"‘It is interesting that economists for all of the cliches about the dismal profession do tend to have a more positive view because they are aware of one of the greatest facts in human history. Namely, that prosperity has skyrocketed since the Industrial Revolution. And the data oriented mindset leads economists like many data oriented people to have a different view of the world than you get from journalism.
And I think there's a systematic reason why and that is that journalism presents a systematically biased sample of world experience, namely, by covering things that happen, especially things that happen suddenly. There's a built in bias to cover things that go wrong because things can fall apart very, very quickly.
Whereas improvement creeps up a few percentage points a year which can then compound and transform our lives. But there's never a Thursday in October, which it happens suddenly, so you never read about it, but you do read about all the wars and the pandemics and the riots and the terrorist attacks. So unless you are nerdy enough to get your view of the world from graphs and data, you can miss the spectacular improvements that have taken place.’
‘So I can understand how someone would disagree with you, before they read your book, because they're biased by the media. But which surprises me is that some people are still not convinced by your book, even if they read it, because I know there's like a lot of noise around your book from both the left and the right. Both find all sorts of things they don't like about it. But reading it, I'm not sure what they complain about.’
‘Indeed. And of course, the left and the right, both have grievances about modern institutions, the grievances differ. But for those on the hard left to believe that the modern neoliberal establishment is fundamentally corrupt, to say that, well, things are better than they were 30 years ago, or 100 years ago, or 150 years ago, is a kind of heresy. In parallel, there are big currents in the right, that believe the Enlightenment was a terrible mistake. We were better off when we submitted to an authority higher than ourselves, mainly the Church, but established social norms and institutions like the monarchy and the class system. So there's a kind of ideologized pessimism on both sides.’...
‘I know a celebrity who says that he blames climate change on Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, and the Doobie Brothers, for their excellent concept of No Nukes, it turned the baby boomer generation against nuclear, Joshua Goldstein and I argued that the millennials and Generation Z should reject the baby boomer consensus and form their own climate policy that's more in touch with a statistical reality’...
‘Isaac’s son Jacob has a daughter Dinah. Dinah is kidnapped and raped, apparently a customary form of courtship at the time, since the rapist’s family then offers to purchase her from her own family as a wife for the rapist. Dinah's brothers explain that an important moral principle stands in the way of this transaction. The rapist is uncircumcised. So they make a counteroffer. If all the men in the rapist’s hometown cut off their foreskins Dinah will be theirs. While the men are incapacitated with bleeding penises, the brothers invade the city, plunder and destroy it, massacre the men and carry off the women and children. When Jacob worries that neighboring tribes may attack them in revenge, his sons explain it was worth the risk, should our sister be treated like a whore? Soon afterward, they reiterate their commitment to family values by selling their brother Joseph into slavery. I mean, funny or not funny. And I grew up with the idea that historically, the Hebrew Bible was what first introduced morality into the world. When I read some of the passages as an adult, It's horrifying'.
And that's what's in the the Old Testament, and made me realize that for all of the pageantry, the community, that the beauty of religious observance, it's a big mistake to think of the Bible as the source of our moral values... … the God of the Old Testament basically works by the moral code of the Corleones. He's like, yeah, you do something that insults me, I murder you and your family. Blood revenge is, was the highest moral value’...
‘I don't just sign on to any old controversy. And in the case of Larry Summers, part of it was that he’d based some of his arguments on chapter in one of my books called Gender in the Blank Slate, the Modern Denial of Human Nature. So I felt I already had a dog in that fight. Also, it offended me the way in which Summers was distorted by highly intelligent people. He made a statistical argument that the variance among male abilities was greater than the variance among female abilities in spatial cognition. So you had a higher percentage of men at the high end and at the low end, even if the means were the same. And even if there were at any given level of ability, you obviously have both men and women. That was turned into women can't do math by some professors of science, who clearly had no particular interest in accurate citation, but wanted to get people riled up… it did offend me that that basic way of just thinking about exceptions versus central tendencies was expunged from this debate in the service of moral outrage...
Do kids really have an advantage [in learning languages]? And how long does it last? And the answer is, they do but it lasts surprisingly long. With some mathematical modeling, we estimated that the change in the underlying ability to soak up the grammar of a new language only takes place around 17. Now, if you start at 12, you're at a disadvantage because it takes more than five years to master all the ins and outs of the language. So you're only doing it at a top capacity for five of the necessary years. But to our own surprise, the window is longer than people think. Now what about if you're older than 17? Well, the window doesn't shut, there's a decline. So it's still possible. I would say that to make up for the fact that presumably the underlying circuitry isn't as plastic as it used to be when we were kids, that a number of strategies have to be used. And one of them of course, is using the language in context, in a conversational situation... combined with making up for the decline in underlying fluency and facility by applying intellect, by remembering the irregularities, and by reading and developing conscious rules to help make up for the fact that it doesn't come as naturally as when we were kids... As Mark Twain said, [in German] there are more exceptions to the rule than instances of it’"
