More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers.
“If old truths are to retain their hold on men’s minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations”
each gets back something that is more valuable to him than what he gives up.
continuing to absorb energy to resist entropy).
some, like Hobbes, proposed that “reasoning is but reckoning,”
Energy channeled by knowledge is the elixir with which we stave off entropy, and advances in energy capture are advances in human destiny.
Left-wing and right-wing political ideologies have themselves become secular religions,
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.
Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day,
while pessimists sound like they’re trying to help you, optimists sound like they’re trying to sell you something.
progress is an outcome not of magic but of problem-solving.
Poverty has no causes,” wrote the economist Peter Bauer. “Wealth has causes.”
and blamed the declining fortunes of the working class not on Wall Street and the one percent but on immigration and foreign trade.
is not important everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough.”
a market economy maximizes the average, but we also care about the variance and the range.)
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.
people esteem others according to how much time or money they forfeit in their altruistic acts rather than by how much good they accomplish.
the pursuits that almost everyone would agree are constituents of a good life: connecting with loved ones and friends, experiencing the richness of the natural and cultural worlds, and having access to the fruits of intellectual and artistic creativity.
Nations are happier when their people are in better health (holding income constant), and, as I mentioned, they are happier when their citizens feel they are free to choose what to do with their lives.
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.
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.
this does not imply that life is meaningless, because people care about you, and vice versa.
Your loved ones care about you, and you have a responsibility not to orphan your children, widow your spouse, and shatter your parents.
