historian neil ferguson will argue networks of people have impacted history more than hierarchies. on wednesday new orleans's mayor will be at st. joseph's college in brooklyn to talk about his decision to remove four confederate statues last year. thursday we head west to the nixon library in california, karen pens's story of their pet rabbit, his time in the vice president's residents. thursday through saturday in charlottesville for the virginia festival of the book. that is a look at what we are covering this week. many of these are open to the public. look for them to air in the near future on booktv on c-span2.

>> good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to barnes & noble's upper west side. steven pinker is a harvard professor of psychology at harvard university. a two time pulitzer prize finalist in the winter of many awards for his research, teaching and books, he has been named one of time's 100 most influential people. and foreign-policy's 100 global thinkers. he is here to talk about his new book "enlightenment now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress". bill gates says the world is getting better even if it doesn't always feel that way. i'm glad we have steven pinker to help us see the big picture. "enlightenment now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress" is not only the

best book steven pinker has ever written, it is my new favorite book of all time. without further ado, please join me in welcoming steven pinker. >> thank you very much. time to time we ask deep questions. why is the world -- how can we make it better? how do we give meaning and purpose to our lives? typical as these questions are, many don't have answers to them. for example, some people believe morality is dictated by god in holy scriptures. when everyone obeys his law the world will be perfect. or problems are the fault of evil people who must be shamed, punished and defeated. or our tribe should claim its rightful greatness under

control of a strong leader who embodies its authentic virtue. or in the past we lived in a state of order and harmony until alien forces brought on decadence and degeneration. we must restore society to its golden age. what about the rest of us? in "enlightenment now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress" argue there's an alternative system of beliefs and values, the enlightenment, we can use knowledge to enhance human flourishing. many people embrace the ideals of the enlightenment without being able to name or describe them. it has faded into the background as the status quo or the establishment. other ideology had passionate advocates and i suggest the alignment ideas, a positive defense and explicit commitment. the details of the alignment

can be captured in four key ideas, reason, science, humanism and progress. it all begins with reason, the realization that traditional sources of belief are generators of delusion. faith, revelation, tradition, authority, charisma, mysticism, intuition, parsing of sacred texts. always of being wrong. reason in contrast is nonnegotiable and we tried to provide reasons to trust anything other than reason. as soon as you try to suggest that you are right, other people should believe you, you are not lying or full of crap, you lost the argument because you have appealed to reason. humans on their own are not particularly reasonable. cognitive psychologists, most

notably daniel condiment have shown human beings are likely to generalize from anecdotes, to reason from stereotypes, seek evidence that confirms our beliefs and blow off evidence that this confirms them and overconfident about knowledge, wisdom, however, people are capable of reason if they establish certain norms and institutions such as free speech. anyone can criticize the claims of anyone else. open criticism and debate, logical analysis, fact checking and empirical testing which brings me to the second of the enlightenment ideals, science. science is based on the conviction that the world is intelligible, we can understand the world by formulating possible explanations and testing them against our

reality. science has shown itself to be the most reliable way of understanding the world including ourselves. an important enlightened ideal is there can be a science of human nature and beliefs about society are testable like any other beliefs about the world. science provides not just technical know-how and handy gadgets but fundamental insights about the human condition. naturalism. the universe has no all or purpose related to human welfare, with the implication that if we want to improve that welfare we have to figure out how to do it ourselves. entropy. in a system without input of energy, disorder increases. things fall apart. that is because there are vastly more ways for things to go wrong then to go right. evolution. humans are products of a competitive process which selects for reproductive

success, not for well-being. out of the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be dealt. this leads to the third alignment, humanism, the ultimate moral purpose is to reduce suffering and enhance the flourishing of human beings and other sentient creatures. that sounds pretty obvious. who could be against human flourishing? the answer is there are lots of alternative moral systems that prioritize other things such as the ultimate good is to enhance the glory of the tribe, nation, race, class or faith, to obey the dictates of divinity and pressure others to do the same, to achieve greatness, to advance a mystical force, dialectic struggle or pursuit of a utopian or messianic age. humanism is feasible because humans are endowed with a sense

of sympathy. another recurring and latent theme. we can be concerned with the welfare of others was we fear -- we feel this pain. our sympathy is rather puny. we sympathize only with genetic relatives, close friends and allies, cute little for the baby animals, that is about it but our sense of sympathy can be expanded through cosmopolitanism, education, journalism, art, mobility and reason. just because i'm me and you are not and hope you take me seriously. that forces us to expand our circle of sympathy to include others. the final enlightenment ideal is progress. if you apply knowledge and sympathy to reduce suffering and enhance flourishing, we can

gradually succeed. if human nature doesn't change how can progress be possible? an important answer from the alignment, it is possible through benevolent norms and institutions, by which we can deploy energy and knowledge, to combat entropy, we can magnify the better angels of our nature such as reason and sympathy. while marginalizing our inner demons, our illusions, tribalism, dominance and vengeance. examples of enlightenment institutions being children of the alignment our democracy, declarations of rights, markets, organizations for global cooperation and institutions of truth seeking such as academies, scientific societies and a free press. how did that enlightenment thing work out? if you ask most intellectuals,

not very well. i have learned most intellectuals hate progress. intellectuals who call themselves progressive really hate progress. if you think we can solve problems, i have been told, you have a blind faith quote by religious belief in the outmoded superstition of the false promise of the myth of the onward march of inevitable progress. you are a cheerleader for vulgar american can do with the raw raw spirit of boardroom ideology, silicon valley and the chamber of commerce. you are a practitioner of week history. a naïve optimist. a pollyanna, and allusion to the altar character who declared all this for the best in the best of all possible worlds. by today's standards, payingloss would be categorized a pessimist because an optimist

we could do better than the world we find today, this is not the best of all possible worlds. but it should not depend on an attitude, temperament, whether you have a sunny disposition. it can be treated as an empirical hypothesis. human well-being can be measured. we can measure life, health, prosperity, peace, freedom, safety, knowledge, measure, happiness. that is progress. enlightenment, in "enlightenment now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress" i try to make the case with graphs, plotting, measures of human being over time, i feel naked telling the story without graphs behind me, have to do verbal description and pantomime to convey the same point. the most precious resource of

all, life itself. through most of human history, life expectancy at birth, thanks to vaccination, sanitation, antibiotics, health and medicine, life expectancy at birth today in the developed world is 80 years and in the world as a whole, 71 years, virtually no one guesses it is that high. through most of history the biggest hits to human lifespan has been child mortality. even in a country is wealthy and advanced as sweden, 200 years ago, one third of children did not make it to their fifth birthday. today, in the poorest parts of the world, 6% of children, this is sub-saharan countries like ethiopia, the rate of child

mortality down from 20% 526%. still too high but the improvement is continuing. maternal mortality is another contributor to premature death and in sweden, 200 years ago, 1% of mothers died in childbirth. that has been brought down to 1% in the poorest countries of the world and most of the measures of well-being, i can't depict it in graphs and in measure after measure. before the alignment, everyone was richard. poverty, hunger, early death, european and american countries were the first to make the great escape from universal poverty adderley death followed by asia, southern asia and sub-saharan africa is closing

the gap. health. as someone who spent a good. go study the grammar of the past tense in english identified my favorite past tense sentence in the history of the language. it comes from a wikipedia entry for smallpox and the entry begins smallpox was a disease caused by two viruses yet the definition is in the past tense because smallpox killed 300 million people in the 20th century alone, has ceased to exist. similar progress has been made, not quite similar yet, other diseases are slated for the past tense including polio and

ginny were and even diseases that will not be extinguished are coming down in the mortality rates. pneumonia, direct, malaria, measles, hiv-aids. sustenance, starting with the agricultural revolution in britain in the late 18th century, crop rotation, synthetic fertilizers, mechanization of farming, selective breeding captured in the green revolution saved 1 billion lives and transportation networks and the number of calories available per person has increased in every part of the world including sub-saharan africa and india if all the extra calories where making fat people fat or, undernourishment is being decimated, 50% of the world met the definition of undernourishment. that felt a 33% in 1970 and it has come down in every part of

the world. and also coming down in latin america, asia and sub-saharan africa. as a result, one of the horsemen of the apocalypse could strike any continents without warning for most of human history, has pretty much been banished except for the most remote and war-torn corners of the world. for most of human history, economic growth pretty much was nonexistent. a tiny little increase until the industrial revolution in the 18th century which initiated blastoff of exponential growth, it increased 200folding the last 250 years. once again this was an uneven process with europe and the

americas thanks to the growth of education and technology and institutions that foster commerce and trade. .. the growth of prosperity is starting to put an end to extreme poverty. it is defined as the minimum amount necessary to feed oneself and one family. about 90% of the worlds population said the definition of the population. it was set as one of the sustainable development goals. the elimination of extreme policy everywhere on earth by the 2030s. may we all live to see that day. as a result of the decimation of extreme policy. the global inequality has been decreasing it is inevitable

that what the industrial revolution in the first expansion of the wealth. before the industrial revolution. everyone lived in poverty. with the discovery of new sources of wealth from industrialization meant that it meant that some people escaped from extreme poverty leaving others behind. therefore increasing global inequality but more recently because of globalization and trade in markets poor countries have been getting richer faster than rich come trees --dash make rich countries have been getting richer. within wealthy countries like the united states and grit -- britain. not so much the gap between the rich and poor. not so much whether everyone has the same but whether they have enough.

of reallocation of wealth to the poor of the sick and the young and the old. and every developed country. it's even called by the wagner's a lot. even the wealthiest countries devoted. today, the median is 22 percent. even a country like that. behind the western average. allocates 19% of its gdp to social transfers. while inequality has increased poverty has not by the measure of disposable income that is after taxes and transfers the poverty rate in the united

states has fallen by one measure from about 30%. to about 6% today. and if it's measured by consumption by what people can afford in food and clothing and shelter piece, for most of modern history war is that natural state of relations. it shows that the percentage of years that the great powers of the day it's at a time when they were at each other's throats. there has not been a great power were. when they face up against china 60 years ago.

we see that another unheralded development which is with ups and downs. it has been dramatically decreasing. during the era of the korean war. twenty per hundred thousand people died in war that went down to about nine or ten and during the 1960s and the vietnam war. about five in the 1980s. at the soviet invasion of afghanistan. even with the worst war in the generation the syrian civil war it's about 1.2. with the signing of the peace agreement with the government of columbia. the last war came to an end. fifty-six of the world's surface is now free of war.

freedom and rights. the overall trend towards democratization. it has not been reversed. 1971 the world only had 31 democracies. spain and portugal where the fastest dictatorships. under control. most of latin america was under control of military governments. hundred three countries our democracy. two thirds of the world's countries and populations. within countries as well the power of governments took to

brutalize their citizens has been gradually curtailed capital punishment which used to be pretty much universal has been abolished in country after country if current trends continue with if you were to extrapolate the line. another development. homosexuality has been decriminalized. child labor in england in the mid- 19th century. they are immobilized about a third of the children were put to work in farms and factories. the mechanization of agriculture. an increase in valuation and

the lives of children that went down to pretty much zero. it is not been replicated in the world as a whole. in 1950 also about 30% of the worlds children were put to work. today it is now 10% in continuing to fall. they won the nobel peace prize. going down with the rates of child labor. violent crimes. in the homicide statistics in many part of the world go back a hundred years to that middle ages and in the 14th century the homicide rate in england and the netherlands and other european countries. only about 35 per hundred. thanks to the frontier regions been brought under control of the rule of law. in the code of vendetta at being displaced.

that race has fallen to about one per hundred thousand per year. a 35 fold reduction that is a process that seems to be replicated whenever they are brought under the rule of law. the same thing happened in new england. when the on anarchy of the frontier fell into the rule of law. and even parts of the world that today remain notorious for their high violence. they had have a five fold reduction compared to the rate of violence in the 1930s. that process has continued in the united states. as with and many other areas of human flourishing. when it comes to wealthy democracy. we fall behind the democratic peers most notably homicide.

they've been between five and ten times that of european country. but even in the united states it has fallen by more than half and in just the last 25 years. it's not just the most extreme crime mainly homicide and has shown productions. the rate of domestic violence has plummeted. in the victimization of children they have all gone down. we have become safer better licensing requirements.

we are 88% less likely to be mowed down on the sidewalk. 99% less likely to die in a plane crash. 59% less likely to fall to her death and 92% less likely to be burned to death. there is one succession to that trend. the very accidental causes of death. and one of them going up. as a category that public health experts call death by poison, solid or liquid. i wondered why people were drinking bleach. that is the category that includes drug overdoses. as one category of safety that has gone in the wrong direction. 95% less likely to be killed on the job.

and glibly we are far less likely to be killed in an act of god in an earthquake a brush fire. what about the quince is essential act of god. everyone's favorite metaphor for an unpredictable date with death. both from the blue. we are 96% less likely to die from a lightning strike compared to several decades ago. knowledge, for most of european history no more than 15% on the population of new how to read or write. that figure is 100 percent in the developed world in the world as a whole. it has exceeded 80%. this is true not just for boys as was traditional in literacy

and basic education. and perhaps the most incredible example of human progress that i have come across. one that still strains most people's gratuity we are getting smarter and well replicated effect. they had been increasing by three points a decade. also because of the rise of public health and probably also with the the spread of symbols and abstract contracts into everyday life trickling down from science academia and technology. does any of this bring any gains in quality of life. all of the things that they like to measure and quantify. for example. as they reminded us in a

christmas carol in the 19th century people worked about 65 hours per week that has fallen by 22 hours a week. and most workers today get three weeks of paid vacation in addition to the reduced work week. we used to spend about 60 hours a week on housework. but thanks we have a majority of households head. including a majority of poor households. the amount of time that we lose. in a fact an entire day of week of one's life used to be called wash day. they did nothing but wash

close has been returned to our lives. the reduction in house work. even since the 1960s. if you were to see the graph you would see one anomaly. the amount of time for men has increased. it increased through the early '90s and then kind of leveled off. and the reason is that they spent more time today with to date with their children. in fact a single working mother today spends more time time than unmarried stay-at-home mom spent in the 1950s. less of our paycheck on necessities. they have a focal -- fork over more than 50% of their paycheck.

today it's less than a third. does any of this make any difference for happiness. it does. in a majority of countries for which we have the tracks happiness overtime. there has been an increase in the united the united states by the way is an exception. it's pretty much stagnated. although it hasn't gotten worse. and more generally if we look at the effects of economic development. from poor countries to rich countries and we see that there is a very strong but logarithmic relationship. both across countries and within countries. as the world gets richer. the people on average get happier. in a development that few people appreciate the environment is rebounding.

in a report card for the state of the environment at yale university. seventy out of 80 countries have shown an increase in environmental quality in the last several decades. this includes the united states where since the passage of the environmental protection act in 1970. our gdp has gone up and the number of miles that we drive has gone up. the amount a population has gone up. the idea that is popular both among the hard green left and the libertarian right that you could have environmental growth or you can have environmental you can't have both. it's false. we had had both. thanks to environmental regulation which needless to say is currently under threat.

in parts of the world before station has upon 20 as farms have been abandoned into re- claimed by force. even in tropical forests where there still an alarming amount. they had peaked. has come way down. the direction is downward. as the world has shifted more and more oil by sea. there had been fewer oil spills and more of the earth's surface both land surface and oceans are now protected against economic exploitation. about 15% of the land area and about 12% of the worlds oceans. i had reviewed case after case of what one would have to call human progress. how is this reflected in the news.

they use a technique is not just the new york times a sample of the words sources. why do people deny progress. in the nature of journalism. a shortcut that they take a rule of thumb by which we assess probability and danger. namely the easier it is to recall examples from memory. the more likely we think

something is. now think about how the news works. news is about stuff that happens not about stuff that doesn't happen you never see a reporter saying here i am reporting live from a city that has not been struck by terrace today. as long as it hasn't fallen to zero. you combine that with the availability and you get the impression that the world is getting more dangerous there are other psychological quirks that i think inflate our sense of dread and doom. and a phenomena sometimes called the negativity bias that is bad is stronger than good. we dread losses more than we favor gains. we worry more about threats than we appreciate improvements not only a sense

that the world is always a dangerous place. but it opens up a niche for professional to remind us of threats that we may have overlooked. it sets up the perverse property market. they are the ones that we accord the greatest seriousness. optimist try to sound like they're trying to sell you something. let me conclude about progress and enlightenment. is an important to rake the muck.

to be aware of problems and suffering. in ways that they can be reduced. there are dangerous to thoughtless pessimism. if every institution is failing if all of our problems are intractable society is just spiraling downward circling the drain. then we may as well raise the institutions. burn the empire to the ground.

it can be a dangerous kind of and a sentiment that things can't get any worse. even with the problems that remain. it will make things better off all by themselves. quite the contrary. the laws of the universe are indifferent to human well-being. and left to their own devices. they create new problems which had to be there in return. they do have them. like the world wars. the 1960s crime boom.

there are severe global challenges that we have not yet solved. prominent among them. the threat of nuclear war in improbable but catastrophic events. i think we are best off seen in these as problems that are unsolved but solvable. climate change must be addressed by decarbonization via carbon pricing. and negative carbon technologies. the d nuclear station the programs with a set reduction and arms reduction.

and to some extent it has been happening. you find that there is an art that britain for example had huge carbon emissions when it relied on wood and coal. and renewables and nuclear. the united states and followed the same u-shaped curve. china has repeated that trajectory and yet in the world as a whole. it is not committed to flaming carbon. it's a process that has been done. it has to be accelerated much more and brought to zero but those suggests that is not impossible likewise few people are aware that the nuclear arsenal indeed about 10% of

american energy comes from nuclear power it should be brought to zero. the final question that i will raise. does the enlightenment somehow go enlightenment somehow go against human nature. it's a frequent acquisition from defenders of a religion and nationalism that humanism all sounds very good but isn't it kind of arrant or tepid or a flattened view of human life as if the conquest of disease, poverty and famine is boring. do people need to believe in magic a father in the sky. for one thing secular liberal democracy had proven themselves to be the happiest and healthiest places on earth.

i get to say. that applying knowledge in sympathy. when properly appreciated is heroic, glorious and i daresay spiritual. thank you very much. [applause]. we have some time for questions from the audience. just raise your hand we will get to as many folks as we can. and do keep your questions to questions. stephen, i have a lot of admiration for you.

and the enlightenment and western civilization is only a couple hundred years old. i was looking at the curve you head on gdp. it feels like it is going against the dynamic party. if you like your just get a fall do you think that maybe this is a local maximus. with the climate change that all bets are off. there is no a lot of physics that says that the gdb growth as to level off or stop. it's not about stuff. it's about things that people value. and in particular as a with the advance in technology. we get more and more human benefit with fewer and fewer atoms. our smart phones have replaced 50 appliances. we consume less timber, less

steel less of every resource. but life keeps getting more and more interesting because we process bits on the cell phone. there's no law that says it has to level off. climate change indeed is an unsolved problem. .. .. and so there is undoubtedly a

local maximum in the span of hundreds of millennia, millions of years. you could become i can't stay there is and but none of the arguments hold water. the threat of runaway artificial intelligence i discussed in detail in the book, is completely fanciful. the fear we remember of the y2k bug. in 1999, remember how nuclear missiles were going to launch from their silos, planes were going to fall from the sky, nuclear power plants were going to melt down. i think the threat from artificial intelligence is in that category. that is different from the threat of nuclear war and climate change which i think are real, serious, unsolved and might be solvable. i'm not worried about robots. >> thanks for coming today and thanks for the great talk.

of the mainstream media is negative in nature is there a trade-off between being happy and informed even though it is going to be negative? >> there is a trade-off which i discussed in the chapter on happiness. no one knows the reason why given the rising objective fortunes of americans, why has our happiness stagnated? the percentage of americans who called himself extremely happy has gradually sunk. some of it may be as we become more aware of the world's problems, as we grow up and become more mature our worry burden increases, we have to pay a ransom and make a living and put food on the table, as a species we have to worry about things that a couple generations ago people didn't worry about. in the 1950s, the peak of american influence, glory and standing people didn't worry

about racial inequality, they didn't worry as much as we do about nuclear war. there was the atomic café. atomic bombs were kind of cute in the 1970s, domestic bliss, poverty was invisible. african-americans were invisible. as we became more aware of american foreign policy blunders, environmental degradation, it wasn't surprising that each of us might add to our personal worry list some of the world's problems. there are people anxious about climate change even though there's nothing they can do about it. there is a trade-off and one of the challenges to us as individuals is how to be mature and responsible about taking the world's problems seriously without worrying ourselves to death, whether it is through

mindfulness or cognitive behavior therapy, pharmaceuticals, it is a challenge we face as we grow up and become mature citizens. >> thank you for being here. i was wondering what you thought causes the enlightenment? a long time ago civilization being relatively new, in that span, the 1700s, made people value science and humanism. >> a great question and the problem being it only happened once so we can't rewind the tape and play it thousands of times and add up the different outcomes. enlightenment ideas in classical greece during the

renaissance, here are some possibilities. one of them is historical memory of the carnage of the wars of religion, the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries and people realized horrific results happen when you take your religious beliefs too seriously, the massacre of catholics and vice versa. the scientific revolution of the 17th century showed people age-old convictions could be flat wrong and the path to understanding had to be applying reason, making beliefs subject to empirical verification. the age of exploration, the fact that entirely new continence came into people's consciousness with all these people doing things differently than europeans did once we step back, enlightenment thinkers were cultural anthropologists appreciating the diversity of human cultures, things we have

taken for granted should be given another look. the final contributor may have been a technological development. the only industry that showed a huge increase in efficiency prior to the industrial revolution of the 19th century was publishing. in the 18th century the cost of distributable book and the pamphlet plunged. at the same time literacy surpassed the 50% mark for the first time in european history and ideas grew. catholics, broadside treatises and manifestoes went viral meaning in a matter of weeks, not minutes, there's a huge -- the exchange of ideas, people become more immobile. you can hop on a ship and go to amsterdam when the heat got too

high. a lot of enlightenment thinkers were persecuted but managed to find safe havens somewhere else. people and ideas played a role. those are some conjectures. >> i really enjoyed the book and this talk and i'm looking forward to your talk but on the topic of artificial intelligence, you suggest the way to deal with the risk of malevolent super intelligent ai that can't be turned off is simple, don't build one. it seems to me the intelligent people concerned about the risks of a i think it will be malevolent and tamperproof, that it won't be malevolent and tamperproof by design but be unintended consequence. given the potential for good

and profit do you think it is realistic to expect simply not building one is a viable possibility? >> i do. i have an extensive discussion in a chapter on exit stencil threats. one is to resist the temptation to think as we get smarter we beget more ambitious and malevolent. we project human primate psychology on the concept of intelligence. it is inevitable as computers get smarter they will want to control more resources and css rivals and i think that is a fallacy. there's a more sophisticated argument, the value alignment problem that maybe they won't actually want to dominate or displace us but we will be collateral damage. so we say cure cancer, then it will draft us all as guinea

pigs and fatal experiments, nothing we can do about it or say increase happiness, and it will cover the universe with smiley faces because every atom in the universe into a:-). i think these scenarios are self refuting. for one thing they assume we are going to be so brilliant that we will design an artificial intelligence with the power to cure cancer but so stupid that we will give up control over all of our bodies and all of society without thinking what could possibly go wrong? and intelligence itself would be so brilliant that it could devise experiments that would cure cancer but so idiotic that it would interpret our rules so literally that it would kill us all instantly in the process. i think these are not just

exotic but badly conceived scenarios. even someone like eli moscow i have to disrespect for, why is he building self driving cars, isn't he worried someone will program in take me to the airport by the fastest route possible and the car will go in a straight line and mow people down on the sidewalk and crashed through buildings? he is not worried about that because he wouldn't build a car that would accept a command like that and real artificial intelligence won't be built, we won't give up control over every molecule of the universe. the idea that intelligence will take off in such an unstoppable process i think is falling victim to the current hype cycle in ai which it is always subject to and a lot of the current systems are not as brilliant as they are made out to be. this is a widespread

understanding about people in the trenches of ai research and also these scenarios confuse general intelligence with laplace's demons, the hypothetical entity that knows the position of every molecule in the universe and can predict what will happen by sheer cogitation, sheer computation. that is impossible for a variety of reasons. real intelligence is interacting with the world by trial and error. there will always be a limitation of how smart a system can get based on how embodied it is, how connected it is to real-world atoms. the fantasy of take off faster than we can control it is different from the actual nature of intelligence. i don't think we have had a single woman asking a question.

>> given get to this gentleman. >> thank you. a huge fan of your work. a lot of us are saying it sounds great but what about terrible? you talked about the increase in intelligence, it started to slow down. are there concerns that it may reverse? thinking about studies of intelligence, number of children being inversely correlated in western countries. is that a concern? >> it is called davies law, things that can't go on forever don't. it has leveled off in what has gone on the longest. it won't keep increasing but there will be a distant effect

in the movie idiotic was the - idiotcracy -- doesn't seem to be a strong effect, strong enough to reduce the flynn effect going the other direction. if you think what percentage of the world has not had the opportunity to put its innate intelligence into full use, the percentage of people in asia, africa, the top 1% of iq distribution have not gone to college or graduate school that probably will in the next several decades if current trends continue, there could be a massive recruitment of underused brainpower across the globe that would swamp any i o idiocracy scenario. >> thank you for the talk. my question for you in

relationship to your finding of the happiness factor being leveled off for us in the united states, correct? 2016 causes of death, the 2016 morbidity all correlate to what seems to be the stress factor, bruce mcewan's work with the stress cycle, if it is not that, what is going on and how we perceive it is because of our negativity bias we are always looking for worst-case scenario and inabilities. the earth institute and united nations did a sustainable happiness, the world factors

that were identified were positive emotion, resilience, mindfulness and pro social emotion. >> freedom and gdp per capita. those are number one and number 2 factors, social trust, lack of corruption. >> the thing regarding the news, that again, towards the negativity factor, it becomes news because it is more the exception than a common factor. >> indeed. i should emphasize progress does not mean everything gets better for everyone always. that would be magic, science driven problem-solving. in the united states in the last 5 to 10 years there has been a regression in a sector of the population identified --

concentrated in less educated more rural baby boomer white men where life expectancy has gone down, suicide has gone up, there are enough of them that dragged down life expectancy as a whole and defined the pattern of the rest of the world. this is an example of how there can be local reversals of progress and stress might be a contributor because it is concentrated in sectors where there has been employment and underemployment and more direct mainly loss of healthcare and health benefits, some is self-inflicted because of availability of opioids and some driven by suicide. this is a reversal of progress in certain sectors of the united states and one that is

imperative -- how progress doesn't happen by itself to identify problems in turn. >> time for the signing if you have any final comments. big round of applause for steven pinker. [applause] >> a look at the current best-selling books according to amazon.

>> many of these authors have appeared on booktv and you can watch them on our website,

booktv.org. >> my favorite researcher which shows what a dork i have because i have a favorite researcher. a guy named nicholas sp. he has been researching these intangibles of human nature for years. not just nicholas but accrue of people. when we read and opinion we disagree with in any form it doesn't matter if it is printed in a newspaper, a book, and email, facebook. if we read it we are much more likely to think we disagree because that person is stupid and ignorant of the real issues. if we hear someone telling us the same opinion whether it is recorded, in a podcast, if we hear their voice telling us

that opinion, we are more likely to think they disagree with us because they have a different experience and perspective. what that means is the human voice is literally humanizing. it is the voice itself, some quality of the human voice that helps us to recognize each other as human beings deserving of respect and we do deserve respect. not every opinion and every person. it also means the process of transferring communication to the digital world is dehumanizing us. we hate each other, we don't see each other as human beings deserving of respect. this is not a partisan issue. those liberals, they are always

jerks or the other way, it doesn't matter what you are thinking. it is not partisan. every single person is equally prone to do this to the other side. every person is equally prone to confirmation bias. you believe something and someone gives you evidence proving that belief is wrong and makes you believe it harder. we are the only species that suffers confirmation bias. that is because confirmation bias is not helpful. it is not really helpful. if you have a cat and the cat truly believes there is no cat in the next room - i mean a mouse, sorry. if you have a mouse and the mouse totally believes there is in the next room and show them evidence of cats in the next room, lots of cats, that makes

them believe harder there are no cats, mice would be wiped off the face of the planet. why do we have confirmation bias? how does it help us? because frankly why would it survive through all millennia of evolution. we don't fully understand it yet. i think confirmation bias is a strength. what it does is proves was constantly that we need each other. we need to talk to each other because we are our own checks and balances. i need you guys to tell me when i have said something nutballs. i need to believe you.

we need each other, all of us. there is no virtue in saying i don't talk to people like that. you can talk to everybody. and i will give you two examples was when is georgia's own. does anyone know who clayton is? one person. there's a street named after her in atlanta. clayton was a good friend of the kings, dr. king and his wife coretta. when they decided to create the great neighborhoods initiative, great society initiative to strengthen neighborhoods in atlanta. she was far from that program and had a different neighborhood captain and the mayor came to her and said listen i have to warn you there

is an african-american woman. that hasn't changed. a grand dragon in the kkk, just so you know. she described that very first meeting where the captains came in and one of them refused to touch her or shake her hand. so he would come in from time to time and she would talk to him. about whatever. she says dr. king told her you don't try to change hearts, leave that to god. you have no control over whether a heart is changed, you don't have the power but you can be a human being and respectful and that is what she did and they would talk to each other. he ended up coming two or three times a week and at one point why do you keep coming here? you don't even like me.

i know, but i like to talk to you. >> you can watch this and other programs online. a look at authors featured on afterwords, weekly other interview program featuring best-selling nonfiction books and guest interviewers.

>> $1 trillion of government funding at all levels on the side of the status quo. this means we have a successful education system people think of as purely good. there is a dark side to accessibility. need to end up at the same time it would've ended up at a lower level, like when people are always thinking the talented kid from a poor family, not thinking about the other kids from the same neighborhood who don't like school and had many opportunities taken away from them because employers say so many people with college degrees, why give the chance to someone else who hasn't jumped through the same hoops they are? another thing is there is a general social shift towards a stigma against not being well-educated, parents,

teachers, peers working together. the funding and attitudes of the funding is the easiest thing to do something about so i talk about that in the book. >> afterwords airs on booktv every saturday at 10:00 pm eastern and sunday at 9:00 pm eastern and pacific while previous afterwords programs are available to watch online on booktv.org. >> i thought they were having glue like everyone else. they said these things that sounded supremely racist and bananas. but if we field the right candidate our message close the borders, build a wall, bring the troops, they believe, to say these things, they could get - gain some power.

and they knew back then white voters in america would be willing to accept the ideology, the mindframe of conditions were right. >> when does he start uniting all these french persons? >> he always wanted files to but it was never really the right time because these are young guys. you have to become a known entity on the far right. he tried to start his own thing. he was relatively well-known in 2012, 2013, he had a thing called white student union, that he started - started tauzin university in maryland but it spreads until the colleges are not good.

and they need to have a faculty advisor. this thing had a faculty advisor and they said no. you cannot be this faculty advisor, forming a political party, it was a proto-fascist it with elements of far left ideology. very pro union and workers and all this kind of stuff, he was very populist, he looked at the movement itself, we are too small and fractured. it forms something. started reaching out to other groups and was very talkative and convincing so he was able

to start growing the pie, he went to skinheads in california and recruited them and the league of the south. and jeff scoop is the leader of the national socialist movement. and he was looking for more members. that is what this comes down to. we have 20 guys, 35 guys so they were able somehow to put aside their ideological differences, there were a lot of differences, they can agree on very little. there is an alliance of sorts. >> you can watch