What if everything we believe about changing minds is wrong? What if the foundation of democratic discourse — the belief that better arguments lead to better outcomes — is not just flawed but destructively naive?

Sarah Lubrano, with her PhD from Oxford and years of writing about the intersection of psychology and politics, brings devastating news: Decades of research reveal that political debates don’t change minds; they calcify them. 

Her book Don’t Talk About Politics reads like a clinical study of American democracy, dissecting why our most sacred ritual of reasoned argument has become democracy’s poison pill.

But Lubrano’s diagnosis goes far beyond the failure of debate. She reveals something more troubling: We’ve accidentally engineered a society that systematically prevents the kinds of human connections that actually do transform political thinking. 

While we’ve been arguing ourselves into exhaustion online, the real mechanisms of change — proximity, friendship, shared struggle — have been quietly dismantled by economic inequality and digital isolation.

This isn’t academic theory — it’s a field guide for understanding why we’re failing and what actually works. 

Her insights will shift how you see everything from neighborhood design to protest movements, from housing costs to the future of American democracy itself.

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Full Text Transcript:

(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)

[00:00:14] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. There was a time when political minds changed over coffee and grew cold during long conversations. In living rooms where neighbors lingered after dinner parties, on front porches where strangers became friends through the slow accumulation of shared evenings. These weren’t spaces designed for political persuasion. They were simply the ordinary architecture of human connection, where ideas shifted not through debate, but through the quiet witness of how other people live their lives. That world is vanishing. We conduct our most intimate conversations through screens now. Swipe our way through potential connections and mistake the performance of our digital selves for genuine relationship. The coffee shops have Wi-Fi passwords instead of lingering conversations. The front porches have been replaced by Ring doorbells. Even our protests happen as much online as in the streets.

Into this landscape of digital isolation comes my guest, Sarah Lubrano, with a startling proposition. The very moment we most need human connection to heal our political divisions, we’re systematically destroying the conditions that make such connections possible. Her book, Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds, isn’t just an indictment of our faith and rational argument. It’s a forensic examination of how the erosion of genuine human contact has left us politically adrift. Lubrano, with her PhD from Oxford and years of studying the intersection of psychology and politics, has assembled compelling evidence that our most cherished democratic ritual, the reasoned debate, was never particularly effective at changing minds. But in an age of algorithmic feeds and Zoom fatigue, it’s become actively counterproductive. The real work of political transformation, she argues, happens in the spaces between formal discourse, in the accumulated intimacy of shared experience.

Consider how quickly attitude towards gay marriage shifted; not through Supreme Court arguments or political campaigns, but because suddenly everyone knew someone. A generation came out to their families, their co-workers, their neighbors. People witnessed firsthand not political theory, but human reality. Couples trying to build ordinary lives. The legal victories came later, codifying what hearts and minds had already accepted through the simple power of proximity and recognition. But those conditions for transformation, the workplaces where we knew our colleagues’ stories, the neighborhoods where we encountered differences, the social spaces where strangers became friends, are precisely what our digital age has systemically dismantled. We’ve gained the entire world through our screens, while losing the next-door neighbor who might have changed our mind about everything.

Today we explore what it means to rebuild the infrastructure of human connection in an age of digital isolation. To stop talking about politics and start creating the conditions where political change becomes possible. Not through the force of our arguments, but through the patient cultivation of the social world that shapes how we think, feel, and ultimately vote. It is my pleasure to welcome Dr. Sarah Lubrano here to talk about her new book, Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds. Sarah, thanks so much for joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.

[00:03:47] Sarah Lubrano: Thank you so much for having me, and also for having understood this book so well.

[00:03:50] Jeff Schechtman: Well, thank you. And it is a delight to have you here. Certainly, one of the fundamental ideas here is that we really don’t change people’s minds when we argue with them about politics. Talk a little bit about that in a general sense first.

[00:04:06] Sarah Lubrano: Yeah, absolutely. So, look, I think most of my fellow Americans, and indeed many other people around the world, assume that democracy kind of works like this, right? You get to think about lots of different ideas, you evaluate them somewhat rationally on a good day, and then you go to the polls and you vote and that’s democracy, right? And for that matter, I would say there’s a lot built into our culture about this process of arguing with one another. That’s how I was taught to write essays in school. That’s how we see a lot of almost every form of media has some kind of debate built into it these days, I find. Even the way algorithms work encourages us to like fight with each other, basically, and present arguments.

And, so, I always implicitly assumed for a long period of my life that this was effective in some way. That we would see some movement when people experience debate. Until I began to look at something called cognitive dissonance theory in my PhD. And dissonance theory provides one of many good explanations for why we don’t generally change our minds when we are presented with new information, especially when it comes to politics. We’re actually not so bad at changing our minds about things that don’t affect our sense of self or our sense of agency. So, if I tell you that actually you might be better off with a different kind of roofing or car or, you know, there’s a scientific fact that you’re not particularly attached to because it doesn’t tell you anything about who you are, people can change their minds about some things. But it turns out, when you look at the evidence accumulated over seven decades in dissonance theory, that we’re specifically bad at changing our minds about things that affect our sense of self, or our sense of agency, or sense that we could go out and do the right things in the world. And when people are presented with new information in those areas, they do not change their minds. They often have very strong reactions quite quickly, and they try to rationalize away the new information. Or they will selectively only accept or seek out sources that they already agree with.

And, so, that’s startling enough. But then I began to look at the data behind whether, for example, watching debates changes people’s minds. And there have been big meta-studies, again, over decades and decades, looking at whether people’s voting intentions changed meaningfully after watching presidential debates. Again, we might assume, yes, because after all, they’re considered a huge deal. And we got Joe Biden, a kind of flub one, for lack of a better word. And, you know, there’s the famous Kennedy-Nixon debate, and everything, everything lines up in a sort of storytelling way that they must matter. But statistically, empirically, especially when you add all of these studies together, and you look at whether changes are significant or stick, the answer is no. These debates do not have a permanent effect, or even a particularly days-long effect on public opinion. They more or less look like a random walk, statistically, in terms of how people’s opinions shift.

And, in fact, I would argue that that really shouldn’t surprise us that much. Because as I go on to say in my book, there are a lot of other things that are much more influential over our political views, besides arguments, and just encountering an argument in the wild is rarely powerful enough to counteract these other forces that shape our views.

[00:07:08] Jeff Schechtman: Why is it that we are so invested in those political beliefs. That we’re willing to have our mind changed about a car we buy or the clothes we’re wearing or what it might be, but when it comes to those beliefs, we’re so much more invested in them?

[00:07:24] Sarah Lubrano: I like this question, but I’m going to turn it around on you, right, which is, of course we are. For me, at least, my political beliefs tell me about whether I’m a good person, whether my friends are good people, how I should live my life, who I should trust, what I should be doing with my life, why my life choices make sense. They’re incredibly orientating in my life, right? They’re telling me what I should do. If I got rid of some of my political beliefs — never mind replace them with completely different ones — I’d have to change so much in my life. I’d have to change my relationships. I’d have to change my actions. It would be incredibly destabilizing. And you can see that it is in the rare instances where people change fundamental beliefs. They do have to reorganize their lives, right? And that’s incredibly disruptive.

I actually think it’s kind of rather that we’ve been living with a naive cultural myth that’s been part of, I don’t know — and I mean this in a sort of political theory way — but like the foundational principles of liberalism, which is like individuals thinking on their own are going to come to good solutions. You know, one of the most faulty bits of that is just that people do not change their minds when they’re sitting around on their own considering evidence in the abstract, at least when it relates strongly to the commitments they already share day to day in their lives. And it makes sense. It makes sense. Of course we don’t. I talk about it as it would be a form of surgery on the self. It’s much more costly than we usually characterize it as, I would say, in our society.

[00:08:48] Jeff Schechtman: One of the things that we’ve seen of late — and certainly there have been other times in history when this has been the case — but we’re certainly going through it now, is that everything, all of our decisions, become so politicized, so that the house we buy or the car we buy or the food we eat, the things we drink, are really a function of what our political beliefs are.

[00:09:08] Sarah Lubrano: Yeah, absolutely. I wrote this book, as a very gentle, loving, painful letter to my fellow ex [liberals] and current liberals in America. And I don’t actually mean the left half of the Overton window, by the way. I actually mean people that are committed to the sort of undergirding principles of liberal political theory. So, people who used to really believe in like, oh, the main things are going to be individual rights and this certain form of autonomy and so on. Because when I was growing up, I still held on to many of those beliefs. And in fact, I would say, I still hold on to some of those beliefs. But watching what’s happening in our country right now, I think also there are aspects of that cultural and sort of foundational principles within liberalism that are harming us right now. And, yeah, I think what I want to emphasize is just how tricky that is to navigate now that we have the reality of how people behave in such conditions, right?

[00:10:08] Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about how we are influenced by others, not in a political way, but the way that neuroscience and social engineering tells us how we are influenced today.

[00:10:22] Sarah Lubrano: Yes, good. OK. So to go back to your previous question for a second, it’s really painful because now everything seems to be political. I would say it always was. But now we have to mourn the fact that we had this myth that it wasn’t, right. And when you look at the actual evidence, what you’re seeing basically is that people are profoundly shaped by things. There are things that do slowly, over time, change their political views. And there are two that I cover in my book because they’re so important. One is our day-to-day actions and our experiences. And the other one is our friendships.

And I’ll start with our actions. So, some of the things that do appear to change our minds over time are simply trying out new ways of living in the world. And I go through a lot of different evidence in that chapter about action to show this. But for example, people who experience climate events do over time appear to become more concerned about climate change. People who go to protests, and especially people who join protest movements, that does change their mind. Seeing a protest seems to have no effect on the public, and not very much effect on the government. But joining a protest movement, that’s a big one. That changes your mind a lot.

Even quite unusual things. So, there’s some evidence, some significant evidence, that people who are denied abortions — interestingly, you would expect they’d become more in favor of abortion rights — but they become a little bit less in favor of abortion rights, simply because they don’t have an abortion. And the people that do have an abortion become a little bit more in favor, right? We tend to, for various reasons, including cognitive dissonance theory, which I listed before, move our beliefs in the direction that our life has taken essentially, right? It’s kind of painful not to. Otherwise, we’re living with a life that’s in contradiction with our beliefs, and we’re experiencing the discomfort, the dissonance of that, all the time. So, our actions change our views in lots of ways.

And then the other thing is our relationships. People change our minds. And I wrote a whole chapter on friendship about this, because I care about friendship so much. I think it’s really, in a way, the foundational political relationship. And this isn’t my own idea. Aristotle had this idea, but I think it gets lost a bit in the modern world. Our friends are like windows into the lives of others. And one of the most important ways this is true appears to be about overcoming prejudice. So, I’m particularly interested in the sociological field of study called social contact theory, which is simply a way of evaluating in what environments people become less prejudiced against other groups, right? It began, actually, when they looked at what happened when the US military was integrated after World War II, and people served in the same units. Black and white people, for example, served in the same units. And what one finds there, importantly, is that people, in fact, do become less prejudiced under the following conditions. They need to be positioned as equals by the institution that they’re a part of. And I would say this matters a lot. If only the most important officers or people in the company are white, then you’re probably not going to overcome your racial prejudice. But if you’re officially positioned as equals, and you actually see that, that has a big difference, apparently.

You need to have shared goals. I think the shared goals is really an interesting condition, because if you think about the internet, we almost never have shared goals with people on the internet, right? So, that’s very important. We need to have the salient differences made obvious. We need to notice that the other person is of a different race or gender or sexuality or whatever. And we also need to have long-form conversations that can lead effectively to friendships. And it seems to me that when you look at this body of sociological evidence, what you learn is that over time, in certain conditions, having friendships with people that are different from us, allows us to, as you said, so beautifully in your introduction, create the conditions for us to think things differently. The way I put it in my book, and the way I put it in times when I’m speaking to movement organizers and activists, and so on, is that it’s never the conversation, it’s the relationship. And frankly, that makes sense. Why would you listen to someone who’s not willing to build some kind of important relationship with you? Right? I think the cultural liberal idea is I give you a really good argument, and your mind is changed. We have a great conversation, and that’s it. But no, no, you have to build some kind of relationship of equals, where you respect each other, and you are friends in a meaningful sense. And then people change their minds. And that is also what the data shows.

[00:14:32] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about the cultural impact of the fact that we tend to pick out and live in neighborhoods and befriend people that are so much like us.

[00:14:43] Sarah Lubrano: Yeah, good. So, the fancy term for this is homophily, right? Where people pick out people that are similar to themselves. And there’s certainly lots of evidence that human beings like to do that, for all the reasons you can imagine. But, obviously, that does weaken our ability to experience the positive effects of social contact, right? And I think this is one important thing that I talk about a lot in my book when I look at the importance of social infrastructure. So, you could think about a social infrastructure as effectively anything that creates an either cheap, or free, and easy and almost obvious way of moving through the world where you have this kind of important social contact with other people. And something as simple as the playground outside of a school is an important piece of social infrastructure, because people are going to meet there for free as equals. And if it’s set up really well, so that parents can actually park their car and go wait for the kids, right, or take them on the bus, you’re much more likely to suddenly have parents meeting as equals with somewhat shared goals, having long-form conversations. And, you know, voila! You have a social infrastructure. But if you have parents waiting alone in their cars by themselves to pick up the kids, and maybe even getting angry at each other, because it’s too long of a line, then you have created exactly the opposite of a social infrastructure.

And the really bad news about our society is that increasingly it looks like the second option, in all sorts of areas. We are building a world where we have delivery drivers, and therefore, we don’t have favorite restaurants where we know all the people in them, right? We are building a world where we work from home. I’m somewhat in favor of that flexibility for lots of other reasons of equality, but it does have negative effects on certain kinds of social infrastructure. We’re building a world where we spend more hours of the day alone. We are seeing that trend massively, if you look at the American Time Survey. And we’re also building worlds that are unequal, right? And that really matters, too.

[00:16:31] Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about income inequality and the impact that that has on this.

[00:16:36] Sarah Lubrano: Yeah, good. Okay. So, there are a lot of other people that have talked at least a little bit in the public sphere about the danger of our increasing isolation from one another. And they’re right to worry about this. One of the most famous is the sociologist Robert Putnam, who’s amazingly running around doing this now at, I think, 85, you know. And I really admire his work, and I use his work, and I also disagree with some of his approach. And one of the things that he and others often do is downplay the question of economics. I think, because in Putnam’s case, he just loves graphs, and he thinks that, oh, look, in this one graph our increasing inequality seems to follow from our increasing isolation, so it probably isn’t the causal factor, so that’s it. And I don’t think that’s persuasive at all for a lot of reasons.

But rather than dive into this argument, this sort of semi-niche argument within social science, I’m going to look at it another way. When you’re facing a problem, one of the most important questions you can ask is, what can we actually change here, right? If we have cell phones, what can we do about that? Well, there are lots of probably kind of interesting and clever interventions around the margins with our cell phones, but I’m personally not in favor of a world where we ban everyone from having cell phones. Crazily enough, it might actually be more effective to change our economy than to roll back all technology, right? I see that as an important and possible intervention.

And let’s also look at the causation there and the possible ways that causation works. One of the most important is simply housing. If you look at my generation, right, I’m a millennial. The data on millennials is astounding. We’re much less likely than our parents or our grandparents to move in the course of our lives, which might surprise you, but it’s true. And one of the reasons that that’s true is quite simply that there are no exciting jobs to move to. So if you think about my parents’ generation, my parents’ generation all moved into cities that were fairly multicultural in various ways, and they mixed up with lots of different people, and they had friends from different environments, and they lived in fairly close proximity to each other, which turns out to be a massive predictor of your politics, incidentally. And in my generation, what I see a lot of is people moving out of the city because they cannot afford it. They move to a suburban area that’s a bit more affordable and they lose their friends, and they cannot see their friends, right. Because they’re just far apart from those friends.

And the other thing is, even minor changes in your income mean a lot for how likely you are to go out of the house. And we can see this because as the economy has become more unequal year after year after year, we see the closing of pubs in this country. I’m in the UK right now. You know, we see the closing of all these social spaces because really that’s about your disposable income, right? Disposable income both to get to that place transit-wise and to spend the money there that is required to engage in that.

So, there are lots of good reasons to think that any amount of change in income inequality is going to change the degree to which people are social, and the degree to which they basically experience the underpinnings of democratic life. And that’s huge. And in fact, you see an exact and perfect correlation. And correlation, of course, doesn’t mean causation. But [we see] a perfect correlation, nearly an inverse correlation, between income inequality and social trust, how much we like and basically trust other people in our society. And that’s incredibly worrying. So, I would say we not only see a strong correlation and some mechanisms for causation, but it’s also an area that we could change things. And we could change things without becoming like technophobic dictators.

[00:19:50] Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about what you see in terms of the success or failure on the other side of political organizations, political parties, using mobilization of relationships to be successful, versus the romantic traditional argument culture that we’ve been talking about.

[00:20:10] Sarah Lubrano: Yeah, great. Well, look, I think one of the things that’s rather difficult is that sometimes in politics you see people that you really dislike doing something very effectively, right? And in the process of writing this book, and actually in the process of writing the next book I’m writing, I have been looking a lot at what, for example, the far right are doing to mobilize people. And I’m afraid that they almost act like they’ve read this book, right? That many of their best strategists, Steve Bannon, for example, or other very far right groups actually, have recognized that what most matters for recruiting people a lot of the time is offering them the chance to do something in person. And, if you look at Steve Bannon’s New York Times interview, for example, he’s really clear about this. He says, I offer people a chance to get offline and meet in person in their nearby local environment, and then they join my group, and then they also become local Republican council people, or whatever the correct word is. And they love it because now they have connections with people offline. He’s basically using that as a way to mobilize them. And he’s been pretty successful within his absolutely radical and horrible sphere, I would say. And that’s very worrying.

And then at the same time, we have, I would say, to very broadly characterize left-wing movements, we have these massive protest movements on the left. And those protest movements, with some exceptions, of course, increasingly tend to work like this: You see somebody that you maybe vaguely know post about a protest, and maybe it’s in your local area, and you go to the protest, and you have hopefully a great time, and you make beautiful signs and wear funky outfits, and maybe you have a pint with your friends afterward, and you feel good about yourself. And maybe, maybe you’ve joined a mailing list for something, and then you’re done, right? And this is what sociologists refer to as networked protests. So, you’re joining via your network, but again, maybe not through your best friends, right? They’re just people you kind of know. And the ties that bind you there are not very strong, and you are not necessarily being asked to do very much.

Now, obviously, there are exceptions. By the way, there are exceptions on both the left and right in this case. But I worry about — and I think left and right isn’t even quite the right spectrum to use here — but I worry that the groups that I most care about, particularly, let’s say, people who are interested in preserving democracy, or maintaining some semblance of a livable climate, for example, are not very good at doing the kind of deep embedded movement building that is required for this moment of absolute crisis in our society. And one of the examples I give in the book about what that would look like is the civil rights movement. And you know, the civil rights movement, to be clear, it was not popular in its own time, but with a lot of others, like people who are not members. So I’m not claiming that it won popularity overnight or anything like that. But it did have the strength of a deeply embedded network of people who were essentially friends and in a meaningful and deep sense comrades, right? And they, for various reasons, both discrimination and choice, often shopped in the same places, went to the same social infrastructures, organized in the barbershop and a church and even the grocery store. [They] knew each other. If you wanted to organize a meeting, you had to call 20 people. And that’s a great thing to do, actually. And a skill that many people don’t have nowadays, right? And you had to do a lot of lengthy and elaborate planning. But actually, the more you contribute to a movement, often, the more you are devoted to it, and the more deeply embedded you are in it. And I am concerned that we are losing those organizing skills and that we absolutely have to rebuild them to face the problems of the 21st century.

[00:23:38] Jeff Schechtman: How is the protest movement today, progressive protest movements, for example, how is it fundamentally different than the movements we saw, the anti-war protests in the 60s, etc?

[00:23:50] Sarah Lubrano: Well, again, we’re basically looking at a place where technology has made something easy, but because it’s easy, it’s potentially worse, right? And people are therefore a little bit less invested on a good day, and a lot less invested on a bad day. Look, I’m happy to make fun of, for example, the hippie movement of the 1960s. And there’s, you know, lots of possible issues with it. But I think it’s an interesting other counterexample, besides the civil rights movement, of what it would mean. Because the hippies changed their whole lifestyle, at least for a while. And yeah, some of them were rich and spoiled and annoying and, you know, went on drugs and whatever. We could go on and on complaining about them. But nevertheless, they asked, in a way, for you to change your whole life. And that’s a very effective way of getting people to think about politics differently. Because you change their action and you change their relationships, right? Nowadays, when people ask me to join their movement, very little is asked of me most of the time, right? Like, would you donate a little bit of money? Could you maybe show up once in a while to a thing, maybe? Let’s get educated, you know, and those are good things.

But, I think, you can almost see the difference just in what I’ve described about the civil rights movement and what I’ve described about the hippie movement, versus almost any left-wing movement you could sign up to today, it’s going to ask less of you in a way, right? And I mean, they’re niche counterexamples, but we’re seeing a lot of really easy activism. And I think this is a lost opportunity, because, actually, the more I give talks to the public and write for the public and post on social media, the more people write me back and they say, I really want to be doing more, but I don’t know what to do anymore. So yeah, I think we’re seeing a less intense amount of connection with other people in the movement, and all the things I’ve just talked about, democracy, right? Fewer obvious shared goals that you could do as activists, and so on. So, we’re lacking here.

[00:25:37] Jeff Schechtman: And come back to what the right, as you see it, is doing differently.

[00:25:41] Sarah Lubrano: They’re creating a lot of social space for the people that are in the movement to hang out with each other and be rewarded by that, right? They’re also asking quite a bit of members. In some cases, anyway. It depends, obviously. They’re asking quite a bit of members, in terms of like, you need to become an elected official, for example, in one of Bannon’s organizing schemes. That’s a big ask. It takes a ton of work, right? But they’re asking you to change both your actions and your relationships, and that hugely changes people’s minds and gets people profoundly dug into the movement in a lot of ways. So, yeah, we’re seeing people who really weaponize these insights. But unfortunately, they weaponize them in ways that are deeply harmful. And I would say also, to go back to these questions about debate and discourse and arguments, at the same time, certain people on the right are really good at using that as distraction, so the rest of us don’t do what they’re doing, right? And this is one of the fundamental things I say in the book. To all the other fellow heartbroken liberals and ex-liberals and whatever, is that I think it’s a beautiful idea that we could think about an idea in the abstract, and it would change our mind, and I love ideas, and I read books all the time, and I’m a huge nerd. But there are multiple ways to love an idea, and one of the ways is to act on them. And I think if we spend all of our time arguing online or even watching debates or, you know, occasionally telling our horrible brother-in-law or whatever that he’s wrong, that is a massive misuse of our time. It is a distraction. And meanwhile, other people will be going around actually doing stuff in the background that builds a world we don’t want to live in. And so we probably need to love ideas by acting in the world. And, of course, we can also later have a drink and talk about them, too.

[00:27:24] Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about generational differences and what you see.

[00:27:29] Sarah Lubrano: Oh, good questions. I mean, I’ve just talked a little bit about income, and I really do think that’s an important one. Obviously, we’re facing a complicated thing around technology also, right, where there’s a worry that younger people are using technology more and differently, and I will get to that a little bit probably. But I want to look at income first, because income is really important. If you look at my generation in America, and around the world actually to a slightly different degree, we are simply unbelievably less wealthy than our parents. And to the degree that we’re going to become wealthy, we’re going to become wealthy very unequally and when we inherit. And that has to do with a lot of different things, but one of the big ones is house prices. People in my generation, basically, mostly cannot afford to buy houses, and they certainly can’t afford to buy houses with the same ease as their parents. We also have a lot more debt in a lot of cases about other things like education or health. There are, in many cases, fewer exciting jobs. That’s part of why we’re moving less, right?

So, if you want to think about educational differences, I think one of the big ones is actually prior to anything specific with technology, although technology can help cause inequality. And it just has to do with the amount of opportunity that is available to people in my generation versus other generations. And I understand that this can be hard for people to conceptualize because the general narrative of the last century was basically progress, right? Like, grandpa did maybe not so great, but then dad did pretty well, and now his kids are going to do better, too. But that is not the trend that we’re seeing worldwide, and it’s not even the trend that we’re seeing in America. We are seeing a lot of cases of downward mobility, right? I was actually just reading a report yesterday — this is not in my book, but it’s related — about how common intergenerational living is now. A lot of millennials live with their parents, and they live with their parents because housing is expensive. There are other reasons, too, but that’s a big part of it.

I’m moving slightly from giving you a bunch of data to telling you that there are different ways to address those facts. But one of the things that I think we need to think about is what does it mean to live a life that is as good as your parents, or better than your parents, that isn’t just about material stuff? Now, to be clear, I also think we have a massive material issue to solve. When we live in an inequality this extreme, that is undemocratic in itself, and it’s a powerful political problem, and it cannot be ignored. But I also want to encourage people in my generation to think about the other kinds of wealth that they can cultivate, so to speak. And the number one thing for me is social connection. I think the more that we know our neighbors, the more we have friends, the more we organize together, the more we build meaningful political life, and also what’s prior to political life together. In a way, we will have done better than our parents if we do better than that.

But also, we have a significant generational economic problem that we’re facing. And then, of course, there are some technological things as well. And I look at, especially the generation just below mine, Generation Z, and the way that they are often particularly isolated, and particularly lonely, and particularly anxious, and particularly on their phones, although we are all way too much on our phones, by the way. And I see that as something that is kind of like a nasty, self-reinforcing loop with these questions about other opportunities to be in the world, and make social connections, and have interesting jobs, and do stuff with your life, right? But I see them as two parts of the same problem. Because to be honest, all of us have had an experience that was so exciting in the real world that we couldn’t possibly have been looking at our phones, you know? And I think we talk much too little about the not-phone part of the phone problem. Like, what else is available to this person? Where can they go? Is it affordable? Is it easy to get to? Is it going to help them learn the social skills so that they could do something other than looking at memes? I mean, you know, I think that’s a much bigger question. For me, a question of almost political justice.

[00:31:18] Jeff Schechtman: Are we going to find an even larger divide among Millennials going forward? Those that are left behind, those that are not as successful as their parents, and those that are more successful? Because there are still plenty of Millennials that are doing very well, and very successful. And the same with Gen Z. Are we going to see a greater divide in those generations? And what might the consequences of that be going forward?

[00:31:46] Sarah Lubrano: Yes, absolutely. So far, as I understand, and I have looked at the data, there’s maybe some other economists with some rogue theory of what’s going to happen in the future. But right now, we see Millennials as experiencing much bigger generational wealth… Sorry, much bigger wealth gaps between Millennials as well. Because much of the wealth that Millennials have is inherited. And there’s just a much wider gap between them as well. That is part of what it means to have increasing inequality in the world. So, our parents, the gaps between them and their cohort, and the gaps between me and my Millennial cohort, in terms of how much wealth inequality there is, the wealth inequality is increasing. We are more unequal. And I think there are all kinds of ramifications for this inequality. But to focus on questions of democracy, if you look at the data around the world, people increasingly don’t believe in it, right? Sometimes they don’t believe in it, like they don’t think it’s a good thing. But also, they simply lack faith that it could happen. And again, one of the number one ways we can see this is in declining social trust. And we have very good reasons to think that the way people experience income inequality and related material problems lowers their trust in democracy and society in general.

One of my favorite studies on this has to do with Obamacare. It just looks at what happens when people lose their jobs. And basically compares very similar people, but looks at a person who has very similar circumstances, but happens not to lose their health care in that instance, usually because of Obamacare, versus somebody who has the same circumstances, loses their job, but doesn’t lose their health insurance, right? And the person who doesn’t lose their health insurance, on average, still holds on to most of their trust in society. They’re still more likely to say, on average, you can trust other people. And the person who loses their health insurance doesn’t trust other people as much anymore. They lose social trust. That’s the term in sociology, and they lose essentially political trust as well. And to me, that makes absolute sense. Because why would you believe in a society that is going to let you die if something happens to you medically after you lost your job, right?

So, we see pretty strict correlation between people’s declining trust in their society and the democracy it could potentially have, and their level of economic inequality. And it certainly doesn’t help that when people lose their jobs or their health insurance nowadays, they can also see that people they went to high school with, and people who are running the country, who are billionaires or are incredibly wealthy, or are simply doing better than them in ways that don’t appear to have anything to do with hard work or effort or anything like that. So, that inequality is not just a crisis of fairness or of having a society that’s healthy in a basic economic sense, but it’s also a crisis of social trust and democracy.

[00:34:20] Jeff Schechtman: In fact, arguably, the social trust is the bigger issue, even bigger than the economic issue sometimes.

[00:34:27] Sarah Lubrano: Look, they’re both important. I never want to talk one down. But I do think that which one is likely to cause us to have a really bad political system, in a way, it might matter less. For example, in this case, what’s interesting about the study I just cited to you is there isn’t even another study where they look at whether you actually got sick. In a way, it doesn’t matter whether you then got sick and didn’t have health care. It does matter, of course, for that person. But they’re not even measuring that. They’re just measuring how we feel about the inequality that we are experiencing. Whether or not it has an effect on our physical body in that sense. It might be that trust and social connection are influenced just by us knowing that we have essentially experienced an inequality and injustice. In a way, if nobody had health insurance, I think that’d be pretty bad, too. Or rather, if no one had access to health care, but it might have less of an impact on democracy. So, it’s not just about the material stuff. It’s about the way it’s set up and the way we trust each other as a result.

[00:35:29] Jeff Schechtman: Sarah Lubrano, her book is Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds. Sarah, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.

[00:35:39] Sarah Lubrano: Thank you so much for such wonderful and thoughtful questions.

[00:35:42] Jeff Schechtman: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.