In some ways the world has become less equal, but in more ways the world’s people have become better off.

Quite possibly, had there been no Nazis, there would be no nukes. Weapons don’t come into existence just because they are conceivable or physically possible.

Troublemakers are impulsive: they seize on sudden opportunities to steal or vandalize, and lash out at people who cross them, heedless of the long-term consequences.35 These temptations can be counteracted with therapies that teach strategies of self-control. Troublemakers also have narcissistic and sociopathic thought patterns, such as that they a

CHAPTER 6 HEALTH

Morgan Housel notes, “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

In my view the best projection of the outcome of our multicentury war on death is Stein’s Law—“Things that can’t go on forever don’t”—as amended by Davies’s Corollary—“Things that can’t go on forever can go on much longer than you think.”

Like all advances, the Green Revolution came under attack as soon as it began. High-tech agriculture, the critics said, consumes fossil fuels and groundwater, uses herbicides and pesticides, disrupts traditional subsistence agriculture, is biologically unnatural, and generates profits for corporations. Given that it saved a billion lives and helped

Organisms are open systems: they capture energy from the sun, food, or ocean vents to carve out temporary pockets of order in their bodies and nests while they dump heat and waste into the environment, increasing disorder in the world as a whole. Organisms’ use of energy to maintain their integrity against the press of entropy is a modern explanati

we will see how 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. Our greatest enemies are ultimately not our political adversaries but entropy, evolution (in the form of pestilence and the flaws in huma