Steven Pinker - 2017 National Convention

my name is Steven hurdle and I am the chair of the Executive Board of FFRF and this is just amazing to see a crowd here it's been a great turnout I'm from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania so for those of you who were went to the meeting last year it was great to see you there as well I am very pleased to introduce FFRF honorary president Steven Pinker who is a cognitive scientist experimental psychologist linguist and popular science author I first heard Stevens speak in 1982 at the University of Michigan where I was completing my doctorate in mathematical psychology and I have followed his career ever since which I'm pleased to tell you a little about he is right now the Johnstone family professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind he was born in Montreal he's one of the foremost writers on language mind and human nature has taught at Stanford and MIT and has received eight honorary doctorates several teaching awards and numerous prizes for his books the landscape the language instinct in 1994 how the mind works in 1997 the blank slate the modern denial of human nature in 2002 and the better angel of our nature his latest book is the sense of style the thinking persons guide to writing in the 21st century he has an upcoming book which we might get a little sneak preview of with a working title of enlightenment now I might add that we have several of his books for sale in the back including the blanks Slade and the better angels of our nature and the sense of style and he will be autographing those books at the close of his speech at the table over here on your left am i right what's that okay and all right there's gonna be two book signings over there at the end I'm sorry and Michelle dueling book signing so in addition to his academic pointment Steven is the chair of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and has served as editor or advisor for numerous scientific and scholarly media and humanist organisations for his writing he has been awarded the William James Book Prize three times the Los Angeles Times science books prize and the Eleanor Maccabi Book Prize he also received research awards from the National Academy of Sciences the American Psychological Association the Royal Institution of Great Britain and the Association for psychological science for various aspects of his groundbreaking research he served as honorary president of the Canadian Psychological Association had and has been listed in Prospect magazine's the world's top 100 public Internet intellectuals Foreign Policy's 100 global thinkers Time Magazine's the 100 most influential people in the world today can you get up to the like the top ten and always top 100 it's the distance stuck in a second the 100 list he received frf s emperor has no clothes award in 2002 the title of his talk is in latent Manabe suggested an alternative title might be pessimism in a world of progress and he has promised us a pep talk to cheer us up please welcome FFRF honorary president the distinguished Steven Pinker thank you very much Steven thank you Annie Laurie and Dan and it is an honor to speak about my forthcoming book in public for the first time in front of this audience so I'm going to begin with some big questions why is the world filled with woe how can we make it better how do we give meaning and purpose to our lives now these may seem like unanswerable questions but all too many people have answers to them for example morality is dictated by God in holy scriptures the world will be better when everyone obeys his laws the world's problems are the fault of a certain kind of evil people who must be defeated and punished one tribe of people is inherently worthy it should have power and prestige implemented by a strong leader who channels it's authentic virtue and experience at some time in the past there was a well-ordered state then alien forces subverted this harmony have led to decadence and degeneration only a heroic Vanguard with memories of the old ways can restore the society to its golden age well what about the rest of us the point of my book forthcoming book enlightenment now is that there is an alternative system of beliefs and values namely the ideals of the Enlightenment also sometimes known as classical liberalism secular humanism or the open society in a sentence that we can use knowledge to enhance human flourishing now many people embrace an Enlightenment humanism without being able to name or describe it they are like the molière's bourgeois gentleman who was delighted to learn that he had been speaking prose all his life as a result the values of the Enlightenment fade into the a bland background they are just seen as the status quo or the establishment and whereas other ideologies have passionate advocates and I argue that enlightenment values need a positive defense and an explicit commitment the Enlightenment values Center on four themes reason science humanism and progress and let me say a few words about each it all begins with reason with the conviction that traditional sources of belief are generators of delusion including faith revelation tradition Dogma Authority charisma mysticism divination visions conventional wisdom gut feelings subjective certainty and the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts that in place of these generators of error we must rely on reason now reason is non-negotiable as soon as you doubt this as soon as you to try to provide reasons why you should we should distrust reason as soon as you argue that you're right that other people should believe you that you're not lying that you're not full of baloney you've lost the argument because you have already tacitly conceded that there are reasons that may be shared with your audience that can persuade them of the correctness of your beliefs whatever they are now human beings on their own are not particularly reasonable cognitive science tells us that people are apt to generalize from anecdotes to seek confirming evidence and to ignore disconfirming evidence to project stereotypes onto individuals and that people are overconfident about their own knowledge wisdom and rectitude however people are capable of reason and there are norms and institutions that can refine our puny powers of reason norms such as free speech open debate and criticism logical analysis fact-checking and empirical testing and that brings me to the second of the for enlightenment values science the underlying conviction of science is that the world is intelligible that we can understand the world by formulating possible explanations and testing them against reality and indeed that science is our most reliable means of understanding the world including ourselves there can be a science of human nature and that our beliefs about society are testable in principle just like any other empirical claims science also provides fundamental insights about the human condition such as naturalism the discovery that the laws of the universe have no goal or purpose related to human welfare such as entropy in a closed system that is one that without input of energy disorder increases because there are vastly more ways for things to go wrong and for things to go right and evolution that humans are products of a competitive process which selects for reproductive success not for wellbeing well that leads to the third enlightenment theme humanism that the ultimate moral purpose is to reduce the suffering and enhance the flourishing of men women and children and other sentient beings but I will concentrate on on humans that is on maximizing life health happiness knowledge beauty love friendship and social connectedness now this may seem obvious by now trite uncontroversial but in fact there are distinct alternatives to humanism such as that the ultimate good is to enhance the glory of the tribe nation race class or faith to achieve feats of heroic greatness including martial conquest to advance some mystical force or dialectic or struggle or pursuit of a utopian or messianic age or to obey the dictates of a divinity and pressure others to do the same now humanism is feasible because people are endowed with a sense of sympathy an ability to show concern for the welfare of others now by default our circle of sympathy as given to us by evolution is rather small we naturally extend it only to kin friends allies and cute little fuzzy baby animals but Aras and a circle of sympathy can be expanded through forces of cosmopolitanism education journalism art mobility and reason the realization that there can be nothing special about me just because I'm me and you're not and that leads to final to the fourth of the Enlightenment ideals progress namely that if we apply knowledge and sympathy to reduce suffering and enhance flourishing we can gradually succeed well how is that is progress possible the Enlightenment thinkers proposed a number of answers to this question namely that there can be benevolent institutions which deploy energy and knowledge to combat entropy which magnify the positive parts of human nature the better angels of our nature as Abraham Lincoln put it such as reason and sympathy while marginalizing the negative aspects our biases allusions susceptibility to magical thinking and tribalism and dominance and vengeance examples of invited some of the brain children of the Enlightenment are democracy humans are poised between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny but democratic governments can steer between these extremes by deploying just enough force to prevent people from preying on one another without preying on the people itself that can be implemented by declarations of rights such as the French English and American declarations of rights that there are red lines that governments may not cross such as the deprivation of life and liberty without due process the use of cruel punishments infringement Sanh speech a third brainchild of the Enlightenment is markets that they coming from the realization that the natural condition of humankind is poverty and that wealth must be created it's created by specialization the application of knowledge and skill to produce things that people want and like through exchange where different specialists can exchange the fruits of their ingenuity and labor and through prices which propagate information about need and availability throughout a society in a way that no central planner acting on his own ingenuity could do moreover that exchange makes people not just richer but nicer the ideal of dukkha Maris gentle commerce as Ludwig von Mises protego goes to war against the baker he must henceforth bake his own bread a fourth brainchild of enlightenment consists of global institutions institutions that foster international trade which generalizes the principle of dukkha marx to relations among nations making it easier to buy things from other countries than to invade and occupy them and it makes people in other countries more valuable alive than dead you don't kill your customers you don't kill your debtors global institutions can also foster peace by making war an illegitimate move in the in relations among countries the conquest is no longer recognized but rather punished by sanctions shaming and withdrawal of cooperation and international peacekeeping forces can separate belligerents finally what are the brain children of the Enlightenment is consists of institutions of science and scholarship journals societies universities that can develop aggregate and disseminate knowledge and foster norms of disinterested inquiry such as rejection of authority and dogma open debate peer review and empirical testing so how did that Lightman thing work out all sounds just fine in theory but how did it work out in practice well if you ask most intellectuals the answer is not very well because I have discovered that intellectuals hate progress and intellectuals who call themselves progressive really hate progress if you think that we can solve problems I have been told then you have a blind faith or a quasi religious belief in the outmoded superstition and false promise of the myth of the onward march of inevitable progress you are a cheerleader for vulgar American can do ISM with the rah-rah spirit of boardroom ideology Silicon Valley and the Chamber of Commerce you are a practitioner of Whig history a naive optimist a Pollyanna or a Pangloss named after the character the Voltaire character who believes that this all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds well in fact progress is not a matter of faith but it is an empirical hypothesis that is aspects of human well-being can be measured life health sustance wealth peace freedom safety knowledge richness of experience all of these can be measured if they have increased over time I submit that is progress well let's take a look we'll begin with life um here we have a graph of life expectancy in different parts of the world from 1760 to 2015 at this let's see if I can get a pointer to work yes this blue line here shows life expectancy for the world as a whole which increased from a global average of 30 in the 19th century to 71 today and in the whoops here we go okay and in the richer countries 281 now the growth in longevity shows a pattern that we will see is quite general across aspects of human flourishing namely before the Enlightenment pretty much everyone all over the world was wretched then there was an escape from universal wretchedness first in Europe America's but that other parts of the world have been catching up later Asia and as we can see Africa much of this increase in longevity was driven by a decline in child mortality and once again we're going to see that general pattern here we have data for Sweden in the 18th century Sweden one of the richest countries in the world had a child mortality rate of one third that is one third of sweet Swedish babies did not live to the age of five today that fate befall is less than six percent of people in the poorest part of the world so a childhood Ethiopia today has the same chance of living to the age of five as a child in Sweden just 70 years ago maternal mortality shows a similar pattern once again we see that in areas that we think of as affluent and blessed like Sweden about 1% of mothers died in childbirth a death rate that's higher than that of breast cancer today but that starting in Europe followed by the United States and then Asia and then Africa rates of maternal mortality have been coming down health if you look at the rate of childhood deaths from the four worst infectious diseases then all of them have been in decline pneumonia diarrhea malaria measles and hiv/aids some diseases such as smallpox have been eradicated altogether others such as polio and guinea worm are down to a few dozen cases each year and are slated for extinction sustenance famine youth was one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and was a threat to every society but as you can see from this graph from the 19th century to the present the risk of catastrophic famine has disappeared from most of the world except for certain regions in freaka a less dramatic form of suffering from lack of food is undernourishment that is children who are stunted or don't get a minimum number of calories to to flourish here we have the line for the world as a whole and other region by region have been conquering undernourishment here we have the curve for Latin America East Asia southern Asia Southeast Asia and southern sub-saharan Africa again the poorest part of the world but making tremendous progress prosperity in before the Industrial Revolution poverty was pretty much the universal condition of humankind except for a few wealthy people who had the luxury to write about their lives and our picture of the past often comes from them but in fact most of the world until recently was lived in extreme poverty here we see that the United Kingdom was the first to make the Great Escape from Universal poverty and that other regions such as South Korea Chile now China and India starting to make escapes in their turn as a result the poor will may not always be with us this graph shows the rate of extreme poverty that is people who don't have enough income to pay for food for themselves and their family in 1820 approximately 90% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty today the rate is about 10 percent and the World Bank and United Nations have set a goal of eliminating extreme poverty but from the face of the earth by the 2030s as a result international inequality after a long increase as some parts of the world escape from poverty while others have been left behind that is now starting to loops comeback that is starting to reverse and because poor countries are getting richer faster than rich countries are getting richer within rich countries there has been a huge increase in the amount of redistribution a century ago the richer countries of the world devoted 1% of their wealth to supporting children the poor and the aged today they spend about a quarter of their wealth peace the world is giving peace a chance through most of human history war was the natural state of relations between nations and a peace was a brief interlude between wars we can see this in a graph showing the proportion of years that the great powers that is the largest countries and empires fought each other and about 500 years ago the great powers were pretty much always at war now they are pretty much never at war now of course there were two horrific exceptions to this general trend namely the shown in this graph which shows the rate of death in war in the 20th century and there are two unmistakable spikes of bloodletting centered around the two world wars but contrary to widespread predictions that a third world war was inevitable predictions that many of us grew up with World War three never happened and since then we've been living through a period that historians have called the long piece let's zoom in on that here we have the rate of death in war since 1946 which shows a kind of undulating roller coaster but one with an unmistakable downward trend the proportion of people killed annually in wars now was about is about a quarter of what it was in the 1980s a sixth of what it was in the 1970s a sixteenth of what it was in the early 1950s and a half a percent of what it was during World War two freedom and rights have been expanding despite highly publicized backsliding in countries like Russia and Turkey democracy has been increasing pretty steadily since the 1970s two centuries ago a handful of countries were democratic this is a kesariya graph of the relative democracy versus autocracy score across the world's nations two centuries ago a handful of countries embracing about 1 percent of the world's people who are democratic today two-thirds of the world's countries embracing about two-thirds of the world's population are democratic human rights protection again despite some salient counter examples has in general been in the increase Norway the one of the world's freest countries has itself seen an increase in protection of human rights as has the world as a whole even repressive countries like China are while still far less repressive than the countries of Western Europe or the world as a whole are far less far more respectful of human rights than during the horrific years of Mao in the 1950s and 1960s we see many reforms toward recognition of human rights worldwide this graph shows the number of countries that have decriminalized homosexuality since 1790 and again despite some highly publicized backsliding in Russia and some African countries the worldwide trend has been to decriminalize homosexuality capital punishment is being abolished in country after country this graph shows aside from 1860 to the present and if current trends continue no one is certain that it will then capital punishment will be eliminated from the face of the earth by 2026 now even in the United States which in many of these measures of global well-being is an outlier the United States is kind of backward compared to its peers among rich countries but even in the United States which unlike virtually every democracy retains capital punishment capital punishment appears to be on death row this graph shows the American execution rate since 1990 and there are many predictions that it's only a matter of time before this practice will be struck down once and for all and child labor has been in decline here we again the Vanguard child labor used to be pretty much universal across the globe child labor was seen not as a form of exploitation but as a form of moral education protecting children from idleness and sloth but first England and other European countries and now the world as a whole is pushing back against the practice of child labour people are not just richer and freer and more peaceful and healthier and longer life but also safer here we see the trends in homicide since 1965 for the United States first of all and we can see that after the great rise in the American crime rate in the 60s through the 80s and there was a dramatic decline starting in the 1990s so Americans today are about half as likely to be murdered as they were just two dozen years ago this is true of the world as a whole that people are about to have about 70% chance of being murdered as they did just 20 years ago violence against women is in decline few people realized that the rate of rape has declined by more than 75 percent since its peak in the early 1970s and that intimate partner violence what used to be called wife-beating has been in dramatic decline as well violence against children despite all of the panic news reports about child abuse and kidnapping and sexual abuse and sexting and bullying and so on every measure of violence against children is in decline including violent victimization at school physical abuse by caregivers and sexual abuse by caregivers hate crimes despite all of the publicity about the white supremacists and Trump supporters encouraging hate crimes against Muslims and african-americans the overall trend has been downward since the FBI started keeping statistics in the early 1990s here you have the hate crime rate against African Americans against Jews against whites and against Muslims and against Asians we're also safer not just from deliberate malice aforethought from other humans but the forces of nature and technology over the course of the 20th century Americans became 96% less likely to be killed in a car accident but 88% less likely to be mowed down on the sidewalk the pedestrian fatalities 99 percent less likely to die in a plane crash about 59 percent less likely to fall to their deaths 92% less likely to die by fire or by drowning 92% less likely to be asphyxiated the only exception is an increase in deaths by poison solid or liquid which is a indication of the current opioid epidemic and Americans are 95 percent less likely to be killed on the job worldwide people the chance of dying in a flood earthquake tornado tsunami hurricane and so on is 96 percent down from its peak in the 1920s and what about the very archetype of an act of God the projectile that Zeus hurled down from Olympus the common idiom for an unpredictable date with death the literal bolt from the blue well there's been a 37 portfolios and sighted american will be killed by a bolt of lightning there's been an increase in knowledge here we have a graph showing the increase in the rate of literacy this is the graph for the entire world and once again we see a escape from a condition of universal illiteracy several hundred years ago about 10 to 15 percent of the world was literate in the 16th century first Netherlands Britain United States and Germany began to teach their children to read followed by the countries of southern Europe such as Italy countries of Latin America such as Chile and Mexico and here we have the graph for the world as a whole similarly more and more of the world is receiving a basic education that is a primary school in the first year or so of high school here we have the graph for the world as a whole but high concealing a uneven development region by region first Western Europe and its offshoots such as Canada and the United States then Eastern Europe Asia and Latin America followed by Middle East South and Southeast Asia and southern sub-saharan Africa catching up today most of the world is literate and has a basic education the reason that these figures are still far below a hundred percent is that there are many old people who are never educated but that education is now close to universal among younger people as a result this schooling together with health and wealth are literally making us smarter in a phenomenon called the Flynn effect IQ scores have been rising by about 3 points a decade all over the world and so we are about 30 IQ points or two standard deviations above these scores of our ancestors just several generations ago finally do all of these gains in longevity and health and wealth and education actually make life better well if you plot happiness as a function of wealth of GDP per capita each one of these dots represents a country here we have GDP per capita here we have ratings of life satisfaction people just indicate how good a life they are leading and what this graph shows is that it's on a logarithmic scale so that the greatest increases in fact occurred the lower end of the scale but basically the richer the country the happier its citizens and within each country what this these arrows impaling the dots show so within each country the richer the person the happier relative to his or her compatriots so generally money does on average buy happiness as the world becomes richer the world becomes happier it's not just paychecks that have been improving but work hours Americans work twenty two fewer hours a week than they used to and I now have an average three weeks of paid vacations people as a result of the spread of running water electricity and labor-saving devices such as washing machines vacuum cleaner refrigerator stove dishwashers and microwaves the number of hours that people lose to housework housework has declined by forty three hours a week so unlike our grandmothers and great-grandmother's we and by we I mean especially women are less likely to spend their time slaving over a hot stove working their fingers to the bone as the old cliche had it as a result of the increase in income and the decrease in the price of necessities such as food and clothing there has been a steady decline in the percentage of a typical person's paycheck that they turn over to necessities today Americans spend about a third of their paycheck on necessities rather than more than sixty percent just a few decades ago latter time has increased men have about ten hours a week more of leisure than they did in the 1960s women five hours more the reason for this decrease in how Anna's leisure is primarily that women spend more time with their children and their mothers and grandmothers did a working woman today spends more time with her children than a stay-at-home mom did in the 1950s now while we are enjoying all of these benefits there have been improvements in the environment so as population is increased as GDP is increased as we have been driving more our consumption of energy is leveled off our emissions of co2 have turned a corner and amazingly thanks to the EPA and regulations on emissions and emission control devices even during a period of all of this rise in affluence the emissions of the five major air pollutants have all been in decline at the same time there have been as a decrease in the number of forests that have been cleared the number of oil that has been spilled at see the number amount of land that's been set aside as nature preserves and we may have the world may have peaked in its consumption of oil farmland timber paper cars cold perhaps even carbon a point I'll return to well how is the fact of human progress as displayed in all of these graphs I believe making the matter of progress not a question of naive faith but of cold hard reality how is this reflected in the news well I'm going to show you a graph of tone of news coverage there are algorithms that can measure how positive and optimistic versus negative and pessimistic news coverage is and here we have the state of the world as rendered by the New York Times this black line since the 1940s and an average for the world's news media as a whole so as the world has been getting better and better and better the news coverage has been getting more and more and more morose well is progress inevitable of course not solutions create new problems which take time to solve in their turn and the world will always throw nasty surprises at us some examples that I've mentioned are the two world wars the crime boom from the 1960s to the 1980s AIDS in Africa and opioid overdoses among middle-aged non-college educated whites in the United States also we there are severe global challenges that we have not yet saw foremost among them are climate change and nuclear war but even then although these are wicked horrendous problems as yet unsolved I the case can be made that they are solvable since the extraordinary circumstances of the closing days of World War two nuclear weapons have not been used in the 72 years in which they have existed again contrary to every expert prediction in the 1960s and 1970s predictions that many of us in this room grew up with that a nuclear war was inevitable it was just a matter of time that the Soviet Union and the United States would go to war and few people realize that the world's nuclear stockpiles have been reduced by 85 percent since the 1980s and there are more reductions to come few people realize that about 10 percent of the electricity generated in the United States comes from nuclear fuel repurposed from nuclear weapons and that with the exception of the rogue regime in North Korea nuclear testing has ceased and proliferation has been frozen again this does not mean that the problem is anywhere close to being solved but it does show that progress is possible climate again is a massive unsolved problem but again it can be solved with a combination of technology and policy not that the current administration is at the forefront of this effort but contrary to any suspicion that all of this prosperity is a necessarily depends on flaming carbon this graph shows the amount of car co2 emissions per dollar of GDP that is how in order to get rich and in order to enjoy stuff do you have to burn carbon and the answer is less and less of it here we have the curve for the UK and the US which peaked in the 1920 a--the century China as it was massively developing admitted a lot of carbon but that has been plummeting with India it occurred later and here we have the curve for the world as a whole now this is not nearly enough to stave off part of possibly harmful climate change the fact that a rate of carbon emissions has declined does not mean that it is declined enough nor does it show how we can sequester and reduce the amount of co2 that's already in the atmosphere but but it shows that that economic growth and prosperity can be decoupled from co2 emissions I'm also more generally progress is not a law of nature but it is a gift of the ideals of the Enlightenment of Reason science and humanism and only by dedicating ourselves to these ideals can we reasonably hope for progress to continue finally does the Enlightenment somehow go against human nature as some critics and cynics have recently charged is humanism arid or tepid or a flattened view of humanity is the conquest of disease famine poverty violence and ignorance boring do people need to believe in a Father in the sky a strong chief to protect the tribe or myths of heroic ancestors well I suspect not and that applying knowledge and sympathy to enhance human flourishing is heroic glorious and spiritual I don't claim to have the rhetorical skills to make the values of the Enlightenment heroic and glorious to a large swath of humankind but if I were forced to do it I would tell a story something like this and this is how I and in the book we are born into a pitiless universe facing steep odds against life enabling order and in in jeopardy of falling apart we are shaped by a force that is ruthlessly competitive we are made from crooked timber vulnerable to illusions self-centeredness and at times astounding stupidity yet human nature has also been blessed with resources that open a space for a kind of redemption we are endowed with a power to combine ideas recursively to have thoughts about our thoughts we have an instinct for language allowing us to share the fruits of our experience and ingenuity we are deepened with a capacity for sympathy for pity imagination commiseration compassion these ideas these endowments have found ways to magnify their own power the scope of language has been augmented by the written printed and electronic word our circle of sympathy has been expanded by history journalism and a narrative arts and our puny rational faculties have been multiplied by the norms and institutions of Reason intellectual curiosity open debate skepticism of authority and dogma and the burden of proof to verify ideas by confronting them against reality as the spiral of recursive improvement gathers momentum we eke out victories against the forces that grind us down not least the darker parts of our own nature we penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos including life and mind we live longer suffer less learn more get smarter and enjoy more small pleasures and rich experiences fewer of us are killed assaulted enslaved oppressed or exploited by the others from a few oases the territories with peace and prosperity are growing and could someday encompass the globe much suffering remains and tremendous peril but ideas on how to reduce them have been voiced and an infinite number of others are yet to be conceived we will never have a perfect world and it would be dangerous to seek one but there is no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing this heroic story is not just another myth myths are fictions but this one is true true to the best of our knowledge which is the only truth we can have we believe it because we have reasons to believe it as we learn more we can show which parts of the story continue to be true and which one's false as any of them might be and any could become and the story become belongs not to any tribe but to all of humanity to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being for it requires only the convictions that life is better than death health is better than sickness abundance is better than want freedom is better than coercion happiness is better than the suffering and knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance thank you very much thank you [Applause] and are there any questions yes here yes I'd like to ask about inequality you're the data you showed we're basically you presented averages average poverty in the United States and other countries and regions and average literacy and so on but of course you know averages can be suspect you know if we take Bill Gates and me our average net worth is about 30 billion that's kind of misleading so so my impressions I don't have our data my impression is that inequality has been increased in that if you take say the the wealth of the uppermost there's islands lowermost there style that that's been diverging substantially as well as have other things that have been correlated with that education and infant mortality and so on and if my impression is correct then what's happening in that respect would be the opposite of progress can you speak to that yes well in most of these grass ups you saw I actually broke down the global average into regional figures which show that that all parts of the world have that increased and in fact the global inequality has decreased hasn't increased now within certain rich countries particularly the United States England the english-speaking countries inequality within those countries have increased in income I should also mention by the way that in inequality zin education and health have decreased worldwide as well again because the rich the illiterate the unhealthy sorry the rich the literate the healthy have been increasing at a slower rate than the poor the unhealthy the uneducated so in most measures inequality is decreasing an exception is income in some rich countries but I have a chapter in the book on inequality and I think it's crucial to remember that inequality per se is not a measure of human flourishing that it is true that Bill Gates earns much much more than you do but that's kind of irrelevant to your well-being I suspect that you're pretty comfortable pretty healthy you can afford what you want and if Bill Gates is worth 10 billion or 20 billion or 30 billion or 40 billion that doesn't affect your well-being at all what's relevant is the fate of poor people and and of the middle class and in fact that has not been decreasing it is certainly not increased nearly as much as the well-being of the rich but the the incomes of the poor and the middle class even in the United States if measured in a way that compensates for government benefits which such as the Earned Income Tax Credit if it takes into account the increased value of goods that can be purchased with a given inflation adjusted dollar then then poverty has been decreasing in rich countries as well so yes income inequality in rich countries has been increasing but no poverty in poor countries has not been increased if poverty in rich countries has not been increasing and inequality in the world as a whole has been decreasing thank you yeah I have a question I was wondering in European has in the United States has obesity peaked and has prostitution and sex trafficking peaked and the second question is as a as a percentage of income has the cost of health care and higher education Pete yes so let's say the the the prostitution and sex trafficking trafficking have to be distinguished because prostitution itself is not if it's voluntary is not a itself a social harm that must be decreased although of course trafficking has we don't really have data on that but I suspect that it has decreased but it's extraordinarily hard to measure prostitution of course is called the world's oldest profession so it's certainly not a by no means a scourge of modernity frequently discussed in the Bible for example the obesity I don't know what the weather it is turned a corner but as problems go obesity is much better than the opposite namely starvation obesity is a it's a it's a scourge of plenty and obviously it has taken a toll in health but as far as problems go it's one that our ancestors would have envied and I think there's no reason to think that that it won't be Greece as there are there is increased awareness and increased treatment higher education that there the the costs just go up have been going up exponentially so education and health care are two cases two exceptions to the general rule that things become cheaper over time so higher education has increased whether that will be brought under control by alternative forms of education particularly online education remains to be seen and what was the other variable that you mentioned I think I think you hit them all okay thank you by the way and of course I'm remember the cost of higher education I my employer is as guilty as any the Ivy League schools have been at the forefront of the exponential increase in education largely as a I should say in my own defense this is not because professor salaries have been increasing exponentially but there has been a massive growth in university bureaucracies partly as a result of federal mandates that there are many many deans and sub Dean's and sub sub Dean's who look who measure diversity and sexual harassment and protection of human subjects and accounting and many others vast increasing in the amount of bureaucracy I I fear that perhaps one of the greatest threats to our continued progress due to these Enlightenment values is a failure to appreciate the value of these Enlightenment values in terms of the general public and so that tenor of news concerns me and wondered if you have any explanations for why that is happening that we get more negative even as things are getting better and if there's any way to counter it yeah I think it's a terrific question I couldn't agree more I think there really is a pathology in the way news is reported I'm not the only one I'm not the first one to say this there is a movement sometimes called solutions journalism or positive news constructive journalism that has taken note of the fact that the that there is a systemic bias in the reporting of the news this has been shown even in studies that take the same event present several versions of it two samples of editors and journalists and say which version of the story would you publish and they generally pick the most negative partly it's a the cause is partly that we are avid consumers of bad news partly because we are hypersensitive to what can go wrong as opposed to what goes right the psychologists call this the negativity bias partly because we bad news unfolds on a very short time scale similar to that of journalism whereas good news tends to be achieved incrementally a percentage point at a time which then compounds so if something blows up if there is a terrorist attack if a war breaks out then that is news if a school is not shot up if a country is not at war then nothing happens to make the headlines if every year the world gets a percentage point richer or infant mortality goes down by a few percentage points there's never you know a Thursday in March in which you can report that there needs to be a focus on longer-term trends and annual and and lot longer reports but I think it's more than and as a psychologist I know that humans are susceptible to a illusion called the availability bias documented by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman that we tend to judge the probability of events by how easy we can remember examples so if we can think of a gory plane crash or a shark attack or a tornado we think that that's a particularly dangerous likely way to die whereas things that don't make the news like asthma attacks we just tend not to think about as particular threats or falling off ladders or falling down stairs in addition I think there's also a moralistic bias that journalists have especially in since the 1970s have assumed that it is Noble or virtuous to call attention to problems and that if you point out that things have gone right you're kind of a you know of a tool of the establishment kind of Patsy and this I think has boomeranged to the detriment of the well-being of the country because if people are convinced that country is just a disaster you know a flaming dumpster then there'll be receptive to two strong men who say that only I can solve the problem that that that institutions are should be torn down that the swamp must be drained that we need to level institutions and start over again from the the embers and the ashes and by feeling to take note of the accomplishments I think that the corrosive cynicism has been created that opens up a space for charismatic would be saviors I think you know how will this change he'll you know I'm doing my bitty part but there are even those of you who read the New York Times which you know I read every day although it's one of the it's one of the guilty parties but David Bornstein and TV Tina Rosenberg in Europe times have a column called it will used to be called solutions I think it's now called fixes and they have written a number of op eds and have started a foundation to make the journalist community aware of some of the corrosive effects of the relentless concentration on the negative good place Tim thank you very much you

Channel: FFRF

Views: 9,157

Rating: 4.9319148 out of 5

Keywords: Freedom From Religion Foundation, FFRF, Atheist, Atheism

Id: Li6xUL_QzgE

Length: 55min 48sec (3348 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 21 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Vectoor]

That was fantastic. I read his earlier book "Better angels of our nature" and I loved it and will be sure to read this as well.

[u/HeTalksToComputers]

The products of "enlightened" western democracies created Communism and Fascism. Enlightenment is an amazing moral and intellectual force, but separated from more fundamental sources of human values and traditions it can just as easily be perverted into a source violence, oppression, and destruction.