are number one, why are birth rates declining?

Number two, is capitalism a Ponzi scheme? That's a fun one. And number three, is population collapse worse than overpopulation? So let's go one, two, three. Number one, why are birth rates declining? This is probably the easiest one. In pretty much every region of the world, every country of the world where we see female empowerment rising and women's education increasing and economies modernizing, we tend to see birth rates declining. This is a truly global phenomenon. Now, in the U.S. and Europe, birth rates are declining below the replacement rate, which means that without immigration, you would expect all these countries to shrink eventually. We're going to get to that in a second. there's a lot of stories that would explain this. Number one, there's this big old centuries-long story, that children used to be free labor on the farm, which meant they were cheap, but now they're

expensive human capital investments to put things incredibly unromantically. So parents overall have fewer kids and they spend more time investing in each child. You could say the concept of parenthood, the concept of childhood has changed a lot in the last 150 years as we've moved from a more agrarian economy to a more modern economy where relationships. between parents and children have changed. That, I think, is overall why birth rates are declining. I should also say that, you know, we just talked about high living costs for millennials. That, I think, might also at the margin be keeping parents from having as many babies as they want.

So you put all this together, rising female empowerment, high living costs, changing values, and that I think explains why birth rates are declining around the world. So number two, is capitalism a Ponzi scheme? No, I do not think it is. I think it is the opposite of a Ponzi scheme. And I'm excited to hear from the socialist, anarchist, listeners of this show about how impossibly wrong I am about this particular point. So a Ponzi scheme, as I understand it, and I have not done too many Ponzi schemes in my life.

But a Ponzi scheme is an investment deal where essentially nothing is created, right? Like no real work is done because the profits of the early investors are paid exclusively through the income of newer investors, right? Like, I'm like a Bernie Madoff. I run like a wealth management firm. I have a bunch of clients who, you know, have been investing with me since 1980s. How do I, you know, pay into their accounts if they're expecting a certain rate of return? Well, if I'm not making any trades, remember Bernie Madoff wasn't making any trades toward the end,

all I'm doing is taking my clients from the last 18 months, taking their money and just giving it to my older clients. That's the Ponzi scheme. And that's why a Ponzi scheme requires more and more and more new clientele, how Ponzi schemes end up becoming sort of multi-level marketing campaigns. Capitalism is sort of the opposite, right? Because capitalism is this economic system where private actors own the means of making stuff and earn a profit for selling it. And one critique of capitalism, especially from the environmentalist left, is that capitalism creates too much, right? It's not the made-off phenomenon of not doing anything.

It's actually making too much, doing too much. There are too many clothes. There's too much energy. We're digging up too much oil. There's too much waste with all this stuff that we're buying, too much plastic. Right? So in a narrow sense, creating too many things that people value

is the opposite of creating nothing and relying exclusively on newer investors. Now, I guess maybe you could say, No, well, you know, the consumer base itself is kind of Ponzi-schemish. But like, I actually don't understand how this applies exclusively to capitalism. Like, if you're a communist society and your economy is just a bunch of state-owned farms and oil fields, I'm pretty sure you need a lot of people to run those fields. So it's not clear to me how like a sudden population implosion works out perfectly fine for a communist society,

but is a problem for capitalism. I think sudden population collapse is probably a, huge problem to any system that requires the production of scarce and important goods. So it leads us to number three, which is, you know, the most interesting question in this trio here, is population collapse worse than overpopulation? This gets to a really important point, which I think of as a very important myth when it comes to the Malthusian concerns that the world simply cannot keep growing. I think there's a fear of, of overpopulation that is born out of this idea

that we simply can't keep feeding everybody, right? This was Thomas Malthus' big idea, that eventually the population of certain areas grows to be too high, and so people starve, and there's a collapse, then productivity increases, and then the population keeps growing again. We've broken clean out of the Malthusian trap. The global population has gone up significantly

in the last 50 years, but our capacity to make food has gone up even more. Some statistics here. The average person in Africa and Asia eat significantly more calories per year than he or she did in the 1990s or any decade before. The number of people who died in famines

was lower in the 2010s than any decade on record. In the 1870s, one in every 700 people alive died in a famine. Last decade, it was one in every 200,000. So I realize, you know, parts of this podcast are going to sound to some people like I'm just, you know, giddily reading aloud from my Stephen Pinker volumes about how everything is just absolutely wonderful and no one has any cause for concern. There are lots of causes for concern. Everything is definitely not wonderful. Global pandemics, global warming, not great. But a lot of fear in this particular zip code stems from myths about growths. So let's consider the opposite proposition here, which is not a population growth, but population collapse.

Elon Musk is obsessed with this idea that population collapse is going to spell the end of human society. He thinks the number one biggest risk to civilization is population decline. I don't agree with that. I think that global warming is a significantly bigger threat to the biosphere and to the future of civilization than the prospect of population growth peaking. I think the population decline presents economic and cultural challenges. I think it makes growth harder.

I think it makes innovation harder. I think it probably hardens a sort of zero-sum mindset. What one group earns is what another group loses because the groups are fixed and the pie isn't growing. I think it probably makes people a little worse off than they'd otherwise be. But look, Japan's population hasn't been growing for like 15 years.

Japan is not a hellscape. Japan's pretty nice. And then, it was beautiful. Tokyo is one of the most amazing. places I've ever visited. But I also think that a part of what makes Tokyo great is how dense it is, right? How many people there are. The density and population of Tokyo gives birth to its just absolute riot of choice and diversity and extraordinary culture and high cuisine. That's all downstream of density and population. So if we want a world with more Tokyo's, we should not be

rooting for population decline. We should be rooting for density and population growth. So the most honest answer to this question is that the world and the U.S. specifically has neither an overpopulation crisis right now nor some kind of catastrophic population decline. So we can't say for sure just by looking at the data, which would be worse for us. But what I can say is, I like people and I'd like more of them. I love Tokyo, and I'd like more of those. I'm not worried about feeding the world

in a period where famines are at a historical low point. I am not afraid of overpopulation, and I would like a world with more people. So thank you guys for these questions. They were hard, they were fun. I learned a lot researching my answers to them. We will see you next week.

Thanks for listening.