Sublime

But it’s in the nature of progress that it erases its tracks, and its champions fixate on the remaining injustices and forget how far we have come.

The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned. I wrote this book because I have come to realize that it is not. More than ever, the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress need a wholehearted defense. We take its gifts for granted: newborns who will

Sapir and Whorf’s rhetoric answered to a contemporary moral panic about the use and abuse of language. The young 20th century saw public discourse perverted by new forms of propaganda, disseminated by such new technologies as radio and film, all of which accompanied and facilitated the catastrophic upheavals of the First World War and the political

Notwithstanding the horror that the word elicits in many parts of the political spectrum, globalization, development analysts agree, has been a bonanza for the poor. Deaton notes, “Some argue that globalization is a neoliberal conspiracy designed to enrich a very few at the expense of many. If so, that conspiracy was a disastrous failure—or at

A study led by cognitive scientist Pawel Lewicki

Population resource abundance analysis: summary Population resource abundance analysis quantifies the relationship between the abundance of resources and population growth. It helps us evaluate Ehrlich’s claim that population growth must result in resource scarcity and Simon’s counterclaim that population growth will increase the abundance of

fallacy that it takes Supermen to forge super teams.

reasonable creatures, and sometimes we are. Our individual reasonability is unpredictable, because it arises in unique combinations of facts that we find salient and values that we affirm. Our collective unreasonability is predictable, because (unlike values and facts) impulses and lies can be mechanized. Our collective unreasonability has general