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April 15 - May 15, 2022
there are more people suffering from obesity worldwide than from hunger.
What would have seemed miraculous in the Middle Ages is now commonplace:
Since 1980, the price of one watt of solar energy has plummeted 99%–and
If we’re lucky, 3D printers and solar panels may yet turn Karl Marx’s ideal (all means of production controlled by the masses) into a reality, all without requiring a bloody revolution.
Worldwide, life expectancy grew from sixty-four years in 1990 to seventy in 201212–more than double what it was in 1900.
The share of the world population that survives on fewer than 2,000 calories a day has dropped from 51% in 1965 to 3% in 2005.13
the past decade rating as the most peaceful in all of world history.
According to the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, the number of war casualties per year has plummeted 90% since 1946.
There’s no new dream to replace it because we can’t imagine a better world than the one we’ve got. In fact, most people in wealthy countries believe children will actually be worse off than their parents.
But the real crisis of our times, of my generation, is not that we don’t have it good, or even that we might be worse off later on. No, the real crisis is that we can’t come up with anything better.
Simple desires beget simple utopias.
“any serious utopian thinker will be made uncomfortable by the very idea of the blueprint.”
our dreams can’t even begin before we are woken up.
Whatever we may tell ourselves about freedom of speech, our values are suspiciously close to those touted by precisely the companies that can pay for prime-time advertising.
If success is a choice, then so is failure.
It is capitalism that opened the gates to the Land of Plenty, but capitalism alone cannot sustain it.
True progress begins with something no knowledge economy can produce: wisdom about what it means to live well.
“value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.”
What we need are alternative horizons that spark the imagination.
Without utopia, we are lost. Not that the present is bad; on the contrary. However, it is bleak, if we have no hope of anything better.
“It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.”
“You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots.”
This is so true.
The great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need instead of things that self-appointed experts think they need.
When the poor receive no-strings cash they actually tend to work harder.
the countries with the most universal government programs have been the most successful at reducing poverty.
The more we, our family, and our friends stand to gain through the welfare state, the more we’re willing to contribute.
There is overwhelming evidence to suggest that the vast majority of people actually want to work, whether they need to or not.
Utopias always start out small, with experiments that ever so slowly change the world.
Scarcity impinges on your mind. People behave differently when they perceive a thing to be scarce.
Scarcity narrows your focus to your immediate lack, to the meeting that’s starting in five minutes or the bills that need to be paid tomorrow.
Greater mental bandwidth equates to better child-rearing, better health, more productive employees–you name it.
As long as inequality continues to rise, the gross domestic mental bandwidth will continue to contract.
people living in unequal societies spend more time worrying about how others see them.
Anybody eager to work their way up from rags to riches is better off trying their luck in Sweden, where people born into poverty can still hold out hope of a brighter future.
Nobody would want to live in a society where cobblers earn as much as doctors.
In the U.S., there are five empty homes for each person without one.37
“The past is a foreign country,” a novelist once wrote: “they do things differently there.”1
What’s certain is that the wealthier countries become, the more difficult it is to measure that wealth.
It’s no accident that countries that score high on well-being, like Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, have a large public sector.
“Baumol’s cost disease,” basically says that prices in labor-intensive sectors such as healthcare and education increase faster than prices in sectors where most of the work can be more extensively automated.
When you’re obsessed with efficiency and productivity, it’s difficult to see the real value of education and care. Which is why so many politicians and taxpayers alike see only costs.
They don’t realize that the richer a country becomes the more it should be spending on teachers and doctors.
Governing by numbers is the last resort of a country that no longer knows what it wants, a country with no vision of utopia.
The army of psychologists and psychiatrists are fighting not the advance of ennui, but an epidemic of stress.
nowadays our biggest challenges are not leisure and boredom, but stress and uncertainty.
Research suggests that someone who is constantly drawing on their creative abilities can, on average, be productive for no more than six hours a day.
Psychologists have demonstrated that protracted unemployment has a greater impact on well-being than divorce or the loss of a loved one.
Time heals all wounds, except unemployment. Because the longer you’re sidelined, the deeper you slide.
Bizarrely, it’s precisely the jobs that shift money around–creating next to nothing of tangible value–that net the best salaries.
In 2010, American cows produced twice as much milk as they did in 1970.6
