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| Steven Pinker |
Enlightenment Now es un libro que elegí leer luego del libro del Unabomber, que era muy deprimente. Necesitaba un libro que me subiera el ánimo, que me mostrara que el futuro puede ser positivo, que no estamos tan mal, que a pesar de lo que muestran las notícias todos los días, si nos alejamos un poco, si miramos el bosque, darnos cuenta que venimos mejorando a pasos agigantados comparado con lo que teníamos en el pasado. El libro logra su propósito, demostrando en innúmeros campos que venimos mejorando, bajando la violencia, aumentando la riqueza, la expectativa de vida, la salud, la educación. También que baja la pobreza, que la gente vive más y mejor y que por más que a veces no parezca, si sigue la tendencia del pasado (cosa que no tenemos asegurado, él mismo lo aclara en el libro) nuestro futuro pinta ser mucho mejor de lo que tenemos hoy. Gracias al avance de la ciencia, la razón, el humanismo y el progreso. El libro trata de ser riguroso y cita innúmeras fuentes de datos, y muestra muchos gráficos de cómo las cosas han cambiado en el tiempo. Vale la pena la lectura si queres ver cómo venimos progresando como civilización, no todo está perdido (jajaj).
June 12, 2018
EPIGRAPH, p. ix
Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind. —Baruch Spinoza
Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge. —David Deutsch
June 12, 2018
PREFACE, p. xvii
the ideals of the Enlightenment: reason, science, humanism, and progress. Enlightenment ideals, I hope to show, are timeless, but they have never been more relevant than they are right now.
June 12, 2018
PART I: ENLIGHTENMENT
“Why should I live?”
In the very act of asking that question, you are seeking reasons for your convictions
As a sentient being, you have the potential to flourish. You can refine your faculty of reason itself by learning and debating. You can seek explanations of the natural world through science, and insight into the human condition through the arts and humanities. You can make the most of your capacity for pleasure and satisfaction, which allowed your ancestors to thrive and thereby allowed you to exist. You can appreciate the beauty and richness of the natural and cultural world.
You have been endowed with a sense of sympathy—the ability to like, love, respect, help, and show kindness—and you can enjoy the gift of mutual benevolence with friends, family, and colleagues.
More than ever, the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress need a wholehearted defense. We take its gifts for granted: newborns who will live more than eight decades, markets overflowing with food, clean water that appears with a flick of a finger and waste that disappears with another, pills that erase a painful infection, sons who are not sent off to war, daughters who can walk the streets in safety, critics of the powerful who are not jailed or shot, the world’s knowledge and culture available in a shirt pocket.
Dear Professor Pinker, What advice do you have for someone who has taken ideas in your books and science to heart, and sees himself as a collection of atoms?
other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers
the economist Friedrich Hayek observed, “If old truths are to retain their hold on men’s minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations” (inadvertently proving his point with the expression men’s minds). “What at one time are their most effective expressions gradually become so worn with use that they cease to carry a definite meaning. The underlying ideas may be as valid as ever, but the words, even when they refer to problems that are still with us, no longer convey the same conviction.”2
When properly appreciated, I will suggest, the ideals of the Enlightenment are in fact stirring, inspiring, noble—a reason to live.
- I hope so
June 12, 2018
CHAPTER 1: DARE TO UNDERSTAND!, p. 7
it is a mistake to confuse hard problems with problems unlikely to be solved. Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved. An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism. Its institutions keep improving, and the most important knowledge that they embody is knowledge of how to detect and eliminate errors.3
What is enlightenment? In a 1784 essay with that question as its title, Immanuel Kant answered that it consists of “humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity,” its “lazy and cowardly” submission to the “dogmas and formulas” of religious or political authority.1 Enlightenment’s motto, he proclaimed, is “Dare to understand!” and its foundational demand is freedom of thought and speech. “One age cannot conclude a pact that would prevent succeeding ages from extending their insights, increasing their knowledge, and purging their errors. That would be a crime against human nature, whose proper destiny lies precisely in such progress.”2
four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism, and progress.
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.
not all of the Enlightenment thinkers were atheists. Some were deists (as opposed to theists): they thought that God set the universe in motion and then stepped back, allowing it to unfold according to the laws of nature. Others were pantheists, who used “God” as a synonym for the laws of nature. But few appealed to the law-giving, miracle-conjuring, son-begetting God of scripture.
As Montesquieu wrote, “If triangles had a god they would give him three sides.”
They were social psychologists, who wrote of the moral sentiments that draw us together, the selfish passions that divide us, and the foibles of shortsightedness that confound our best-laid plans
nothing can prevent the circle of sympathy from expanding from the family and tribe to embrace all of humankind, particularly as reason goads us into realizing that there can be nothing uniquely deserving about ourselves or any of the groups to which we belong.10 We are forced into cosmopolitanism: accepting our citizenship in the world.11
The ideal of progress also should not be confused with the 20th-century movement to re-engineer society for the convenience of technocrats and planners
Rather than trying to shape human nature, the Enlightenment hope for progress was concentrated on human institutions. Human-made systems like governments, laws, schools, markets, and international bodies are a natural target for the application of reason to human betterment.
government is not a divine fiat to reign, a synonym for “society,” or an avatar of the national, religious, or racial soul. It is a human invention, tacitly agreed to in a social contract, designed to enhance the welfare of citizens by coordinating their behavior and discouraging selfish acts that may be tempting to every individual but leave everyone worse off. As the most famous product of the Enlightenment, the Declaration of Independence, put it, in order to secure the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, governments are instituted among people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
abundance of useful stuff
depends on a network of specialists, each of whom learns how to make something as efficiently as possible, and who combine and exchange the fruits of their ingenuity, skill, and labor
Specialization works only in a market that allows the specialists to exchange their goods and services, and Smith explained that economic activity was a form of mutually beneficial cooperation (a positive-sum game, in today’s lingo): each gets back something that is more valuable to him than what he gives up. Through voluntary exchange, people benefit others by benefiting themselves
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love.” Smith
now war was no longer thought of as a divine punishment to be endured and deplored, or a glorious contest to be won and celebrated, but a practical problem to be mitigated and someday solved
June 19, 2018
CHAPTER 2: ENTRO, EVO, INFO, p. 17
“The Second Law of Thermodynamics Is the First Law of Psychology.”4 Why the awe for the Second Law? From an Olympian vantage point, it defines the fate of the universe and the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and knowledge to fight back the tide of entropy
Organisms’ use of energy to maintain their integrity against the press of entropy is a modern explanation of the principle of conatus (effort or striving), which Spinoza defined as “the endeavor to persist and flourish in one’s own being,” and which was a foundation of several Enlightenment-era theories of life and mind.7
Grub first, then ethics.19 When the Industrial Revolution released a gusher of usable energy from coal, oil, and falling water, it launched a Great Escape from poverty, disease, hunger, illiteracy, and premature death, first in the West and increasingly in the rest of the world (as we shall see in chapters 5–8). And 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).
They generalize from paltry samples, namely their own experience, and they reason by stereotype, projecting the typical traits of a group onto any individual that belongs to it. They infer causation from correlation. They think holistically, in black and white, and physically, treating abstract networks as concrete stuff. They are not so much intuitive scientists as intuitive lawyers and politicians, marshaling evidence that confirms their convictions while dismissing evidence that contradicts them.24 They overestimate their own knowledge, understanding, rectitude, competence, and luck.25
At first glance the Law of Entropy would seem to allow for only a discouraging history and a depressing future.
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
But there is another kind of orderliness in nature that also must be explained: not the elegant symmetries and rhythms in the physical world, but the functional design in the living world. 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).6
the copies would make copies, which would make copies of the copies, and so on, in an exponential explosion. The replicating systems would compete for the material to make their copies and the energy to power the replication. Since no copying process is perfect—the Law of Entropy sees to that—errors will crop up, and though most of these mutations will degrade the replicator (entropy again), occasionally dumb luck will throw one up that’s more effective at replicating, and its descendants will swamp the competition. As copying errors that enhance stability and replication accumulate over the generations, the replicating system—we call it an organism—will appear to have been engineered for survival and reproduction in the future, though it only preserved the copying errors that led to survival and reproduction in the past.
Organisms are replete with improbable configurations of flesh like eyes, ears, hearts, and stomachs which cry out for an explanation. Before Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace provided one in 1859, it was reasonable to think they were the handiwork of a divine designer—one of the reasons, I suspect, that so many Enlightenment thinkers were deists rather than outright atheists. Darwin and Wallace made the designer unnecessary.
animals are born exploiters: they live off the hard-won energy stored in the bodies of plants and other animals by eating them. So do the viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens and parasites that gnaw at bodies from the inside.
natural world is an arms race. Prey animals protect themselves with shells, spines, claws, horns, venom, camouflage, flight, or self-defense; plants have thorns, rinds, bark, and irritants and poisons saturating their tissues. Animals evolve weapons to penetrate these defenses: carnivores have speed, talons, and eagle-eyed vision, while herbivores have grinding teeth and livers that detoxify natural poisons.
The information contained in a pattern depends on how coarsely or finely grained our view of the world is. If we cared about the exact sequence of characters in the monkey’s output, or the precise difference between one burst of noise and another, or the particular pattern of pixels in just one of the haphazard displays
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.11
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. That gives neural networks the power to engage in information processing or computation. Given a large enough network built out of these logical and statistical circuits (and with billions of neurons, the brain has room for plenty), a brain can compute complex functions,
Internal representations that reliably correlate with states of the world, and that participate in inferences that tend to derive true implications from true premises, may be called knowledge.
a physical system can appear to be teleological, that is, directed by purposes or goals. All it needs are a way of sensing the state of itself and its environment, a representation of a goal state (what it “wants,” what it’s “trying for”), an ability to compute the difference between the current state and the goal state, and a repertoire of actions that are tagged with their typical effects. If the system is wired so that it triggers actions that typically reduce the difference between the current state and the goal
state, it can be said to pursue goals (and when the world is sufficiently predictable, it will attain them).
The principles of information, computation, and control bridge the chasm between the physical world of cause and effect and the mental world of knowledge, intelligence, and purpose. It’s not just a rhetorical aspiration to say that ideas can change the world
as information-processing systems become more sophisticated—as their
representations of the world become richer, their goals are arranged into hierarchies of subgoals within subgoals, and their actions for attaining the goals become more diverse and less predictable—it starts to look like hominid chauvinism to insist that they don’t
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 that promoted selflessness and promised spiritual transcendence.17 Taoism and Confucianism in China, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism in India, Zoroastrianism in Persia, Second Temple Judaism in Judea, and classical Greek philosophy and drama emerged within a few centuries of one another. (Confucius, Buddha, Pythagoras, Aeschylus, and the last of the Hebrew prophets walked the earth at the same time.)
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.
A major breakthrough of the Scientific Revolution—perhaps its biggest breakthrough—was to refute the intuition that the universe is saturated with purpose.
Galileo, Newton, and Laplace replaced this cosmic morality play with a clockwork universe in which events are caused by conditions in the present, not goals for the future.20
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. Houses burn down, ships sink, battles are lost for want of a horseshoe nail.
Yet even today, when few people believe that accidents or diseases have perpetrators, discussions of poverty consist mostly of arguments about whom to blame for it.
Families, couples, friends, allies, and societies seethe with partial conflicts of interest, which are played out in tension, arguments, and sometimes violence. Another implication of the Law of Entropy is that a complex system like an organism can easily be disabled, because its functioning depends on so many improbable conditions being satisfied at once. A rock against the head, a hand around the neck, a well-aimed poisoned arrow, and the competition is neutralized.
People demonize those they disagree with, attributing differences of opinion to stupidity and dishonesty. For every misfortune they seek a scapegoat. They see morality as a source of grounds for condemning rivals and mobilizing indignation against them.
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.
- Universal benefits.. but can we agree on that? Whose interests international organizations defends? Universal interests?
July 5, 2018
CHAPTER 3: COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENTS, p. 31
most of them show little awareness that humanism even exists
The left tends to be sympathetic to yet another movement that subordinates human interests to a transcendent entity, the ecosystem
political ideology undermines reason and science.7 It scrambles people’s judgment, inflames a primitive tribal mindset, and distracts them from a sounder understanding of how to improve the world
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.
By wresting fire from the gods, we have only given our species the means to end its own existence, if not by poisoning our environment then by loosing nuclear weapons, nanotechnology, cyberterror, bioterror, artificial intelligence, and other existential threats upon the world
even if our technological civilization manages to escape outright annihilation, it is spiraling into a dystopia of violence and injustice: a brave new world of terrorism, drones, sweatshops, gangs, trafficking, refugees, inequality, cyberbullying, sexual assault, and hate crimes.
According to these critics, health, peace, and prosperity are bourgeois diversions from what truly matters in life. In serving up these philistine pleasures, technological capitalism has only damned people to an atomized, conformist, consumerist, materialist, other-directed, rootless, routinized, soul-deadening wilderness. In this absurd existence, people suffer from alienation, angst, anomie, apathy, bad faith, ennui, malaise, and nausea;
intellectuals and artists who foresee the collapse of civilization react to their prophecy in either of two ways. The historical pessimists dread the downfall but lament that we are powerless to stop it. The cultural pessimists welcome it with a “ghoulish schadenfreude.” Modernity is so bankrupt, they say, that it cannot be improved, only transcended. Out of the rubble of its collapse, a new order will emerge that can only be superior.
It was not just that science was, “in its intellectual depth, complexity, and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man.”13 Knowledge of science, he argued, was a moral imperative, because it could alleviate suffering on a global scale by curing disease,
Enlightenment humanism, then, is far from being a crowd-pleaser. The idea that the ultimate good is to use knowledge to enhance human welfare leaves people cold. Deep explanations of the universe, the planet, life, the brain? Unless they use magic, we don’t want to believe them! Saving the lives of billions, eradicating disease, feeding the hungry? Bo-ring. People extending their compassion to all of humankind? Not good enough—we want the laws of physics to care about us! Longevity, health, understanding, beauty, freedom, love? There’s got to be more to life than that!
- Bo-ring.. jajaja
- Not good enough..
- Just this?
July 5, 2018
PART II: PROGRESS, p. 37
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
- Racionalmente, si..
- Emocionalmente, no sé.. es probable
July 5, 2018
CHAPTER 4: PROGRESSOPHOBIA, p. 39
How can you say that violence has decreased? Didn’t you read about the school shooting (or terrorist bombing, or artillery shelling, or soccer riot, or barroom stabbing) in the news this morning? A decline is not the same thing as a disappearance. (The statement “x > y” is different from the statement “y = 0.”) Something can decrease a lot without vanishing altogether.
In The Idea of Decline in Western History, Arthur Herman shows that prophets of doom are the all-stars of the liberal arts curriculum, including Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Cornel West, and a chorus of eco-pessimists.
It’s easy to see why people feel that way: every day the news is filled with stories about war, terrorism, crime, pollution, inequality, drug abuse, and oppression. And it’s not just the headlines we’re talking about; it’s the op-eds and long-form stories as well. Magazine covers warn us of coming anarchies, plagues, epidemics, collapses, and so many “crises” (farm, health, retirement, welfare, energy, deficit) that copywriters have had to escalate to the redundant “serious crisis.”
the nature of news will interact with the nature of cognition to make us think that it is. News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out”
Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day, and as they unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle. 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.10
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
People rank tornadoes (which kill about fifty Americans a year) as a more common cause of death than asthma (which kills more than four thousand Americans a year), presumably because tornadoes make for better television.
lower mood levels, learned helplessness, contempt and hostility towards others, desensitization, and in some cases, . . . complete avoidance of the news.”15 And they become fatalistic, saying things like “Why should I vote? It’s not gonna help,”
- Why should I live?
Consumers of negative news, not surprisingly, become glum: a recent literature review cited “misperception of risk, anxiety
A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of suffering and thereby know which measures are most likely to reduce it.
- Reduce world suffering, that’s a good cause.. or increase world joy.. clowns are great, everybody loves them.. and children.
I learned from their questions and objections that resistance to the idea of progress runs deeper than statistical fallacies
Progress cannot always be monotonic because solutions to problems create new problems.18 But progress can resume when the new problems are solved in their turn.
As the investment ads are required to say, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
it isn’t just the Availability heuristic that makes people fatalistic about progress
progressophobia
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.
One exception to the Negativity bias is found in autobiographical memory. Though we tend to remember bad events as well as we remember good ones, the negative coloring of the misfortunes fades with time, particularly the ones that happened to us.24 We are wired for nostalgia: in human memory, time heals most wounds
Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out, “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”
for example, that wars take place today and wars took place in the past and to conclude that “nothing has changed”
it leaves them unappreciative of systemic processes that eke out incremental improvements over the long term.
pessimism has been equated with moral seriousness. Journalists believe that by accentuating the negative they are discharging their duty as watchdogs, muckrakers, whistleblowers, and afflicters of the comfortable. And intellectuals know they can attain instant gravitas by pointing to an unsolved problem and theorizing that it is a symptom of a sick society.
trying to help you, optimists sound like they’re trying to sell you something.28 Whenever someone offers a solution to a problem, critics
Of course, since nothing is a panacea and everything has side effects (you can’t do just one thing), these common tropes are little more than a refusal to entertain the possibility that anything can ever be improved.29
Morgan Housel has observed that while pessimists sound like they’re
A modern society is a league of political, industrial, financial, technological, military, and intellectual elites, all competing for prestige and influence, and with differing responsibilities for making the society run. Complaining about modern society can be a backhanded way of putting down one’s rivals—for academics to feel superior to businesspeople, businesspeople to feel superior to politicians, and so on
we’re apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen.
many Americans today have difficulty imagining, valuing or even believing in the promise of incremental system change, which leads to a greater appetite for revolutionary, smash-the-machine change
Figure 4-1: Tone of the news, 1945–2010 Source: Leetaru 2011. Plotted by month, beginning in January
If you’re reading this, you are not dead, starving, destitute, moribund, terrified, enslaved, or illiterate
“50 Reasons We’re Living Through the Greatest Period in World History.
November 28, 2018
CHAPTER 5: LIFE, p. 54
Figure 5-1: Life expectancy, 1771–2015 Sources: Our World in Data, Roser 2016n, based on data from Riley 2005 for the years before 2000 and from the World Health Organization and the World Bank for the subsequent years. Updated with data provided by Max Roser
Figure 5-2: Child mortality, 1751–2013 Sources: Our World in Data, Roser 2016a, based on data from the UN Child Mortality estimates, http://www.childmortality.org/, and the Human Mortality Database, http://www.mortality.org
Figure 5-3: Maternal mortality, 1751–2013 Source: Our World in Data, Roser 2016p, based partly on data from Claudia Hanson of Gapminder, https://www.gapminder.org/data/documentation/gd010
Figure 5-4: Life expectancy, UK, 1701–2013 Sources: Our World in Data, Roser 2016n. Data before 1845 are for England and Wales and come from OECD Clio Infra, van Zanden et al. 2014. Data from 1845 on are for mid-decade years only, and come from the Human Mortality Database, http://www.mortality.org
Of course the longer you live, the more of those years you’ll live as an older person, with its inevitable aches and pains.
A number of Silicon Valley visionaries are trying to bring that world closer.19 They have funded research institutes which aim not to chip away at mortality one disease at a time but to reverse-engineer the aging process itself and upgrade our cellular hardware to a version without that bug. The result, they hope, will be an increase in the human life span of fifty, a hundred, even a thousand years.
July 10, 2018
CHAPTER 6: HEALTH, p. 62
For most of human history, the strongest force of death was infectious disease, the nasty feature of evolution in which small, rapidly reproducing organisms make their living at our expense and hitch a ride from body to body in bugs, worms, and bodily effluvia.
Doctors themselves used to be a major health hazard as they went from autopsy to examining room in black coats encrusted with dried blood and pus, probed their patients’ wounds with unwashed hands, and sewed them up with sutures they kept in their buttonholes, until Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–1865) and Joseph Lister (1827–1912) got them to sterilize their hands and equipment.
Scientists stand on the shoulders of giants, collaborate in teams, toil in obscurity, and aggregate ideas across worldwide webs.
Figure 6-1: Childhood deaths from infectious disease, 2000–2013 Source: Child Health Epidemiology Reference Group of the World Health Organization, Liu et al. 2014, supplementary appendix
The fruits of science are not just high-tech pharmaceuticals such as vaccines, antibiotics, antiretrovirals, and deworming pills. They also comprise ideas—ideas that may be cheap to implement and obvious in retrospect, but which save millions of lives. Examples include boiling, filtering, or adding bleach to water; washing hands; giving iodine supplements to pregnant women; breast-feeding and cuddling infants; defecating in latrines rather than in fields, streets, and waterways; protecting sleeping children with insecticide-impregnated bed nets; and treating diarrhea with a solution of salt and sugar in clean water. Conversely, progress can be reversed by bad ideas
parts of the world where people are resigned to their poor health, never dreaming that changes to their institutions and norms could improve it.17
July 10, 2018
CHAPTER 7: SUSTENANCE, p. 69
Hungry Europeans titillated themselves with food pornography, such as tales of Cockaigne, a country where pancakes grew on trees, the streets were paved with pastry, roasted pigs wandered around with knives in their backs for easy carving, and cooked fish jumped out of the water and landed at one’s feet. Today we live in Cockaigne, and our problem is not too few calories but too many
Figure 7-1: Calories, 1700–2013 Sources: United States, England, and France: Our World in Data, Roser 2016d, based on data from Fogel 2004. China, India, and the World: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data
Figure 7-2: Childhood stunting, 1966–2014 Source: Our World in Data, Roser 2016j, based on data from the World Health Organization’s Nutrition Landscape Information System, http://www.who.int/nutrition/nlis/en
Figure 7-3: Undernourishment, 1970–2015 Source: Our World in Data, Roser 2016j, based on data from the Food and Agriculture Organization 2014, also reported in http://www.fao.org/economic/ess/ess-fs/ess-fadata/en
Figure 7-4: Famine deaths, 1860–2016 Sources: Our World in Data, Hasell & Roser 2017, based on data from Devereux 2000; Ó Gráda 2009; White 2011, and EM-DAT, The International Disaster Database, http://www.emdat.be/; and other sources. “Famine” is defined as in Ó Gráda 2009
New York Times Magazine readers were introduced to the battlefield term triage (the emergency practice of separating wounded soldiers into the savable and the doomed) and to philosophy-seminar arguments about whether it is morally permissible to throw someone overboard from a crowded lifeboat to prevent it from capsizing and drowning everyone.
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.17
the peaks and troughs in the supply and matched it with demand, coordinated by the information carried in prices
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.
there is no such thing as a genetically unmodified crop
Of the seventy million people who died in major 20th-century famines, 80 percent were victims of Communist regimes’ forced collectivization, punitive confiscation, and totalitarian central planning.
We are led to forget the dominating misery of other times in part by the grace of literature, poetry, romance, and legend, which celebrate those who lived well and forget those who lived in the silence of poverty. The eras of misery have been mythologized and may even be remembered as golden ages of pastoral simplicity. They were not.”1
July 18, 2018
CHAPTER 8: WEALTH, p. 79
Poverty has no causes,” wrote the economist Peter Bauer. “Wealth has causes.”
Figure 8-1: Gross World Product, 1–2015 Source: Our World in Data, Roser 2016c, based on data from the World Bank and from Angus Maddison and Maddison Project 2014
How much did it cost in 1800 to purchase a refrigerator, a musical recording, a bicycle, a cell phone, Wikipedia, a photo of your child, a laptop and printer, a contraceptive pill, a dose of antibiotics? The answer is: no amount of money
Economists are the first to point out that their measures, like Oscar Wilde’s cynic, capture the price of everything but the value of nothing.7
A refrigerator today costs around $500. How much would someone have to pay you to give up refrigeration? Surely far more than $500! Adam Smith called it the paradox of value: when an important good becomes plentiful, it costs far less than what people are willing to pay for it.
A person whose wallet contains the cash equivalent of a hundred 2011 international dollars today is fantastically richer than her ancestor with the equivalent wallet’s worth two hundred years ago.
In 18th-century England this cronyism gave way to open economies in which anyone could sell anything to anyone, and their transactions were protected by the rule of law, property rights, enforceable contracts, and institutions like banks, corporations, and government agencies that run by fiduciary duties rather than personal connections. Now an enterprising person could introduce a new kind of product to the market
- Los derechos de propiedad intelectual son la clave para el próximo salto. Hay que protegerlos por un tiempo bien limitado, como máximo por 15 años por ejemplo.. hoy extienden las patentes por un siglo casi.
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.
The Enlightenment thus translated the ultimate question ‘How can I be saved?’ into the pragmatic ‘How can I be happy?’
The Great Escape in Britain and the Netherlands was quickly followed by escapes in the Germanic states, the Nordic countries, and Britain’s colonial offshoots in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States.
Figure 8-2: GDP per capita, 1600–2015 Source: Our World in Data, Roser 2016c, based on data from the World Bank and from Maddison Project 2014
Figure 8-3: World income distribution, 1800, 1975, and 2015 Source: Gapminder, via Ola Rosling, http://www.gapminder.org/tools/mountain. The scale is in 2011 international dollars.
Figure 8-4: Extreme poverty (proportion), 1820–2015 Sources: Our World in Data, Roser & Ortiz-Ospina 2017, based on data from Bourguignon & Morrison 2002 (1820–1992), averaging their “Extreme poverty” and “Poverty” percentages for commensurability with data on “Extreme poverty” for 1981–2015 from the World Bank 2016g
(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.)
- X personas fueron asesinadas hoy.. al mismo tiempo en que 137 mil salieron de la extrema pobreza.. every day!
Figure 8-5: Extreme poverty (number), 1820–2015 Sources: Our World in Data, Roser & Ortiz-Ospina 2017, based on data from Bourguignon & Morrison 2002 (1820–1992) and the World Bank 2016g (1981–2015).
“In 1976,” Radelet writes, “Mao single-handedly and dramatically changed the direction of global poverty with one simple act: he died.”32
The first is the decline of communism (together with intrusive socialism).
The 1990s and 2000s saw a spread of democracy (chapter 14) and the rise of levelheaded, humanistic leaders
second explanation of the Great Convergence is leadership.
A third cause was the end of the Cold War.
snuffed out many of the civil wars that had racked developing countries since they attained independence in the 1960s. Civil war is both a humanitarian disaster and an economic one
A 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.
with singular unanimity, in any country where they have had the chance, the poor have walked off the land into the factories as fast as the factories could take them.42
Life is getting cheaper, in a good way. Thanks to advances in know-how, an hour of labor can buy more food, health, education, clothing, building materials, and small necessities and luxuries than it used to.
According to one estimate, every cell phone adds $3,000 to the annual GDP of a developing country.52
mobile phones are more than a way to share gossip and cat photos; 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 educa
GDP per capita correlates with longevity, health, and nutrition.57 Less obviously, it correlates with higher ethical values like peace, freedom, human rights, and tolerance.5
July 30, 2018
CHAPTER 9: INEQUALITY, p. 108
Social spending now takes up a median of 22 percent of their GDP.31
Figure 9-4: Social spending, OECD countries, 1880–2016 Source: Our World in Data, Ortiz-Ospina & Roser 2016b, based on data from Lindert 2004 and OECD 1985, 2014, 2017. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development includes thirty-five democratic states with market economies.
Figure 9-5: Income gains, 1988–2008 Source: Milanović 2016, fig. 1.3
economic inequality has become an obsession. Pope Francis called it “the root of social evil”; Barack Obama, “the defining challenge of our time.” Between 2009 and 2016, the proportion of articles in the New York Times containing the word inequality soared tenfold, reaching 1 in 73.1 The new conventional wisdom is that the richest one percent have skimmed off all the economic growth of recent decades, and everyone else is treading water or slowly sinking. If so, the explosion of wealth documented in the previous chapter would no longer be worth celebrating, since it would have ceased contributing to overall human welfare.
Economic inequality is usually measured by the Gini coefficient, a number that can vary between 0, when everyone has the same as everyone else, and 1, when one person has everything and everyone else has nothing. (Gini values generally range from .25 for the most egalitarian income distributions, such as in Scandinavia after taxes and benefits, to .7 for a highly unequal distribution such as the one in South Africa.)
Inequality can also be measured by the proportion of total income that is earned by a given fraction (quantile) of the population. In the United States, the share of income going to the richest one percent grew from 8 percent in 1980 to 18 percent in 2015
There’s no question that some of the phenomena falling under the inequality rubric (there are many) are serious and must be addressed, if only to defuse the destructive agendas they have incited, such as abandoning market economies, technological progress, and foreign trade.
Frankfurt argues that inequality itself is not morally objectionable; what is objectionable is poverty
- What about rights? If inequality of wealth does not imply inequality of rights, thats ok. But wealth make people more powerful, (with more rights?)
“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.”6
- Yes.. maybe if people has enough, they don’t sell themselves to rich people.. MAYBE..
“The poorer half of the population are as poor today as they were in the past, with barely 5 percent of total wealth in 2010, just as in 1910.”8 But total wealth today is vastly greater than it was in 1910, so if the poorer half own the same proportion, they are far richer, not “as poor.”
Thomas Piketty
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.11
countries with greater income inequality also have higher rates of homicide, imprisonment, teen pregnancy, infant mortality, physical and mental illness, social distrust, obesity, and substance abuse.14
In developing countries, inequality is not dispiriting but heartening: people in the more unequal societies are happier. The authors suggest that whatever envy, status anxiety, or relative deprivation people may feel in poor, unequal countries is swamped by hope.
- Hope.. Dante was right..
education and other routes to upward mobility might pay off for them and their children.
conflation of inequality with unfairness.
- La falta de justicia duele, la diferencia, si creemos que es “justa”, no trae problemas.
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.17
- A la gente le gusta los juegos de azar, la lotería, quiniela, bingo, etc..
People are content with economic inequality as long as they feel that the country is meritocratic, and they get angry when they feel it isn’t. Narratives about the causes of inequality loom larger in people’s minds than the existence of inequality. That creates an opening for politicians to rouse the rabble by singling out cheaters who take more than their fair share
- Definen al “enemigo”, política irracional que captura a la imaginación de la gente.. y cuanto más abierta sea la definición del enemigo, mejor.. así cada uno se hace la idea de que se habla de su propio enemigo
investment in research and infrastructure to escape economic stagnation, regulation of the finance sector to reduce instability, broader access to education and job training to facilitate economic mobility, electoral transparency and finance reform to eliminate illicit influence, and so on. The influence of money on politics is particularly pernicious because it can distort every government policy
- Yes, the problem is that a lots of money buys power, power to influence public policies
some people are bound to take greater advantage of the new opportunities than others, whether by luck, skill, or effort, and they will reap disproportionate rewards.
Figure 9-1: International inequality, 1820–2013 Sources: International inequality: OECD Clio Infra Project, Moatsos et al. 2014; data are for market household income across countries. Population-weighted international inequality: Milanović 2012; data for 2012 and 2013 provided by Branko Milanović, personal communication
Figure 9-2: Global inequality, 1820–2011 Source: Milanović 2016, fig. 3.1. The left-hand curve shows 1990 international dollars of disposable income per capita; the right-hand curve shows 2005 international dollars, and combines household surveys of per capita disposable income and consumption
Figure 9-3: Inequality, UK and US, 1688–2013 Source: Milanović 2016, fig. 2.1, disposable income per capita
major wars often level the income distribution.27 Wars destroy wealth-generating capital, inflate away the assets of creditors, and induce the rich to put up with higher taxes, which the government redistributes into the paychecks of soldiers and munition workers, in turn increasing the demand for labor in the rest of the economy.
Four Horsemen of Leveling”: mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse, and lethal pandemics.
to encompass the poor (and as people want to insure themselves should they ever become poor), they increasingly allocate a portion of their pooled resources—that is, government funds—to alleviating that poverty.
from the Renaissance through the early 20th century, European countries spent an average of 1.5 percent of their GDP on poor relief, education, and other social transfers
The explosion in social spending has redefined the mission of government: from warring and policing to also nurturing.32 Governments underwent this transformation for several reasons. Social spending inoculates citizens against the appeal of communism and fascism. Some of the benefits, like universal education and public health, are public goods that accrue to everyone, not just the direct beneficiaries. Many of the programs indemnify citizens against misfortunes for which they can’t or won’t insure themselves (hence the euphemism “social safety net”)
In Canada the top two national pastimes (after hockey) are complaining about their health care system and boasting about their health care system.
social spending is never exactly like insurance but is a combination of insurance, investment, and charity
- Investment is a good part of it.
Wartime restrictions on economic competition may have been sticky, outlasting World War II, but they finally dissipated, freeing the rich to get richer from their investment income and opening up an arena of dynamic economic competition with winner-take-all payoffs.
A “second industrial revolution” driven by electronic technologies replayed the Kuznets rise by creating a demand for highly skilled professionals, who pulled away from the less educated at the same time that the jobs requiring less education were eliminated by automation.
Inequality undoubtedly increased—the rich got richer faster than the poor and middle class got richer—but everyone (on average) got richer.
This may be one of the reasons that economic opinions are subject to the Optimism Gap (the “I’m OK, They’re Not” bias): a majority of Americans believe that the standard of living of the middle class has declined in recent years but that their own standard of living has improved.48
Figure 9-6: Poverty, US, 1960–2016 Sources: Meyer & Sullivan 2017. “Disposable income” refers to their “After-tax money income,” including credits, adjusted for inflation using the bias-corrected CPI-U-RS, and representing a family with two adults and two children. “Consumption” refers to data from the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey on food, housing, vehicles, appliances, furnishings, clothing, jewelry, insurance, and other expenses. “Poverty” corresponds to the US Census definition for 1980, adjusted for inflation; anchoring the poverty line in other years would result in different absolute numbers but the same trends. See Meyer & Sullivan 2011, 2012, and 2016 for details
globalization, may produce winners and losers in income, but in consumption it makes almost everyone a winner. Asian factories, container ships, and efficient retailing bring goods to the masses that were formerly luxuries for the rich.
A dollar today, no matter how heroically adjusted for inflation, buys far more betterment of life than a dollar yesterday. It buys things that didn’t exist, like refrigeration, electricity, toilets, vaccinations, telephones, contraception, and air travel, and it transforms things that do exist, such as a party line patched by a switchboard operator to a smartphone with unlimited talk time.
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.58 (A century and a half before, the Rothschilds, Astors, and Vanderbilts had none of these things.)
When the Gini index is calculated over consumption rather than income, it has remained shallow or flat.
money buys too much political influence
- That’s one problem of inequality.
It makes little sense to make tens of millions of poor Americans pay more for clothing to save tens of thousands of jobs in the apparel industry.6
governments playing an increasing role in both. They are uniquely suited to invest in education, basic research, and infrastructure, to underwrite health and retirement benefits
and to supplement incomes to a level above their market price
The next step in the historic trend toward greater social spending may be a universal basic income (or its close relative, a negative income tax). The idea has been bruited for decades, and its day may be coming
Though implementing a universal basic income is far from easy (the numbers have to add up, and incentives for education, work, and risk-taking have to be maintained), its promise cannot be ignored
Many of the jobs that robots will take over are jobs that people don’t particularly enjoy, and the dividend in productivity, safety, and leisure could be a boon to humanity as long as it is widely shared.
we are not living in a dystopia of falling incomes that has reversed the centuries-long rise in prosperity. Nor does it call for smashing the robots, raising the drawbridge, switching to socialism, or bringing back the 50s.
- Unabomber do not agree with that.
August 13, 2018
CHAPTER 10: THE ENVIRONMENT, p. 127
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. Indeed, it’s a fallacy to think that people “need resources” in the first place.17 They need ways of growing food, moving around, lighting their homes, displaying information, and other sources of well-being. They satisfy these needs with ideas: with recipes, formulas, techniques, blueprints, and algorithms for manipulating the physical world to give them what they want. The human mind, with its recursive combinatorial power, can explore an infinite space of ideas, and is not limited by the quantity of any particular kind of stuff in the ground. When one idea no longer works, another can take its
Figure 10-2: Sustainability, 1955–2109 Source: Randall Munroe, XKCD, http://xkcd.com/1007/. Credit: Randall Munroe, xkcd.com.
As Indira Gandhi said, “Poverty is the greatest polluter.”29
From the vantage point of an individual, the Earth seems infinite, and our effects on it inconsequential. From the vantage points of science, the view is more troubling
Nazi-like comparisons of human beings to vermin, pathogens, and cancer
- “You’re like a virus... you are a cancer and we are the cure”
industrialization has been good for humanity.8 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 (chapters 7, 15, and 17). It has allowed people to read at night, live where they want, stay warm in winter, see the world, and multiply human contact.
As countries first develop, they prioritize growth over environmental purity. But as they get richer, their thoughts turn to the environment.9 If people can afford electricity only at the cost of some smog, they’ll live with the smog, but when they can afford both electricity and clean air, they’ll spring for the clean air.
other concerns are more spiritual. The fate of the black rhinoceros and the well-being of our descendants in the year 2525 are significant moral concerns, but worrying about them now is something of a luxury. 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, and the scope of their concern expands in space and time.
world population growth rate peaked at 2.1 percent a year in 1962, fell to 1.2 percent by 2010, and will probably fall to less than 0.5 percent by 2050 and be close to zero around 2070, when the population is projected to level off and then decline
Figure 10-1: Population and population growth, 1750–2015 and projected to 2100 Sources: Our World in Data, Ortiz-Ospina & Roser 2016d. 1750–2015: United Nations Population Division and History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE), PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (undated). Post-2015 projections: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Medium Projection (aggregate of country-specific estimates, taking education into account), Lutz, Butz, & Samir 2014
farmers have pivoted to slash-and-burn horticulture, night soil (a euphemism for human feces), crop rotation, guano, saltpeter, ground-up bison bones, chemical fertilizer, hybrid crops, pesticides, and the Green Revolution.20 Future pivots may include genetically modified organisms, hydroponics, aeroponics, urban vertical farms, robotic harvesting, meat cultured in vitro, artificial intelligence algorithms fed by GPS and biosensors, the recovery of energy and fertilizer from sewage, aquaculture with fish that eat tofu instead of other fish, and who knows what else
Figure 10-3: Pollution, energy, and growth, US, 1970–2015 Sources: US Environmental Protection Agency 2016, based on the following sources. GDP: Bureau of Economic Analysis. Vehicle miles traveled: Federal Highway Administration. Population: US Census Bureau. Energy Consumption: US Department of Energy. CO2: US Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report. Emissions (carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen, particulate matter smaller than 10 micrometers, sulfur dioxide, and volatile organic compounds): EPA, https://www.epa.gov/air-emissions-inventories/air-pollutant-emissions-trends-data
Figure 10-4: Deforestation, 1700–2010 Source: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization 2012, p. 9.
Figure 10-5: Oil spills, 1970–2016 Source: Our World in Data, Roser 2016r, based on data (updated) from the International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation, http://www.itopf.com/knowledge-resources/data-statistics/statistics/. Oil spills include all those that result in the loss of at least 7 metric tons of oil. Oil shipped consists of “total crude oil, petroleum product, and gas loaded
Figure 10-6: Protected areas, 1990–2014 Source: World Bank 2016h and 2017, based on data from the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Conservation Monitoring Centre, compiled by the World Resources Institute.
All these processes are helped along by another friend of the Earth, dematerialization. Progress in technology allows us to do more with less. An 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. The digital revolution, by replacing atoms with bits, is dematerializing the world in front of our eyes.
And just think of all the plastic, metal, and paper that no longer go into the forty-odd consumer products that can be replaced by a single smartphone, including a telephone, answering machine, phone book, camera, camcorder, tape recorder, radio, alarm clock, calculator, dictionary, Rolodex, calendar, street maps, flashlight, fax, and compass
encouraged younger people to show off their experiences rather than their cars and wardrobes, and hipsterization leads them to distinguish themselves by their tastes in beer, coffee, and music
information technology, works to decouple human flourishing from the exploitation of physical stuff.
The first is cognitive. People have trouble thinking in scale: they don’t differentiate
among level, rate, acceleration, and higher-order derivatives
rather than by how much good they accomplish.59
In many cultures people flaunt their righteousness with vows of fasting, chastity, self-abnegation, bonfires of the vanities, and animal (or sometimes human) sacrifice.
Tragedy of the Commons. People benefit from everyone else’s sacrifices and suffer from their own, so everyone has an incentive to be a free rider and let everyone else make the sacrifice, and everyone suffers
The hydrocarbons in the stuff we burn are composed of hydrogen and carbon, which release energy as they combine with oxygen to form H2O and CO2. The oldest hydrocarbon fuel, dry wood, has a ratio of combustible carbon atoms to hydrogen atoms of about 10 to 1.66 The coal which replaced it during the Industrial Revolution has an average carbon-to-hydrogen ratio of 2 to 1.67 A petroleum fuel such as kerosene
may have a ratio of 1 to 2. Natural gas is composed mainly of methane, whose chemical formula is CH4, with a ratio of 1 to 4.68 So as the industrial world climbed an energy ladder from wood to coal to oil to gas
Figure 10-7: Carbon intensity (CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP), 1820–2014 Source: Ritchie & Roser 2017, based on data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre_coun.html. GDP is in 2011 international dollars; for the years before 1990, GDP comes from Maddison Project 2014
in the United States, was reduced by the replacement of C137H97O9NS coal with CH4 gas.
Figure 10-8: CO2 emissions, 1960–2015 Sources: Our World in Data, Ritchie & Roser 2017 and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-by-region, based on data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, http://cdiac.ornl.gov/CO2_Emission/, and Le Quéré et al. 2016. “International air & sea” refers to aviation and sea transport; it corresponds to “Bunker fuels” in the original sources. “Other” refers to the difference between estimated global CO2 emissions and the sum of the regional and national totals; it corresponds to the “Statistical difference” component
No one owns the atmosphere, so people (and companies) have no reason to stint on emissions that allow each of them to enjoy their energy while harming everyone else, a perverse outcome that economists call a negative externality (another name for the collective costs in a public goods game, or the damage to the commons in the Tragedy of the Commons)
Parents don’t have to calculate whether diaper services, with their trucks and laundries, emit more carbon than the makers of disposable diapers; the difference will be folded into the prices, and each company has an incentive to lower its emissions to compete with the other
Unfortunately, the use of nuclear power has been shrinking just when it should be growing.
Why are Western countries going the wrong way? Nuclear power presses a number of psychological buttons—fear of poisoning, ease of imagining catastrophes, distrust of the unfamiliar
with nuclear power, those who know the most are the least frightened.88 As with oil tankers, cars, planes, buildings, and factories (chapter 12), engineers have learned from the accidents and near-misses and have progressively squeezed more safety out of nuclear reactors, reducing the risks of accidents and contamination far below those of fossil fuels
The French have two kinds of reactors and hundreds of kinds of cheese, whereas in the United States the figures are reversed.”89
Soon to come on line are a few Generation III reactors, which evolved from the current designs with improvements in safety and efficiency but so far have been plagued by financial and construction snafus. Generation IV reactors comprise a half-dozen new designs which promise to make nuclear plants a mass-produced commodity rather than finicky limited editions.90 One type might be cranked out on an assembly line like jet engines, fitted into shipping containers, transported by rail, and installed on barges anchored offshore cities
nuclear fusion, long derided as the energy source that is “thirty years away and always will be,” really may be thirty years away (or less) this time.91
The team that brings clean and abundant energy to the world will benefit humanity more than all of history’s saints, heroes, prophets, martyrs, and laureates combined.
The basic technology is more than a billion years old. Plants suck carbon out of the air as they use the energy in sunlight to combine CO2 with H2O and make sugars (like C6H12O6), cellulose (a chain of C6H10O5 units), and lignin (a chain of units like C10H14O4);
As the world gets richer and more tech-savvy, it dematerializes, decarbonizes, and densifies, sparing land and species. As people get richer and better educated, they care more about the environment, figure out ways to protect it, and are better able to pay the costs.
The economist Paul Romer distinguishes between complacent optimism, the feeling of a child waiting for presents on Christmas morning, and conditional optimism, the feeling of a child who wants a treehouse and realizes that if he gets some wood and nails and persuades other kids to help him, he can build
September 10, 2018
CHAPTER 11: PEACE, p. 165
not so long ago it was war that was considered worthy. War was glorious, thrilling, spiritual, manly, noble, heroic, altruistic—a cleansing purgative for the effeminacy, selfishness, consumerism, and hedonism of decadent bourgeois society.29 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.
Figure 11-1: Great power war, 1500–2015 Source: Levy & Thompson 2011, updated for the 21st century. Percentage of years the great powers fought each other in wars, aggregated over 25-year periods, except for 2000–2015. The arrow points to 1975–1999, the last quarter-century plotted in fig. 5–12 of Pinker 2011
Figure 11-2: Battle deaths, 1946–2016 Sources: Adapted from Human Security Report Project 2007. For 1946–1988: Peace Research Institute of Oslo Battle Deaths Dataset 1946–2008, Lacina & Gleditsch 2005. For 1989–2015: UCDP Battle-Related Deaths Dataset version 5.0, Uppsala Conflict Data Program 2017, Melander, Pettersson, & Themnér 2016, updated with information from Therese Pettersson and Sam Taub of UCDP. World population figures: 1950–2016, US Census Bureau; 1946–1949, McEvedy & Jones 1978, with adjustments. The arrow points to 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 6–2 of Pinker 2011
Figure 11-3: Genocide deaths, 1956–2016 Sources: PITF, 1955–2008: Political Instability Task Force State Failure Problem Set, 1955–2008, Marshall, Gurr, & Harff 2009; Center for Systemic Peace 2015. Calculations described in Pinker 2011, p. 338. UCDP, 1989–2016: UCDP One-Sided Violence Dataset v. 2.5-2016, Melander, Pettersson, & Themnér 2016; Uppsala Conflict Data Program 2017, “High fatality” estimates, updated with data provided by Sam Taub of UCDP, scaled by world population figures from US Census Bureau. The arrow points to 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 6–8 of Pinker 2011
One can never use the word “fortunately” in connection with the killing of innocents, but the numbers in the 21st century are a fraction of those in earlier decades.
many Enlightenment thinkers advanced the theory of gentle commerce, according to which international trade should make war less appealing.
Another brainchild of the Enlightenment is the theory that democratic government serves as a brake on glory-drunk leaders who would drag their countries into pointless wars.
war is illegal.
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.
The idea that nations should agree to make war illegal was proposed by Kant in 1795
laws within a country are broken, too, from parking violations to homicides, yet an imperfectly enforced law is better than no rule of law at all.
Human life has become more precious, while glory, honor, preeminence, manliness, heroism and other symptoms of excess testosterone have been downgraded.
November 28, 2018
CHAPTER 12: SAFETY, p. 171
Figure 12-2: Homicide deaths, 1967–2015 Sources: United States: FBI Uniform Crime Reports, https://ucr.fbi.gov/, and Federal Bureau of Investigation 2016. England (data include Wales): Office for National Statistics 2017. World, 2000: Krug et al. 2002. World, 2003–2011: United Nations Economic and Social Council 2014, fig. 1; the percentages were converted to homicide rates by setting the 2012 rate at 6.2, the estimate reported in United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2014, p. 12. The arrows point to the most recent years plotted in Pinker 2011 for the world (2004, fig. 3–9), US (2009, fig. 3–18), and England (2009, fig. 3–19).
The human body is a fragile thing.
Though lethal injuries are a major scourge of human life, bringing the numbers down is not a sexy cause. The inventor of the highway guard rail did not get a Nobel Prize, nor are humanitarian awards given to designers of clearer prescription drug labels
Gentle commerce proliferated, and the zero-sum plundering of land gave way to a positive-sum trade of goods and services. People became enmeshed in networks of commercial and occupational obligations laid out in legal and bureaucratic rules. Their norms for everyday conduct shifted from a macho culture of honor, in which affronts had to be answered with violence, to a gentlemanly culture of dignity, in which status was won by displays of propriety and self-control.
could not be controlled without solving the root causes of racism, poverty, and inequality. This version of historical pessimism may be called root-causism: the pseudo-profound idea that every social ill is a symptom of some deep moral sickness and can never be mitigated by simplistic treatments which fail to cure the gangrene at the core.9 The problem with root-causism is not that real-world problems are simple but the opposite: they are more complex than a typical root-cause theory allows, especially when the theory is based on moralizing rather than data. So complex, in fact, that treating the symptoms may be the best way of dealing with the problem, because it does not require omniscience about the intricate tissue of actual causes. Indeed, by seeing what really does reduce the symptoms, one can test hypotheses about the causes, rather than just assuming them to be true.
Figure 12-1: Homicide deaths, Western Europe, US, and Mexico, 1300–2015 Sources: England, Netherlands & Belgium, Italy, 1300–1994: Eisner 2003, plotted in fig. 3–3 of Pinker 2011. England, 2000–2014: UK Office for National Statistics. Italy and Netherlands, 2010–2012: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2014. New England (New England, whites only, 1636–1790, and Vermont and New Hampshire, 1780–1890): Roth 2009, plotted in fig. 3–13 of Pinker 2011; 2006 and 2014 from FBI Uniform Crime Reports. Southwest US (Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico), 1850 and 1914: Roth 2009, plotted in fig. 3–16 of Pinker 2011; 2006 and 2014 from FBI Uniform Crime Reports. Mexico: Carlos Vilalta, personal communication, originally from Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía 2016 and Botello 2016, averaged over decades until 2010
the trend appears to be downward as well, from 8.8 homicides per 100,000 people in 2000 to 6.2 in 2012.
- No Brasileirão média é 30! E tem cidades violentas que chegam a 60.. 10x mas que a média mundial
We may never get the homicide rate for the world down to the levels of Kuwait (0.4 per 100,000 per year), Iceland (0.3), or Singapore (0.2), let alone all the way to 0
most of the homicides cluster in a few cities, such as Caracas (120 per 100,000) and San Pedro Sula (in Honduras, 187). Within cities, the homicides cluster in a few neighborhoods; within neighborhoods, they cluster in a few blocks; and within blocks, many are carried out by a few individuals.17 In my hometown of Boston, 70 percent of the shootings take place in 5 percent of the city, and half the shootings were perpetrated by one percent of the youths.18
The homicide rates of the most dangerous countries are several hundred times those of the safest, including Honduras (90.4 homicides per 100,000 per year), Venezuela (53.7), El Salvador (41.2), Jamaica (39.3), Lesotho (38), and South Africa (31)
a quarter are committed in just four: Brazil (25.2), Colombia (25.9), Mexico (12.9), and Venezuela. (The world’s two murder zones—northern Latin America and southern sub-Saharan Africa—
The lopsided skew of violent crime also points a flashing red arrow at the best way to reduce it.27 Forget root causes. Stay close to the symptoms—the neighborhoods and individuals responsible for the biggest wedges of violence—and chip away at the incentives and opportunities that drive them.
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.”
While the threat of ever-harsher punishments is both cheap and emotionally satisfying, it’s not particularly effective, because scofflaws just treat them like rare accidents—horrible, yes, but a risk that comes with the job. Punishments that are predictable, even if less draconian, are likelier to be factored into day-to-day choices.
“aggressive drug enforcement yields little anti-drug benefits and generally increases violence,” while “drug courts and treatment have a long history of effectiveness.”38
Together with anarchy, impulsiveness, and opportunity, a major trigger of criminal violence is contraband. Entrepreneurs in illegal goods and pastimes cannot file a lawsuit when they feel they have been swindled, or call the police when someone threatens them, so they have to protect their interests with a credible threat of violence.
Figure 12-3: Motor vehicle accident deaths, US, 1921–2015 Sources: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, accessed from http://www.informedforlife.org/demos/FCKeditor/UserFiles/File/TRAFFICFATALITIES(1899-2005).pdf, http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx, and https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812384
automobile deaths per capita (as opposed to per vehicle mile) peaked in 1937 at close to 30 per 100,000 per year, and have been in steady decline since the late 1970s, hitting 10.2 in 2014, the lowest rate since 1917.43
Emerging nations like India, China, Brazil, and Nigeria have per capita traffic death rates that are double that of the United States and seven times that of Sweden.44 Wealth buys life.
Figure 12-4: Pedestrian deaths, US, 1927–2015 Sources: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. For 1927–1984: Federal Highway Administration 2003. For 1985–1995: National Center for Statistics and Analysis 1995. For 1995–2005: National Center for Statistics and Analysis 2006. For 2005–2014: National Center for Statistics and Analysis 2016. For 2015: National Center for Statistics and Analysis 2017
Figure 12-5: Plane crash deaths, 1970–2015 Source: Aviation Safety Network 2017. Data on the number of passengers are from World Bank 2016b
After car crashes, the likeliest cause of accidental death consists of falls, followed by drownings and fires, followed by poisonings. We know this because epidemiologists and safety engineers tabulate accidental deaths with almost plane-wreckage attention to detail, classifying and sub-classifying them to determine which kill the most people and how the risks may be reduced. (The International Classification of Diseases, tenth revision, has codes for 153 kinds of falls alone, together with 39 exclusions.) As their advisories are translated into laws, building codes, inspection regimes, and best practices, the world becomes safer.
Figure 12-6: Deaths from falls, fire, drowning, and poison, US, 1903–2014 Source: National Safety Council 2016. Data for Fire, Drowning, and Poison (solid or liquid) are aggregated over 1903–1998 and 1999–2014 datasets. For 1999–2014, data for Poison (solid or liquid) include poisonings by gas or vapor. Data for Falls extend only to 1992 because of reporting artifacts in subsequent years (see note 50 for details
The campaign led to the now-ubiquitous sprinklers, smoke detectors, fire doors, fire escapes, fire drills, fire extinguishers, fire-retardant materials, and fire safety education mascots like Smokey the Bear and Sparky the Fire Dog. As a result, fire departments are putting themselves out of business. About 96 percent of their calls are for cardiac arrests and other medical emergencies, and most of the remainder are for small fires. (Contrary to a charming image, they don’t rescue kittens from trees.) A typical firefighter will see just one burning building every other year.52
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). Household and occupational hazards like solvents, detergents, insecticides, and lighter fluid were responsible for less than a half of one percent of the poisoning deaths
The curve begins to rise in the psychedelic 1960s, jerks up again during the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, and blasts off during the far graver epidemic of opioid addiction in the 21st century. Starting in the 1990s, doctors overprescribed synthetic opioid painkillers
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.
Figure 12-7: Occupational accident deaths, US, 1913–2015 Sources: Data are from different sources and may not be completely commensurable (see note 63 for details). For 1913, 1933, and 1980: Bureau of Labor Statistics, National Safety Council, and CDC National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, respectively, cited in Centers for Disease Control 1999. For 1970: Occupational Safety and Health Administration, “Timeline of OSHA’s 40 Year History,” https://www.osha.gov/osha40/timeline.html. For 1993–1994: Bureau of Labor Statistics, cited in Pegula & Janocha 2013. For 1995–2005: National Center for Health Statistics 2014, table 38. For 2006–2014: Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016a. The latter data were reported as deaths per full-time-equivalent workers and are multiplied by .95 for rough commensurability with the preceding years, based on the year 2007, when the Census of Fatal Occupation Injuries reported rates both per worker (3.8) and per FTE (4.0
Figure 12-8: Natural disaster deaths, 1900–2015 Source: Our World in Data, Roser 2016q, based on data from EM-DAT, The International Disaster Database, www.emdat.be. The graph plots the sum of the death rates for Drought, Earthquake, Extreme temperature, Flood, Impact, Landslide, Mass movement (dry), Storm, Volcanic activity, and Wildfire (excluding Epidemics). In many decades a single disaster type dominates the numbers: droughts in the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, and 1960s; floods in the 1930s and 1950s; earthquakes in the 1970s, 2000s, and 2010s
The annual death rate from natural disasters in low-income countries has come down from 0.7 per 100,000 in the 1970s to 0.2 today, which is lower than the rate for upper-middle-income countries in the 1970s. That’s still higher than the rate for high-income countries today (0.05, down from 0.09),
Figure 12-9: Lightning strike deaths, US, 1900–2015 Source: Our World in Data, Roser 2016q, based on data from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/victims.shtml, and López & Holle 1998
September 15, 2018
CHAPTER 13: TERRORISM, p. 191
Terrorism is a unique hazard because it combines major dread with minor harm.
Western Europeans are less murderous than Americans (with about a quarter their homicide rate) and also less car-crazy, so fewer die on the road.4
A majority of the world’s terrorist deaths take place in zones of civil war
a global citizen was 11 times as likely to have died in a homicide as in a terrorist attack, more than 30 times as likely to have died in a car crash, and more than 125 times as likely to have died in an accident of any kind.
Figure 13-1: Terrorism deaths, 1970–2015 Sources: “Global Terrorism Database,” National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism 2016, https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/. The rate for the world excludes deaths in Afghanistan after 2001, Iraq after 2003, Pakistan after 2004, Nigeria after 2009, Syria after 2011, and Libya after 2014. Population estimates for the world and Western Europe are from the European Union’s 2015 Revision of World Population Prospects (https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/); estimates for the United States are from US Census Bureau 2017. The vertical arrow points to 2007, the last year plotted in figs. 6–9, 6–10, and 6–11 in Pinker 2011
Though terrorism poses a minuscule danger compared with other risks, it creates outsize panic and hysteria because that is what it is designed to do. Modern terrorism is a by-product of the vast reach of the media.11
News media gobble the bait and give the atrocities saturation coverage. The Availability heuristic kicks in and people become s
Indeed, the rise of terrorism in public awareness is not a sign of how dangerous the world has become but the opposite.
in the Middle Ages, every sector of society retained a private militia—aristocrats, guilds, towns, even churches and monasteries—and they secured their interests by force
As modern states have successfully claimed a monopoly on force, driving down the rate of killing within their borders, they opened a niche for terrorism:
The citizens, for their part, have become used to zero political violence, so the theatre of terror incites in them visceral fears of anarchy
As states try to carry out the impossible mandate of protecting their citizens from all political violence everywhere and all the time, they are tempted to respond with theater of their own. The most damaging effect of terrorism is countries’ overreaction to it
The media can examine their essential role in the show business of terrorism by calibrating their coverage to the objective dangers and giving more thought to the perverse incentives they have set up. (Lankford, together with the sociologist Erik Madfis, has recommended a policy for rampage shootings of “Don’t Name Them, Don’t Show Them, but Report Everything Else,”
We may never drive the already low numbers of terrorist casualties to zero, but we can remember that terror about terrorism is a sign not of how dangerous our society has become, but of how safe.
September 24, 2018
CHAPTER 14: DEMOCRACY, p. 201
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.8 Fukuyama coined a runaway meme: in the decades since his essay appeared, books and articles have announced “the end of” nature, science, faith, poverty, reason, money, men, lawyers, illness, the free market, and sex.
Despotism has persisted through history not just because being a despot is nice work if you can get it, but because from the people’s standpoint the alternative was often worse.
Chaos is deadlier than tyranny
the Availability bias could make us forget about all the boring countries that become democratic bit by bit.
Figure 14-1: Democracy versus autocracy, 1800–2015 Source: HumanProgress, http://humanprogress.org/f1/2560, based on Polity IV Annual Time-Series, 1800–2015, Marshall, Gurr, & Jaggers 2016. Scores are summed over sovereign states with a population greater than 500,000, and range from –10 for a complete autocracy to 10 for a perfect democracy. The arrow points to 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 5–23 of Pinker 2011.
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). Even ‘not free’ is not what it used to be.”20
Political scientists are repeatedly astonished by the shallowness and incoherence of people’s political beliefs, and by the tenuous connection of their preferences to their votes and to the behavior of their representatives.21 Most voters are ignorant not just of current policy options but of basic facts, such as what the major branches of government are,
They use the franchise as a form of self-expression: they vote for candidates who they think are like them and stand for their kind of people.
autocrats can learn to use elections to their advantage. The latest fashion in dictatorship has been called the competitive, electoral, kleptocratic, statist, or patronal authoritarian regime.22 (Putin’s Russia is the prototype.) The incumbents use the formidable resources of the state to harass the opposition, set up fake opposition parties, use state-controlled media to spread congenial narratives, manipulate electoral rules, tilt voter registration, and jigger the elections themselves.
In his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, the 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.
Democracy, he suggests, is essentially based on giving people the freedom to complain
progress has a way of covering its tracks. As our moral standards rise over the years, we become alert to harms that would have gone unnoticed in the past.
Figure 14-2: Human rights, 1949–2014 Source: Our World in Data, Roser 2016i, graphing an index devised by Fariss 2014, which estimates protection from torture, extrajudicial killing, political imprisonment, and disappearances. “0” is the mean over all countries and years; the units are standard deviations
Figure 14-3: Death penalty abolitions, 1863–2016 Source: “Capital Punishment by Country: Abolition Chronology,” Wikipedia, retrieved Aug. 15, 2016. Several European countries abolished the death penalty in their mainland earlier than indicated here, but the time line records the last abolition in any territory under their jurisdiction. The arrow points to 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 4–3 of Pinker 2011
The top five countries that still execute people in significant numbers form an unlikely club: China and Iran (more than a thousand apiece annually), Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States
European democracies did not convert the opinions of the common man into policy. The penal codes of their countries were drafted by committees of renowned scholars, passed into law by legislators who thought of themselves as a natural aristocracy, and implemented by appointed judges who were lifelong civil servants
American executions are concentrated in a handful of Southern states, mainly Texas, Georgia, and Missouri—indeed, in a handful of counties in those states.37
Seven states have repealed the death penalty in the past decade, an additional sixteen have moratoria, and thirty have not executed anyone in five years.
Figure 14-4: Executions, US, 1780–2016 Sources: Death Penalty Information Center 2017. Population estimates from US Census Bureau 2017. The arrow points to 2010, the last year plotted in fig. 4–4 of Pinker 2011
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. The sentencing phase after a guilty verdict is tantamount to a second trial, and a death sentence triggers a lengthy process of reviews and appeals—so lengthy that most death-row prisoners die of natural causes. Meanwhile, the billable hours from expensive lawyers cost the state eight times as much as life in prison.
But it’s in the nature of progress that it erases its tracks, and its champions fixate on the remaining injustices and forget how far we have come.
September 25, 2018
CHAPTER 15: EQUAL RIGHTS, p. 215
During his campaign, Trump uttered misogynistic, anti-Hispanic, and anti-Muslim insults that were well outside the norms of American political discourse, and the rowdy followers he encouraged at his rallies were even more offensive. Some commentators worried that his victory represented a turning point in the nation’s progress toward equality and rights, or that it uncovered the ugly truth that we had never made progress in the first place.
Figure 15-1: Racist, sexist, and homophobic opinions, US, 1987–2012 Source: Pew Research Center 2012b. The arrows point to the most recent years plotted in Pinker 2011 for similar questions: Blacks, 1997 (fig. 7–7); Women, 1995 (fig. 7–11); Homosexuals, 2009 (fig. 7–24).
Not only has the American population become more liberal, but each generational cohort is more liberal than the one born before it.9 As we will see, people tend to carry their values with them as they age, so the Millennials (those born after 1980), who are even less prejudiced than the national average, tell us which way the country is going.10
fewer people willing to confess their disreputable attitudes to a pollster
- Con la onda de lo políticamente correcto, no dudo que así sea..
Figure 15-2: Racist, sexist, and homophobic Web searches, US, 2004–2017 Source: Google Trends (www.google.com/trends), searches for “nigger jokes,” “bitch jokes,” and “fag jokes,” United States, 2004–2017, relative to total search volume. Data (accessed Jan. 22, 2017) are by month, expressed as a percentage of the peak month for each search term, then averaged over the months of each year, and smoothed
- La gente ya tiene miedo del control de google? Jajajaj
Among African Americans, the poverty rate fell from 55 percent in 1960 to 27.6 percent in 2011.14 Life expectancy rose from 33 in 1900 (17.6 years below that of whites) to 75.6 years in 2015 (less than 3 years below whites).
The claims come from advocacy organizations, whose funding depends on whipping up fear, rather than disinterested recordkeepers
- Siempre es importante tener en cuenta el interés detrás de quien denuncia o habla.
Figure 15-3: Hate crimes, US, 1996–2015 Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation 2016b. The arrow points to 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 7–4 of Pinker 2011
it seems to be pushed along by the tide of modernity. In a cosmopolitan society, people rub shoulders, do business, and find themselves in the same boat with other kinds of people, and that tends to make them more sympathetic to one another.
- Vivir en comunidad..
Figure 15-4: Rape and domestic violence, US, 1993–2014 Sources: US Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, Victimization Analysis Tool, http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=nvat, with additional data provided by Jennifer Truman of BJS. The gray line represents “Intimate partner violence” with female victims. The arrows point to 2005, the last year plotted in fig. 7–13, and 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 7–10, of Pinker 2011
With women’s rights, too, the progress is global. In 1900, women could vote in only one country, New Zealand. Today they can vote in every country in which men can vote but one, Vatican City
- Una manera interesante de verlo.. los neozelandeses son los más avanzados y los miembros De la Iglesia los más atrasados..
Homosexual acts used to be a criminal offense in almost every country in the world.34 The first arguments that behavior between consenting adults is no one else’s business were formulated during the Enlightenment by Montesquieu, Voltaire, Beccaria, and Bentham
Figure 15-5: Decriminalization of homosexuality, 1791–2016 Sources: Ottosson 2006, 2009. Dates for an additional sixteen countries were obtained from “LGBT Rights by Country or Territory,” Wikipedia, retrieved July 31, 2016. Dates for an additional thirty-six countries that currently allow homosexuality are not listed in either source. The arrow points to 2009, the last year plotted in fig. 7–23 of Pinker 2011
People begin to prioritize freedom over security, diversity over uniformity, autonomy over authority, creativity over discipline, and individuality over conformity. Emancipative values may also be called liberal values, in the classical sense related to “liberty” and “liberation” (rather than the sense of political leftism).
Figure 15-6: Liberal values across time and generations, developed countries, 1980–2005 Source: Welzel 2013, fig. 4.1. World Values Survey data are from Australia, Canada, France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States (each country weighted equally
Figure 15-7: Liberal values across time (extrapolated), world’s culture zones, 1960–2006 Source: World Values Survey, as analyzed in Welzel 2013, fig. 4.4, updated with data provided by Welzel. Emancipative value estimates for each country in each year are calculated for a hypothetical sample of a fixed age, based on each respondent’s birth cohort, the year of testing, and a country-specific period effect. The labels are geographic mnemonics for Welzel’s “culture zones” and do not literally apply to every country in a zone. I have renamed some of the zones: Protestant Western Europe corresponds to Welzel’s “Reformed West.” US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand = “New West.” Catholic & Southern Europe = “Old West.” Central & Eastern Europe = “Returned West.” East Asia = “Sinic East.” Former Yugoslavia & USSR = “Orthodox East.” South & Southeast Asia = “Indic East.” Countries in each zone are weighted equally
Figure 15-8: Victimization of children, US, 1993–2012 Sources: Physical abuse and Sexual abuse (mainly by caregivers): National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, http://www.ndacan.cornell.edu/, analyzed by Finkelhor 2014; Finkelhor et al. 2014. Violent victimization at school: US Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, Victimization Analysis Tool, http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=nvat. Rates for physical and sexual abuse are per 100,000 children younger than 18. Rates for violent victimization at school are per 10,000 children aged 12–17. The arrows point to 2003 and 2007, the last years plotted in fig. 7–22 and fig. 7–20 in Pinker 2011, respectively
Figure 15-9: Child labor, 1850–2012 Sources: Our World in Data, Ortiz-Ospina & Roser 2016a, and the following. England: Percentage of children aged 10–14 recorded as working, Cunningham 1996. United States: Whaples 2005. Italy: Child work incidence, ages 10–14, Tonioli & Vecchi 2007. World ILO-EPEAP (International Labour Organization Programme on Estimates and Projections of the Economically Active Population): Child Labor, ages 10–14, Basu 1999. World ILO-IPEC (International Labour Organization International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour): Child Labor, ages 5–17, International Labour Organization 2013
November 27, 2018
CHAPTER 16: KNOWLEDGE, p. 233
Homo sapiens, “knowing man,” is the species that uses information to resist the rot of entropy and the burdens of evolution.
The supernova of knowledge continuously redefines what it means to be human. Our understanding of who we are, where we came from, how the world works, and what matters in life depends on partaking of the vast and ever-expanding store of knowledge
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.4
The mind-altering effects of education extend to every sphere of life
Do better-educated countries get richer, or can richer countries afford more education? One way to cut the knot is to take advantage of the fact that a cause must precede its effect
- Mmmmmm.. tiene sentido pero sigue siendo especulación..
Better-educated girls grow up to have fewer babies, and so are less likely to beget youth bulges with their surfeit of troublemaking young men.
- Beget bulges surfeit..
So much changes when you get an education! You unlearn dangerous superstitions, such as that leaders rule by divine right, or that people who don’t look like you are less than human. You learn that there are other cultures that are as tied to their ways of life as you are to yours, and for no better or worse reason. You learn that charismatic saviors have led their countries to disaster. You learn that your own convictions, no matter how heartfelt or popular, may be mistaken. You learn that there are better and worse ways to live, and that other people and other cultures may know things that you don’t. Not least, you learn that there are ways of resolving conflicts without violence. All these epiphanies militate against knuckling under the rule of an autocrat or joining a crusade to subdue and kill your neighbors. Of course, none of this wisdom is guaranteed, particularly when authorities promulgate their own dogmas, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories
Studies of the effects of education confirm that educated people really are more enlightened. They are less racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and authoritarian.10 They place a higher value on imagination, independence, and free speech.11 They are more likely to vote, volunteer, express political views, and belong to civic associations such as unions, political parties, and religious and community organizations.12 They are also likelier to trust their fellow citizens—a prime ingredient of the precious elixir called social capital which gives people the confidence to contract, invest, and obey the law without fearing that they are chumps who will be shafted by everyone else.13
Figure 16-1: Literacy, 1475–2010 Source: Our World in Data, Roser & Ortiz-Ospina 2016b, including data from the following. Before 1800: Buringh & Van Zanden 2009. World: van Zanden et al. 2014. US: National Center for Education Statistics. After 2000: Central Intelligence Agency 2016
- England and Netherlands in 1650?
- Really 50% ?
Figure 16-2: Basic education, 1820–2010 Source: Our World in Data, Roser & Nagdy 2016c, based on data from van Zanden et al. 2014. The graphs indicate the share of the population aged 15 or older that had completed at least a year of education (more in later eras); see van Leeuwen & van Leewen-Li 2014, pp. 88–93.
the premium for knowledge in an economy that is driven by technology has been soaring.20
- !!!
Figure 16-3: Years of schooling, 1870–2010 Source: Our World in Data, Roser & Ortiz-Ospina 2016a, based on data from Lee & Lee 2016. Data are for the population aged 15–64
Most of the world’s knowledge is now online rather than locked in libraries (much of it free), and massive open online courses (MOOCs) and other forms of distance learning are becoming available to anyone with a smartphone.
It took the West centuries to figure out that educating the whole population, not just the half with testicles, was a good idea:
Figure 16-4: Female literacy, 1750–2014 Sources: England (all adults): Clark 2007, p. 179. World, Pakistan, & Afghanistan (ages 15–24): HumanProgress, http://www.humanprogress.org/f1/2101, based on data from UNESCO Institute for Statistics, summarized in World Bank 2016f. Data for the world are averaged over slightly different sets of countries in different years
Also, it beggars belief to think that an average person of 1910, if he or she had entered a time machine and materialized today, would be borderline retarded by our standards, while if Joe and Jane Average made the reverse journey, they would outsmart 98 percent of the befrocked and bewhiskered Edwardians who greeted them as they emerged.
Intelligence Quotient (IQ) scores have been rising for more than a century, in every part of the world, at a rate of about three IQ points (a fifth of a standard deviation) per decade.
Figure 16-5: IQ gains, 1909–2013 Source: Pietschnig & Voracek 2015, supplemental online material. The lines display changes in IQ measured by different tests starting at different times and cannot be compared with one another
better nutrition and less disease. Brains are greedy organs, consuming about a fifth of the body’s energy, and they are made of fats and proteins that are demanding for the body to produce.
So which kinds of intellectual performance have been pushed upward by the better environments of recent decades? Surprisingly, the steepest gains have not been found in the concrete skills that are directly taught in school, such as general knowledge, arithmetic, and vocabulary. They have been found in the abstract, fluid kinds of intelligence, the ones tapped by similarity questions (“What do an hour and a year have in common?”), analogies (“BIRD is to EGG as TREE is to what?”), and visual matrices (where the test-taker has to choose a complex geometric figure that fits into a rule-governed sequence). What has increased the most, then, is an analytic mindset
Outside the schoolhouse, analytic thinking is encouraged by a culture that trades in visual symbols (subway maps, digital displays), analytic tools (spreadsheets, stock reports), and academic concepts that trickle down into common parlance (supply and demand, on average, human rights, win-win, correlation versus causation, false positive).
A high IQ is a tailwind in life.
Some skeptics (including, at the outset, Flynn himself) doubted whether the 20th century really produced more brilliant ideas than the ages of Hume, Goethe, and Darwin.40 Then again, the geniuses of the past had the advantage of exploring virgin territory. Once someone discovers the analytic-synthetic distinction or the theory of natural selection, no one can ever discover it again. Today the intellectual landscape is well trodden, and it’s harder for a solitary genius to tower above the crowd of hypereducated and networked thinkers who are mapping every nook and cranny.
Cyberspace is the ultimate abstract realm, in which goals are achieved not by pushing matter around in space but by manipulating intangible symbols and patterns.
Policies that hurry the Flynn effect along, namely investments in health, nutrition, and education, could make a country richer, better governed, and happier down the road.42
the United Nations Development Programme, inspired by the economists Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen, offers a Human Development Index that is a composite of three of the major ones: life expectancy, GDP per capita, and education (being healthy, wealthy, and wise)
Figure 16-6: Global well-being, 1820–2015 Sources: Historical Index of Human Development: Prados de la Escosura 2015, 0–1 scale, available at Our World in Data, Roser 2016h. Well-Being Composite: Rijpma 2014, p. 259, standard deviation scale over country-decades
opportunities to enjoy the aesthetic, intellectual, social, cultural, and natural delights of the world, regardless of which ones people put on their trays, is the ultimate form of progress.
November 28, 2018
CHAPTER 17: QUALITY OF LIFE, p. 247
This chapter is about a broader cultural pessimism: the worry that all that extra healthy life span and income may not have increased human flourishing after all if they just consign people to a rat race of frenzied careerism, hollow consumption, mindless entertainment, and soul-deadening anomie.
the glories of communism: “Come the revolution, everyone will eat strawberries and cream!” A man at the front whimpers, “But I don’t like strawberries and cream.” The speaker thunders, “Come the revolution, you will like strawberries and cream!”2
set of “fundamental capabilities” that all people should be given the opportunity to exercise.
people to realize: longevity, health, safety, literacy, knowledge, free expression, and political participation. It goes on to include aesthetic experience, recreation and play, enjoyment of nature, emotional attachments, social affiliation
Figure 17-1: Work hours, Western Europe and US, 1870–2000 Source: Roser 2016t, based on data from Huberman & Minns 2007 on full-time production workers (both sexes) in nonagricultural activities
Figure 17-2: Retirement, US, 1880–2010 Source: Housel 2013, based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Costa 1998
senior citizens today are richer than people of working age: the poverty rate for people over 65 plunged from 35 percent in 1960 to less than 10 percent in 2011, well below the national rate of 15 percent.8
work fewer than 24 hours (and the new fridge was frost-free and came with an icemaker).12 Mindless consumerism? Not when you remember that food, clothing, and shelter are the three necessities of life, that entropy degrades all three, and that the time it takes to keep them usable is time that could be devoted to other pursuits. Electricity, running water, and appliances (or as they used to be called, “labor-saving devices”) give us that time back—the many hours our grandmothers spent pumping, canning, churning, pickling, curing, sweeping, waxing, scrubbing, wringing, sudsing, drying, stitching, mending, knitting, darning, and, as they used to remind us, “slaving over a hot stove, working our fingers to the bone.”
Time spent on laundry alone fell from 11.5 hours a week in 1920 to 1.5 in 2014.14 For returning “washday” to our lives, Hans Rosling suggests, the washing machine deserves to be called the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution.15
In 1919, an average American wage earner had to work 1,800 hours to pay for a refrigerator; in 2014, he or she had to
Figure 17-3: Utilities, appliances, and housework, US, 1900–2015 Sources: Before 2005: Greenwood, Seshadri, & Yorukoglu 2005. Appliances, 2005 and 2011: US Census Bureau, Siebens 2013. Housework, 2015: Our World in Data, Roser 2016t, based on the American Time Use Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016b.
Arguments for the equality of women go back to Mary Astell’s 1700 treatise and are irrefutable
a million lumen-hours of light (about what you would need to read for two and a half hours a day for a year) has fallen twelve thousandfold since the Middle Ages (once called the Dark Ages), from around £35,500 in 1300 to less than £3 today.
Figure 17-4: Cost of light, England, 1300–2006 Source: Our World in Data, Roser 2016o, based on data from Fouquet & Pearson 2012. Cost of one million lumen-hours (about 833 hours from an 80-watt incandescent bulb), in pounds sterling (inflation-adjusted to the year 2000
as Adam Smith pointed out, “The real price of every thing . . . is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.”
The technology expert Kevin Kelly has proposed that “over time, if a technology persists long enough, its costs begin to approach (but never reach) zero.”19 As the necessities of life get cheaper, we waste fewer of our waking hours obtaining them, and have more time and money left over for everything else—and the “everything else” gets cheaper, too, so we can experience more of them.
Figure 17-5: Spending on necessities, US, 1929–2016 Source: HumanProgress, http://humanprogress.org/static/1937, adapted from a graph by Mark Perry, using data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, http://www.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?ReqID=9&step=1#reqid=9&step=1&isuri=1. Proportion of disposable income spent on food at home, cars, clothing, household furnishings, housing, utilities, and gasoline. Data from 1941 to 1946 are omitted because they are distorted by rationing and soldiers’ salaries during World War II.
In 2015, men reported 42 hours of leisure per week, around 10 more than their counterparts did fifty years earlier, and women reported 36 hours, more than 6 hours more (figure 17-6).20 (To be fair, the yuppies might have something to kvetch about: less-educated people reported having more leisure, and this inequality-in-reverse has grown over these fifty years.
With the rise of two-career couples, overscheduled kids, and digital devices, there is a widespread belief (and recurring media panic) that families are caught in a time crunch that’s killing the family dinner
and that was before smartphones and social medi
Figure 17-6: Leisure time, US, 1965–2015 Sources: 1965–2003: Aguiar & Hurst 2007, table III, Leisure Measure 1. 2015: American Time Use Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016c, summing Leisure and Sports, Lawn and Garden Care, and Volunteering for commensurability with Aguiar & Hurst’s Measure 1.
Couples separated by study, work, or war would reread a letter dozens of times and tumble into despair if the next one was late, not knowing whether the postal service had lost it or whether the lover was
A century ago, if family members moved to a distant city
angry, faithless, or dead (an agony recounted in songs like the Marvelettes’ and Beatles’ “Please Mr. Postman” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Why Don’t You Write Me?”). Even when long-distance telephony allowed people to reach out and touch someone, the exorbitant cost put a strain on intimacy.
In past eras people had only a mental image to remind them of a family member, living or dead. Today, like billions of others, I get a wave of gratitude for my blessings several times a day as my eyes alight on a photo of my loved ones. Affordable photography
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. Despite soaring fuel costs, the real price of plane travel in the United States has fallen by more than half since the late 1970s, when the airlines were deregulated (figure 17-7).
Figure 17-7: Cost of air travel, US, 1979–2015 Source: Thompson 2013, updated with data from Airlines for America, http://airlines.org/dataset/annual-round-trip-fares-and-fees-domestic/. Domestic travel, excluding checked baggage fees (which would raise the average cost for baggage-checking passengers by about a half-cent per mile since 2008).
we must concede that life is better when people can expand their awareness of our planet and species rather than being imprisoned within walking distance of their place of birth.
Figure 17-8: International tourism, 1995–2015 Source: World Bank 2016e, based on data from the World Tourism Organization, Yearbook of Tourism Statistics.
We have, at our fingertips, virtually all the works of genius prior to our time, together with those of our own time, whereas the people who lived before our time had neither. 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.
- Excepto por las patentes que deben vencer más rápido para que ese conocimiento llegue a los que más los necesitan (enfermedades, tratamientos, optimizaciones, ventajas competitivas, etc)
April 21, 2019
CHAPTER 18: HAPPINESS, p. 269
My favorite comes from the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers and may be summarized in a graph. Figure 18-1 plots ratings of average life satisfaction against average income (on a logarithmic scale) for 131 countries, each represented by a dot, together with the relationship of life satisfaction to income among the citizens of each country, represented by an arrow impaling the dot.
If we have a shred of cosmic gratitude, we ought to be. 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.
People seem to bitch, moan, whine, carp, and kvetch as much as ever, and the proportion of Americans who tell pollsters that they are happy has remained steady for decades.
According to the theory of the hedonic treadmill, people adapt to changes in their fortunes, like eyes adapting to light or darkness, and quickly return to a genetically determined baseline.4 According to the 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
“Epidemics of mental illness are crushing the minds and bodies of millions. It’s time to ask where we are heading and why.” The article itself warned, “The latest, catastrophic figures for children’s mental health in England reflect a global crisis.”6
- To the final destruction
freedom (together with life and reason) is a prerequisite to the very act of evaluating what is good in life.
- Sera? A lo mejor sin razonamiento podes ser feliz, los locos felices porque no razonan, o razonan bajo premisas y variables que no manejamos (tal vez bajo químicos diferentes en el cerebro).
Happiness isn’t everything. We can make choices that leave us unhappy in the short term but fulfilled over the course of a life, such as raising a child, writing a book, or fighting for a worthy cause.
The results suggest that many of the things that make people happy also make their lives meaningful, such as being connected to others, feeling productive, and not being alone or bored
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. Parents get meaning from their children, but not necessarily happiness. Time spent with friends makes a life happier; time spent with loved ones makes it more meaningful. Stress, worry, arguments, challenges, and struggles make a life unhappier but more meaningful.
We are happier, in general, when we are healthy, comfortable, safe, provisioned, socially connected, sexual, and loved. The function of happiness is to goad us into seeking the keys to fitness: when we are unhappy, we scramble for things that would improve our lot; when we are happy, we cherish the status quo.
Figure 18-1: Life satisfaction and income, 2006 Source: Stevenson & Wolfers 2008a, fig. 11, based on data from the Gallup World Poll 2006. Credit: Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers.
Absolute income, not relative income, is what matters most for happiness (a conclusion that’s consistent with the finding discussed in chapter 9 on the irrelevance of inequality to happiness)
- Interesante
happiness takes a sustained hit from trials like unemployment or disability, and a sustained boost from gifts like a good marriage or immigrating to a happier country.22 And contrary to an earlier belief, winning the lottery does, over the long term, make people happier.23
People tend to get happier as they get older (an age effect), presumably because they overcome the hurdles of embarking on adulthood and develop the wisdom to cope with setbacks and to put their lives in perspective.38 (They may pass through a midlife crisis on the way, or take a final slide in the last years of old age.
For a member of gregarious Homo sapiens, social isolation is a form of torture, and the stress of loneliness a major risk to health and life.43 So it would be another joke on modernity if our newfound connectivity has left us lonelier than ever.
digital friendships don’t provide the psychological benefits of face-to-face contact.
Among the world’s problems, social isolation would seem to be one of the easier ones to solve: just invite someone you know for a chat at a neighborhood Starbucks or around the kitchen table. Why would people fail to notice the opportunities?
Figure 18-2: Loneliness, US students, 1978–2011 Source: Clark, Loxton, & Tobin 2015. College students (left axis): Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale, trend line across many samples, taken from their fig. 1. High school students (right axis): Mean rating of six loneliness items from the Monitoring the Future survey, triennial means, taken from their fig. 4. Each axis spans half a standard deviation, so the slopes of the college and high school curves are commensurable, but their relative heights are not
- 2008 es el pico más bajo.. después sube.. en el 2008 aparecen los smartphones.. hay que ver cómo sigue la tendencia.
women among them are less stressed, with one telling exception: they get upset when they learn that someone they care about has suffered an illness, a death in the family, or some other setback. 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.
the social critic’s standard formula for sowing panic: Here’s an anecdote, therefore it’s a trend, therefore it’s a crisis.
- Interesante .. la deducción de la pseudo ciencia..
Suicides increase during economic downturns and political turmoil, not surprisingly, but they are also affected by the weather and the number of daylight hours, and they increase when the media normalize or romanticize recent instances.53
Though the suicide rate for women in developed countries fell by more than 40 percent between the mid-1980s and 2013, men kill themselves at around four times the rate of women, so the numbers for men tend to push the overall trends around.56 And no one knows why, for example, the world’s most suicidal countries are Guyana, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Lithuania, nor why France’s rate shot up from 1976 to 1986 and fell back down by 1999.
- 4x más en hombres? Porque?
Figure 18-3: Suicide, England, Switzerland, and US, 1860–2014 Sources: England (including Wales): Thomas & Gunnell 2010, fig. 1, average of male and female rates, provided by Kylie Thomas. The series has not been extended because the data are not commensurable with current records. Switzerland, 1880–1959: Ajdacic-Gross et al. 2006, fig. 1. Switzerland, 1960–2013: WHO Mortality Database, OECD 2015b. United States, 1900–1998: Centers for Disease Control, Carter et al. 2000, table Ab950. United States, 1999–2014: Centers for Disease Control 2015
Everyone occasionally suffers from depression, and some people are stricken with major depression, in which the sadness and hopelessness last more than two weeks and interfere with carrying on with life.
Bureaucracies demand that people be diagnosed with some disorder before they can receive entitlements such as therapy, government services, and a right against discrimination. All these inducements could make people more likely to report that they are depressed.
the mental health professions, and perhaps the culture at large, has been lowering the bar for what counts as a mental illness. The list of disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association tripled between 1952 and 1994, when it included almost three hundred disorders, including Avoidant Personality Disorder (which applies to many people who formerly were called shy), Caffeine Intoxication, and Female Sexual Dysfunction. The number of symptoms needed to justify a diagnosis has fallen, and the number of stressors that may be credited with triggering one has increased.
One of psychology’s best-kept secrets is that cognitive behavior therapy is demonstrably effective (often more effective than drugs) in treating many forms of distress, including depression, anxiety, panic attacks, PTSD, insomnia, and the symptoms of schizophrenia.68
The dire warnings about plagues of loneliness, suicide, depression, and anxiety don’t survive fact-checking. And though every generation has worried that the next one is in trouble, as younger generations go the Millennials seem to be in pretty good shape, happier and mentally healthier than their helicoptering parents.
- Y porque no parece? Porque siempre parece más difícil, más complicado, pero es cada vez más fácil y solo al estar viejos ya no nos adaptamos?
A modicum of anxiety may be the price we pay for the uncertainty of freedom. It is another word for the vigilance, deliberation, and heart-searching that freedom demands. It’s not entirely surprising that as women gained in autonomy relative to men they also slipped in happiness. In earlier times, women’s list of responsibilities rarely extended beyond the domestic sphere. 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.83
- Las sondear-women..
it’s also the great questions of existence. As people become better educated and increasingly skeptical of received authority, they may become unsatisfied with traditional religious verities and feel unmoored in a morally indifferent cosmos.
American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945–1960. In that era, everything seemed great. Belching smokestacks were a sign of prosperity. America had a mission to spread democracy around the world. The atom bomb was proof of Yankee ingenuity. Women enjoyed domestic bliss, and Negroes knew their place.
- La confianza de la ignorancia del que cree que sabe todo..
- La inseguridad de saber que somos ignorantes..
as 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.”
- Jajaja.. no se van a enojar los believers?
One of the challenges of modernity is how to grapple with a growing portfolio of responsibilities without worrying ourselves to death.
- Mi “pecado” como dijo el pa’í la única vez que me confesé y comulgué..
with all new challenges, we are groping toward the right mixture of old-fashioned and novel stratagems, including human contact, art, meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness, small pleasures, judicious use of pharmaceuticals, reinvigorated service and social organizations, and advice from wise people on how to lead a balanced life.
- Un poco de todo esto y ya.. ademas de cuidar a la familia, el trabajo, mantener contacto con las amistades y familiares cercanos, hacer deportes, ejercicios, comer bien, etc etc etc ji ji ji
Not every problem is a crisis, a plague, or an epidemic, and among the things that happen in the world is that people solve the problems confronting them.
what do you think are the greatest threats to the human species? In the 1960s several thinkers advised that they were overpopulation, nuclear war, and boredom.89 One scientist warned that although the first two might be survivable, the third definitely was not. Boredom, really? You see, as people no longer have to work all day and think about where their next meal is coming from,
- Mucho tiempo, muchas elecciones inútiles, y pasa eso..
Figure 18-4: Happiness and excitement, US, 1972–2016 Source: “General Social Survey,” Smith, Son, & Schapiro 2015, figs. 1 and 5, updated for 2016 from https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/projects/15157/variables/438/vshow. Data exclude nonresponses
anxiety has always been a perquisite of adulthood: it rises steeply from the school-age years to the early twenties as people take on adult responsibilities, and then falls steadily over the rest of the life course as they learn to cope with them
people who feel they lead meaningful lives are more susceptible to stress, struggle, and worry.
April 22, 2019
CHAPTER 19: EXISTENTIAL THREATS, p. 303
A saboteur with a thirst for havoc could tamper with supermarket products, lace some pesticide into a feedlot or water supply, or even just make an anonymous call claiming to have done so, and it could cost a company hundreds of millions of dollars in recalls, and a country billions in lost exports.43 Such attacks could take place in every city in the world many times a day, but in fact take place somewhere or other every few years (leading the security expert Bruce Schneier to ask, “Where are all the terrorist attacks?”).44 Despite all the terror generated by terrorism, there must be very few individuals out there waiting for an opportunity to wreak wanton destruction.
- Cierto
And in their campaign to shake people out of their apathy, scientific experts have made some not-so-prescient predictions: Only the creation of a world government can prevent the impending self-destruction of mankind. —Albert Einstein, 195072 I have a firm belief that unless we have more serious and sober thought on various aspects of the strategic problem . . . we are not going to reach the year 2000—and maybe not even the year 1965—without a cataclysm. —Herman Kahn, 196073 Within, at the most, ten years, some of those [nuclear] bombs are going off. I am saying this as responsibly as I can. That is the certainty. —C. P. Snow, 196174
I am completely certain—there is not the slightest doubt in my mind—that by the year 2000, you [students] will all be dead. —Joseph Weizenbaum, 197675 They are joined by experts such as the political scientist Hans Morgenthau, a famous exponent of “realism” in international relations, who predicted in 1979: In my opinion the world is moving ineluctably towards a third world war—a strategic nuclear war. I do not believe that anything can be done to prevent it.76 And the journalist Jonathan Schell, whose 1982 bestseller The Fate of the Earth ended as follows: One day—and it is hard to believe that it will not be soon—we will make our choice. Either we will sink into the final coma and end it all or, as I trust and believe, we will awaken to the truth of our peril . . . and rise up to cleanse the earth of nuclear weapons
- To the final destruction!
like the man who fell off the roof and says “So far so good” as he passes each floor.
Or we will be blindsided by a black swan, a four-sigma event far along the tail of the statistical distribution of hazards, with low odds but calamitous harm.
For half a century the four horsemen of the modern apocalypse have been overpopulation, resource shortages, pollution, and nuclear war. They have recently been joined by a cavalry of more exotic knights: nanobots that will engulf us, robots that will enslave us, artificial intelligence that will turn us into raw materials, and Bulgarian teenagers who will brew a genocidal virus or take down the Internet from their bedrooms.
humanity has a finite budget of resources, brainpower, and anxiety. You can’t worry about everything. Some of the threats facing us, like climate change and nuclear war, are unmistakable, and will require immense effort and ingenuity to mitigate. Folding them into a list of exotic scenarios with minuscule or unknown probabilities can only dilute the sense of urgency.
- Focus on what is important.
We have media ratings to protect children from sex or violence in movies, but we think nothing of inviting a scientist into a second grade classroom
At that moment, bank balances would be wiped out, elevators would stop between floors, incubators in maternity wards would shut off, water pumps would freeze, planes would fall from the sky, nuclear power plants would melt down, and ICBMs would be launched from their silos.
Remember the Y2K bug?
In a parochial sense, the weather killed them; but the deeper explanation is lack of knowledge. Many of the hundreds of millions of victims of cholera throughout history must have died within sight of the hearths that could have boiled their drinking water and saved their lives; but, again, they did not know that. Quite generally, the distinction between a “natural” disaster and one brought about by ignorance is parochial
the danger that we will be subjugated, intentionally or accidentally, by artificial intelligence (AI), a disaster sometimes called the Robopocalypse and commonly illustrated with stills from the Terminator movies. As with Y2K, some smart people take it seriously. Elon Musk, whose company makes artificially intelligent self-driving cars, called the technology “more dangerous than nukes.” Stephen Hawking, speaking through his artificially intelligent synthesizer, warned that it could “spell the end of the human race.
confusion of intelligence with motivation—of beliefs with desires, inferences with goals, thinking with wanting. Even if we did invent superhumanly intelligent robots, why would they want to enslave their masters or take over the world?
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.
- Depende con quien compite..
Intelligence is a contraption of gadgets: software modules that acquire, or are programmed with, knowledge of how to pursue various goals in various domains.24 People are equipped to find food, win friends and influence people, charm prospective mates, bring up children, move around in the world, and pursue other human obsessions and pastimes. Computers may be programmed to take on some of these problems (like recognizing faces), not to bother with others (like charming mates), and to take on still other problems that humans can’t solve (like simulating the climate or sorting millions of accounting records). The problems are different, and the kinds of knowledge needed to solve them are different.
Understanding does not obey Moore’s Law: knowledge is acquired by formulating explanations and testing them against reality, not by running an algorithm faster and faster.25
The 2010s have, to be sure, brought us systems that can drive cars, caption photographs, recognize speech, and beat
humans at Jeopardy!, Go, and Atari computer games. But the 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.
The danger, sometimes called the Value Alignment Problem, is that we might give an AI a goal and then helplessly stand by as it relentlessly and literal-mindedly implemented its interpretation of that goal, the rest of our interests be damned. If we gave an AI the goal of maintaining the water level behind a dam, it might flood a town, not caring about the people who drowned. If we gave it the goal of making paper clips, it might turn all the matter in the reachable universe into paper clips, including our possessions and bodies. If we asked it to maximize human happiness, it might implant us all with intravenous dopamine drips, or rewire our brains
When we put aside fantasies like foom, digital megalomania, instant omniscience, and perfect control of every molecule in the universe, artificial intelligence is like any other technology. It is developed incrementally, designed to satisfy multiple conditions, tested before it is implemented, and constantly tweaked for efficacy and safety
- Ojalá.. más o menos.. hay veces que las cosas salen terriblemente mal, por irresponsables con poder y poca experiencia..
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.”32 Driving a car is an easier engineering problem than unloading a dishwasher, running an errand, or changing a diaper
According to a common line of thinking, as technology advances, the destructive power available to an individual will multiply. It’s only a matter of time before a single nerd or terrorist builds a nuclear bomb in his garage, or genetically engineers a plague virus, or takes down the Internet. And with the modern world so dependent on technology, an outage could bring on panic, starvation, and anarchy.
- No?
If not robots, then what about hackers
- Esto si es bastante más peligroso cuando alguien con muchos recursos diseña algo que pueda cumplir objetivos más malignos, principalmente cuando algunas empresas tienen datos y parte del control (google, Facebook, apple) de parte importante de la vida de la mitad de la población del mundo.
The question I’ll consider is whether the grim facts should lead any reasonable person to conclude that humanity is screwed. Is it inevitable that the black hats will someday outsmart the white hats and bring civilization to its knees? Has technological progress ironically left the world newly fragile?
- Good question..
But Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine and author of What Technology Wants, argues that this is in fact not the way technology progresses.4
It is extremely hard to do, and the smaller the rogue team, the harder. The larger the team, the more societal influences.41
- Puede ser.. ya todo es tan complejo que no se puede construir nada solo.. estamos hiper especializados..
They could go on stabbing rampages, spray gunfire into crowds, mow down pedestrians with cars, set off pressure-cooker bombs, and shove people off sidewalks and subway platforms into the path of hurtling vehicles.
Typical specimens include the Shoe Bomber, who unsuccessfully tried to down an airliner by igniting explosives in his shoe; the Underwear Bomber, who unsuccessfully tried to down an airliner by detonating explosives in his underwear; the ISIS trainer who demonstrated an explosive vest to his class of aspiring suicide terrorists and blew himself and all twenty-one of them to bits; the Tsarnaev brothers, who followed up on their bombing of the Boston Marathon by murdering a police officer in an unsuccessful attempt to steal his gun, and then embarked on a carjacking, a robbery, and a Hollywood-style car chase during which one brother ran over the other; and Abdullah al-Asiri, who tried to assassinate a Saudi deputy minister with an improvised explosive device hidden in his anus and succeeded only in obliterating himself.46 (An intelligence analysis firm reported that the event “signals a paradigm shift in suicide bombing tactics.”)47 Occasionally, as on September 11, 2001, a team of clever and disciplined terrorists gets lucky, but most successful plots are low-tech attacks on target-rich gatherings, and (as we saw in chapter 13) kill very few people. Indeed, I venture that the proportion of[…]
State-based cyber-sabotage escalates the malevolence from terrorism to a kind of warfare, where the constraints of international relations, such as norms, treaties, sanctions, retaliation, and military deterrence, inhibit aggressive attacks, as they do in conventional “kinetic” warfare.
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! The assumption is that modern people are so helpless that if the Internet ever went down, farmers would stand by and watch their crops rot while dazed city-dwellers starved. But disaster sociology (yes, there is such a field) has shown that people are highly resilient in the face of catastrophe.53 Far from looting, panicking, or sinking into paralysis, they spontaneously cooperate to restore order and improvise
Hiroshima nuclear blast,
Within a day, apart from the planning undertaken by the government and military organizations that partly survived, other groups partially restored electric power to some areas, a steel company with 20 percent of workers attending began operations again, employees of the 12 banks in Hiroshima assembled in the Hiroshima branch in the city and began making payments, and trolley lines leading into the city were completely cleared with partial traffic restored the following day.54
- Interesante. Ya estaban viviendo la guerra.. había que seguir, como siempre hay que seguir.. no hay otro camino..
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
The world’s leaders are no more moved. Carl Sagan was a coauthor of the first paper warning of a nuclear winter, and when he campaigned for a nuclear freeze by trying to generate “fear, then belief, then response,” he was advised by an arms-control expert, “If you think that the mere prospect of the end of the world is sufficient to change thinking in Washington and Moscow you clearly haven’t spent much time in either of those places.”81
prognosticators are biased toward scaring people.
The fundamental fact of the nuclear age is that no atomic weapon has been used since Nagasaki. If the hands of a clock point to a few minutes to midnight for seventy-two years, something is wrong with the clock. Now, maybe the world has been blessed with a miraculous run of good luck
True, the thought of Kim Jong-un with nukes is alarming, but the world has survived half-mad despots with nuclear weapons before, namely Stalin and Mao, who were deterred from using them, or, more likely, never felt the need.
Probably even fewer people realize that about 10 percent of electricity in the United States comes from dismantled nuclear warheads, mostly Soviet
Figure 19-1: Nuclear weapons, 1945–2015 Sources: HumanProgress, http://humanprogress.org/static/2927, based on data from the Federation of Atomic Scientists, Kristensen & Norris 2016a, updated in Kristensen 2016; see Kristensen & Norris 2016b for additional explanation. The counts include weapons that are deployed and those that are stockpiled, but exclude weapons that are retired and awaiting dismantlement
there is no “hair trigger” that automatically launches missiles without human intervention.122 But when missiles can be launched on short notice, the risks of a false alarm or an accidental, rogue, or impetuous launch are real.
more than two centuries later we can say that it has worked: we have seen six dozen graphs that have vindicated the hope for progress by charting ways in which the world has been getting better. Lines that plot good things over time cannot automatically be extrapolated rightward and upward,
April 22, 2019
CHAPTER 20: THE FUTURE OF PROGRESS, p. 326
Better still, improvements build on one another. 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. The technological advances that have propelled this progress should only gather speed. Stein’s Law continues to obey Davies’s Corollary (Things that can’t go on forever can go on much longer than you think
By failing to acknowledge that hard-won knowledge is the key to societal improvement, it denigrates “elites” and “experts” and downplays the marketplace of ideas, including freedom of speech, diversity of opinion, and the fact-checking of self-serving claims. By valorizing a strong leader, populism overlooks the limitations in human nature, and disdains the rule-governed institutions and constitutional checks that constrain the power of flawed human actors. Populism comes in left-wing and right-wing varieties
The poor may not always be with us. The world is about a hundred times wealthier today than it was two centuries ago, and the prosperity is becoming more evenly distributed across the world’s countries and people. The proportion of humanity living in extreme poverty has fallen from almost 90 percent to less than 10 percent, and within the lifetimes of most of the readers of this book it could approach zero.
The world is giving peace a chance. War between countries is obsolescent, and war within countries is absent from five-sixths of the world’s surface. The proportion of people killed annually in wars is less than a quarter of what it was in the 1980s, a seventh of what it was in the early 1970s, an eighteenth of what it was in the early 1950s, and a half a percent of what it was during World War II.
Over the course of the 20th century, Americans became 96 percent less likely to be killed in a car accident, 88 percent less likely to be mowed down on the sidewalk, 99 percent less likely to die in a plane crash, 59 percent less likely to fall to their deaths, 92 percent less likely to die by fire, 90 percent less likely to drown, 92 percent less likely to be asphyxiated, and 95 percent less likely to be killed on the job.
At the turn of the 20th century, women could vote in just one country; today they can vote in every country where men can vote save one.
As people are getting healthier, richer, safer, and freer, they are also becoming more literate, knowledgeable, and smarter
The schooling, together with health and wealth, are literally making us smarter—by thirty IQ points, or two standard deviations above our ancestors.
Americans work 22 fewer hours a week than they used to, have three weeks of paid vacation, lose 43 fewer hours to housework, and spend just a third of their paycheck on necessities rather than five-eighths. They are using their leisure and disposable income to travel, spend time with their children, connect with loved ones, and sample the world’s cuisine, knowledge, and culture.
For all the bleeding headlines, for all the crises, collapses, scandals, plagues, epidemics, and existential threats, these are accomplishments to savor. The Enlightenment is working: for two and a half centuries, people have used knowledge to enhance human flourishing. Scientists have exposed the workings of matter, life, and mind. Inventors have harnessed the laws of nature to defy entropy, and entrepreneurs have made their innovations affordable. Lawmakers have made people better off by discouraging acts that are individually beneficial but collectively harmful. Diplomats have done the same with nations. Scholars have perpetuated the treasury of knowledge and augmented the power of reason. Artists have expanded the circle of sympathy. Activists have
pressured the powerful to overturn repressive measures, and their fellow citizens to change repressive norms.
progress is not utopia, and that there is room—indeed, an imperative—for us to strive to continue that progress.
Since the early 1970s, the annual rate of growth has fallen by more than half, to around 1.4 percent.7
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.
The first half of the 20th century revolutionized the home with electricity, water, sewerage, telephones, and motorized appliances. Since then homes haven’t changed nearly as much. An electronic bidet with a heated seat is nice, but it’s not like going from an outhouse to a flush toilet.
- The world is digital now.. better infrastructure in less developed countries and then more quality of life in the form of organization, better transit, better services, and a world of digital services, alcanzable por la gran mayoría.. contenido, arte, cosas que muevan a la gente serán las oportunidades.. en las tecnologías establecidas, mayor eficiencia llevará el servicio a más gente y con mayor calidad.
As the entrepreneur Peter Thiel lamented, “We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters.”
- We got what people want and can afford..! That’s the way capitalism works..
the postwar glory days is still growth—indeed, exponential growth. Gross World Product has increased in fifty-one of the last fifty-five years, which means that in each of those fifty-one years (including the last six), the world got richer than it was the year before.13 Also, secular stagnation is largely a first-world problem. Though it’s a tremendous challenge to get the most highly developed countries to become even more highly developed, year after year after year, the less developed countries have a lot of catching up to do, and they can grow at high rates as they adopt the richer countries’ best practices
In addition to dematerialization, information technology has launched a process of demonetization.22 Many things that people used to pay for are now essentially free, including classified ads, news, encyclopedias, maps, cameras, long-distance calls, and the overhead of brick-and-mortar retailers. People are enjoying these goods more than ever, but they have vanished from GDP.
aggregate statistics like GDP per capita and its derivatives such as factor productivity . . . were designed for a steel-and-wheat economy, not one in which information and data are the most dynamic sector. Many of the new goods and services are expensive to design, but once they work, they can be copied at very low or zero costs. That means they tend to contribute little to measured output even if their impact on consumer welfare is very large.”
Authoritarian populism can be seen as a pushback of elements of human nature—tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, zero-sum thinking—against the Enlightenment institutions that were designed to circumvent them. By focusing on the tribe rather than the individual, it has no place for the protection of minority rights
- Este puede ser un peligro. Pero difícilmente será aceptado.. ya tenemos los primeros resultados, en los populismos de izquierda.. los populismos de derecha ya fracasaron anteriormente.. hay que recordar que las instituciones fueron creadas para protegernos.. pero la excesiva burocracia, la frustración con la velocidad del avance y la distancia entre los representantes y representados es lo que fomenta este tipo de “soluciones”.. pero creo, o tal vez espero, que no prevalecerán sobre las instituciones porque los ejemplos de dónde terminan abundan, y también permiten identificarlos de forma temprana.
- Gracias a la diversidad y a la mala experiencia de otros, es probable que hayamos aprendido, o eso espero. También hay varios ejemplos de sociedades exitosas que lograron grandes avances como los mencionados aquí relativamente rápido, copiando lo que funciona y usando ese conocimiento.
Problems are seen not as challenges that are inevitable in an indifferent universe but as the malevolent designs of insidious elites, minorities, or foreigners.
- El enemigo común, el otro, el problema externo como culpable de todos los problemas es una técnica antigua, brillantemente descripta en la fábula de Orwell, Animal Farm o Rebelión en la Granja.
In 2016 populist parties (mostly on the right) attracted 13.2 percent of the vote in the preceding European parliamentary elections (up from 5.1 percent in the 1960s) and entered the governing coalitions of eleven countries, including the leadership of Hungary and Poland.25 Even when they are not in power, populist parties can press their agendas
the chain of command gives an American president enormous discretion over the use of nuclear weapons in a crisis, on the tacit assumption that no president would act rashly on such a grave matter.
the business of government under real-world constraints which can’t easily be erased by populist applause lines or the whims of the man at the top. It includes legislators who have to respond to constituents and lobbyists, judges with reputations of probity to uphold, and executives, bureaucrats, and functionaries who are responsible for the missions of their departments.
Also boxing a president in are state and local governments, which are closer to the facts on the ground; the governments of other nations, which cannot be expected to put a high priority on making America great again; and even most corporations, which benefit from peace, prosperity, and stability. Globalization in particular is a tide that is impossible for any ruler to order back
In the American political duopoly, any Republican candidate starts from a partisan floor of at least 45 percent of the votes in a two-way race, and Trump was defeated in the popular vote 46–48 percent, while benefiting from electoral shenanigans and from campaigning misjudgments on Clinton’s part. And Barack Obama—who in his farewell speech actually credited the Enlightenment for the “essential spirit of this country”—left office with an approval rating of 58 percent, above average for departing presidents.
In the year following the Trump and Brexit shocks, right-wing populism was repudiated in elections in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and France—where the new president, Emmanuel Macron, proclaimed that Europe was “waiting for us to defend the spirit of the Enlightenment, threatened in so many places.”33
the highly educated happen to affiliate with a liberal political tribe, and that education may be a better long-term predictor of economic security than current income
Among the exit poll questions that probed general attitudes, the most consistent predictor of Trump support was pessimism.37 Sixty-nine percent of Trump supporters felt that the direction of the country was “seriously off track,”
- Causado por los medios + manipulación dela gente por redes sociales. El miedo es fácil de infundir cuando se conoce tanto a las personas como Facebook lo hace.
Populist voters are older, more religious, more rural, less educated, and more likely to be male and members of the ethnic majority. They embrace authoritarian values, place themselves on the right of the political spectrum, and dislike immigration and global and national governance.
Brexit voters, too, were older, more rural, and less educated than those who voted to remain: 66 percent of high school graduates voted to leave, b
How will the tension play out between the liberal, cosmopolitan, enlightenment humanism that has been sweeping the world for decades and the regressive, authoritarian, tribal populism pushing back?
in the 20th century every birth cohort has been more tolerant and liberal than the one that came before (at the same time that all the cohorts have drifted liberalward).
Figure 20-1: Populist support across generations, 2016 Sources: Trump: Exit polls conducted by Edison Research, New York Times 2016. Brexit: Exit polls conducted by Lord Ashcroft Polls, BBC News Magazine, June 24, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36619342. European populist parties (2002–2014): Inglehart & Norris 2016, fig. 8. Data for each birth cohort are plotted at the midpoint of their range
As has been said about science, sometimes society advances funeral by funeral.47
journalistic coverage that tied candidates’ reputations to their record of accuracy and coherence rather than to trivial gaffes and scandals
Radical regimes from Nazi Germany and Maoist China to contemporary Venezuela and Turkey show that people have a tremendous amount to lose when charismatic authoritarians responding to a “crisis” trample over democratic norms and institutions and command their countries by the force of their personalities.
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. By failing to take note of the gifts of modernity, social critics poison voters against responsible custodians and incremental reformers who can consolidate the tremendous progress we have enjoyed and strengthen the conditions that will bring us more
among the perquisites of freedom is the freedom of people to screw up their own lives. Liberal democracies can make progress, but only against a constant backdrop of messy compromise and constant reform:
my great optimism of the future is rooted in history.53
- Interesante. No está en las noticias o en algunas historias relatadas por alguien.. sino en la historia!
“Optimism” is not quite right, because a belief that things will always get better is no more rational than the belief that things will always get worse. Kelly offers “protopia,” the pro- from progress and process. Others have suggested “pessimistic hopefulness,” “opti-realism,” and “radical incrementalism.”54 My favorite comes from Hans Rosling, who, when asked whether he was an optimist, replied, “I am not an optimist. I’m a very serious possibilist.”55
- Possibilist!
April 22, 2019
PART III: REASON, SCIENCE, AND HUMANISM, p. 349
Ideas matter. Homo sapiens is a species that lives by its wits, concocting and pooling notions of how the world works and how its members can best lead their lives.
Illiberal ideas like authoritarianism, tribalism, and magical thinking easily get the blood pumping, and have no shortage of champions. It’s hardly a fair fight.
we should remind ourselves that people weren’t so rational in the past, either.
- Era bastante peor
June 15, 2019
CHAPTER 21: REASON, p. 377
or when one generation is replaced by another that doesn’t cling to the same dogmas (progress, funeral by funeral). Across the society as a whole the wheels of reason often turn slowly, and it would be nice to speed them up. The obvious places to apply this torque are in education and the media.
- Al menos así también se avanza
a slew of irrationalists from favoring the heart over the head, the limbic system over the cortex, blinking over thinking, McCoy over Spock.
Even members of my own tribe of cognitive psychologists often claim to have refuted what they take to be the Enlightenment belief that humans are rational agents
- I agree.. maybe not individuals but societies, organizations or the institutions we create. Maybe we even don’t want to be reasonable!
The claim “Everything is subjective” must be nonsens
We don’t believe in reason; we use reason (just as we don’t program our computers to have a CPU; a program is a sequence of operations made available by the CPU).4
- Interesante como usa la comparación justo con la CPU, que de razonamiento no tiene nada, pero tampoco de subjetividad, es totalmente objetiva, la suma de los mismos inputs resultara todas las veces en el mismo output. Verdad absoluta que solo existe, como la ciencia o las leyes de la naturaleza? O subjetividad infinita, simplemente dada por el conjunto de variables del meta-programa del que somos solo autómatas?
it goes back to the ancient Liar’s Paradox, featuring the Cretan who says, “All Cretans are liars.”)
Life is not a dream, in which disconnected experiences appear in bewildering succession. And the application of reason to the world validates itself by granting us the ability to bend the world to our will, from curing infections to sending a man to the moon.
- Under certain conditions already programmed?
By now many people have become aware of the research in cognitive psychology on human irrationality, explained in bestsellers like Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational.
- Serán lecturas interesantes?
Spinoza, Hume, Smith, or the Encyclopédistes, who were cognitive and social psychologists ahead of their time.6 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
- Collectively if not individually! Bien ahí..
We are a cognitive species that depends on explanations of the world
species that lives by ideas must have evolved with an ability to prefer correct ones. The challenge for us today is to design an informational environment in which that ability prevails over the ones that lead us into folly.
The standard explanation of the madness of crowds is ignorance: a mediocre education system has left the populace scientifically illiterate, at the mercy of their cognitive biases, and thus defenseless against airhead celebrities, cable-news gladiators, and other corruptions from popular culture. The standard solution is better schooling and more outreach to the public by scientists on television, social media, and popular Web sites.
People affirm or deny these beliefs to express not what they know but who they are.15 We all identify with particular tribes or subcultures, each of which embraces a creed on what makes for a good life and how society should run its affairs. These creeds tend to vary along two dimensions. One contrasts a right-wing comfort with natural hierarchy with a left-wing preference for forced egalitarianism
The values that divide people are also defined by which demons are blamed for society’s misfortunes: greedy corporations, out-of-touch elites, meddling bureaucrats, lying politicians, ignorant rednecks, or, all too often, ethnic minorities.
To express the wrong opinion on a politicized issue can make one an oddball at best—someone who “doesn’t get it”—and a traitor at worst. The pressure to conform becomes all the greater as people live and work with others who are like them and as academic, business, or religious cliques brand themselves with left-wing or right-wing causes.
- Si sos dueño de la verdad y estás seguro está bien. Si tienes dudas, ya la iglesia te castigaba. La sociedad no valora el escepticismo de la ciencia y fomenta la seguridad de la “crença”
The anthropologist John Tooby adds that preposterous beliefs are more effective signals of coalitional loyalty than reasonable ones.20 Anyone can say that rocks fall down rather than up, but only a person who is truly committed to the brethren has a reason to say that God is three persons but also one person, or that the Democratic Party ran a child sex ring out of a Washington pizzeria.
- O que la virgen María era virgen.. sin faltar el respeto, tolero cualquiera de las posturas, es más, no pienso en absoluto que mi verdad sea más verdadera, y tampoco lo hago cuando otras culturas dicen que hay que apedrear a la mujer por cometer adulterio (aunque en contra de su voluntad). Recordemos que hace un par de décadas las mujeres no podían abrir cuentas en el banco sin autorización del marido u otras décadas atrás tener derecho al voto. Qué está bien o mal? Cada cultura y sociedad lo juzga, yo no tengo la verdad, ni sé si existe esa verdad absoluta.
The perverse incentives behind “expressive rationality” or “identity-protective cognition” help explain the paradox of 21st-century irrationality.
- Y mientras más nos juntemos y conectemos en tribus parecidas en grupos de redes donde nos sentimos confortables en nuestra mera opinión, más duras son nuestras posturas.
Psychologists have long known that the human brain is infected with 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), and a My-Side bias (self-explanatory).21 I
Engagement with politics is like sports fandom in another way: people seek and consume news to enhance the fan experience, not to make their opinions more accurate.
they try to show that their political adversaries are biased, a fallacy that can be called the bias bias
I’ve been arguing that the main drivers were the nonpolitical ideals of reason, science, and humanism, which led people to seek and apply knowledge that enhanced human flourishing.
The reactionary fringe of conservatism, recently disinterred by Trumpists and the European far right (chapter 23), believes that Western civilization has careened out of control since some halcyon century, having abandoned the moral clarity of traditional Christendom for a decadent secular fleshpot that, if left on its current course, will soon implode from terrorism, crime, and anomie.
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.
A real society comprises hundreds of millions of social beings, each with a trillion-synapse brain, who pursue their well-being while affecting the well-being of others in complex networks with massive positive and negative externalities, many of them historically unprecedented. It is bound to defy any simple narrative of what will happen under a given set of rules. A more rational approach to politics is to treat societies as ongoing experiments and open-mindedly learn the best practices, whichever part of the spectrum they come from
The empirical picture at present suggests that people flourish most in liberal democracies with a mixture
of civic norms, guaranteed rights, market freedom, social spending, and judicious regulation.
Though examining data from history and social science is a better way of evaluating our ideas than arguing from the imagination
most readers have no idea whether their favorite columnists, gurus, or talking heads are more accurate than a chimpanzee picking bananas. The consequences can be dire: many military and political debacles arose from misplaced confidence in the predictions of experts (such as intelligence reports in 2003 that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons), and a few percentage points of accuracy in predicting financial markets can spell the difference between gaining and losing a fortune.
A rational society should seek the answers by consulting the world rather than assuming the omniscience of a bloc of opinionators who have coalesced around a creed.
The payoffs that determine their reputations don’t coincide with the accuracy of the predictions, since no one is keeping score. Instead, their reputations hinge on their ability to entertain, titillate, or shock; on their ability to instill confidence or fea
what distinguishes accurate forecasters from the many oracles who are “often mistaken but never in doubt.”
Indeed, the very traits that put these experts in the public eye made them the worst at prediction. The more famous they were, and the closer the event was to their area of expertise, the less accurate their predictions turned out to be.
- Hace falta objetividad y para eso distanciarse y mirar el bosque. Alguien muy cerca siempre se puede estar perdiendo de vista cosas, muy experto, muy detallista, se pierde el bosque.
neither left-wing nor right-wing. They aren’t necessarily humble about their abilities, but they are humble about particular beliefs, treating them as “hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded.” They constantly ask themselves, “Are there holes in this reasoning? Should I be looking for something else to fill this in? Would I be convinced by this if I were somebody else?” They are aware of cognitive blind spots like the Availability and confirmation biases, and they discipline themselves to avoid them
- No impulsivo, humilde respecto a sus creencias (no sus habilidades), quiere trastear hipótesis, buscar agujeros, ponerse en el lugar del otro e imaginarse qué piensa.
- “Si yo naciera en Arabia Saudita seria musulman y no cristiano?”
Successful prediction is the revenge of the nerds. Superforecasters are intelligent but not necessarily brilliant, falling just in the top fifth of the population. They are highly numerate, not in the sense of being math whizzes but in the sense of comfortably thinking in guesstimates. They have personality traits that psychologists call “openness to experience” (intellectual curiosity and a taste for variety), “need for cognition” (pleasure taken in intellectual activity), and “integrative complexity” (appreciating uncertainty and seeing multiple sides).
- Curiosidad, variación, intelectual, aprecia la complejidad y la dificultad de predecir
They are anti-impulsive, distrusting their first gut feeling. They are
Events are determined by myriad small forces incrementing or decrementing their likelihoods and magnitudes rather than by sweeping laws and grand dialectics.
between 1994 and 2014, from 10 to 21 percent. The polarization has coincided with an increase in social segregation by politics: over those twenty years, the ideologues have become more likely to say that most of their close friends share their political views.
- And social media!
Fortunately, a majority of Americans are more moderate in all these opinions, and the proportion who call themselves moderate has not changed in forty years.51 Unfortunately, it’s the extremists who are more likely to vote, donate, and pressure their representatives.
vary by field: departments of business, computer science, engineering, and health science are evenly split, while the humanities and social sciences are decidedly on the left: the proportion of conservatives is in the single digits, and they are outnumbered by Marxists two to one.
A liberal tilt is also, in moderation, desirable. Intellectual liberalism was at the forefront of many forms of progress that almost everyone has come to accept, such as democracy, social insurance, religious tolerance, the abolition of slavery and judicial torture, the decline of war, and the expansion of human and civil rights.56 In many ways we are (almost) all liberals now.57
- Hay que contestar y provocar para que se hagan los cambios necesarios, pero no romper todo ni evolucionar, solo pequeñas correcciones de rumbo son mejores, o si no miremos la revolución francesa.
Humans may be vulnerable to bias and error, but clearly not all of us all the time, or no one would ever be entitled to say that humans are vulnerable to bias and error. The human brain is capable of reason, given the right circumstances; the problem is to identify those circumstances and put them more firmly in place.
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.
few influential people today believe in werewolves, unicorns, witches, alchemy, astrology, bloodletting, miasmas, animal sacrifice, the divine right of kings, or supernatural omens in rainbows and eclipses.
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.
The tipping point depends on the balance between how badly the opinion holder’s reputation would be damaged by relinquishing the opinion and whether the counterevidence is so blatant and public as to be common knowledge: a naked emperor, an elephant in the room.
Any curriculum will be pedagogically ineffective if it consists of a lecturer yammering in front of a blackboard, or a textbook that students highlight with a yellow marker. People understand concepts only when they are forced to think them
through, to discuss them with others, and to use them to solve problems.
critical reasoning is a prerequisite
to thinking about anything else, few educational institutions have set themselves the goal of enhancing rationality
Experiments have shown that the right rules can avert the Tragedy of the Belief Commons and force people to dissociate their reasoning from their identities.88 One technique was discovered long ago by rabbis: they forced yeshiva students to switch sides in a Talmudic debate and argue the opposite position. Another is to have people try to reach a consensus in a small discussion group
Scientists themselves have hit upon a new strategy called adversarial collaboration, in which mortal enemies work together to get to the bottom of an issue, setting up empirical tests that they agree beforehand will settle it.90
Health care is being reshaped by evidence-based medicine (which should have been a redundant expression long ago).95 Psychotherapy has progressed from the couch and notebook to Feedback-Informed Treatment
Volunteering and charitable giving are being scrutinized by the Effective Altruism movement, which distinguishes altruistic acts that enhance the lives of beneficiaries from those that enhance the warm glow in benefactors.
Voters have a say on issues that don’t affect them personally, and never have to inform themselves or justify their positions. Practical agenda items like trade and energy are bundled with moral hot buttons like euthanasia and the teaching of evolution. Each bundle is strapped to a coalition with geographic, racial, and ethnic constituencies. The media cover elections like horse races, and analyze issues by pitting ideological hacks against each other in screaming matches. All of these features steer people away from reasoned analysis and toward perfervid self-expression. Some are products of the misconception that the benefits of democracy come from elections, whereas they depend more on having a government that is constrained in its powers, responsive to its citizens, and attentive to the results of its policies
When issues are not politicized, people can be altogether rational. Kahan notes that “bitter public disputes over science are in fact the exception rather than the rule.”105 No one gets exercised over whether antibiotics work, or whether driving drunk is a good idea.
Experiments have shown that when people hear about a new policy, such as welfare reform, they will like it if it is proposed by their own party and hate it if it is proposed by the other—all the while convinced that they are reacting to it on its objective merits.107 That implies that spokespeople should be chosen carefully.
Can we imagine a day in which the most famous columnists and talking heads have no predictable political orientation but try to work out defensible conclusions on an issue-by-issue basis? A day in which “You’re just repeating the left-wing [or right-wing] position” is considered a devastating gotcha? In which people (especially academics) will answer a question like “Does gun control reduce crime?” or “Does a minimum wage increase unemployment?” with “Wait, let me look up the latest meta-analysis” rather than with a patellar reflex predictable from their politics?
It took centuries for Francis Bacon’s observations on anecdotal reasoning and the confusion of correlation with causation to become second nature to scientifically literate people.
October 1, 2019
CHAPTER 22: SCIENCE, p. 396
Glaciers, Gender, and Science: A Feminist Glaciology Framework for Global Environmental Change Research Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers—particularly related to
epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge—remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: (1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.25
- 🤦🏼♂️
Feynman put it, the first principle of science is “that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Many people are willing to credit science with giving us handy drugs and gadgets and even with explaining how physical stuff works. But they draw the line at what truly matters to us as human beings: the deep questions about who we are, where we came from, and how we define the meaning and purpose of our lives. That is the traditional territory of religion, and its defenders tend to be the most excitable critics of scientism
world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the genesis of the world, life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken
We know, but our ancestors did not, that humans belong to a single species of African primate that developed agriculture, government, and writing late in its history. We know that our species is a tiny twig of a genealogical tree that embraces all living things and that emerged from prebiotic chemicals almost four billion years ago. We know that we live on a planet that revolves around one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, which is one of a hundred billion galaxies in a 13.8-billion-year-old universe, possibly one of a vast number of universes. We know that our intuitions about space, time, matter, and causation are incommensurable with the nature of reality on scales that are very large and very small. We know that the laws governing the physical world (including accidents, disease, and other misfortunes) have no goals that pertain to human well-being. There is no such thing as fate, providence, karma, spells, curses, augury, divine retribution, or answered prayers—though the discrepancy between the laws of probability and the workings of cognition may explain why people believe there are.
The scientific refutation of the theory of vengeful gods and occult forces undermines practices such as human sacrifice, witch hunts, faith healing, trial by ordeal, and the persecution of heretics. 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. For the same reason, it undercuts any moral or political system based on mystical forces, quests, destinies, dialectics, struggles, or messianic ages
the worldview that guides the moral and spiritual values of a knowledgeable person today is the worldview given to us by science. Though the scientific facts do not by themselves dictate values, they certainly hem in the possibilities. By stripping ecclesiastical authority of its credibility on factual matters, they cast doubt on its claims to certitude in matters of morality
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