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August 1 - August 11, 2018
The obvious way to remove CO2 from the air, then, is to recruit as many carbon-hungry plants as we can to help us. We can do this by encouraging the transition from deforestation to reforestation and afforestation (planting new forests), by reversing tillage and wetland destruction, and by restoring coastal and marine habitats.
physicist David Keith makes a case for a form of climate engineering that is moderate, responsive, and temporary. “Moderate” means that the amounts of sulfate or calcite would be just enough to reduce the rate of warming, not cancel it altogether; moderation is a virtue because small manipulations are less likely to bring unwelcome surprises. “Responsive” means that any manipulation would be careful, gradual, closely monitored, constantly adjusted, and, if indicated, halted altogether. And “temporary” means that the program would be designed only to give humanity breathing space until it
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enlightened environmentalism recognizes that humans need to use energy to lift themselves out of the poverty to which entropy and evolution consign them. It seeks the means to do so with the least harm to the planet and the living world.
two of the wars in 2014 and 2015 were fueled by another counter-Enlightenment ideology, Russian nationalism, which drove separatist forces, backed by Vladimir Putin, to battle the government of Ukraine in two of its provinces.
Human life has become more precious, while glory, honor, preeminence, manliness, heroism, and other symptoms of excess testosterone have been downgraded.
With the exception of the world wars, more people are killed in homicides than wars.
the single most effective tactic for reducing violent crime is focused deterrence.
Do the subtractions and you find that in every decade it’s the members of the generation born between 1953 and 1963 who are drugging themselves to death.
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, who the United States fought in World War II, and which countries have used nuclear weapons. Their opinions flip depending on how a question is worded: they say that the government spends too much on “welfare” but too little on “assistance to
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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.
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: “It comes about when the people effectively agree not to use violence to replace the leadership, and the leadership leaves them free to try to dislodge it by any other means.”
Its main prerequisite is that a government be competent enough to protect people from anarchic violence so they don’t fall prey to, or even welcome, the first strongman who promises he can do the job.
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.
the American population become more liberal, but each generational cohort is more liberal than the one born before
Compared with the country as a whole, retirement communities are seven times as likely to search for “nigger jokes” and thirty times as likely to search for “fag jokes.” (“Google AdWords,” he told me apologetically, “doesn’t give data on ‘bitch jokes.’”)
older and less-educated people (mainly white men) may not respect the benign taboos on racism, sexism, and homophobia that have become second nature to the mainstream, and may even dismiss them as “political correctness.”
Trump’s success, like that of right-wing populists in other Western countries, is better understood as the mobilization of an aggrieved and shrinking demographic in a polarized political landscape than as the sudden reversal of a century-long movement toward equal rights.
As societies shift from agrarian to industrial to informational, their citizens become less anxious about fending off enemies and other existential threats and more eager to express their ideals and to pursue opportunities in life.
for all the talk about right-wing backlashes and angry white men, the values of Western countries have been getting steadily more liberal (which, as we will see, is one of the reasons those men are so angry).
knowledge and sound institutions lead to moral progress.
The first countries that made the Great Escape from universal poverty in the 19th century, and the countries that have grown the fastest ever since, are the countries that educated their children most intensely.
An 11-point increase in IQ, he estimated, would accelerate a country’s growth rate enough to double well-being in just nineteen years rather than twenty-seven. 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.
Though we bristle at the motor coaches and tour guides, the selfie-shooting throngs in their tacky shorts, 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.
There can be no question of which was the greatest era for culture; the answer has to be today, until it is superseded by tomorrow.
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.
Users of social media have more close friends, express more trust in people, feel more supported, and are more politically involved.49 And notwithstanding the rumor that they are drawn into an anxious competition to keep up with the furious rate of enjoyable activities of their digital faux-friends, social media users do not report higher levels of stress than non-users.
People see each other less in traditional venues like clubs, churches, unions, fraternal organizations, and dinner parties, and more in informal gatherings and via digital media.
the label “depression” today may be applied to conditions that in the past were called grief, sorrow, or sadness.
Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with the word no.
Those who are nostalgic for traditional folkways have forgotten how hard our forebears fought to escape them. Though no one gave happiness questionnaires to the people who lived in the close-knit communities that were loosened by modernity, much of the great art composed during the transition brought to life their dark side: the provincialism, conformity, tribalism, and Taliban-like restrictions on women’s autonomy.
“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.”
The original definition of Enlightenment, after all, was “humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity.”
The observation of a 1965 report from NASA still holds: “Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.”
Until the day when battalions of robots are inoculating children and building schools in the developing world, or for that matter building infrastructure and caring for the aged in ours, there will be plenty of work to be done.
“The more powerful technologies become, the more socially embedded they become.” Cutting-edge technology requires a network of cooperators who are connected to still wider social networks, many of them committed to keeping people safe from technology and from each other.
we should at least consider the possibility that systematic features of the international system have worked against their use.
Anything that reduces the risk of war reduces the risk of nuclear war.
In the American election, voters in the two lowest income brackets voted for Clinton 52–42, as did those who identified “the economy” as the most important issue. A majority of voters in the four highest income brackets voted for Trump, and Trump voters singled out “immigration” and “terrorism,” not “the economy,” as the most important issues.
Silver found that the regional map of Trump support did not overlap particularly well with the maps of unemployment, religion, gun ownership, or the proportion of immigrants. But it did align with the map of Google searches for the word nigger,
the regions of the country that gave Trump his Electoral College victory are those with the most resistance to the decades-long process of integration and the promotion of minority interests (particularly racial preferences, which they see as reverse discrimination against them).
Support for populist parties is strongest not from manual workers but from the “petty bourgeoisie” (self-employed tradesmen and the owners of small businesses), followed by foremen and technicians. Populist voters are older, more religious, more rural, less educated, and more likely to be male and members of the ethnic majority. They embrace authoritarian values, place themselves on the right of the political spectrum, and dislike immigration and global and national governance.
supporters of authoritarian populism are the losers not so much of economic competition as cultural competition.
(The alt-right movement, which overlaps with populism, has a youngish membership, but for all its notoriety it is an electoral nonentity, numbering perhaps 50,000 people or 0.02 percent of the American population.)
as the Silent Generation and older Baby Boomers shuffle off this mortal coil, they will take authoritarian populism with them.
Economic insecurity is not the driver, so the strategies of reducing income inequality and of talking to laid-off steelworkers and trying to feel their pain, however praiseworthy, will probably be ineffective.
Since populist movements have achieved an influence beyond their numbers, fixing electoral irregularities such as gerrymandering and forms of disproportionate representation which overweight rural areas (such as the US Electoral College) would help.
So would journalistic coverage that tied candidates’ reputations to their record of accuracy and coherence rather than to trivial gaffes and scandals.
I believe that the media and intelligentsia were complicit in populists’ depiction of modern Western nations as so unjust and dysfunctional that nothing short of a radical lurch could improve them.
Even moderate editorialists in mainstream newspapers commonly depict the country as a hellhole of racism, inequality, terrorism, social pathology, and failing institutions.
