Enlightenment Now

Even with fair winds and following seas, the effort needed to prevent climate change is immense, and we have no guarantee that the necessary transformations in technology and politics will be in place soon enough to slow down global warming before it causes extensive harm. This brings us to a last-ditch protective measure: lowering the world’s temp

A combination of Internet technology and crowdsourcing from thousands of volunteers has led to flabbergasting access to the great works of humankind. There can be no question of which was the greatest era for culture; the answer has to be today, until it is superseded by tomorrow. The answer does not depend on invidious comparisons of the quality o

Having billions of people decide how best to conserve, given their values and the information conveyed by prices, is bound to be more efficient and humane than having government analysts try to divine the optimal mixture from their desks. The potters don’t have to hide their kilns from the Carbon Police; they can do their part in saving the planet

If there’s anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world, and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings, or the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts.

It was only at the time of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution that people figured out how to bend the curve upward.15 In Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel, the moral imperative was explained to Gulliver by the King of Brobdingnag: “Whoever makes two ears of corn, or two blades of grass to grow where only one grew before, deserves better of h

Psychologists have long known that people tend to see their own lives through rose-colored glasses: they think they’re less likely than the average person to become the victim of a divorce, layoff, accident, illness, or crime. But change the question from the people’s lives to their society, and they transform from Pollyanna to Eeyore. Public opini

The data scientist Kalev Leetaru applied a technique called sentiment mining to every article published in the New York Times between 1945 and 2005, and to an archive of translated articles and broadcasts from 130 countries between 1979 and 2010. Sentiment mining assesses the emotional tone of a text by tallying the number and contexts of words wit

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.”

CHAPTER 8 WEALTH