PART I ENLIGHTENMENT

The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers.

CHAPTER 1 DARE TO UNDERSTAND!

If there’s anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world, and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings, or the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts.

The deliberate application of reason was necessary precisely because our common habits of thought are not particularly reasonable.

The Enlightenment is sometimes called the Humanitarian Revolution, because it led to the abolition of barbaric practices that had been commonplace across civilizations for millennia.

CHAPTER 2 ENTRO, EVO, INFO

Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one. -- Physicist Arthur Eddington

The law that entropy always increases . . . holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature.

But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.2

Clark Barrett entitled a recent paper on the foundations of the science of mind “The Second Law of Thermodynamics Is the First Law of Psychology.”

One reason the cosmos is filled with so much interesting stuff is a set of processes called self-organization, which allow circumscribed zones of order to emerge.

When energy is poured into a system, and the system dissipates that energy in its slide toward entropy, it can become poised in an orderly, indeed beautiful, configuration—a sphere, spiral, starburst, whirlpool, ripple, crystal, or fractal.

The brain’s aesthetic response may be a receptiveness to the counter-entropic patterns that can spring forth from nature.

Living things are made of organs that have heterogeneous parts which are uncannily shaped and arranged to do things that keep the organism alive (that is, continuing to absorb energy to resist entropy).

Creationists commonly doctor the Second Law of Thermodynamics to claim that biological evolution, an increase in order over time, is physically impossible. The part of the law they omit is “in a closed system.”

Information may be thought of as a reduction in entropy—as the ingredient that distinguishes an orderly, structured system from the vast set of random, useless ones.

To say that the universe is orderly rather than random is to say that it contains information in this sense. Some physicists enshrine information as one of the basic constituents of the universe, together with matter and energy.

A momentous discovery of 20th-century theoretical neuroscience is that networks of neurons not only can preserve information but can transform it in ways that allow us to explain how brains can be intelligent.

Two input neurons can be connected to an output neuron in such a way that their firing patterns correspond to logical relations such as AND, OR, and NOT, or to a statistical decision that depends on the weight of the incoming evidence.

Around 500 BCE, in what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, several widely separated cultures pivoted from systems of ritual and sacrifice that merely warded off misfortune to systems of philosophical and religious belief

Recently an interdisciplinary team of scholars identified a common cause.

prosaic: energy capture. The Axial Age was when agricultural and economic advances provided a burst of energy: upwards of 20,000 calories

This surge allowed the civilizations to afford larger cities, a scholarly and priestly class, and a reorientation of their priorities from short-term survival to long-term harmony.

the Industrial Revolution released a gusher of usable energy

launched a Great Escape from poverty, disease, hunger, illiteracy, and premature death,

the next leap in human welfare—the end of extreme poverty and spread of abundance, with all its moral benefits—will depend on technological advances that provide energy at an acceptable economic and environmental cost to the entire world (chapter 10).

Entro, evo, info. These concepts define the narrative of human progress: the tragedy we were born into, and our means for eking out a better existence.

The first piece of wisdom they offer is that misfortune may be no one’s fault.

A major breakthrough of the Scientific Revolution—perhaps its biggest breakthrough—was to refute the intuition that the universe is saturated with purpose.

Not only does the universe not care about our desires, but in the natural course of events it will appear to thwart them, because there are so many more ways for things to go wrong than for them to go right.

Awareness of the indifference of the universe was deepened still further by an understanding of evolution.

Predators, parasites, and pathogens are constantly trying to eat us, and pests and spoilage organisms try to eat our stuff. It may make us miserable, but that’s not their problem.

Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind.

modern evolutionary theory explains how selfish genes can give rise to unselfish organisms.

Evolution left us with another burden: our cognitive, emotional, and moral faculties are adapted to individual survival and reproduction in an archaic environment, not to universal thriving in a modern one.

People are by nature illiterate and innumerate, quantifying the world by “one, two, many”

They underestimate the prevalence of coincidence.

The human moral sense can also work at cross-purposes to our well-being.26 People demonize those they disagree with, attributing differences of opinion to stupidity and dishonesty.

People see violence as moral, not immoral: across the world and throughout history, more people have been murdered to mete out justice than to satisfy greed.

Human cognition comes with two features that give it the means to transcend its limitations.

The first is abstraction. People can co-opt their concept of an object at a place and use it to conceptualize an entity in a circumstance,

as when we take the pattern of a thought like The deer ran from the pond to the hill and apply it to The child went from sick to well.

These formulas give people the means to think about a variable with a value and about a cause and its effect—just the conceptual machinery one needs to frame theories and laws.

The second stepladder of cognition is its combinatorial, recursive power.

The mind can entertain an explosive variety of ideas by assembling basic concepts like thing, place, path, actor, cause, and goal into propositions.

Thanks to language, ideas are not just abstracted and combined inside the head of a single thinker but can be pooled across a community of thinkers.

Thomas Jefferson explained the power of language with the help of an analogy: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

The wisdom of crowds can also elevate our moral sentiments. When a wide enough circle of people confer on how best to treat each other, the conversation is bound to go in certain directions. If my starting offer is “I get to rob, beat, enslave, and kill you and your kind, but you don’t get to rob, beat, enslave, or kill me or my kind,”

So for all the flaws in human nature, it contains the seeds of its own improvement, as long as it comes up with norms and institutions that channel parochial interests into universal benefits. Among those norms are free speech, nonviolence, cooperation, cosmopolitanism, human rights, and an acknowledgment of human fallibility, and among the institutions are science, education, media, democratic government, international organizations, and markets. Not coincidentally, these were the major brainchildren of the Enlightenment.

CHAPTER 3 COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENTS

a common criticism of the Enlightenment project—that it is a Western invention, unsuited to the world in all its diversity—is doubly wrongheaded.

Enlightenment ideals have been articulated in non-Western civilizations at many times in history.

The Enlightenment was swiftly followed by a counter-Enlightenment, and the West has been divided ever since.

The Romantic movement pushed back particularly hard against Enlightenment ideals.

To take something on faith means to believe it without good reason,

Religions also commonly clash with humanism whenever they elevate some moral good above the well-being of humans,

Belief in an afterlife implies that health and happiness are not such a big deal, because life on earth is an infinitesimal portion of one’s existence; that coercing people into accepting salvation is doing them a favor; and that martyrdom may be the best thing that can ever happen to you.

A second counter-Enlightenment idea is that people are the expendable cells of a superorganism—a clan, tribe, ethnic group, religion, race, class, or nation—and that the supreme good is the glory of this collectivity rather than the well-being of the people who make it up.

Nationalism should not be confused with civic values, public spirit, social responsibility, or cultural pride. Humans are a social species, and the well-being of every individual depends on patterns of cooperation and harmony that span a community.

not so long ago the left was sympathetic to nationalism when it was fused with Marxist liberation movements.

Left-wing and right-wing political ideologies have themselves become secular religions, providing people with a community of like-minded brethren, a catechism of sacred beliefs, a well-populated demonology, and a beatific confidence in the righteousness of their cause.

Our greatest enemies are ultimately not our political adversaries but entropy, evolution (in the form of pestilence and the flaws in human nature), and most of all ignorance—a shortfall of knowledge of how best to solve our problems.

Many intellectuals and critics express a disdain for science as anything but a fix for mundane problems. They write as if the consumption of elite art is the ultimate moral good.

PART II PROGRESS

If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be—you didn’t know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family or a poor family, what country you’d be born in, whether you were going to be a man or a woman—if you had to choose blindly what moment you’d want to be born, you’d choose now. —Barack Obama, 2016

CHAPTER 4 PROGRESSOPHOBIA

Intellectuals who call themselves “progressive” really hate progress.

It’s not that they hate the fruits of progress,

It’s the idea of progress that rankles

the Enlightenment belief that by understanding the world we can improve the human condition.

it’s not just those who intellectualize for a living who think the world is going to hell in a handcart. It’s ordinary people when they switch into intellectualizing mode.

people tend to see their own lives through rose-colored glasses:

they think they’re less likely than the average person to become the victim of a divorce, layoff, accident, illness, or crime.

Optimism Gap.

In almost every year from 1992 through 2015, an era in which the rate of violent crime plummeted, a majority of Americans told pollsters that crime was rising.

As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news,

The news, far from being a “first draft of history,” is closer to play-by-play sports commentary.

It focuses on discrete events, generally

The peace researcher John Galtung pointed out that if a newspaper came out once every fifty years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy.

Availability heuristic: people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind.

there are three times as many words with k in the third position (ankle, ask, awkward, bake, cake, make, take . . .), but we retrieve words by their initial sounds, so keep, kind, kill, kid, and king are likelier to pop into mind on demand.

Our inability to prophesy is not, of course, a license to ignore the facts. An improvement in some measure of human well-being suggests that, overall, more things have pushed in the right direction than in the wrong direction. Whether we should expect progress to continue depends on whether we know what those forces are and how long they will remain in place.

Moral reasoning requires proportionality. It may be upsetting when someone says mean things on Twitter, but it is not the same as the slave trade or the Holocaust.

The psychological literature confirms that people dread losses more than they look forward to gains, that they dwell on setbacks more than they savor good fortune, and that they are more stung by criticism than they are heartened by praise.

Negativity bias

We are wired for nostalgia: in human memory, time heals most wounds.

we mistake the growing burdens of maturity and parenthood for a less innocent world, and we mistake a decline in our own faculties for a decline in the times.

columnist Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out, “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”

Experiments have shown that a critic who pans a book is perceived as more competent than a critic who praises it, and the same may be true of critics of society.

data scientist Kalev Leetaru applied a technique called sentiment mining to every article published in the New York Times between 1945 and 2005,

we see that the impression that the news has become more negative over time is real.

In the year 2000, all 189 members of the United Nations, together with two dozen international organizations, agreed on eight Millennium Development Goals for the year 2015 that blend right into this list.31 And here is a shocker: The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being. Here is a second shocker: Almost no one knows about it.

CHAPTER 5 LIFE

How long do you think an average person in the world can be expected to live today?

The answer for 2015 is 71.4 years.

Average life spans are stretched the most by decreases in infant and child mortality,

well into the 19th century, in Sweden, one of the world’s wealthiest countries, between a quarter and a third of all children died before their fifth birthday, and in some years the death toll was close to half.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the child mortality rate has fallen from around one in four in the 1960s to less than one in ten in 2015, and the global rate has fallen from 18 to 4 percent—still

for an American woman, being pregnant a century ago was almost as dangerous as having breast cancer today.

at least in developed countries, where estimates are available for 2010 as well, we know that out of the 4.7 years of additional expected life we gained in those two decades, 3.8 were healthy years.

For many people the greatest fear raised by the prospect of a longer life is dementia, but another pleasant surprise has come to light: between 2000 and 2012, the rate among Americans over 65 fell by a quarter, and the average age at diagnosis rose from 80.7 to 82.4 years.

projections from today’s vital statistics, based on the assumption that medical knowledge will be frozen at its current state.

In his 2006 bestseller The Singularity Is Near, the inventor Ray Kurzweil forecasts that those of us who make it to 2045 will live forever, thanks to advances in genetics, nanotechnology (such as nanobots that will course through our bloodstream and repair our bodies from the inside), and artificial intelligence,

In my view the best projection of the outcome of our multicentury war on death is Stein’s Law—“Things that can’t go on forever don’t”—as amended by Davies’s Corollary—“Things that can’t go on forever can go on much longer than you think.”

CHAPTER 6 HEALTH

CHAPTER 7 SUSTENANCE

Together with senescence, childbirth, and pathogens, another mean trick has been played on us by evolution and entropy: our ceaseless need for energy.

premodern Europe suffered from famines every few decades.

comedian Chris Rock observed, “This is the first society in history where the poor people are fat.”

Though obesity surely is a public health problem, by the standards of history it’s a good problem to have.

in spite of burgeoning numbers, the developing world is feeding itself.

China, whose 1.3 billion people now have access to an average of 3,100 calories per person per day,

the number needed by a highly active young man.

India’s billion people get an average of 2,400 calories

Africa comes in between the two at 2,600.

When children are underfed, their growth is stunted,

Though the proportion of stunted children in poor countries like Kenya and Bangladesh is deplorable, we see that in just two decades the rate of stunting has been cut in half.

If this trend continues, the 20th century should go down as the last during which tens of millions of people died for lack of access to food.

when people get richer and more of their babies survive, they have fewer babies

food supply can grow geometrically when knowledge is applied to increase the amount of food that can be coaxed out of a patch of land.

In the mid-19th century it took twenty-five men a full day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain; today one person operating a combine harvester can do it in six minutes.

In the United States in 1901, an hour’s wages could buy around three quarts of milk; a century later, the same wages would buy sixteen quarts.

Thanks to the Green Revolution, the world needs less than a third of the land it used to need to produce a given amount of food.

between 1961 and 2009 the amount of land used to grow food increased by 12 percent, but the amount of food that was grown increased by 300 percent.

Depressing studies have shown that about half of the populace believes that ordinary tomatoes don’t have genes but genetically modified ones do, that a gene inserted into a food might migrate into the genomes of people who eat it, and that a spinach gene inserted into an orange would make it taste like spinach.

As Brand put it, “I daresay the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we’ve been wrong about. We’ve starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool.”

Of the seventy million people who died in major 20th-century famines, 80 percent were victims of Communist regimes’ forced collectivization,

The first governments in postcolonial Africa and Asia often implemented ideologically fashionable but economically disastrous policies such as the mass collectivization of farming, import restrictions to promote “self-sufficiency,” and artificially low food prices which benefited politically influential city-dwellers at the expense of farmers.37 When the countries fell into civil war, as they so often did, not only was food distribution disrupted, but both sides could use hunger as a weapon, sometimes with the complicity of their Cold War patrons.

CHAPTER 8 WEALTH

Poverty has no causes,” wrote the economist Peter Bauer. “Wealth has causes.”

Economists speak of a “lump fallacy” or “physical fallacy” in which a finite amount of wealth has existed since the beginning of time, like a lode of gold, and people have been fighting over how to divide it up ever since.

Enlightenment is the realization that wealth is created.

Between 1820 and 1900, the world’s income tripled. It tripled again in a bit more than fifty years. It took only twenty-five years for it to triple again, and another thirty-three years to triple yet another time.

The Gross World Product today has grown almost a hundredfold since the Industrial Revolution was in place in 1820, and almost two hundredfold from the start of the Enlightenment in the 18th century.

the development of institutions that lubricated the exchange of goods, services, and ideas—the dynamic singled out by Adam Smith as the generator of wealth.

Today I take it for granted that if I want some milk, I can walk into a convenience store and a quart will be on the shelves, the milk won’t be diluted or tainted, it will be for sale at a price I can afford, and the owner will let me walk out with it after a swipe of a card, even though we have never met, may never see each other again, and have no friends in common who can testify to our bona fides.

Aristocratic, religious, and martial cultures have always looked down on commerce as tawdry and venal. But in 18th-century England and the Netherlands, commerce came to be seen as moral and uplifting.

The Great Escape is becoming the Great Convergence.16 Countries that until recently were miserably poor have become comfortably rich, such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore.

Extreme poverty is being eradicated, and the world is becoming middle class.

In two hundred years the rate of extreme poverty in the world has tanked from 90 percent to 10, with almost half that decline occurring in the last thirty-five years.

(Max Roser points out that if news outlets truly reported the changing state of the world, they could have run the headline NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY every day for the last twenty-five years.)

In 2000 the United Nations laid out eight Millennium Development Goals, their starting lines backdated to 1990.25 At the time, cynical observers of that underperforming organization dismissed the targets as aspirational boilerplate. Cut the global poverty rate in half, lifting a billion people out of poverty, in twenty-five years? Yeah, yeah. But the world reached the goal five years ahead of schedule.

Radelet and other development experts point to five causes.

The first is the decline of communism

Market economies, in addition to reaping the benefits of specialization and providing incentives for people to produce things that other people want, solve the problem of coordinating the efforts of hundreds of millions of people by using prices to propagate information about need and availability far and wide, a computational problem that no planner is brilliant enough to solve from a central bureau.

A satellite photograph of Korea showing the capitalist South aglow in light and the Communist North a pit of darkness vividly illustrates the contrast in the wealth-generating capability between the two economic systems,

West and East Germany when they were divided by the Iron Curtain; Botswana versus Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe; Chile versus Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro—the

It’s important to add that the market economies which blossomed in the more fortunate parts of the developing world were not the laissez-faire anarchies of right-wing fantasies and left-wing nightmares. To varying degrees, their governments invested in education, public health, infrastructure, and agricultural and job training, together with social insurance and poverty-reduction programs.

second explanation of the Great Convergence is leadership.

The 1990s and 2000s saw a spread of democracy (chapter 14) and the rise of levelheaded, humanistic leaders—not just national statesmen like Nelson Mandela, Corazon Aquino, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf but local religious and civil-society leaders

A third cause was the end of the Cold War.

pulled the rug out from under a number of tinpot dictators

snuffed out many of the civil wars that had racked developing countries since they attained independence in the 1960s.

economist Paul Collier, who calls war “development in reverse,” has estimated that a typical civil war costs a country $50 billion.39

fourth cause is globalization, in particular the explosion in trade made possible by container ships and jet airplanes and by the liberalization of tariffs and other barriers to investment and trade.

Deaton notes, “Some argue that globalization is a neoliberal conspiracy designed to enrich a very few at the expense of many. If so, that conspiracy was a disastrous failure—or at least, it helped more than a billion people as an unintended consequence. If only unintended consequences always worked so favorably.”

development experts such as Radelet, who observes that “while working on the factory floor is often referred to as sweatshop labor, it is often better than the granddaddy of all sweatshops: working in the fields as an agricultural day laborer.”

Chelsea Follett (the managing editor of HumanProgress) recounts that factory work in the 19th century offered women an escape from the traditional gender roles of farm and village life, and so was held by some men at the time “sufficient to damn to infamy the most worthy and virtuous girl.”

The last, and in many analyses the most important, contributor to the Great Convergence is science and technology.

Today about half the adults in the world own a smartphone, and there are as many subscriptions as people.

they are a major generator of wealth. They allow people to transfer money, order supplies, track the weather and markets, find day labor, get advice on health and farming practices, even obtain a primary education.

According to one estimate, every cell phone adds $3,000 to the annual GDP of a developing country.

In the richest country two centuries ago (the Netherlands), life expectancy was just forty, and in no country was it above forty-five. Today, life expectancy in the poorest country in the world (the Central African Republic) is fifty-four, and in no country is it below forty-five.

Though it’s easy to sneer at national income as a shallow and materialistic measure, it correlates with every indicator of human flourishing,

Most obviously, GDP per capita correlates with longevity, health, and nutrition.

Less obviously, it correlates with higher ethical values like peace, freedom, human rights, and tolerance.

Richer countries, on average, fight fewer wars with each other (chapter 11), are less likely to be riven by civil wars (chapter 11), are more likely to become and stay democratic (chapter 14), and have greater respect for human rights (chapter 14—on average, that is; Arab oil states are rich but repressive).

CHAPTER 9 INEQUALITY

The left and right ends of the political spectrum, incensed by economic inequality for their different reasons, curled around to meet each other, and their shared cynicism about the modern economy helped elect the most radical American president in recent times.

Gini coefficient, a number that can vary between 0, when everyone has the same as everyone else, and 1, when one person has everything

The starting point for understanding inequality in the context of human progress is to recognize that income inequality is not a fundamental component of well-being.

philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his 2015 book On Inequality.5 Frankfurt argues that inequality itself is not morally objectionable; what is objectionable is poverty.

Frankfurt writes, “From the point of view of morality, it is not important everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough.”

When the rich get too rich, everyone else feels poor, so inequality lowers well-being even if everyone gets richer. This is an old idea in social psychology, variously called the theory of social comparison, reference groups, status anxiety, or relative deprivation.

richer people and people in richer countries are (on average) happier than poorer people and people in poorer countries.

Wealthy but unequal countries, such as Singapore and Hong Kong, are often socially healthier than poorer but more equal countries, such as those of ex-Communist Eastern Europe.

Inequality is seen as a harbinger of opportunity, a sign that education and other routes to upward mobility might pay off for them and their children.

article “Why People Prefer Unequal Societies,” the psychologists Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin, and Paul Bloom took another look at the studies and found that people prefer unequal distributions, both among fellow participants in the lab and among citizens in their country, as long as they sense that the allocation is fair: that the bonuses go to harder workers, more generous helpers, or even the lucky winners of an impartial lottery.

The influence of money on politics is particularly pernicious because it can distort every government policy, but it’s not the same issue as income inequality.

sedentary hunter-gatherers, such as the natives of the Pacific Northwest, which is flush with salmon, berries, and fur-bearing animals, were florid inegalitarians, and developed a hereditary nobility who kept slaves, hoarded luxuries, and flaunted their wealth in gaudy potlatches.

while nomadic hunter-gatherers share meat, since hunting is largely a matter of luck and sharing a windfall insures everyone against days in which they come home empty-handed, they are less likely to share plant foods, since gathering is a matter of effort, and indiscriminate sharing would allow free-riding.

recent survey of inequality in the forms of wealth that are possible for hunter-gatherers (houses, boats, and hunting and foraging returns) found that they were “far from a state of ‘primitive communism’”: the Ginis averaged .33, close to the value for disposable income in the United States in 2012.

famous conjecture by the economist Simon Kuznets, as countries get richer they should get less equal, because some people leave farming for higher-paying lines of work while the rest stay in rural squalor. But eventually a rising tide lifts all the boats.

Kuznets curve.

international and global Gini curves show that despite the anxiety about rising inequality within Western countries, inequality in the world is declining.

what’s significant about the decline in inequality is that it’s a decline in poverty.

historian Walter Scheidel identifies “Four Horsemen of Leveling”: mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse, and lethal pandemics.

driving up the wages of those who survive. Scheidel concludes, “All of us who prize greater economic equality would do well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions it was only ever brought forth in sorrow. Be careful what you wish for.”28

in most countries they largely come from a graduated income tax, in which richer citizens pay at a higher rate because they don’t feel the loss as sharply. The net result is “redistribution,” but that is something of a misnomer, because the goal is to raise the bottom, not lower the top, even if in practice the top is lowered.

The United States is famously resistant to anything smacking of redistribution. Yet it allocates 19 percent of its GDP to social services, and despite the best efforts of conservatives and libertarians the spending has continued to grow.

many Americans are forced to pay for health, retirement, and disability benefits through their employers rather than the government. When this privately administered social spending is added to the public portion, the United States vaults from twenty-fourth into second place among the thirty-five OECD countries, just behind France.

For all their protestations against big government and high taxes, people like social spending.

“Keep your government hands off my Medicare”

In Canada the top two national pastimes (after hockey) are complaining about their health care system and boasting about their health care system.

Indonesia, for example, spends 2 percent of its GDP, India 2.5 percent, and China 7 percent. But as they get richer they become more munificent, a phenomenon called Wagner’s Law.

economist Leandro Prados de la Escosura found a strong correlation between the percentage of GDP that an OECD country allocated to social transfers as it developed between 1880 and 2000 and its score on a composite measure of prosperity, health, and education.

the number of libertarian paradises in the world—developed countries without substantial social spending—is zero.

correlation between social spending and social well-being holds only up to a point: the curve levels off starting at around 25 percent and may even drop off at higher proportions.

Milanović has combined the two inequality trends of the past thirty years—declining inequality worldwide, increasing inequality within rich countries—into a single graph which pleasingly takes the shape of an elephant

This “growth incidence curve” sorts the world’s population into twenty numerical bins or quantiles, from poorest to richest, and plots how much each bin gained or lost in real income per capita between 1988 (just before the fall of the Berlin Wall) and 2008 (just before the Great Recession).

The elephant’s bulk (its body and head), which includes about seven-tenths of the world’s population, consists of the “emerging global middle class,” mainly in Asia. Over this period they saw cumulative gains of 40 to 60 percent in their real incomes.

nostrils at the tip of the trunk consist of the world’s richest one percent, who also saw their incomes soar. The rest of the trunk tip, which includes the next 4 percent down, didn’t do badly either.

Where the bend of the trunk hovers over the floor around the 85th percentile we see globalization’s “losers”: the lower middle classes of the rich world, who gained less than 10 percent.

The Great Recession, Milanović points out, was really a recession in North Atlantic countries. The incomes of the world’s richest one percent were trimmed, but the incomes of workers elsewhere soared (in China, they doubled).

globalization helped the lower and middle classes of poor countries, and the upper class of rich countries, much more than it helped the lower middle class of rich countries—but

it’s true that the world’s poor have gotten richer in part at the expense of the American lower middle class, and if I were an American politician I would not publicly say that the tradeoff was worth it. But as citizens of the world considering humanity as a whole, we have to say that the tradeoff is worth it.

But even in the lower and lower middle classes of rich countries, moderate income gains are not the same as a decline in living standards.

Today’s discussions of inequality often compare the present era unfavorably with a golden age of well-paying, dignified, blue-collar jobs that have been made obsolete by automation and globalization.

This idyllic image is belied by contemporary depictions of the harshness of working-class life in that era,

A full 25 percent of Americans, 40 to 50 million people, were poor in the mid-1950s, and in the absence of food stamps and housing programs, this poverty was searing.

Even when we consider only native-born, white families, one-third could not get by on the income of the household head.

Economists point to four ways in which inequality statistics can paint a misleading picture

The first is the difference between relative and absolute prosperity.

Between 1979 and 2014, the percentage of poor Americans dropped from 24 to 20, the percentage in the lower middle class dropped from 24 to 17, and the percentage in the middle class shrank from 32 to 30.

Many ended up in the upper middle class ($100,000–$350,000), which grew from 13 to 30 percent of the population, and in the upper class, which grew from 0.1 percent to 2 percent.

The middle class is being hollowed out in part because so many Americans are becoming affluent.

The second confusion is the one between anonymous and longitudinal data.

recent study using longitudinal data showed that half of Americans will find themselves among the top tenth of income earners for at least one year of their working lives, and that one in nine will find themselves in the top one percent (though most don’t stay there for long).

A third reason that rising inequality has not made the lower classes worse off is that low incomes have been mitigated by social transfers.

United States has a lot of redistribution. The income tax is still graduated, and low incomes are buffered by a “hidden welfare state”

unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, food stamps, and the Earned Income Tax Credit,

In 2013 the Gini index for American market income (before taxes and transfers) was a high .53; for disposable income (after taxes and transfers) it was a moderate .38.

economist Gary Burtless has shown that between 1979 and 2010 the disposable incomes of the lowest four income quintiles grew by 49, 37, 36, and 45 percent, respectively.

recovery from the Great Recession: between 2014 and 2016, median wages leapt to an all-time high.

the poverty rate has fallen in the past fifty years by more than three-quarters, and in 2013 stood at 4.8 percent.

fourth way in which inequality measures understate the progress of the lower and middle classes in rich countries.56 Income is just a means to an end: a way of paying for things that people need, want, and like, or as economists gracelessly call it, consumption.

When poverty is defined in terms of what people consume rather than what they earn, we find that the American poverty rate has declined by ninety percent since 1960,

The two forces that have famously increased inequality in income have at the same time decreased inequality in what matters.

The first, globalization, may produce winners and losers in income, but in consumption it makes almost everyone a winner.

The second force, technology, continually revolutionizes the meaning of income

A dollar today, no matter how heroically adjusted for inflation, buys far more betterment of life than a dollar yesterday.

In 2011, more than 95 percent of American households below the poverty line had electricity, running water, flush toilets, a refrigerator, a stove, and a color TV.

(A century and a half before, the Rothschilds, Astors, and Vanderbilts had none of these things.)

not to deny the formidable problems facing 21st-century economies.

Though disposable income has increased, the pace of the increase is slow,

hardships faced by one sector of the population—middle-aged, less-educated, non-urban white Americans—are real and tragic, manifested in higher rates of drug overdose (chapter 12) and suicide

robotics threaten to make millions of additional jobs obsolete.

Education, a major driver of economic mobility, is not keeping up with the demands of modern economies:

Many parts of the American tax system are regressive, and money buys too much political influence.

most damaging, the impression that the modern economy has left most people behind encourages Luddite and beggar-thy-neighbor policies that would make everyone worse off.

Rather than tilting at inequality per se it may be more constructive to target the specific problems lumped with it.

Inequality is not the same as poverty, and it is not a fundamental dimension of human flourishing. In comparisons of well-being across countries, it pales in importance next to overall wealth. An increase in inequality is not necessarily bad:

globalization and technology have lifted billions out of poverty

created a global middle class,

global inequality have decreased,

enrich elites whose analytical, creative, or financial impact has global reach.

lower classes in developed countries have not improved nearly as much,

have improved, often because their members rise into the upper classes.

The improvements are enhanced by social spending, and by the falling cost and rising quality of the things people want.

CHAPTER 10 THE ENVIRONMENT

The key idea is that environmental problems, like other problems, are solvable, given the right knowledge.

Green ideology begins with an image of the Earth as a pristine ingénue which has been defiled by human rapacity.

an alternative approach to environmental protection

has been called Ecomodernism, Ecopragmatism, Earth Optimism, and the Blue-Green or Turquoise movement, though we can also think of it as Enlightenment Environmentalism or Humanistic Environmentalism.

Ecomodernism begins with the realization that some degree of pollution is an inescapable consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

A dirty secret of the conservation movement is that wilderness preserves are set up only after indigenous peoples have been decimated or forcibly removed from them,

Brand has pointed out (chapter 7), “natural farming” is a contradiction in terms.

No product of agriculture is the slightest bit natural to an ecologist! You take a nice complex ecosystem, chop it into rectangles, clear it to the ground, and hammer it into perpetual early succession! You bust its sod, flatten it flat, and drench it with vast quantities of constant water! Then you populate it with uniform monocrops of profoundly damaged plants incapable of living on their own! Every food plant is a pathetic narrow specialist in one skill, inbred for thousands of years to a state of genetic idiocy! Those plants are so fragile, they had to domesticate humans just to take endless care of them!

A second realization of the ecomodernist movement is that industrialization has been good for humanity.

It has fed billions, doubled life spans, slashed extreme poverty, and, by replacing muscle with machinery, made it easier to end slavery, emancipate women, and educate children

The third premise is that the tradeoff that pits human well-being against environmental damage can be renegotiated by technology. How to enjoy more calories, lumens, BTUs, bits, and miles with less pollution and land is itself a technological problem, and one that the world is increasingly solving.

As societies get richer and people no longer think about putting food on the table or a roof over their heads, their values climb a hierarchy of needs,

people with stronger emancipative values—tolerance, equality, freedom of thought and speech—which tend to go with affluence and education, are also more likely to recycle and to pressure governments and businesses into protecting the environment.

From the 1970s to the early 2000s newsmagazines periodically illustrated cover stories on the world’s oil supply with a gas gauge pointing to Empty. In 2013 The Atlantic ran a cover story about the fracking revolution entitled “We Will Never Run Out of Oil.”

as the most easily extracted supply of a resource becomes scarcer, its price rises, encouraging people to conserve it, get at the less accessible deposits, or find cheaper and more plentiful substitutes.

The supply of food, too, has grown exponentially

farmers could save massive amounts if they switched to Israeli-style precision farming.

And if the world develops abundant carbon-free energy sources (a topic we will explore later), it could get what it needs by desalinating seawater.

since 1970, when the Environmental Protection Agency was established, the United States has slashed its emissions of five air pollutants by almost two-thirds. Over the same period, the population grew by more than 40 percent, and those people drove twice as many miles and became two and a half times richer.

refute both the orthodox Green claim that only degrowth can curb pollution and the orthodox right-wing claim that environmental protection must sabotage economic growth and people’s standard of living.

Deforestation of the world’s largest tropical forest, the Amazon, peaked in 1995, and from 2004 to 2013 the rate fell by four-fifths.

Environmental Performance Index,

Out of 180 countries that have been tracked for a decade or more, all but two show an improvement.

The wealthier the country, on average, the cleaner its environment:

Indira Gandhi said, “Poverty is the greatest polluter.”

according to the ecologist Stuart Pimm, the overall rate of extinctions has been reduced by 75 percent.

The fact that many measures of environmental quality are improving does not mean that everything is OK, that the environment got better by itself, or that we can just sit back and relax.

dematerialization. Progress in technology allows us to do more with less.

aluminum soda can used to weigh three ounces; today it weighs less than half an ounce.

Mobile phones don’t need miles of telephone poles and wires.

digital revolution, by replacing atoms with bits, is dematerializing the world

Digital technology is also dematerializing the world by enabling the sharing economy, so that cars, tools, and bedrooms needn’t be made in huge numbers that sit around unused most of the time.

unquestionably alarming: the effect of greenhouse gases on the earth’s climate.

concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen from about 270 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution to more than 400 parts today.

global average temperature has risen as well, by about .8° Celsius

2016 was the hottest year on record, with 2015 coming in second and 2014 coming in third.

A rise of 2°C is considered the most that the world could reasonably adapt to, and a rise of 4°C, in the words of a 2012 World Bank report, “simply must not be allowed to occur.”

have to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by half or more by the middle of the 21st century and eliminate them altogether before the turn of the 22nd.

Anthropogenic climate change is the most vigorously challenged scientific hypothesis in history.

world’s emission of greenhouse gases, which are dominated by heavy industry (29 percent), buildings (18 percent), transport (15 percent), land-use change (15 percent), and the energy needed to supply energy (13 percent).

two psychological impediments we face in dealing with climate change.

The first is cognitive. People have trouble thinking in scale: they don’t differentiate among actions that would reduce CO2 emissions by thousands of tons, millions of tons, and billions of tons.

global temperatures (which will rise even if the level of CO2 remains constant).

The other impediment is moralistic.

conflating profligacy with evil and asceticism with virtue, the moral sense can sanctify pointless displays of sacrifice.

it’s unwise to let the fate of the planet hinge on the hope that billions of people will simultaneously volunteer to act against their interests.

It may be satisfying to demonize the fossil fuel corporations that sell us the energy we want, or to signal our virtue by making conspicuous sacrifices, but these indulgences won’t prevent destructive climate change.

The enlightened response to climate change is to figure out how to get the most energy with the least emission of greenhouse gases.

Some optimists believe that if the trend is allowed to evolve into its next phase—from low-carbon natural gas to zero-carbon nuclear energy, a process abbreviated as “N2N”—the climate will have a soft landing. But only the sunniest believe this will happen by itself.

begins with carbon pricing:

Economists across the political spectrum endorse carbon pricing because it combines the unique advantages of governments and markets.

second key to deep decarbonization brings up an inconvenient truth for the traditional Green movement: nuclear power is the world’s most abundant and scalable carbon-free energy source.

To satisfy the world’s needs with renewables by 2050 would require tiling windmills and solar panels over an area the size of the United States (including Alaska), plus Mexico, Central America, and the inhabited portion of Canada.

Nuclear energy, in contrast, represents the ultimate in density,

The sixty years with nuclear power have seen thirty-one deaths in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster,

The other two famous accidents, at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Fukushima in 2011, killed no one.

Compared with nuclear power, natural gas kills 38 times as many people per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated, biomass 63 times as many, petroleum 243 times as many, and coal 387 times as many—perhaps a million deaths a year.

Ivan Selin, former commissioner of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, put it, “The French have two kinds of reactors and hundreds of kinds of cheese, whereas in the United States the figures are reversed.”

The last of these is critical

It’s not enough to stop thickening the greenhouse; at some point we have to dismantle it.

Plants suck carbon out of the air

encouraging the transition from deforestation to reforestation and afforestation

BECCS—bioenergy with carbon capture and storage—has been called climate change’s savior technology.

In all but one of the forty countries surveyed (Pakistan), a majority of respondents were in favor of limiting greenhouse gas emissions, including 69 percent of the Americans.

the Paris agreement would substantially reduce the likelihood of a 2°C rise and essentially eliminate the possibility of a 4°C rise.102

We cannot be complacently optimistic about climate change, but we can be conditionally optimistic. We have some practicable ways to prevent the harms and we have the means to learn more. Problems are solvable. That does not mean that they will solve themselves, but it does mean that we can solve them if we sustain the benevolent forces of modernity that have allowed us to solve problems so far,

CHAPTER 11 PEACE

In The Better Angels of Our Nature I showed that, as of the first decade of the 21st century, every objective measure of violence had been in decline.

(Great powers are the handful of states and empires that can project force beyond their borders, that treat each other as peers, and that collectively control a majority of the world’s military resources.)

at the dawn of the modern era the great powers were pretty much always at war. But nowadays they are never at war: the last one pitted the United States against China in Korea more than sixty years ago.

War in the classic sense of an armed conflict between the uniformed armies of two nation-states appears to be obsolescent.

The world’s wars are now concentrated almost exclusively in a zone stretching from Nigeria to Pakistan, an area containing less than a sixth of the world’s population. Those wars are civil wars,

A precipitous decline in the number of civil wars after the end of the Cold War—from fourteen in 1990 to four in 2007—went back up to eleven in 2014 and 2015 and to twelve in 2016.9 The flip is driven mainly by conflicts that have a radical Islamist group on one side

without them, there would have been no increase in the number of wars at all.

The Syrian civil war, with 250,000 battle deaths as of 2016 (conservatively estimated), is responsible for most of the uptick in the global rate of war deaths

That uptick, however, comes at the end of a vertiginous six-decade plunge.

political scientist Joshua Goldstein notes that today’s four million Syrian refugees are outnumbered by the ten million displaced by the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971, the fourteen million displaced by the partition of India in 1947, and the sixty million displaced by World War II in Europe alone, eras when the world’s population was a fraction of what it is now.

The prevalence of conscription, the size of armed forces, and the level of global military spending as a percentage of GDP have all decreased in recent decades.18 Most important, there have been changes

theory of gentle commerce, according to which international trade should make war less appealing.

trade as a proportion of GDP shot up in the postwar era, and quantitative analyses have confirmed that trading countries are less likely to go to war, holding all else constant.

the data support a graded version of the Democratic Peace theory, in which pairs of countries that are more democratic are less likely to confront each other in militarized disputes.

the world’s nations have committed themselves to not waging war except in self-defense or with the approval of the United Nations Security Council.

legal scholars Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro argue that it’s the outlawry of war that deserves much of the credit for the Long Peace.

penalties are effective to the extent that nations value their standing in the international community—a reminder of why we should cherish and strengthen that community in the face of threats from populist nationalism today.

an imperfectly enforced law is better than no rule of law

Civil wars kill fewer people than interstate wars, and since the late 1980s civil wars have declined as well.

as countries get richer, they become less vulnerable to civil war.

not so long ago it was war that was considered worthy. War was glorious,

Today, the idea that it is inherently noble to kill and maim people and destroy their roads, bridges, farms, dwellings, schools, and hospitals strikes us as the raving of a madman.

a world in which all parties refrain from war is better for everyone. Inventions such as trade, democracy, economic development, peacekeeping forces, and international law and norms are tools that help build that world.

CHAPTER 12 SAFETY

Worldwide, injuries account for about a tenth of all deaths, outnumbering the victims of AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined, and are responsible for 11 percent of the years lost to death and disability.

the zero-sum plundering of land gave way to a positive-sum trade of goods and services.

Whenever a government brings a frontier region under the rule of law and its people become integrated into a commercial society, rates of violence fall.

Starting in the 1960s, most Western democracies saw a boom in personal violence that erased a century of progress.8 It was most dramatic in the United States, where the rate of homicide shot up by a factor of two and a half,

2014, Eisner, in consultation with the World Health Organization, proposed a goal of reducing the rate of global homicide by 50 percent within thirty years.

two facts about the statistics of homicide.

first is that the distribution of homicide is highly skewed at every level of granularity.

Half of the world’s homicides are committed in just twenty-three countries containing about a tenth of humanity,

Within a country, most of the homicides cluster in a few cities, such as Caracas

Eisner’s one-sentence summary of how to halve the homicide rate within three decades: “An effective rule of law, based on legitimate law enforcement, victim protection, swift and fair adjudication, moderate punishment, and humane prisons is critical to sustainable reductions in lethal violence.”

The adjectives effective, legitimate, swift, fair, moderate, and humane differentiate his advice from the get-tough-on-crime rhetoric favored by right-wing politicians.

single most effective tactic for reducing violent crime is focused deterrence.

first be directed on the neighborhoods where crime is rampant

further beamed at the individuals and gangs who are picking on victims

it must deliver a simple and concrete message about the behavior that is expected of them, like “Stop shooting and we will help you, keep shooting and we will put you in prison.”

Violent crime exploded in the United States when alcohol was prohibited in the 1920s and when crack cocaine became popular in the late 1980s, and it is rampant in Latin American and Caribbean countries in which cocaine, heroin, and marijuana are trafficked today.

Perhaps the ongoing decriminalization of marijuana, and in the future other drugs, will lift these industries out of their lawless underworld.

Abt and Winship observe that “aggressive drug enforcement yields little anti-drug benefits and generally increases violence,”

A typical firefighter will see just one burning building every other year.

In 2013, 98 percent of the “Poison” deaths were from drugs (92 percent) or alcohol (6 percent), and almost all the others were from gases and vapors (mostly carbon monoxide).

it’s the members of the generation born between 1953 and 1963 who are drugging themselves to death. Despite perennial panic about teenagers, today’s kids are, relatively speaking, all right, or at least better.

high schoolers’ use of alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs (other than marijuana and vaping) have dropped to the lowest levels since the survey began in 1976.

(Today, safety engineers and public health researchers don’t even use the word accident, since it implies a fickle finger of fate; the term of art is unintentional injury.)

The first safety measures and insurance policies in the 18th and 19th centuries protected property, not people.

Workplaces began to change in the late 19th century as the first labor unions organized, journalists took up the cause, and government agencies started to collect data quantifying the human toll.

At almost 5,000 deaths in 2015, the number of workers killed on the job is still too high, but it’s much better than the 20,000 deaths in 1929, when the population was less than two-fifths the size.

saving lives while producing the same number of widgets is a solvable engineering problem.

a richer and more technologically advanced society can prevent natural hazards from becoming human catastrophes.

Though geologists can’t yet predict earthquakes, they can often predict volcanic eruptions, and can prepare the people who live along the Rim of Fire and other fault systems to take lifesaving precautions.

A 2010 earthquake in Haiti killed more than 200,000 people, while a stronger one in Chile a few weeks later killed just 500.

CHAPTER 13 TERRORISM

in 2015 an American was more than 350 times as likely to be killed in a police-blotter homicide as in a terrorist attack, 800 times as likely to be killed in a car crash, and 3,000 times as likely to die in an accident of any kind.

(Among the categories of accident that typically kill more than 44 people in a given year are “Lightning,” “Contact with hot tap water,” “Contact with hornets, wasps, and bees,” “Bitten or struck by mammals other than dogs,” “Drowning and submersion while in or falling into bathtub,” and “Ignition or melting of clothing and apparel other than nightwear.”)

Excluding 9/11 and Oklahoma, about twice as many Americans have been killed since 1990 by right-wing extremists as by Islamist terror groups.

Western Europe has seen: the rate of killing was higher in the 1970s and 1980s, when Marxist and secessionist groups (including the Irish Republican Army and the Basque ETA movement) carried out regular bombings and shootings.

historian Yuval Harari notes that terrorism is the opposite of military action, which tries to damage the enemy’s ability to retaliate and prevail.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, it left the United States without a fleet to send to Southeast Asia in response. It would have been mad for Japan to have opted for terrorism, say, by torpedoing a passenger ship to provoke the United States into responding with an intact navy.

Harari notes, what terrorists seek to accomplish is not damage but theater.

political scientist Robert Jervis observes that the placement of terrorism at the top of the list of threats “in part stems from a security environment that is remarkably benign.”

The most damaging effect of terrorism is countries’ overreaction to it, the case in point being the American-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq following 9/11.

Instead, countries could deal with terrorism by deploying their greatest advantage: knowledge and analysis,

uppermost goal should be to make sure the numbers stay small by securing weapons of mass destruction

countered with better systems of value and belief

media can examine their essential role in the show business of terrorism by calibrating their coverage

Governments can step up their intelligence and clandestine actions against networks of terrorism and their financial tributaries.

people could be encouraged to keep calm and carry on, as the British wartime poster famously urged during a time of much greater peril.

CHAPTER 14 DEMOCRACY

humanity has tried to steer a course between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny.

A good democratic government allows people to pursue their lives in safety, protected from the violence of anarchy, and in freedom, protected from the violence of tyranny.

democracies also have higher rates of economic growth, fewer wars and genocides, healthier and better-educated citizens, and virtually no famines.

In 1989 the political scientist Francis Fukuyama published a famous essay in which he proposed that liberal democracy represented “the end of history,” not because nothing would ever happen again but because the world was coming to a consensus over the humanly best form of governance and no longer had to fight over it.

A good rule of thumb is that any country that has the word “democratic” in its official name, like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (a.k.a. North Korea) or the German Democratic Republic (a.k.a. East Germany), isn’t one.

The Polity Project deals with these obstacles by using a fixed set of criteria to assign a score between –10 and 10 to every country in every year indicating how autocratic or democratic it is, focusing on citizens’ ability to express political preferences, constraints on the power of the executive, and a guarantee of civil liberties.

the third wave of democratization is far from over, let alone ebbing, even if it has not continued to surge at the rate of the years surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

The world’s 103 democracies in 2015 embraced 56 percent of the world’s population, and if we add the 17 countries that were more democratic than autocratic, we get a total of two-thirds

Of the people living in the 60 nondemocratic countries today (20 full autocracies, 40 more autocratic than democratic), four-fifths reside in a single country, China.

Johan Norberg summarizes life in China: “The Chinese people today can move almost however they like, buy a home, choose an education, pick a job, start a business, belong to a church (as long as they are Buddhists, Taoist, Muslims, Catholics or Protestants), dress as they like, marry whom they like, be openly gay without ending up in a labor camp, travel abroad freely, and even criticize aspects of the Party’s policy (though not its right to rule unopposed).

Most voters are ignorant not just of current policy options but of basic facts, such as what the major branches of government are, who the United States fought in World War II, and which countries have used nuclear weapons.

philosopher Karl Popper argued that democracy should be understood not as the answer to the question “Who should rule?” (namely, “The People”), but as a solution to the problem of how to dismiss bad leadership without bloodshed.

political scientist John Mueller broadens the idea from a binary Judgment Day to continuous day-to-day feedback.

Democracy, he suggests, is essentially based on giving people the freedom to complain:

Women’s suffrage is an example: by definition, they could not vote to grant themselves the vote, but they got it by other means.

democracy has trouble getting a toehold in extremely poor countries with weak governments,

political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way point out, “State failure brings violence and instability; it almost never brings democratization.”

But the world also has some benevolent autocracies, like Singapore, and some repressive democracies, like Pakistan.

The reason the United States is a death-penalty outlier is that it is, in one sense, too democratic.

The abolitionist elites in Europe got their way over the misgivings of the common man because European democracies did not convert the opinions of the common man into policy.

in 2016, popular support for the death penalty slipped just below 50 percent for the first time in almost fifty years.

First, advances in forensic science, particularly DNA fingerprinting, have shown that innocent people have almost certainly been put to death, a scenario that unnerves even ardent supporters of the death penalty.

Second, the grisly business of snuffing out a life has evolved from the gory sadism of crucifixion and disembowelment, to the quick but still graphic ropes, bullets, and blades, to the invisible agents of gas and electricity, to the pseudo-medical procedure of lethal injection. But doctors refuse to administer it, pharmaceutical companies refuse to supply the drugs, and witnesses are disturbed by the death throes during botched attempts.

Third, the chief alternative to the death penalty, life in prison, has become more reliable as escape-proof and riot-proof penitentiaries have been perfected.

Fourth, as the rate of violent crime has plummeted (chapter 12), people feel less need for draconian remedies.

Fifth, because the death penalty is seen as such a momentous undertaking, the summary executions of earlier eras have given way to a drawn-out legal ordeal.

Sixth, social disparities in death sentences, with poor and black defendants disproportionately being put to death (“Those without the capital get the punishment”), have weighed increasingly on the nation’s conscience.

Finally, the Supreme Court, which is repeatedly tasked with formulating a consistent rationale for this crazy quilt, has struggled to rationalize the practice, and has chipped away at it piece by piece.

has ruled that states may not execute juveniles, people with intellectual disabilities, or perpetrators of crimes other than murder, and it came close to ruling against the hit-and-miss method of lethal injection.

CHAPTER 15 EQUAL RIGHTS

First Lady Michelle Obama in a speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2016: “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, and I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent black young women, playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.”

In a parallel universe very similar to this one until November 8, 2016, the world’s three most influential nations (the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany) are all led by women.

The data suggest that the number of police shootings has decreased, not increased, in recent decades

three independent analyses have found that a black suspect is no more likely than a white suspect to be killed by the police.6

A spate of news about rape cannot tell us whether there is now more violence against women, a bad thing, or whether we now care more about violence against women, a good thing.

Not only has the American population become more liberal, but each generational cohort is more liberal than the one born before it.

In 1950, almost half the world’s countries had laws that discriminated against ethnic or racial minorities (including, of course, the United States). By 2003 fewer than a fifth did, and they were outnumbered by countries with affirmative action policies that favored disadvantaged minorities.

In 1993 the UN General Assembly adopted a Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Since then most countries have implemented laws and public-awareness campaigns

Though homosexuality is still a crime in more than seventy countries (and a capital crime in eleven Islamic ones), and despite backsliding in Russia and several African countries, the global trend, encouraged by the UN and every human rights organization, continues toward liberalization.

In his book Freedom Rising, the political scientist Christian Welzel (building on a collaboration with Ron Inglehart, Pippa Norris, and others) has proposed that the process of modernization has stimulated the rise of “emancipative values.”36 As societies shift from agrarian to industrial to informational, their citizens become less anxious about fending off enemies and other existential threats and more eager to express their ideals and to pursue opportunities in life.

in every part of the world, people have become more liberal.

young Muslims in the Middle East, the world’s most conservative culture, have values today that are comparable to those of young people in Western Europe, the world’s most liberal culture, in the early 1960s.

the single best predictor of emancipative values is the World Bank’s Knowledge Index, which combines per capita measures of education (adult literacy and enrollment in high schools and colleges), information access (telephones, computers, and Internet users), scientific and technological productivity (researchers, patents, and journal articles), and institutional integrity (rule of law, regulatory quality, and open economies).

children are increasingly escaping human-made ones: they are safer than they were before, and likelier to enjoy a true childhood.

Media reports of school shootings, abductions, bullying, cyberbullying, sexting, date rape, and sexual and physical abuse make it seem as if children are living in increasingly perilous times. The data say otherwise.

advertisement for tractors in a 1921 issue of the magazine Successful Farming entitled “Keep the Boy in School”:

Keep the boy in school—and let a Case Kerosene Tractor take his place in the field. You’ll never regret either investment.

the poorer the country, the larger the percentage of its children who work.

CHAPTER 16 KNOWLEDGE

Homo sapiens, “knowing man,”

Today, education is compulsory in most countries, and it is recognized as a fundamental human right by the 170 members of the United Nations that signed the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

investing in education really does make countries richer. At least it does if the education is secular and rationalistic.

better education today makes a country more democratic and peaceful tomorrow.

now 83 percent of the world is literate.

the illiterate fifth is mostly middle-aged or elderly.

current projections, by the middle of this century, only five countries will have more than a fifth of their population uneducated, and by the end of the century the worldwide proportion will fall to zero.

Since educated people tend to have fewer children, the growth of education is a major reason that, later in this century, world population is expected to peak and then decline

When girls are educated, they are healthier, have fewer and healthier children, and are more productive—and so are their countries.

People with high scores on intelligence tests get better jobs, perform better in their jobs, enjoy better health and longer lives, are less likely to get into trouble with the law, and have a greater number of noteworthy accomplishments like starting companies, earning patents, and creating respected works of art—all holding socioeconomic status constant.

a country’s average IQ predicted its subsequent growth in GDP per capita, together with growth in noneconomic measures of well-being like longevity and leisure time.

although the world remains highly unequal, every region has been improving, and the worst-off parts of the world today are better off than the best-off parts not long ago.

while almost every indicator of human well-being correlates with wealth, the lines don’t just reflect a wealthier world: longevity, health, and knowledge have increased even in many of the times and places where wealth has not.

CHAPTER 17 QUALITY OF LIFE

one metric of progress is a reduction in the time people must devote to keeping themselves alive at the expense of the other, more enjoyable things in life.

The average American now retires at age 62. One hundred years ago, the average American died at age 51.”

Time spent on laundry alone fell from 11.5 hours a week in 1920 to 1.5 in 2014.

over the course of the 20th century, typical American parents spent more time, not less, with their children.

single and working mothers today spend more time with their children than stay-at-home married mothers did in 1965.

Today, almost half of the world’s population has Internet access, and three-quarters have access to a mobile phone.

democratization of plane travel has removed the barriers of distance and oceans.

The term jet set for chic celebrities is an anachronism from the 1960s, when no more than a fifth of Americans had ever flown in a plane.

Another way in which the scope of our aesthetic experience has been magnified is food.

Today, even small towns and shopping mall food courts offer a cosmopolitan menu, sometimes with all these cuisines plus Greek, Thai, Indian, Vietnamese, and Middle Eastern.

He could fact-check rumors on Snopes, teach himself math and science at Khan Academy, build his word power with the American Heritage Dictionary, enlighten himself with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and watch lectures by the world’s great scholars, writers, and critics, many long dead.

We have, at our fingertips, virtually all the works of genius prior to our time, together with those of our own time,

Better still, the world’s cultural patrimony is now available not just to the rich and well-located but to anyone who is connected to the vast web of knowledge, which means most of humanity and soon all of it.

CHAPTER 18 HAPPINESS

An American in 2015, compared with his or her counterpart a half-century earlier, will live nine years longer, have had three more years of education, earn an additional $33,000 a year per family member (only a third of which, rather than half, will go to necessities), and have an additional eight hours a week of leisure.

monologue by the comedian Louis C.K. known as “Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy”:

economist Richard Easterlin identified a paradox

Though in comparisons within a country richer people are happier, in comparisons across countries the richer ones appeared to be no happier than poorer ones.

And in comparisons over time, people did not appear to get happier as their countries got richer.

theory of the hedonic treadmill, people adapt to changes in their fortunes,

theory of social comparison (or reference groups, status anxiety, or relative deprivation, which we examined in chapter 9), people’s happiness is determined by how well they think they are doing relative to their compatriots, so as the country as a whole gets richer, no one feels happier—indeed,

well-being is not a single dimension. People can be better off in some ways and worse off in others.

distinguish the major ones.

top of that list is life itself; also on it are health, education, freedom, and leisure.

Among these intrinsic goods is freedom or autonomy: the availability of options to lead a good life (positive freedom) and the absence of coercion that prevents a person from choosing among them (negative freedom).

the level of happiness in a country is correlated with the level of freedom.

people single out freedom as a component of a meaningful life, whether or not it leads to a happy life.11

final dimension of a good life, meaning and purpose.

This is the quality that, together with happiness, goes into Aristotle’s ideal of eudaemonia

People who lead happy but not necessarily meaningful lives have all their needs satisfied:

Happy people live in the present; those with meaningful lives have a narrative about their past and a plan for the future.

Those with happy but meaningless lives are takers and beneficiaries; those with meaningful but unhappy lives are givers and benefactors.

Stress, worry, arguments, challenges, and struggles make a life unhappier but more meaningful.

they pursue ambitious goals: “Man plans and God laughs.”

there is plenty of unhappiness that can be reduced, and no limit as to how meaningful our lives can become.

Not only are richer people in a given country happier, but people in richer countries are happier, and as countries get richer over time, their people get happier.

World Happiness Report 2016.

a given number of extra dollars boosts the happiness of people in a poor country more than the happiness of people in a rich country,

the richer a country is, the more additional money its people need to become happier still.

Easterlin paradox

casts doubt on the idea that people are happy or unhappy only in comparison to the Joneses. Absolute income, not relative income,

is what matters most for happiness

contrary to an earlier belief, winning the lottery does, over the long term, make people happier.

found that in eight out of nine European countries, happiness increased between 1973 and 2009 in tandem with the country’s rise in GDP per capita.

The trends over time close the books on the Easterlin paradox: we now know that richer people within a country are happier, that richer countries are happier, and that people get happier as their countries get richer (which means that people get happier over time).

Among the countries that punch below their wealth in happiness is the United States.

in 2015 the United States came in at thirteenth place

Over the past thirty-five years African Americans have been getting much happier while American whites have gotten a bit less happy.

Women tend to be happier than men, but in Western countries the gap has shrunk, with men getting happier at a faster rate than women.

In the United States it has reversed outright, as women got unhappier while men stayed more or less the same.

People tend to get happier as they get older (an age effect),

(They may pass through a midlife crisis on the way, or take a final slide in the last years

economists call a composite of the inflation rate and the unemployment rate the Misery Index—and

younger Americans have in fact been getting happier. (As we saw in chapter 12, they have also become less violent and less druggy.)

in The Village Effect the psychologist Susan Pinker reviews research showing that digital friendships don’t provide the psychological benefits of face-to-face contact.

Users of social media have more close friends, express more trust in people, feel more supported, and are more politically involved.

Social media users care too much, not too little, about other people, and they empathize with them over their troubles rather than envying them their successes.

People see each other less in traditional venues

and more in informal gatherings and via digital media.

It’s not entirely surprising that as women gained in autonomy relative to men they also slipped in happiness.

Today young women increasingly say that their life goals include career, family, marriage, money, recreation, friendship, experience, correcting social inequities, being a leader in their community, and making a contribution to society.

George Bernard Shaw observed, “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”

CHAPTER 19 EXISTENTIAL THREATS

There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They’re called women.

advances have not come from a better understanding of the workings of intelligence but from the brute-force power of faster chips and bigger data, which allow the programs to be trained on millions of examples and generalize to similar new ones.

Each system is an idiot savant, with little ability to leap to problems it was not set up to solve, and a brittle mastery of those it was.

one can always imagine a Doomsday Computer that is malevolent, universally empowered, always on, and tamperproof. The way to deal with this threat is straightforward: don’t build one.

As the AI expert Stuart Russell puts it, “No one in civil engineering talks about ‘building bridges that don’t fall down.’ They just call it ‘building bridges.’” Likewise, he notes, AI that is beneficial rather than dangerous is simply AI.

The observation of a 1965 report from NASA still holds: “Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.”

If not robots, then what about hackers? We all know the stereotypes:

Kelly was the co-organizer (with Stewart Brand) of the first Hackers’ Conference in 1984, and since that time he has repeatedly been told that any day now technology will outrun humans’ ability to domesticate it. Yet despite the massive expansion of technology in those decades (including the invention of the Internet), that has not happened. Kelly suggests that there is a reason: “The more powerful technologies become, the more socially embedded they become.”

Kelly suggests that because of the social embeddedness of technology, the destructive power of a solitary individual has in fact not increased over time:

The more sophisticated and powerful a technology, the more people are needed to weaponize it. And the more people needed to weaponize it, the more societal controls work to defuse, or soften, or prevent harm from happening.

The key is not to fall for the Availability bias and assume that if we can imagine something terrible, it is bound to happen.

(leading the security expert Bruce Schneier to ask, “Where are all the terrorist attacks?”).

venture that the proportion of brilliant terrorists in a population is even smaller than the proportion of terrorists multiplied by the proportion of brilliant people.

Terrorism is a demonstrably ineffective tactic, and a mind that delights in senseless mayhem for its own sake is probably not the brightest bulb in the box.

Serious threats to the integrity of a country’s infrastructure are likely to require the resources of a state.

The reality is that so far, not a single person has ever been injured by a cyberattack. The strikes have mostly been nuisances such as doxing,

Schneier explains, “A real-world comparison might be if an army invaded a country, then all got in line in front of people at the Department of Motor Vehicles so they couldn’t renew their licenses. If that’s what war looks like in the 21st century, we have little to fear.”

Suppose a hacker did manage to take down the Internet. Would the country literally cease to exist? Would civilization collapse? Would the human species go extinct? A little proportion, please—even Hiroshima continues to exist!

One reason that the death toll of World War II was so horrendous is that war planners on both sides adopted the strategy of bombing civilians until their societies collapsed—which they never did.55 And no, this resilience was not a relic of the homogeneous communities of yesteryear. Cosmopolitan 21st-century societies can cope with disasters, too, as we saw in the orderly evacuation of Lower Manhattan following the 9/11 attacks in the United States, and the absence of panic in Estonia in 2007 when the country was struck with a devastating denial-of-service cyberattack.

Bioterrorism may be another phantom menace.

tiny living things make lousy weapons. They easily blow back and infect the weaponeers, warriors, and citizens of the side that uses them

Some of the threats to humanity are fanciful or infinitesimal, but one is real: nuclear war.

The world has more than ten thousand nuclear weapons distributed among nine countries.

India and Pakistan went to war and detonated a hundred of their weapons, twenty million people could be killed right away, and soot from the firestorms could spread through the atmosphere, devastate the ozone layer, and cool the planet for more than a decade, which in turn would slash food production and starve more than a billion people.

exchange between the United States and Russia could cool the Earth by 8°C for years and create a nuclear winter

The historian Paul Boyer found that nuclear alarmism actually encouraged the arms race by scaring the nation into pursuing more and bigger bombs,

since the nine nuclear states won’t be scuppering their weapons tomorrow, it behooves us in the meantime to figure out what has gone right, so we can do more of whatever it is.

Anything that reduces the risk of war reduces the risk of nuclear war.

documents from the Cuban Missile Crisis, particularly transcripts of John F. Kennedy’s

records show that Khrushchev and Kennedy remained in firm control of their governments, and that each sought a peaceful end to the crisis, ignoring provocations and leaving themselves several options for backing down.

Contrary to predictions in the 1960s that there would soon be twenty-five or thirty nuclear states, fifty years later there are nine.

During that half-century four countries have un-proliferated by relinquishing nuclear weapons (South Africa, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus),

another sixteen pursued them but thought the better of it, most recently Libya and Iran.

The Manhattan Project grew out of the fear that the Germans were developing a nuclear weapon,

Quite possibly, had there been no Nazis, there would be no nukes.

Most historians today believe that Japan surrendered not because of the atomic bombings, whose devastation was no greater than that from the firebombings of sixty other Japanese cities, but because of the entry into the Pacific war of the Soviet Union, which threatened harsher terms of surrender.

nuclear weapons turn out to be lousy deterrents (except in the extreme case of deterring existential threats, such as each other).

Nuclear states have been no more effective than non-nuclear states in getting their way in international standoffs, and in many conflicts, non-nuclear countries or factions have picked fights with nuclear ones.

United States has reduced its inventory by 85 percent from its 1967 peak, and now has fewer nuclear warheads than at any time since 1956.

Russia, for its part, has reduced its arsenal by 89 percent from its Soviet-era peak.

10 percent of electricity in the United States comes from dismantled nuclear warheads, mostly Soviet.)

CHAPTER 20 THE FUTURE OF PROGRESS

progress is not utopia, and that there is room—indeed, an imperative—for us to strive to continue that progress.

If we can sustain the trends in the first eight paragraphs by deploying knowledge to enhance flourishing, the numbers in the last three paragraphs should shrink.

The Enlightenment is an ongoing process of discovery and betterment.

A richer world can better afford to protect the environment, police its gangs, strengthen its social safety nets, and teach and heal its citizens. A better-educated and connected world cares more about the environment, indulges fewer autocrats, and starts fewer wars.

Davies’s Corollary (Things that can’t go on forever can go on much longer than you think),

The Industrial Revolution ushered in more than two centuries of economic growth, especially during the period between World War II and the early 1970s, when the Gross World Product per capita grew at a rate of around 3.4 percent a year, doubling every twenty years.

Since the early 1970s, the annual rate of growth has fallen by more than half, to around 1.4 percent.

No one really knows why productivity growth slacked off in the early 1970s or how to bring it back up.

growth that is slower than it was during the postwar glory days is still growth—indeed, exponential growth. Gross World Product has increased in fifty-one of the last fifty-five years,

technologically driven productivity growth has a way of sneaking up on the world.

Electrification, to take a prominent example, started in the 1890s, but it took forty years before economists saw the boost in productivity

“Imagine a world of nine billion people,” write the tech entrepreneur Peter Diamandis and the journalist Steven Kotler, “with clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tier medical care, and nonpolluting, ubiquitous energy.”17 Their vision comes not from fantasies out of The Jetsons but from technologies that are already working, or are very close.

Most economists agree that GNP (or its close relative, GDP) is a crude index of economic thriving. It has the virtue of being easy to measure, but because it’s just a tally of the money that changes hands in the production of goods and services, it’s not the same as the bounty that people enjoy.

The second decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of a counter-Enlightenment movement called populism, more accurately, authoritarian populism.

Problems are seen not as challenges that are inevitable in an indifferent universe but as the malevolent designs of insidious elites, minorities, or foreigners.

Life and Health

among the conspiracy theories that Trump has endorsed is the long-debunked claim that preservatives in vaccines cause autism.

Worldwide improvements in Wealth

Trump is a protectionist who sees international trade as a zero-sum contest between countries, and is committed to tearing up international trade agreements.

Growth in Wealth

Trump is indifferent to technology and education and an advocate of regressive tax cuts on the wealthy, while appointing corporate and financial tycoons to his cabinet who are indiscriminately hostile to regulation.

Inequality, Trump has demonized immigrants and trade partners while ignoring the major disrupter of lower-middle-class jobs, technological change.

The Environment

Trump believes that environmental regulation is economically destructive; worst of all, he has called climate change a hoax

Safety,

While Trump has cultivated a reputation for law and order, he is viscerally uninterested in evidence-based policy

The postwar Peace has been cemented by trade, Democracy, international agreements and organizations,

Trump has vilified international trade and has threatened to defy international agreements and weaken international organizations.

admirer of Vladimir Putin,

Democracy

Trump proposed to relax libel laws against journalists, encouraged violence against his critics at his rallies, would not commit to respecting the outcome of the 2016 election if it went against him, tried to discredit the popular vote count that did go against him, threatened to imprison his opponent in the election, and attacked the legitimacy of the judicial system when it challenged his decisions—all hallmarks of a dictator.

ideals of tolerance, equality, and Equal Rights

Trump demonized Hispanic immigrants, proposed banning Muslim immigration altogether

ideal of Knowledge—that

Trump’s repetition of ludicrous conspiracy theories:

PolitiFact judged that an astonishing 69 percent of the public statements by Trump they checked were “Mostly False,” “False,” or “Pants on Fire”

Trump has pushed back against the norms that have protected the world against the possible Existential Threat of nuclear war.

Not even a congenital optimist can see a pony in this Christmas stocking.

There are reasons not to take poison just yet. If a movement has proceeded for decades or centuries, there are probably systematic forces behind it, and many stakeholders with an interest in its not being precipitously reversed.

In the American election, voters in the two lowest income brackets voted for Clinton 52–42, as did those who identified “the economy” as the most important issue. A majority of voters in the four highest income brackets voted for Trump, and Trump voters singled out “immigration” and “terrorism,” not “the economy,” as the most important issues.

statistician Nate Silver

“Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote for Trump.”

Silver found that the regional map of Trump support did not overlap particularly well with the maps of unemployment, religion, gun ownership, or the proportion of immigrants.

But it did align with the map of Google searches for the word nigger,

Economic issues, they found, have been playing a smaller role in party manifestoes for decades, and noneconomic issues a larger role.

Support for populist parties is strongest not from manual workers but from the “petty bourgeoisie” (self-employed tradesmen and the owners of small businesses), followed by foremen and technicians.

Populist voters are older, more religious, more rural, less educated, and more likely to be male and members of the ethnic majority.

Inglehart and Norris concluded that supporters of authoritarian populism are the losers not so much of economic competition as cultural competition.

Voters who are male, religious, less educated, and in the ethnic majority “feel that they have become strangers from the predominant values in their own country, left behind by progressive tides of cultural change that they do not share. 

the possibility that as the Silent Generation and older Baby Boomers shuffle off this mortal coil, they will take authoritarian populism with them.

Part of the problem, over the long term, will dissipate with urbanization: you can’t keep them down on the farm. And part will dissipate with demographics.

A liberal democracy is a precious achievement. Until the messiah comes, it will always have problems, but it’s better to solve those problems than to start a conflagration and hope that something better arises from the ashes and bones.

Hans Rosling, who, when asked whether he was an optimist, replied, “I am not an optimist. I’m a very serious possibilist.”

PART III REASON, SCIENCE, AND HUMANISM

Ideas matter.

CHAPTER 21 REASON

McCoy over Spock.

Descartes’s argument “I think, therefore I am.” Just as the very fact that one is wondering whether one exists demonstrates that one exists, the very fact that one is appealing to reasons demonstrates that reason exists.

Liar’s Paradox, featuring the Cretan who says, “All Cretans are liars.”)

We don’t believe in reason; we use reason

I’ve alluded to these cognitive infirmities in earlier chapters: the way we estimate probability from available anecdotes, project stereotypes onto individuals, seek confirming and ignore disconfirming evidence, dread harms and losses, and reason from teleology and voodoo resemblance rather than mechanical cause and effect.

no Enlightenment thinker ever claimed that humans were consistently rational.

What they argued was that we ought to be rational, by learning to repress the fallacies and dogmas that so readily seduce us, and that we can be rational, collectively if not individually, by implementing institutions and adhering to norms that constrain our faculties, including free speech, logical analysis, and empirical testing.

We are a cognitive species that depends on explanations of the world. Since the world is the way it is regardless of what people believe about it, there is a strong selection pressure for an ability to develop explanations that are true.

Reasoning thus has deep evolutionary roots.

none of this contradicts the discovery that humans are vulnerable to illusions and fallacies. Our brains are limited in their capacity to process information and evolved in a world without science,

a person’s opinions on climate change or evolution are astronomically unlikely to make a difference to the world at large. But they make an enormous difference to the respect the person commands in his or her social circle.

Kahan concludes that we are all actors in a Tragedy of the Belief Commons: what’s rational for every individual to believe (based on esteem) can be irrational for the society as a whole to act upon (based on reality).

people are sharing blue lies. A white lie is told for the benefit of the hearer; a blue lie is told for the benefit of an in-group (originally, fellow police officers).

anthropologist John Tooby adds that preposterous beliefs are more effective signals of coalitional loyalty than reasonable ones.

Benjamin Franklin observed, “So convenient a thing is it to be a rational creature, since it enables us to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to.”

motivated reasoning (directing an argument toward a favored conclusion, rather than following it where it leads),

biased evaluation (finding fault with evidence that disconfirms a favored position and giving a pass to evidence that supports it),

My-Side bias

We know today that political partisanship is like sports fandom:

psychologists Charles Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark Lepper presented proponents and opponents of the death penalty with a pair of studies, one suggesting that capital punishment deterred homicide (murder rates went down the year after states adopted it), the other that it failed to do so

experimenters found that each group was momentarily swayed by the result they had just learned, but as soon as they had had a chance to read the details, they picked nits in whichever study was uncongenial to their starting position,

Thanks to this selective prosecution, the participants were more polarized after they had all been exposed to the same evidence than before:

“Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math”

as ingenuity and sympathy have been applied to the human condition, life has gotten longer, healthier, richer, safer, happier, freer, smarter, deeper, and more interesting. Problems remain, but problems are inevitable.

unbridled, unregulated, unfettered, or untrammeled free markets,

a free market can coexist with regulations on safety, labor, and the environment, just as a free country can coexist with criminal laws.

some of the countries with the greatest amount of social spending also have the greatest amount of economic freedom.

Often the refusal to seek the optimum level of government is justified by an appeal to Friedrich Hayek’s argument in The Road to Serfdom that regulation and welfare lay out a slippery slope along which a country will slide into penury and tyranny.

countries that combine free markets with more taxation, social spending, and regulation than the United States (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Western Europe) turn out to be not grim dystopias but rather pleasant places to live, and they trounce the United States in every measure of human flourishing, including crime, life expectancy, infant mortality, education, and happiness.

no developed country runs on right-wing libertarian principles, nor has any realistic vision of such a country ever been laid out.

people flourish most in liberal democracies with a mixture of civic norms, guaranteed rights, market freedom, social spending, and judicious regulation.

Reason tells us that political deliberation would be most fruitful if it treated governance more like scientific experimentation and less like an extreme-sports competition.

Science proceeds by testing the predictions of hypotheses,

most readers have no idea whether their favorite columnists, gurus, or talking heads are more accurate than a chimpanzee picking bananas.

Experts are ingenious at wordsmithing their predictions to protect them from falsification, using weasely modal auxiliaries (could, might), adjectives (fair chance, serious possibility), and temporal modifiers (very soon, in the not-too-distant future).

The forecasters who did the worst were the ones with Big Ideas—left-wing or right-wing, optimistic or pessimistic—which they held with an inspiring (but misguided) confidence:

superforecasters were: pragmatic experts who drew on many analytical tools, with the choice of tool hinging on the particular problem they faced. These experts gathered as much information from as many sources as they could.

When thinking, they often shifted mental gears, sprinkling their speech with transition markers such as “however,” “but,” “although,” and “on the other hand.” They talked about possibilities and probabilities, not certainties. And while no one likes to say “I was wrong,” these experts more readily admitted it and changed their minds.

psychologist Jonathan Baron calls “active open-mindedness,”

opinions such as these:48 People should take into consideration evidence that goes against their beliefs. [Agree] It is more useful to pay attention to those who disagree with you than to pay attention to those who agree. [Agree] Changing your mind is a sign of weakness. [Disagree] Intuition is the best guide in making decisions. [Disagree] It is important to persevere in your beliefs even when evidence is brought to bear against them. [Disagree]

Superforecasters are Bayesian,

The superforecasters believe in the wisdom of crowds, laying their hypotheses on the table for others to criticize or amend and pooling their estimates with those of others. And they have strong opinions on chance and contingency in human history as opposed to necessity and fate.

most accurate superforecasters expressing the most vehement rejection of fate and acceptance of chance.

Whatever differences in policy or philosophy divide the parties, the mechanisms of democratic deliberation should be sacrosanct. Their erosion, disproportionately by the right, has led many people, including a growing share of young Americans, to see democratic government as inherently dysfunctional and to become cynical about democracy itself.

The discovery of cognitive and emotional biases does not mean that “humans are irrational”

If humans were incapable of rationality, we could never have discovered the ways in which they were irrational,

editorialists should retire the new cliché that we are in a “post-truth era” unless they can keep up a tone of scathing irony. The term is corrosive, because it implies that we should resign ourselves to propaganda and lies and just fight back with more of our own. We are not in a post-truth era.

Mendacity, truth-shading, conspiracy theories, extraordinary popular delusions, and the madness of crowds are as old as our species,

[Many of] today’s TV journalists . . . have picked up the torch of fact-checking and now grill candidates on issues of accuracy during live interviews.

more than eight in 10 Americans have a positive view of political fact-checking.

Persuasion by facts and logic, the most direct strategy, is not always futile.

When people are first confronted with information that contradicts a staked-out position, they become even more committed to it, as we’d expect from the theories of identity-protective cognition, motivated reasoning, and cognitive dissonance reduction. Feeling their identity threatened, belief holders double down and muster more ammunition to fend off the challenge. But since another part of the human mind keeps a person in touch with reality, as the counterevidence piles up the dissonance can mount until it becomes too much to bear and the opinion topples over, a phenomenon called the affective tipping point.

scientists often treat the public the way Englishmen treat foreigners: they speak more slowly and more loudly.

Making the world more rational, then, is not just a matter of training people to be better reasoners and setting them loose. It also depends on the rules of discourse in workplaces, social circles, and arenas of debate and decision-making.

When people with die-hard opinions on Obamacare or NAFTA are challenged to explain what those policies actually are, they soon realize that they don’t know what they are talking about, and become more open to counterarguments.

CHAPTER 22 SCIENCE

Yet there is one realm of accomplishment of which we can unabashedly boast before any tribunal of minds, and that is science.

scientific knowledge eradicated smallpox, a painful and disfiguring disease which killed 300 million people in the 20th century alone.

scorn for scientific consensus has widened into a broadband know-nothingness.

politicized repression of science comes from the left as well. It was the left that stoked panics about overpopulation, nuclear power, and genetically modified organisms.

The first step in understanding the promise of science in human affairs is to escape the bunker mentality of the Second Culture, captured, for example, in the tag line of a 2013 article by the literary lion Leon Wieseltier: “Now science wants to invade the liberal arts. Don’t let it happen.”

recognize that what science allows is an increasing confidence in a hypothesis as the evidence accumulates, not a claim to infallibility on the first try.

One attempt to build a wall around science and make science pay for it uses a different argument: that science deals only with facts about physical stuff, so scientists are committing a logical error when they say anything about values or society or culture.

naturalism, the position that “reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing ‘supernatural,’ and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the ‘human spirit.’”

By exposing the absence of purpose in the laws governing the universe, science forces us to take responsibility for the welfare of ourselves, our species, and our planet.

one could say that architecture has produced both museums and gas chambers, that classical music both stimulates economic activity and inspired the Nazis, and so on.

political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan assembled a dataset of political resistance movements across the world between 1900 and 2006 and discovered that three-quarters of the nonviolent resistance movements succeeded, compared with only a third of the violent ones.

Gandhi and King were right, but without data, you would never know it.

CHAPTER 23 HUMANISM

Science is not enough to bring about progress.

Humanism, which promotes a non-supernatural basis for meaning and ethics: good without God.

The Humanist Manifesto III, from 2003,

Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis.

Humans are an integral part of nature, the result of unguided evolutionary change. 

Ethical values are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience.

Life’s fulfillment emerges from individual participation in the service of humane ideals.

Humans are social by nature and find meaning in relationships.

Working to benefit society maximizes individual happiness.

If I object to being raped, maimed, starved, or killed, I can’t very well rape, maim, starve, or kill you.

(The Silver Rule is “Don’t do to others what you don’t want done to yourself”;

Platinum Rule, “Do to others what they would have you do to them.”

Martha Nussbaum filled this gap by laying out a list of “fundamental capabilities” that people have the right to exercise, such as longevity, health, safety, literacy, knowledge, free expression, play, nature, and emotional and social attachments.

Much of what we call wisdom consists in balancing the conflicting desires within ourselves, and much of what we call morality and politics consists in balancing the conflicting desires among people.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a humanist manifesto with thirty articles, was drafted in less than two years, thanks to the determination of Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of the drafting committee, to avoid getting mired in ideology and move the project along.

Roosevelt had to twist the arms of American and British officials to get them behind it: the United States was worried about its Negroes, the United Kingdom about its colonies. The Soviet bloc, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa abstained.

theistic morality has two fatal flaws.

The first is that there is no good reason to believe that God exists.

different religions, drawing on these sources, decree mutually incompatible beliefs

could have contained uncannily prescient scientific truths such as “Thou shalt not travel faster than light” or “Two strands entwined is the secret of life.”

God of the Gaps

The other supposedly God-fillable gap is the “hard problem of consciousness,” also known as the problem of sentience, subjectivity, phenomenal consciousness, and qualia

Nothing that we know about consciousness is inconsistent with the understanding that it depends entirely on neural activity.

Why would God have endowed a mobster with the ability to enjoy his ill-gotten gains, or a sexual predator with carnal pleasure? (If it’s to plant temptations for them to prove their morality by resisting, why should their victims be collateral damage?)

Like the phenomena of physics, the phenomena of consciousness look exactly as you would expect if the laws of nature applied without regard to human welfare.

The God of the Old Testament murdered innocents by the millions, commanded the Israelites to commit mass rape and genocide, and prescribed the death penalty for blasphemy, idolatry, homosexuality, adultery, talking back to parents, and working on the Sabbath, while finding nothing particularly wrong with slavery, rape, torture, mutilation, and genocide.

The Euthyphro argument puts the lie to the common claim that atheism consigns us to a moral relativism in which everyone can do his own thing. The claim gets it backwards. A humanistic morality rests on the universal bedrock of reason and human interests:

it’s an inescapable feature of the human condition that we’re all better off if we help each other and refrain from hurting each other.

Contestants over a material resource are usually better off if they split it than fight over it, particularly if they value their own lives on earth. But contestants over a sacred value (like holy land or affirmation of a belief) may not compromise, and if they think their souls are immortal, the loss of their body is no big deal—indeed,

(Hitler himself was a deist who said, “I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.”)

Donald Trump won the votes of 81 percent of white Evangelical and born-again Christians, a higher proportion than of any other demographic.

video sketch by the comedienne Amy Schumer called “The Universe.” It opens with the science popularizer Bill Nye standing against a backdrop of stars and galaxies:

the world’s fastest-growing religion is no religion at all.

Secularization Thesis, irreligion is a natural consequence of affluence and education.

Recent studies confirm that wealthier and better-educated countries tend to be less religious.

survey found that in 2010, a sixth of the world’s population, when asked to name their religion, chose “None.” There are more Nones in the world than Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, or devotees of folk religions,

atheism rides the Flynn effect: as countries get smarter, they turn away from God.

Many irreligious societies like Canada, Denmark, and New Zealand are among the nicest places to live in the history of our kind (with high levels of every measurable good thing in life), while many of the world’s most religious societies are hellholes.

United States is more religious than its Western peers but underperforms them in happiness and well-being, with higher rates of homicide, incarceration, abortion, sexually transmitted disease, child mortality, obesity, educational mediocrity, and premature death.

The same holds true among the fifty states: the more religious the state, the more dysfunctional its citizens’ lives.

All of the wars raging in 2016 took place in Muslim-majority countries or involved Islamist groups, and those groups were responsible for the vast majority of terrorist attacks.

Sarah Haider (co-founder of Ex-Muslims of North America);

Maajid Nawaz (coauthor, with Sam Harris, of Islam and the Future of Tolerance);

the second enemy of humanism, the ideology behind resurgent authoritarianism, nationalism, populism, reactionary thinking, even fascism.

Nietzsche argued that it’s good to be a callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath.

Nietzsche helped inspire the romantic militarism that led to the First World War and the fascism that led to the Second.

links to Bolshevism and Stalinism—from the Superman to the New Soviet Man—are less well known but amply documented by the historian Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal.

Nietzsche was an inspiration to relativists everywhere. Disdaining the commitment to truth-seeking among scientists and Enlightenment thinkers, Nietzsche asserted that “there are no facts, only interpretations,” and that “truth is a kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live.”

Why should intellectuals and artists, of all people, kiss up to murderous dictators?

One explanation, offered by the economist Thomas Sowell and the sociologist Paul Hollander, is professional narcissism. Intellectuals and artists may feel unappreciated in liberal democracies, which allow their citizens to tend to their own needs in markets and civic organizations.

Trump was endorsed in the 2016 election by 136 “Scholars and Writers for America” in a manifesto called “Statement of Unity.”

Trump has been closely advised by two men, Stephen Bannon and Michael Anton, who are reputed to be widely read and who consider themselves serious intellectuals.

Theocons hold that the erosion of the church’s authority during the Enlightenment left Western civilization without a solid moral foundation,

People undoubtedly feel solidarity with their tribe, but whatever intuition of “tribe” we are born with cannot be a nation-state, which is a historical artifact of the 1648 Treaties of Westphalia.

(If you want to see tribalism at its fiercest, check out a “Nikon vs. Canon” Internet discussion group.)

There’s a reason we refer to unsophisticated things as provincial, parochial, and insular and to sophisticated ones as urbane and cosmopolitan. No one is brilliant enough to dream up anything of value all by himself. Individuals and cultures of genius are aggregators, appropriators, greatest-hit collectors. Vibrant cultures sit in vast catchment areas in which people and innovations flow from far and wide.

Roots are for trees; people have feet.

Finally, let’s not forget why international institutions and global consciousness arose in the first place. Between 1803 and 1945, the world tried an international order based on nation-states heroically struggling for greatness. It didn’t turn out so well.

After 1945 the world’s leaders said, “Well, let’s not do that again,” and began to downplay nationalism in favor of universal human rights, international laws, and transnational organizations.

result, as we saw in chapter 11, has been seventy years of peace and prosperity in Europe and, increasingly, the rest of the world.

The European elections and self-destructive flailing of the Trump administration in 2017 suggest that the world may have reached Peak Populism, and as we saw in chapter 20, the movement is on a demographic road to nowhere.

Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn’t mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there’s no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology: much of what we know isn’t so, especially when our comrades know it too.

Keep some perspective. Not every problem is a Crisis, Plague, Epidemic, or Existential Threat, and not every change is the End of This, the Death of That, or the Dawn of a Post-Something Era. Don’t confuse pessimism with profundity: problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable, and diagnosing every setback as a symptom of a sick society is a cheap grab for gravitas.

Finally, drop the Nietzsche. His ideas may seem edgy, authentic, baaad, while humanism seems sappy, unhip, uncool. But what’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?

The story of human progress is truly heroic. It is glorious. It is uplifting. It is even, I daresay, spiritual

We are born into a pitiless universe, facing steep odds against life-enabling order and in constant jeopardy of falling apart. We were shaped by a force that is ruthlessly competitive. We are made from crooked timber, vulnerable to illusions, self-centeredness, and at times astounding stupidity.

Yet human nature has also been blessed with resources that open a space for a kind of redemption. We are endowed with the power to combine ideas recursively, to have thoughts about our thoughts. We have an instinct for language, allowing us to share the fruits of our experience and ingenuity. We are deepened with the capacity for sympathy—for pity, imagination, compassion, commiseration.

These endowments have found ways to magnify their own power. The scope of language has been augmented by the written, printed, and electronic word. Our circle of sympathy has been expanded by history, journalism, and the narrative arts. And our puny rational faculties have been multiplied by the norms and institutions of reason: intellectual curiosity, open debate, skepticism of authority and dogma, and the burden of proof to verify ideas by confronting them against reality.

As the spiral of recursive improvement gathers momentum, we eke out victories against the forces that grind us down, not least the darker parts of our own nature. We penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos, including life and mind. We live longer, suffer less, learn more, get smarter, and enjoy more small pleasures and rich experiences. Fewer of us are killed, assaulted, enslaved, oppressed, or exploited by the others. From a few oases, the territories with peace and prosperity are growing, and could someday encompass the globe. Much suffering remains, and tremendous peril. But ideas on how to reduce them have been voiced, and an infinite number of others are yet to be conceived.

We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one. But there is no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing. This heroic story is not just another myth. Myths are fictions, but this one is true—true to the best of our knowledge, which is the only truth we can have. We believe it because we have reasons to believe it. As we learn more, we can show which parts of the story continue to be true, and which ones false - as any one of them might be, and any could become.

And the story belongs not to any tribe but to all of humanity - to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persists in its being. For it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedome is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering, and knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance.