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 end of 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 Haites' 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. Height knew what he was talking about.

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