More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 19 - August 15, 2019
Whether or not the generous European welfare state is sustainable over the long run and transplantable to the United States, some kind of welfare state may be found in all developed countries, and it reduces inequality even when it is hidden.
The two forces that have famously increased inequality in income have at the same time decreased inequality in what matters.
The first, globalization, may produce winners and losers in income, but in consumption it makes almost everyone a winner. Asian factories, container ships, and efficient retailing bring goods to the masses that were formerly luxuries for the rich.
The second force, technology, continually revolutionizes the meaning of income (as we saw in the discussion of the paradox of value in chapter 8). 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,
Together, technology and globalization have transformed what it means to be a poor person, at least in developed countries. The old stereotype of poverty was an emaciated pauper in rags. Today, the poor are likely to be as overweight as their employers, and dressed in the same fleece, sneakers, and jeans. The poor used to be called the have-nots. 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.
the lives of the poor are improving more rapidly than the lives of the rich.
Inequality is not the same as poverty, and it is not a fundamental dimension of human flourishing. In comparisons of well-being across countries, it pales in importance next to overall wealth. An increase in inequality is not necessarily bad: as societies escape from universal poverty, they are bound to become more unequal, and the uneven surge may be repeated when a society discovers new sources of wealth. Nor is a decrease in inequality always good: the most effective levelers of economic disparities are epidemics, massive wars, violent revolutions, and state collapse.
For all that, the long-term trend in history since the Enlightenment is for everyone’s fortunes to rise. In addition to generating massive amounts of wealth, modern societies have devoted an increasing proportion of that wealth to benefiting the less well-off.
As globalization and technology have lifted billions out of poverty and created a global middle class, international and global inequality have decreased, at the same time that they enrich elites whose analytical, creative, or financial impact has global reach. The fortunes of the lower classes in developed countries have not improved nearly as much, but they have improved, often because their members rise into the upper classes. The improvements are enhanced by social spending, and by the falling cost and rising quali...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The wealthier the country, on average, the cleaner its environment: the Nordic countries were cleanest; Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and several sub-Saharan African countries, the most compromised. Two of the deadliest forms of pollution—contaminated drinking water and indoor cooking smoke—are afflictions of poor countries.
As agriculture becomes more intensive by growing crops that are bred or engineered to produce more protein, calories, and fiber with less land, water, and fertilizer, farmland is spared, and it can morph back to natural habitats.
As people move to cities, they not only free up land in the countryside but need fewer resources for commuting, building, and heating, because one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.
Indeed, we may be reaching Peak Stuff: of a hundred commodities Ausubel plotted, thirty-six have peaked in absolute use in the United States, and another fifty-three may be poised to drop (including water, nitrogen, and electricity), leaving only eleven that are still growing. Britons, too, have reached Peak Stuff, having reduced their annual use of material from 15.1 metric tons per person in 2001 to 10.3 metric tons in 2013.39
The enlightened response to climate change is to figure out how to get the most energy with the least emission of greenhouse gases.
It begins with carbon pricing: charging people and companies for the damage they do when they dump their carbon into the atmosphere, either as a tax on carbon or as a national cap with tradeable credits.
A second key to deep decarbonization brings up an inconvenient truth for the traditional Green movement: nuclear power is the world’s most abundant and scalable carbon-free energy source.
Although renewable energy sources, particularly solar and wind, have become drastically cheaper, and their share of the world’s energy has more than tripled in the past five years, that share is still a paltry 1.5 percent, and there are limits on how high it can go.
Nuclear energy is available around the clock, and it can be plugged into power grids that provide concentrated energy where it is needed. It has a lower carbon footprint than solar, hydro, and biomass, and it’s safer than them, too.
“There is no credible path to reducing global carbon emissions without an enormous expansion of nuclear power. It is the only low carbon technology we have today with the demonstrated capability to generate large quantities of centrally generated electric power.”
The benefits of advanced nuclear energy are incalculable. Most climate change efforts call for policy reforms (such as carbon pricing) which remain contentious and will be hard to implement worldwide even in the rosiest scenarios. An energy source that is cheaper, denser, and cleaner than fossil fuels would sell itself, requiring no herculean political will or international cooperation.
Breakthroughs in energy may come from startups founded by idealistic inventors, from the skunk works of energy companies, or from the vanity projects of tech billionaires, especially if they have a diversified portfolio of safe bets and crazy moonshots.
In The Better Angels of Our Nature I showed that, as of the first decade of the 21st century, every objective measure of violence had been in decline.
Sure enough, trade as a proportion of GDP shot up in the postwar era, and quantitative analyses have confirmed that trading countries are less likely to go to war, holding all else constant.
Yet the biggest single change in the international order is an idea we seldom appreciate today: war is illegal. For most of history, that was not the case. Might made right, war was the continuation of policy by other means, and to the victor went the spoils.
Over the long run, a world in which all parties refrain from war is better for everyone. Inventions such as trade, democracy, economic development, peacekeeping forces, and international law and norms are tools that help build that world.
Now, combine the cockeyed distribution of violent crime with the proven possibility that high rates of violent crime can be brought down quickly, and the math is straightforward: a 50 percent reduction in thirty years is not just practicable but almost conservative.
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.
It begins with law enforcement.
“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.”
Together with the presence of law enforcement, the legitimacy of the regime appears to matter, because people not only respect legitimate authority themselves but factor in the degree to which they expect their potential adversaries to respect it.
When robotic cars are ubiquitous, they could save more than a million lives a year, becoming one of the greatest gifts to human life since the invention of antibiotics.
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 graph shows that the third wave of democratization is far from over, let alone ebbing, even if it has not continued to surge at the rate of the years surrounding the fall of
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
By now you should be skeptical about reading history from the headlines, and that applies to the recent assaults on equal rights. The data suggest that the number of police shootings has decreased, not increased, in recent decades (even as the ones that do occur are captured on video), and three independent analyses have found that a black suspect is no more likely than a white suspect to be killed by the police.6 (American police shoot too many people, but it’s not primarily a racial issue.)
What is surprising, though, is that in every part of the world, people have become more liberal. A lot more liberal: young Muslims in the Middle East, the world’s most conservative culture, have values today that are comparable to those of young people in Western Europe, the world’s most liberal culture, in the early 1960s.
Can we identify the causes that differentiate the world’s regions and liberalize them all over time? Many society-wide traits correlate with emancipative values,
Prosperity (measured as GDP per capita) correlates with emancipative values, presumably because as people become healthier and more secure they can experiment with liberalizing their societies. The data show that more liberal countries are also, on average, better educated, more urban, less fecund, less inbred (with fewer marriages among cousins), more peaceful, more democratic, less corrupt, and less crime- and coup-ridden.
Yet the single best predictor of emancipative values is the World Bank’s Knowledge Index, which combines per capita measures of education (adult literacy and enrollment in high schools and colleges), information access (telephones, computers, and Internet users), scientific and technological productivity (researchers, patents, and journal articles), and institutional integrity (rule of law, regulatory quality, and open economies).44 Welzel found that the Knowledge Index accounts for seventy percent of the variation in emancipative values across countries, making it a far better predictor than
...more
Child labor, now as always, is concentrated not in manufacturing but in agriculture, forestry, and fishing, and it goes with national poverty, as both cause and effect: the poorer the country, the larger the percentage of its children who work.53 As wages rise, or when governments pay parents to send their children to school, child labor plummets, which suggests that poor parents send their children to work out of desperation rather than greed.
Studies that assess education at Time 1 and wealth at Time 2, holding all else constant, suggest that investing in education really does make countries richer. At least it does if the education is secular and rationalistic.
Until the 20th century, Spain was an economic laggard among Western countries, even though Spaniards were highly schooled, because Spanish education was controlled by the Catholic Church, and “the children of the masses received only oral instruction in the Creed, the catechism, and a few simple manual skills. . . . Science, mathematics, political economy, and secular history were considered too controversial for anyone but trained theologians.”6 Clerical meddling has similarly been blamed for the economic lag of parts of the Arab world today.
And better-educated countries are richer, and as we saw in chapters 11 and 14, richer countries tend to be more peaceful and democratic.
Since educated people tend to have fewer children, the growth of education is a major reason that, later in this century, world population is expected to peak and then decline
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. To behold this graph is to apprehend human progress at a glance. And packed into the lines are two vital subplots. One is that although the world remains highly unequal, every region has been improving, and the worst-off parts of the world today are better off than the best-off parts not long ago.45 (If we divide the world into the
...more
“We constantly worry about the looming ‘retirement funding crisis’ in America without realizing that the entire concept of retirement is unique to the last five decades. It wasn’t long ago that the average American man had two stages of life: work and death. . . . Think of it this way: The average American now retires at age 62. One hundred years ago, the average American died at age 51.”
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,
...more
Figure 17-3 shows that as utilities and appliances penetrated American households during the 20th century, the amount of life that people lost to housework—which, not surprisingly, people say is their least favorite way to spend their time—fell almost fourfold, from 58 hours a week in 1900 to 15.5 hours in 2011.
so the liberation of humankind from household labor is in practice the liberation of women from household labor.
Artists, philosophers, and social scientists agree that well-being is not a single dimension. People can be better off in some ways and worse off in others. Let’s distinguish the major ones.
At the top of that list is life itself; also on it are health, education, freedom, and leisure.
freedom (together with life and reason) is a prerequisite to the very act of evaluating what is good in life.
