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Niall Ferguson on how life has changed since Channel 4 went on air
What were the historical turning points of the period 1982 to 2007? The obvious answer is that there were two: first, the collapse of Communism and the end of the Cold War
; then, the rise of militant Islamism and the advent of the ‘war on terror’. In a quarter of a century, we went from a world of superpower tensions to a world of clashing civilisations. The key dates were 9 November 1989 and 11 September 2001. The leading roles were played by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and Tony Blair and George Bush after 2001. The main supporting actors in the drama were Mikhail Gorbachev and Osama bin Laden.
But did any of this really alter the way we lived? Was the average Briton’s daily life fundamentally altered by either the fall of the Berlin Wall or the fall of the World Trade Centre? Apart from longer lines at airport security and shorter waits for plumbers (thanks to Polish migrant workers), the answer must surely be no. Right now, most of us are about as worried about terrorists today as we were by Soviet nuclear missiles in 1982. Which is to say hardly at all.
So what did change our lives between 1982 and now? One
way of answering that question is to look at the way we lived then and the way we live now. Make that comparison and you begin to discern some real changes. Call it the difference between an old stereo system and an iPod. Call it the difference between a predictable world and a randomised world. Or let’s just say:
We got shuffled.
The world of 1982 was boringly (or was it reassuringly?) bipolar: US/USSR, Right/Left, Boy/Girl, Posh/Naff, Protestant/Catholic, Rangers/Celtic. You were either on one side or the other. The world of 2007 is chaotic by comparison. It is as if our very identities have become dazed and confused.
To begin with, we no longer spend so much time in a single nuclear family. In fact, the family itself went nuclear at some point between 1982 and now. Back in the early Eighties a third of all households consisted of married couples with one child or more. Today that proportion is down to 22 per cent. Meanwhile, the number of single-person households has risen from 22 per cent to 29 per cent. The nuclear family is now officially out-numbered by social atoms.
Marriage itself matters less. In 1982, twelve per cent of babies were illegitimate. Today it’s 42 per cent, and in Wales it’s more than 50 per cent. Marriages, if couples ever get around to tying the knot, are less likely to last, while divorce appears to be habit-forming. In 1981 just over one in ten men and women divorcing had already been divorced at least once. Today it’s one in five.
Families form and fragment; households are in a state of unprecedented flux. Lovers, spouses, offspring and even friends move in. High property prices mean a substantial proportion of children live with their parents into their twenties. But overall, more people move out than move in. In old age we have a much higher probability of ending up alone, often for many years.
Our increased mobility manifests itself in many other ways. Only a quarter of us are still living in the same place where we first watched Channel 4. And even those of us who haven’t moved house are peripatetic as never before. When Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister more than two-fifths of households had no car, and those of us who did notched up just over 400 billion passenger kilometres a year. The equivalent figure in 2005 was 678 billion, a 70 per cent increase.
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