Secret Peace

Why the heck is crime so low?

2012-01-13T21:42:00.004-05:00

Crime goes up in a recession, right? More people are unemployed, and some of them get desperate. It's only common sense.

Well, think again. Crime rates in the U.S. have been dropping for 20 years, and in the two years since the recession hit, they've dropped even faster. Take a look at this chart, courtesy of this BBC News article:

So why is this happening? The frustrating thing is, no one knows for sure. But there are lots of theories, and I think a combination of the following ones makes the most sense:

Smarter policing
More people imprisoned
Reduction of lead poisoning
Baby boomers aging (fewer young people)
Video games

The video games theory is particularly interesting … recent studies have shown that playing violent video games does increase violent tendencies slightly, but this is more than offset by the simple incapacitation of sitting at home playing video games rather than going out to commit crimes. In other words, if video games are increasing aggressiveness at all, players are then taking out that aggressiveness on more video games.

At any rate, no matter what the true cause of the reduction, it's good news. Now if we can just keep that crime rate low without imprisoning quite so large a percentage of our population - strike a slightly smarter balance there, and make sure our prisoners are treated as humanely as possible - it would be the best of both worlds. (For more information about that issue, I recommend When Brute Force Fails by Mark Kleiman.)

And for more details about the crime drop - specifically, homicide, which has just dropped off the list of the top 15 causes of death for the first time since 1965, check out this Washington Post article and this other one, too.

The mysteries of photography reveal progress

2011-12-26T17:20:00.006-05:00

I just read Errol Morris's excellent book, Believing is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography). Every bit of the book is thought-provoking, as he takes old photographs and analyzes them to find out the stories behind them, which brings up all sorts of questions about what truth is and how accurately we can portray and remember it. One small portion of the book reminded me of the Secret Peace so I thought I'd share it.

Have you ever seen either of these famous photographs?

The first one is by Arthur Rothstein, from 1936. The second is also from the same year, by Dorothea Lange. Both of these photos perfectly evoke the desperation of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, and have become iconic pieces of American history.

But when we come back years later, this is what we find:

We see the little boy on the right of the Dust Bowl photo, now grown and in his own home, as well as a story in Look Magazine about "The Dust Bowl Turns to Gold." Then we also see the "Migrant Mother" herself, surrounded by her three now-grown daughters, posing in one of their suburban backyards. Put simply, here is photographic evidence of people who are much better off than they were in the 1930s.

In The Secret Peace book, I don't mention many cases like this, because they are only anecdotal evidence. In and of themselves, they don't build a case for progress because they are only two examples. And you can always find counter-examples. (Although it would probably be difficult to find many families worse off than they were during the '30s, and even harder the farther back in time you go ... this would be an interesting experiment.) So the book focuses on broader statistics. Nevertheless, these pictures are riveting in a way that statistics can not be; in fact, this was the point of the original photographs themselves.

Morris's book goes into a lot more nuanced detail about these photographs as well as many others, of the Crimean War and Abu Ghraib, for example. It's a fascinating read that I highly recommend. You'll never look at photographs the same way again.

2011 was a bad year to be a dictator

2011-12-23T19:08:00.004-05:00

The Daily Beast has a well-done short photo slideshow of 2011's most notorious fallen dictators. Remind yourself how far the world has come this year alone by reading about the nutcases who will no longer be tormenting their citizens, from Gaddafi to Mubarak and more - not to mention Kim Jong-Il. North Korea's future remains up in the air, but in most of the rest of the cases, the dictators' downfalls spell increased freedoms for their peoples. Honestly, compared to most of human history, there are hardly even any dictators left in the world. Here's hoping we get rid of the rest of them soon.

Check out the slideshow here.

(Osama bin Laden isn't included in the list, since he didn't rule any country (thankfully), but let's not forget to loop him into the broader category of won't-be-missed when reminiscing.)

We live in a much safer world

2011-12-07T01:01:00.006-05:00

In honor of my wife and I leaving today for St. Martin, for our first vacation in years, here are some reassuring statistics about flying, as well as other safety measures.

To start with, want to guess how many fatalities there were on U.S. airlines in 2010? Your guess is either going to be correct or too high, because there wasn't a single one. This is the third year in the past four without a single death, despite more than 10 million flights with more than 700 million passengers a year. (The Week, Feb 4, 2011)

In fact, as Stephen Moore and Julian Simon mention in It's Getting Better All the Time, "Peter Spencer of Consumers' Research magazine estimates that if an individual were to take a random flight every day, on average 20,000 years would pass before the person perished in a fatal crash." These charts are from their book, too.

Here's a look at death rates in the U.S. from natural disasters. Of course, this chart ends at 2000 and so doesn't include Hurricane Katrina (for example), but the overall trend is clear.

The rate of accidents for infants has fallen 88 percent since 1900, and the rate of accidents for seniors has fallen 72 percent. "Americans are now employed in occupations that are far safer than in the past. The accidental death rate at work has plummeted from about 38 per 100,000 workers in 1930 to about 28 in 1950 to about 4 per 100,000 today."

Vaccines save lives

2011-11-19T09:43:00.004-05:00

Sure, you knew that the world eradicated smallpox in 1979, but did you know polio has also been eliminated 99% worldwide?

Bill Gates narrates a short talk about vaccines and why they're so important - and also so easy, so cheap, and so obvious as a means to save lives. The talk was animated in a fun way, check it out (it's only 3 minutes long):

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also has a neat interactive infographic on its site, illustrating the fight against malaria, as well. You can see all the progress the world has made, and how much more we still need to do to ensure a healthy life for everyone.

Why the Titanic is a bad metaphor

2011-11-14T20:29:00.004-05:00

Someone used the phrase "could crash and burn like the Titanic" when talking about the potential dangers of a project recently, and rather than be perturbed over the use of "burn" rather than, say, "sink", I got annoyed at another invocation of the huge ship. The Titanic is used so often as a metaphor for man's hubris that the satirical newspaper The Onion fake-back-dated an article to 1912 that says, "World's Largest Metaphor Hits Ice-Berg: Representation of Man's Hubris Sinks in North Atlantic."

On the surface, it makes sense: vain, overzealous shipbuilders and titans of industry boasted that the Titanic couldn't be sunk, even going so far as to not include very many lifeboats, and then it sank anyway. Clearly, mankind should be more humble. We should learn a lesson from the disaster, and not overreach. Specifically, we should reign in science and technology so they never get too out of hand.

Sure, on the surface it makes sense. But lurking below the surface is the much-larger realization that this is an incorrect lesson to draw from the events of 1912. After all, what did we do after the Titanic sunk? Did we learn our lesson and stop making all boats? Did we declare the Titanic's 882-feet length the upper limit in boat construction and vow never to try to approach that size again?

No. Today, the world's largest ship is almost twice the length of the Titanic. Lots of ships are larger than the Titanic - oil tankers, container ships, aircraft carriers. There are even a few that are passenger ships like the Titanic was. They're all doing fine; no icebergs to report. So, we didn't really reign in our hubris at all. Take that, lesson!

But that's not really true - we did learn our lesson. But the lesson was: take what practical information can be learned from our mistakes and apply it to keep pushing forward anyway. I'm sure that boats built after 1912 contained more lifeboats, for example, and maybe routes changed to better avoid icebergs. Perhaps construction was changed in ways to make large boats sturdier.

So this is why this metaphor annoys me. It's a subtle difference in some ways, but the context I've often seen the Titanic metaphor in implies that science should be reigned in, while the real-world lesson learned vindicates science. After all, the whole point of scientific development is to allow mistakes and the constant refinement of knowledge. Science and technological development are less hubristic than other fields of human endeavor, like art, religion or politics. And while the Titanic was a disaster in terms of lives lost, it was also an essential step on the long path of progress that led us to where we are today.

I bet you haven't thought about water today. Exactly.

2011-11-06T16:06:00.001-05:00

We are lucky to live in an era of history when water is not a concern for many of us: we can go about our daily lives without even thinking about it, and just get as much water as we like at any moment. This would have astonished our ancestors.

Charles Fishman, in The Big Thirst, warns that this might change soon, as new shortages force us to value water more (again.) But here are at least two pieces of good news excerpted from that book, one historical and one current:

"One hundred years ago, with the dawn of bacteriology, two things happened. Cities started aggressively separating their freshwater supplies from their sewage disposal, something they had been surprisingly slow to do. (Philadelphia is just one of many cities whose sewage system, 100 years ago, emptied into a river upstream of the city water-supply intakes from the same river.) And water utilities discovered that basic sand filters and chlorination could clean and disinfect water supplies, all but assuring their safety. … Between 1900 and 1940, mortality rates in the united States fell 40 percent. … Clean water [also] cut child mortality in half."

"It is a mistake to imagine that small changes don't matter, or that even big water issues are not manageable. One of the most startling and least well-known examples involves the United States. The U.S. uses less water today than it did in 1980. Not in per capita terms, in absolute terms. U.S. water use peaked in 1980, at 440 billion gallons a day for all purposes. Today, the country uses less than 410 billion gallons a day. That performance is amazing in many ways. Since 1980, the U.S. population has grown by 70 million people. The U.S. GDP has more than doubled in constant dollars: We use less water to create a $13 trillion economy than we needed to create a $6 trillion economy. It has been nothing less than a revolution in water use in the biggest economy in the world, a completely silent revolution. Most of the change has come in water use by power plants and farms. Farmers today use 15 percent less water than they did in 1980, and produce a 70 percent larger harvest."

Guardian article on The Secret Peace

2011-11-06T13:17:00.004-05:00

Really great full-length article by Paul Harris in the Guardian/Observer last weekend. It talks about The Secret Peace and a few other related books that have recently just come out, like Steven Pinker's book on declining violence.

There was also a very lively debate in the article's comments section, with a lot of the usual detracting arguments I hear, but also a lot of defenders. The most common argument I often hear about the book is, "How can you say things are perfect when such-and-such is so bad?" Of course, this is a misunderstanding of my thesis; I don't deny the awful things happening in the world today. I only make the claim that it was worse in the past, and keeps improving. It was interesting to read in these comments a clear environmental spin (ie. Who cares what progress we make, since it's all going to be wiped out by global warming.) This is a British paper, and the environment is more of an issue there, so perhaps that's responsible for that trend in the comments. To those people I say: Read the chapter in my book about the environment. Oh, and then read the rest of the book, too.

Check out the full article and the comments here.

More of the world is protected

2011-10-23T18:00:00.003-04:00

Over 12 percent of the world's land area is now officially protected, and that number has been rising fast, doubling just since 1990. You can see it in the right-most bars on the chart below. The rest of the chart breaks down the progress by types of regions.

This reminds me of a story that I can only half remember (by Grant Morrison maybe?), where in the far future humanity, with a population even greater than ours today, has coalesced into a few immense towering city-states, protected by bubbles. The majority of the earth was allowed to return to its natural, wild state, with humanity carefully visiting the "outside" for recreation. It was a peaceful, prosperous future.

Source: Vital Signs 2010, article by Margarita Yatsevich

Deaf woman hears her voice for the first time

2011-10-09T09:36:00.003-04:00

Just a quick feel-good pick-me-up post to tug at the heartstrings and remind us how lucky we all are to live in this day and age. We've come to the point where doctors and scientists perform miracles every day - healing the blind, deaf, and the sick.

This is a woman who has been deaf her whole life. 29 years of relying on reading lips, and to a very limited extent, hearing aids. Here is the video of her receiving a new implant that allows her to fully hear for the first time. Apologies if you've already seen this; it's making the facebook rounds quite a bit:

Getting Better all the time

2011-09-30T00:18:00.002-04:00

The recent book Getting Better, by Charles Kenny (from the Center for Global Development, World Bank, and Foreign Policy magazine), is similar to The Secret Peace but focuses on global development. It's a great book, and more succinct than mine, which is an admirable achievement. I heard him speak last night at the UN, and it was enlightening.

One of his main points is that we shouldn't be measuring all progress solely by looking at income and GDP. Income growth has been remarkable in many countries in recent decades. But we've been partially using income as a proxy when we're really concerned about standards of living. There are also plenty of countries that have advanced in many areas recently (literacy rate, education, health, etc) even though their economies are stagnant.

He described the two main reasons for this progress as a decrease in the cost of goods and an increase in demand. The "goods" decreasing in cost are not just commodities and physical goods, but health and education. Likewise, demand has increased for education and health in developing ocuntries as cultural norms change and people come to expect higher standards of living.

I agree, and that's a good way of looking at it, but I think we can still go one layer deeper, to the primary reason for progress: compounding human knowledge. This increase in knowledge is responsible for declining costs: innovations developed for the rich world end up easily spreading elsewhere. The spreading information is also responsible for cultural-norm memes about human rights and what all the world's citizens should expect in their lives (such as the brave participants in the Arab Spring expecting more from their governments.)

After the talk, I asked the question, "Is it important to spread this good news? Conversely, do you ever have doubts or fears of spreading good news about development since a lot of NGO fundraising relies on making events seem as dire as possible?" His answer was great - he says that the current method of "crying crisis" each time money needs to be raised is going to prove less effective soon, since organizations have been doing it for 60 years. People are starting to think that there's no point to donate, since there will always be crises. But by sharing the truth - that our money did help in many cases, and we can see the progress we've made, but there's still more work to be done - it should inspire people to help more and not give in to apathy.

Thanks for the event, Charles!

Check out the book on Amazon.

Nice charts and graphs that illustrate Kenny's points.

What do you most like about the age we live in?

2011-09-24T15:34:00.002-04:00

Proust.com, where I've been working for the past year, is a place online for families to share and preserve their memories and stories. When you join Proust, you have the option to make your story private or public (private is the default, and the majority of stories are private.) You then tell your story by answering questions.

Besides learning things I never knew about my close family and friends, I enjoy reading the answers posted to the public questions. Each of the 1,000 questions on the site has its own page, which lists the public answers.

Naturally, this is one of my favorite questions: "What do you most like about the age we live in?"

Some people's answers include:

"The predominant democratic society …"
"Running water."
"If you really want to you can go anyplace in the world … nothing is beyond reach."
"Technology" [a common answer.]
"Google knows everything. Also, there are SO MANY RECIPES I haven't made yet!"

So, what do you like most about the age we live in? Post your answer on Proust, and you can keep it private or share it with the world: http://www.proust.com/questions/my-two-cents/312/what-do-you-most-like-about-the-age-we-live-in

Great radio interview about The Secret Peace

2011-09-15T08:16:00.004-04:00

On Monday morning I was excited to be featured on KNews, a California station, in an interview with Charlie Dyer. Here you can listen to the 15-minute interview:

(Or you can download it as an MP3 here (7 MB).)

I thought the interview went great. Granted, it's tough to hear "self-described Renaissance man" since "self" in that case means "my pr company", I swear. And he threw me off a bit by opening with some questions about Meetup (where I used to work) and then ended up cutting the question in which I talk about Proust (where I work now), but the rest of the questions were on point and I really got to share some good Secret Peace facts. Take a listen if you get a chance.

Everything we learn makes everyone better off

2011-09-10T08:16:00.002-04:00

At the cornerstone of the Secret Peace is the idea that increasing shared human knowledge is the main driver of our inevitable, relentless progress. This idea is now radically compounding in an age in which it is so easy to store and pass on information. Indeed, it's practically impossible to lose information at this point. (Organizing and understanding it all is our next hurdle.)

Here are two examples.

The New York Times reports on a startup named Wicked Start, created by Bryan Janeczko. Janeczko had the idea after starting an earlier company. He was shocked at how hard the process was, and after eventually navigating it successfully, he found demand for his new knowledge. So he started Wicked Start, a free service to guide people through the new business process. The web site has customizable templates for all sorts of different industries, and lots of information about each step of the process.

Another article I found, on CNet News, talks about Fermilab astrophysicist Jason Steffen. Like Janeczko, Steffen stumbled across a problem and realized he had insight that could benefit everyone. The problem in this case was boarding planes - often an agonizing process, as we all know. Steffen theorized about more efficient ways to board, and even found support to stage some trials on a mock 757. The trials proved his theories correct. The savings for the airline industry could be over a billion dollars in total! Steffen has offered his ideas to the airlines; with their competitive nature, I'm sure one of them will eventually see the wisdom to enact his suggestions, gain an advantage, and then see the others follow.

In both these cases, someone outside the "traditional" knowledge path for a certain task/industry - Janeczko isn't a business school professor and Steffen doesn't work for an airline - had a good idea. Whereas in the past, that idea might have lingered unrealized, today it's easier than ever before to gain support, start a new company, or find publicity. Even just throwing the idea out on the Internet might eventually float it in front of the eyes of someone with the means to take it to the next step, or with an additional idea that builds on the first. This cycle ensures that we rarely stumble backwards; we are always learning from each others' mistakes.

Worldwide military spending down, surprisingly

2011-09-03T17:20:00.000-04:00

As Gregg Easterbrook describes in Sonic Boom, "Military spending is among the least desirable uses of social resources. The best-case outcome for most defense spending is that it is totally wasted - that is, military force is never used. Worst-case outcomes go downhill from there."

So what's the good news? He continues: "As most nations have begun spirited economic competition, they have reduced their competition in arms buildups. Stated in today's dollars, global military spending peaked in 1985 at $1.5 trillion, and by 2008 had fallen to $1.3 trillion. Owing to world population growth through the period, military spending has declined from $312 per capita in 1985 (in today's dollars) to $194 per capita in 2008."

Source: Sonic Boom, p. xv.

Majority of Americans say Dr. King's dream has been realized

2011-08-29T22:13:00.002-04:00

Well, a slim majority. On the eve of the opening of Martin Luthor King's new memorial in DC, 51% of Americans say his dream of racial equality has been realized. 23% say major progress has been made, another 23% say minor progress has been made, and only 3% say no progress has been made. I created a chart:

What drug epidemic?

2011-08-21T09:35:00.003-04:00

How many Americans use illegal drugs? The numbers are probably much lower than you think.

Only 8 percent of Americans have used any illicit drugs in the past month. If you subtract marijuana from the equation, it drops to 4 percent. And most of that 4 percent is accounted for by the nonmedical use of pain relievers.

So that's the epidemic: About 4 percent of Americans using marijuana, 4 percent using pain relievers when they shouldn't, and 92 percent sitting at home knitting and playing Jenga, without any drugs whatsoever (except alcohol and tobacco, of course.)

What about meth? "Meth epidemic" gives us 1,860,000 Google results, including a Newsweek cover article of that name. But only 0.3 percent of Americans have used methamphetamines in the past month. The number was so low that federal researchers changed the survey and did it again, only to confirm the low result.

Source: Bet You Didn't Know, by Cheryl Russell.

"What happened to our market?" - other Jesse

What grade would you give our public schools?

2011-08-09T17:02:00.014-04:00

Everyone knows our schools are failing. In fact, in a "report card" survey taken a few years ago, a paltry 16 percent of Americans gave the nation's public schools an A or a B.

But the more interesting results from that survey came when people were asked to rank their local schools: a much larger 45 percent gave them an A or B.

Even more interesting, when asked to rate the school their own child attends, fully 67 percent awarded them an A or a B.

What's going on here? It's simple: when we rate our local school, we know what we're talking about, and when we rate the nation's schools, we don't. We don't have first-hand knowledge, only snippets we've heard from the mass media. And the mass media doesn't do reports titled, "Nation's schools not that bad; many parents satisfied."

Source: Bet You Didn't Know, by Cheryl Russell.

PS. Here's some more education news beyond our borders, from Charles Kenny in Getting Better:

	1970	2000
Ratio of female to male literacy worldwide:	59%	80%
Literacy in sub-Saharan Africa:	28%	61%

PPS. This stock photo was described as "a young boy looks up with excitement and happiness with his A+ grade" but I think it equally could have been known as "a young boy curses the universe and vows revenge as his heavy backpack causes him to topple backwards."

Radio interview with Patricia Raskin's Positive Living

2011-08-06T15:22:00.004-04:00

A few days ago, I had the honor of being a guest on Patricia Raskin's radio show, Positive Living, on VoiceAmerica. Her tagline is "changing attitudes with positive buzz" so it was a perfect fit for The Secret Peace. Take a listen to the episode below (it's about 25 minutes long):

Or, download the MP3 file here.

Thanks for having me on the show, Patricia!

Driving today is much safer than it used to be, even with cell phones

2011-07-30T16:42:00.002-04:00

Here's a rare clip of good news from the nightly news: driving deaths in the US are at their lowest level since 1949.

Smoking is lethal and gross, says most people and now packaging, too

2011-07-29T23:37:00.001-04:00

Starting next year, cigarette packages are going to get pretty disgusting. Federal health officials selected nine graphic warning labels that will soon be on all cigarettes. Lots of other countries do this, and it has proven somewhat effective in contributing to declining smoking rates. Smoking's been in decline in developed countries for decades now.

As reported in the New York Times: "Dr. Lawrence R. Deyton, director of the F.D.A.’s Center for Tobacco Products, said the government estimates, based on other countries’ experience, that the new warning labels will prompt an additional 213,000 Americans to quit smoking in 2013, the first full year with the graphic labels."

Take a look, if you can stomach it:

The present is so much better than the past thought it would be

2011-07-06T18:20:00.005-04:00

Here's a cool Mashable article showing short films from the past that envisioned the future.

These are fun, but what's more meaningful is to realize how our current society easily eclipses their dreams. Not only is their technology too humble (automatic mixers are very exciting but are far surpassed by a microwave oven, for example), but more importantly, they didn't envision pivotal cultural changes, only technological ones. It's telling that the men of the 1950s thought their doting wives would be most excited by automatic kitchen appliances, and not, say, equal rights.

Here's one of the videos; go to the article to see them all.

Empire State Building says congrats on marriage equality

2011-06-26T09:35:00.006-04:00

Here are some (grainy, sorry, it's just my phone) photos of the Empire State Building last night. It was lit in rainbow colors to celebrate Gay Pride and coincidentally the landmark event of New York becoming the sixth state to legalize same-sex marriage.

In the Equality chapter of The Secret Peace, I talk about history's march towards equality. Invariably, history has shown minority groups (of religion, race, sexual orientation, and more) gaining greater rights over time. The times in modern history when rights have instead been permanently removed or set back are remarkably few.

From 2nd avenue:

From the window of our apartment:

Is trusting our lives to strangers a joke?

2011-06-19T12:32:00.006-04:00

Is trusting our lives to strangers a joke? The Onion thinks so. The satirical newspaper recently published, "Report: Life Put In Hands Of 2,000 Complete Strangers Every Single Day." I love the Onion (and its sister site, the AV Club), but this article struck me as odd for them.

According to a new report from the National Institute for Safety Management, on any given day, the average American's life is entrusted to more than 2,000 different people who are complete strangers.

The report, which shows how any one of these anonymous individuals making a single mistake can easily cause another person's death, concluded that it is only through sheer luck that anyone ever makes it through a 24-hour period alive.

"People you don't know and will never even meet — food-safety regulators, bridge inspectors, whoever installed the gas lines in your home — ultimately have the power to decide whether you live or die," the report read in part. "We have no choice but to trust that these individuals are always being very careful and know exactly what they're doing." ...

The article was odd because much more of it than usual could be read straight, and it was only really the fake quotes that stand out as obvious jokes. "'Now I feel like I need to be extra wary,' said Howard, dialing her cell phone while driving on virtually no sleep and sipping a cup of hot coffee. 'It's scary to think who I could be trusting my personal safety to.'" is pretty funny, for example.

But putting aside the fake quotes and the fake math (it would be fun to try to figure out for real how many strangers affect our lives daily), this could very well be a real article. One way to look at it (which seems intended) is as a bleak and terrifying realization of how fragile our lives are. But personally, I think it's pretty wonderful to be reminded just how well society works.

Right now I'm trusting in my computer makers to have built something reliable that will work and won't electrocute me. I'm relying on the thousands of people that built New York's water supply over the course of centuries, so I could drink this glass of tap water. I'm trusting that the nine floors of building below our 10th-story apartment won't spontaneously collapse - thanks to Stuyvesant Town engineers and construction crews from 1946. I'll never meet them, but my life depends on them every day. We're about to go get lunch, and I take it for granted that I can eat anywhere I like and not get food poisoning. (In fact, after eating nearly every meal out for the last 8 years in NYC, I've only ever gotten food poisoning - mildly - twice. At nearly 6,000 meals, that's a rate of only .03 percent.) On the way to the restaurant, we'll pass dozens of motorists that will obey traffic laws and not run us over.

It's nice to step back every once in awhile and marvel at how well most people do their jobs (and how we have multiple backup systems in place to compensate when mistakes are inevitably made.) Thanks, Onion.

Bonus: If you click through to the article, it has a "How Many Hands Do You Put Your Life In Each Day?" quiz that generates a fun (albeit arbitrary) number for you.

Breathe Easier

2011-05-13T12:34:00.002-04:00

We've had a beautiful spring week here in NYC, and it's been great to be outside breathing the fresh air. Check these charts out:

"The national picture on air quality shows improvement for almost every type of pollutant - with particularly dramatic declines in carbon monoxide, sulfur, and lead. Lead concentrations have fallen precipitously, by more than 90 percent since 1976."

The quote and charts above only go to 1996, because they are from a slightly older book, It's Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years, by Stephen Moore and Julian Simon. And they don't discuss greenhouse gases, whose reduction has lagged behind the reduction of certain pollutants most harmful to humans, as shown above. But I also saw this fact from a recent The Week:

"Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in 2009 fell 6 percent from the previous year, to their lowest level since 1995, the EPA said. Reduced economic activity and a shift from coal to cleaner-burning natural gas account for the decline, the agency said."

United States Peace Index - Is your state peaceful?

2011-04-16T19:13:00.004-04:00

The Institute for Economics and Peace, an international think tank, just released the first ever United States Peace Index, a ranking of the states based on their levels of peace. They measure "peace" by looking at the number of homicides, violent crimes, the jailed population, the number of police officers, and the availability of guns.

If you look at the map here, you'll see blue representing the most peaceful states (Maine is #1, followed by New Hampshire and Vermont), followed by green, yellow, orange, and finally red (Louisiana is #50).

In general, the report reveals that peace has improved since 1995, driven by a sharp decrease in homicide and violent crime.

I find the chart fascinating, because the map clearly shows a pattern of increasing peace as the climate gets colder: a peaceful north and a less peaceful south. The only real outliers are Nevada, Michigan, and Maryland (worse than expected), and Utah (better than expected).

Click through to read highlights and other tidbits. One that interests me as a New Yorker is that New York experienced the most significant increase in peace, as a result of decreases in violent crime and the homicide rate.

Lecture at Franklin & Marshall College

2011-03-27T11:30:00.004-04:00

What a busy week! My wife and I just signed the lease for a new apartment (down the street from our current one) and then the following day, we took a train out to PA where I gave a lecture on The Secret Peace at Franklin & Marshall College.

I want to thank Professor Michael Penn for hosting me and allowing me to present to his class, The Nature of Hope. I gave a presentation entitled, "Filling the glass half-full: Forming an optimistic evidence-based worldview." It covered how I came to write the book, beginning with my interest in critical thinking, and how my worldview changed as I did more research. It delved into one of my book's chapters in detail - the one about war and world conflict giving way to nonviolence - and looked at how to reach that conclusion using evidence from the mass media and other sources.

What I really enjoyed were the students' reactions and especially their questions and opinions. They asked a ton of smart questions, including (all paraphrased by my poor memory):

"How will we solve our resource problems and overcrowding as population increases worldwide?"
"What do we do about rising inequality and economic stratification?"
"If spreading information is the catalyst for peace, what about the countries like China that are blocking access to information?"
"Why are scholars so pessimistic? Why is it generally considered more mature to be pessimistic, and more naive to be optimistic?"
"Do we need pessimism? Isn't discontent what motivates us to make changes? Will too much optimism makes us complacent?"

All great questions, from very insightful students. Again, thanks to Professor Penn and his class for having me!

6 Billion Others

2011-03-05T09:39:00.001-05:00

Well, actually 7 billion right now - that's right, this year the world population hits 7 billion people. It sounds like a lot, but actually the rate of population growth has been slowing down and it's doubtful that we'll hit any of the worst malthusian predictions we heard of a few decades ago (and hear about again whenever food prices spike).

At any rate, this project called "6 Billion Others" consists of 5,000 interviews filmed in 75 countries, all showing the diversity of humanity as people answered the same few questions about topics such as happiness, dreams, and progress. The video about progress is particularly enlightening: not everyone is in agreement about how much we are progressing as a global civilization, but their stories will definitely open your eyes.

Peace on Facebook

2011-02-14T09:52:00.003-05:00

Lots of news these days about what role Facebook and Twitter played in the Egyptian revolution, with some people extolling the wonders of social networks and others reminding them that plenty of revolutions happened just fine before Facebook came along.

Overlooked is the more subtle, ongoing role the web plays in making connections and building social capital. Peace.Facebook.com is a great site, the highlight of which is a chart showing the huge number of connections made on Facebook between traditionally conflict-prone groups. In our minds, we think of Israelis and Palestinians as completely segregated and full of hatred for one another, but if there are 19,000 friend connections made between the two groups every day, how bad can it be? Likewise, there are a stunning 85,000 daily connections made between Indians and Pakistanis.

The site also shows the results of a survey asking "Do you think we will achieve world peace within 50 years?" While it's interesting to see the different results among countries, I think this is a less useful exercise. It perpetuates a big misconception about peace - that it is a single, all-or-nothing event. How would we know if we hit "world peace" … does that mean the end of all wars? What about simmering conflicts among non-state actors? Does it mean the end of all crime? Does it mean we're all singing together on a hill about Coke? The loftiness of the question is most likely contributing to the low percentage responding "yes": only nine percent in the U.S. Not even I think everything is going to be perfect in 50 years. A lot better than today, yes. But defined as "world peace"? From what I've seen, it's better to keep our goals tangible and well-defined, and thus achievable.

Check out the peace.facebook site here.

Nostalgia & Technochondria

2011-02-01T22:28:00.004-05:00

DC Comics announced last week that they would no longer be submitting their comic books to the notorious Comic Code Authority (CCA) for review. Rather than use this antiquated ratings system, DC will be using a new system of their own making. Marvel Comics, the second of the comic world's "big two" publishers, had already left the CCA several years ago. This is good news, since the Comic Code is laughingly out-of-date, having been devised during a reactionary anti-comics scare in the 1950s. Congress actually held hearings in which experts ridiculously testified that comics caused juvenile delinquency. And if you thought that the very act of Congress wasting time discussing comic books shows a dramatic lack of perspective and priority, wait till you hear this quote from the infamous psychiatrist Fredric Wertham during the hearings: "Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry." So for 60 years after that, nearly every comic published had to adhere to very specific rules that made sure, for example, that each character acted appropriately morally and that authorities were never shown in a harsh light, or risk losing market shelf space due to a lack of the Comic Code seal. Fortunately, in the past few decades, fewer and fewer people paid any attention to this backhanded censorship.

There are a lot of things to be worried about in the world, but needless to say, comic books are not one of them. Yet that type of scare repeats itself again and again, with practically every new technology and innovation (Comic books were relatively new in the 1950s, and juvenile delinquency had to come from somewhere, after all.) It sometimes has much more harmful effects than merely reducing comic book sales, though. For example, fears of genetically-modified crops have led several African nations to ban them, even though harmful effects have never been proven, and the increased crop yield and nutrition they offer might have prevented thousands (millions?) of deaths. Banning DDT is a similar story - we end up with a small environmental benefit (although even that is questionable, you can read a great Skeptoid article about it here), but at the cost of millions of lives lost to malaria.

Nick Bilton, author of I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works, lists other examples of what he calls "technochondria" in that book. Such as how bible-copying monks viewed the printing press as terribly low-quality when it was invented, and knew it wouldn't last. When trains were created, many people thought that if humans traveled at more than twenty miles per hour, they would suffocate. Some scientists believed traveling at such high speeds would simply make our bones fall apart. On Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous System was one of the many books that described these terrible afflictions, in 1867. My favorite is the fear of the New York Times in 1876, when it wrote that "the telephone may really be a device of the enemies of the Republic," because it would cause people to never again go to concert halls and church, since they could hear the music and speakers at home.

"The world has been going to hell for a long, long time," as Bilton writes. There's something in human nature that makes us believe that life was better in the past, despite all evidence to the contrary. Personally, I think it has to do with the fact that things actually were better when we were kids … but only to us, because we were kids. Kind of like how popular music was at its peak coincidentally at the same moment when we were in college, and it's never been the same since. It always takes us a little time to get used to a new technology, and then we love it, and then we want change to stop in its tracks right then, but it never does.

Great Myths about Human Behavior

2011-01-21T22:05:00.008-05:00

From 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology, which I just read, comes some myth-busting that will make you happier. Turns out, many of these myths and misconceptions err on the side of assuming people are worse than they are. Below is the truth.

1. We use more than 10 percent of our brains. This one is a big pet peeve of mine. Up to 60 percent of people believe that we only use 10 percent of our brains. No, we use it all. We know this because we have a ton of cases where someone gets some specific part of their brain mauled and subsequently has trouble performing a certain task. And because we can map the brain and watch it light up when people think about different things. And because the authors trace the root of the myth to the 1936 saying "People only use 10% of their potential", a more plausible but still made-up statistic.

2. Our teen years aren't that turbulent. Studies show that only about 20 percent of teens undergo the turmoil attributed to the stereotype of their age. Most teens report generally happy moods and harmonious relations with their parents.

3. Neither are our mid-life crises, a standard movie cliché that occurs much more often in fiction than in real life.

4. Similarly, "Empty Nest Syndrome" is also an uncommon disorder, and not to be expected as a rule.

5. Amnesia is also rare. (And the loss of past memories particularly so; most amnesiacs have trouble forming new memories.) That's the good news. The bad news about amnesia is, if you have it, a second bump on the head will not cure it. Hard knocks to the head, as a rule, only make things worse.

6. Modern society is not that stressful. The idea that living in modern, Western society is more stressful than living in undeveloped countries is a myth. Turns out, it's very stressful to live in a poor country.

7. Men don't think about sex an average of every 7 seconds. I've heard this one a lot over the years. It's an urban legend, which should be obvious, since it sounds tremendously impractical. It would mean that if I gave a half-hour presentation at work, for example, I would have thought of sex 257 times during it. Quite a feat.

8. Men and women are both from Earth. The authors break down the idea that men and women (Mars & Venus) communicate in totally different ways into several more specific questions. They find that the differences, while some exist, are mostly statistically insignificant.

9. Many childhood victims of sexual abuse grow up well-adjusted. There's a myth that childhood sexual abuse invariably leads to psychological problems as an adult, but thankfully, while this does happen in some cases, it is far less common than we might think. Fortunately, children are much more resilient than we tend to give them credit for.

10. Subliminal messages aren't real. They don't work. If they did, advertising companies would try to use them, I'm sure, but they don't. Our brains are smarter than that. Sorry, plot of Josie & the Pussycats.

11. Crimes don't increase during the full moon. Nor does mental illness, etc etc. Can you think of any easier urban legend to measure and debunk? This one has been straightforwardly disproved time and time again but refuses to go away.

Turns out when we stop relying simply on "common sense" and stories we see on TV, and instead look at decades of hard research and statistics, we find most of humanity's not that bad, after all.

Check out the book on Amazon.

Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky

2011-01-17T19:29:00.001-05:00

Here are some excerpts from Cognitive Surplus, a recent book by Clay Shirky that I enjoyed. His previous book, Here Comes Everybody, had some ideas that contributed to The Secret Peace. This new book has a lot of parallels, as well.

Shirky calls what we have today a "cognitive surplus": a surfeit of intellect, energy, and free time that has been growing for several decades now but was previously subsumed into television viewing. Now, with new outlets to funnel that creativity - the web - we are witnessing a revolution of creativity, and a new wealth of writing and art.

"Scarcity is easier to deal with than abundance, because when something becomes rare, we simply think it more valuable than it was before, a conceptually easy change. Abundance is different: its advent means we can start treating previously valuable things as if they were cheap enough to waste, which is to say cheap enough to experiment with. Because abundance can remove the trade-offs we're used to, it can be disorienting to the people who've grown up with scarcity. When a resource is scarce, the people who manage it often regard it as valuable in itself, without stopping to consider how much of the value is tied to scarcity. For years after the price of long-distance calls collapsed in the United States, my older relatives would still announce that a call was "long distance." Such calls had previously been special, because they were expensive; it took people years to understand that cheap long-distance calls removed the rationale for regarding them as inherently valuable."

"The low-quality material that comes with increased freedom accompanies the experimentation that creates the stuff we all end up prizing. That was true of the printing press in the fifteenth century, and it's true of the social media today. In comparison with a previous age's scarcity, abundance brings a rapid fall in average quality, but over time experimentation pays off, diversity expands the range of the possible, and the best work becomes better than what went before. After the printing press, publishing came to matter more because the expansion of literary, cultural, and scientific writing benefited society, even though it was accompanied by a whole lot of junk."

"A much harder thing to explain to them [Shirky's young college students] is this: if you were a citizen of that world [the world of a few decades ago], and you had something you needed to say in public, you couldn't. Period. Media content wasn't produced by consumers; if you had the wherewithal to say something in public, you weren't a consumer anymore, by definition. Movie reviews came from movie reviewers. Public opinions came from opinion columnists. Reporting came from reporters. … In those days, anyone could produce a photograph, a piece of writing, or a song, but they had no way to make it widely available. Sending messages to the public wasn't for the public to do, and, lacking the ability to easily connect with one another, our motivation to create was subdued."

Talking about how surprised we are that people are creating so much, or that older people are using computers: "Many of the unexpected uses of communication tools are surprising because our old beliefs about human nature were so lousy."

Here's a link to get the book on Amazon.

Here's a grainy photo of Clay Shirky and myself (awkwardly holding a microphone), on the right, on stage on a panel at the NY Tech Meetup several years ago.

200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes: Nothing more clearly demonstrates the story of progress than this exuberant Swedish guy

2010-12-23T01:17:00.004-05:00

Hans Rosling begins this video by saying, "Having the data is not enough. I have to show it in ways that people both enjoy and understand." And boy, does he ever. Really, Rosling is amazing. Just watch this 4-minute video.

I can't think of a better way to encapsulate the gist of The Secret Peace than with this video. It clearly and creatively shows the progress of the world, at least in terms of two of the most compelling facets of the story, wealth and health.

Other facets are available on Rosling's web site, Gapminder. This is a list of indicators - a long list - that includes everything from countries' birth rate, to unemployment, to the average marriage age, to cell phone adoption, to working hours. On any of them, by selecting "Visualize", you have control to move the slider and advance forward and back through the decades at a whiz, watching the countries of the world dance like carbonation, all slowly drifting toward peace.

What is the secret to happiness?

2010-12-07T21:50:00.002-05:00

I didn't write The Secret Peace to try to make everyone happier. I did it to reveal information that I think is the truth; as a corrective to a common sense view and media perspective that I think is incorrect because it is too pessimistic. If my research had revealed that the media is often too optimistic, I would have written in the opposite direction. Thankfully, it didn't.

Nevertheless, if world peace is the goal, and one way to define that is a world where everyone is happy, it's certainly worthwhile to work toward our own and others' happiness. Lots of good research is coming out now (some of it counter-intuitive) that is finally shedding a light on just what makes us happy, and author Dan Buettner is at the forefront of it.

Listen to this 6-minute clip of Dan being interviewed on NPR. He's traveled to some of the happiest places on earth to discover their secrets: the security of Singapore, the tolerance and humility of Denmark, and the good weather and environmental consciousness of San Luis Obispo. In all the places, researchers have discovered that things like socializing, less commuting, getting married, and spending money on experiences rather than objects tend to make people happier. Listen to the interview for more great obvious-in-hindsight advice on happiness.

The Secret Peace is now available on the Kindle!

2010-12-05T00:45:00.009-05:00

The Secret Peace reveals the hidden history of current events: that the world is heading toward peace, believe it or not. Now you can find out all the good news on your Kindle, iPad, iPhone, and more!

And if you prefer good ol'-fashioned paper books, follow the link below to Amazon. (Makes a great, uplifting gift for the holidays, too!)

Read the book already?

If you liked it (or even if you didn't, but you have some useful feedback), why not add a review on Amazon? It only takes a minute and it's much appreciated. The link below goes directly to the review page; you can just start typing.

Write a review on Amazon

Thanks!
- Jesse

What would you rather be in: a war or a car?

2010-11-26T18:34:00.005-05:00

Military deaths are a controversial subject in any country, at any time. I talk about them in my book; how the types of wars we're fighting nowadays are generally less fatal than in the past. I found some interesting numbers that relate to that in Superfreakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

They write than from 2002 to 2008 (the book is from 2009), there were an average of 1,643 active military personal deaths a year. Weirdly, if you look at the mid-1980s, when we weren't fighting any active wars, there were more than 2,100 military deaths per year. Why? Well, the military is actually smaller now, and we also have better medical care, so more people with injuries survive. But also, it seems that the accidental death rate back then was higher than the death rate by hostile fire now. Strange.

Looking at the chart I made here (click on it to see it larger), with the most recent wars at top, you can see just how few casualties we've had recently when compared to some of our conflicts in the past. In fact, both the current Afghan war and the first Gulf War in 1991 have too few deaths for Excel to even generate a bar for them. (Of course, none of these numbers take into account the other side of the conflict, including their civilians. The Civil War number is so high in part because both sides of the war are included, and it took place on U.S. soil (which few wars have) so civilians were killed, too.)
This information is all incredibly useful so that we can keep these conflicts in perspective when debating their merits. Here's another interesting tidbit from Superfreakonomics: Since 1982, about 42,000 active U.S. military personnel have been killed - roughly the same number of Americans who die in traffic accidents every year. So maybe the best lifesaving bang for our tax buck would be to pull everyone out of Iraq and Afghanistan and put all that money into making tons of safe public transportation instead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war

Presenting the Future of Peace

2010-11-22T23:40:00.006-05:00

I had the privilege of giving a talk a few months ago on "The Future of Peace." I forgot to post it to the site, but I had a few requests, so here it is. Download the PPS file. I tried to make the slideshow short, fun, and to the point. Some sample slides:

Good riddance, Rinderpest

2010-11-21T13:38:00.002-05:00

This was reported in Futurific Leading Indicators, an extremely expensive report I subscribe to that is well worth it for its use of the word futurific alone:

"In only the second elimination of a disease in history [smallpox famously being the other, in 1980], rinderpest - a virus that used to kill cattle by the millions, leading to famine and death among humans - has been declared wiped off the face of the earth. Rinderpest, which means "cattle plague" in German, does not infect humans … but for millennia in Asia, Europe and Africa it wiped out cattle, water buffalo, yaks and other animals needed for meat, milk, plowing and cart-pulling."

"The official ceremony in which the World Organization for Animal Health will declare the world rinderpest-free is scheduled for May. (That organization … was created in 1929 chiefly to fight rinderpest.) … 'This is something the entire global community can be proud of,' said Dr. William R. White, director of the United States Department of Agriculture's foreign animal disease diagnostic laboratory on Plum Island, New York."

This image should help you visualize rinderpest. Unfortunately, in real life, it looks much more boring: you can see it here on Wikipedia.

A single chart of the world economy

2010-11-18T00:00:00.000-05:00

Yesterday we looked at a bunch of complex charts about the Millennium Development Goals, so today I thought I'd simplify it and just post one simple chart I found in The Economist. This reassuring line dips drastically during our global recession, but can now be seen having bounced completely back.

Note that the key element here is the depiction of global GDP, not just the U.S. Our economy is certainly not quite that strong yet. But we're doing ok, all things considered. Just read what Warren Buffett had to say in this adorable op-ed in the New York Times yesterday. He praises "Uncle Sam" for saving us from a much worse downturn: "overall, your actions were remarkably effective." Check it out here.

Hey, how are the Millennium Development Goals doing?

2010-11-16T08:26:00.004-05:00

Since we're just about done 1% of the new millennium, I thought it'd be a good time to check in with the Millennium Development Goals. These are the goals that all UN member states have agreed to achieve by the year 2015. There are eight goals, and while progress has been mixed, some countries have made remarkable progress, and many have even already surpassed their goals, five years early.

For example, in 1990, 77 percent of the world was using an "improved" water source, but now it's up to 87 percent, close to the MD Goal of 88 percent. And, in the chart below, you can see the progress each region of the world has made towards reducing the infant mortality rate (under-five, actually). Every region shows significant progress, with even Sub-Saharan Africa, the notable straggler here, still reducing their number from 184 (per 1,000 births) in 1990 to 144 today, a 21 percent reduction.

Or look at the number of people living with HIV today, as shown in another chart from the MDG 2010 Report. That number is still rising, but since the number of newly-infected people has been dropping quickly, this is due in part to fewer people dying of the disease. All 3 trends are illustrated in the chart below.

Lastly, let's look at the big one: the world's poor, measured in the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day. At least 15 poor countries, many in East Asia and Southeast Asia, have already met their 2015 goals, due to the drastic poverty reduction in China and other countries. Other regions are progressing strongly as well, with only Western Asia and Russia seeing setbacks. If we look at the developing world overall, we see that 46 percent of the population lived in extreme poverty in 1990, but by 2005 that had been reduced to 27 percent, nearly meeting the MD Goal already.

You can see more of these charts on Wikipedia here.

Again, trust your neighbors: trick-or-treating is safe

2010-11-07T15:57:00.005-05:00

This topic is a perennial pet peeve of mine, and I mention it in my book. It parallels my last post (about Kitty Genovese), as another example of misinformation that leads to less trust in society and a more pessimistic worldview than is warranted.

This article in the Daily Herald, "Schaumburg Halloween candy tampering a hoax, police say", is about a 16-year-old boy who, to get attention, stuck a needle in his own Halloween candy and claimed he found it there.

The article runs along fine until the last paragraph, which states:

"According to websites like Snopes.com and Ask.com, true incidents of trick-or-treat candy tampering and other related examples of “Halloween sadism” have been documented and, while rare, are not urban legends as they’re sometimes claimed to be."

Which is wrong. If you go to Snopes and look up Halloween poisonings, a big red circle is sitting next to a very clear "FALSE".

I recommend the Snopes article to everyone; I won't repeat all its details here. It lists several incidents, but none fit the story of neighbors inserting needles or poison or razor blades into candy and them giving them out for Halloween. The story has been around for 50 years, and is simply not true.

I think it's amazing that the Daily Herald article itself is about a hoax (it even clearly says "hoax" in the title), and they are aware of Snopes.com and even mention it, and yet still can not give up the belief that Halloween poisonings are real. It's like they threw "Snopes.com" in there without anyone clicking through and actually reading it.

It's sad that it's so difficult for us to believe people wouldn't poison kids. As I said in my last post, trust your neighbors a little more. They're not as bad as you think.

Update: Ok, there is a second Snopes article here that focuses on needles, not poison. It's weird that there would be two separate articles on this. Nevertheless, it seems like many more cases involving pins and needles have been documented than poison. However, most were revealed to be hoaxes, with the exception of one event in Minneapolis in 2000. No one was hurt.

Trust your neighbors; if you were being murdered they would probably help you

2010-10-31T20:08:00.006-04:00

Have any of you, like me, had to sit through a Sociology class in which they discussed the 1964 Kitty Genovese murder? Or, maybe you've seen one of the estimated 1,000 books, articles, or documentaries about the case? (Alan Moore used it as part of his vicious vigilante Rorschach's motivation in Watchmen.) If you're old enough to remember it, perhaps you read the infamous front-page New York Times article that kicked off the nationwide media frenzy. It started:

"For more than half an hour, thirty-eight respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens."

It's no exaggeration to say that this story had far-reaching effects on the American psyche for decades to follow. The crime didn't matter, but the fact that 38 people watched it, with either the classic apathy of "I didn't want to get involved" (the famous quote from one of the witnesses), or worse, a sick voyeuristic glee, well, that shocked the world. Nothing better encapsulated the feeling of traditional American values coming apart at the seams. Nothing better expressed the fears of rising crime, the obvious dehumanizing consequences of urban living, and the just-plain-nastiness of New Yorkers, to boot. As Jim Rasenburger describes in American Heritage,

"The Times article detonated on breakfast tables, then mushroomed into an expanding cloud of gloom. Newspapers disseminated the story across the country. The 38 witnesses were roundly and personally vilified, but to those in the business of worrying about such things, their actions—or rather, inactions—reflected a broad crisis in American society. As clergymen decried the incident from their Sunday pulpits, politicians spoke gravely of the country’s moral lethargy. Mike Wallace broadcast a CBS radio special called “The Apathetic American.” Loudon Wainwright concluded in Life magazine that Americans were “becoming a callous, chickenhearted and immoral people.”"

So, naturally, it's not true. In recent years, several people have stepped up to point out the inconsistencies in this tale. The mistakes include:

There weren't 38 "eyewitnesses", as the article claimed. There were perhaps 7 or so. There were several more "earwitnesses" who heard various bits and pieces, but even they don't add up to 38 people.

One reason that there weren't more witnesses was that the attack happened at 3:20 in the morning. Most of Kitty's neighbors were asleep.

The article was based on an error-filled police report. For example, there were actually two attacks, not three.

The first attack took place in view of some windows, but from far away (and in the dark), it appeared to witnesses to be a domestic dispute. The woman walked away on her own, and her staggering appeared to be drunkenness.

Only one witness ever saw the knife.

The second attack took place shortly thereafter, when the murderer caught up to Kitty in a foyer-type space in the back of a building, out of the line of sight of anyone.

There was no 9-1-1 emergency line in 1964, so calling the police meant waiting for the operator to connect you. In fact, perhaps the only good thing to come out of the aftermath of the inflated media coverage of the Genovese murder was more support for establishing 9-1-1, in 1968.

Nevertheless, at least one person did call the police, and possibly several. The police arrived later than they should, but they arrived.

The article claimed that the police didn't arrive until after Kitty's death. In reality, she died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

Kitty's murderer was caught several days later when a Corona (another Queens neighborhood) man saw someone acting suspiciously and called the police. Yeah.

So instead of 38 people watching Kitty die, we get a handful of people, some of whom called the police and some of whom probably should have, but didn't. Their inaction probably wasn't due to apathy but confusion. For example, our upstairs neighbors here fight all the time, and we can hear them yell. I've called the police on more than one occasion, but not every time. You have to make a judgment call and only report something if you think the seriousness or violence warrants it. Perhaps over the years of living in apartments in the city, there have been sounds in the night that I half-sleepingly heard that were actually crimes but I never reported. How responsible should I feel for that?

Reading about the fallacies in the Genovese story got me madder than usual, really struck home. It's because this story is one of those rare events that becomes a public myth, much larger than itself. It warps people's perspectives for years, even decades, and no amount of mitigating caveats and dry counter-statistics can change the mind of someone won over by the visceral impact, the resonance, of the myth.

(Perhaps it's hitting home because I used to work for Meetup, a site that brings people together in community groups and is thus dependent on social capital and neighborly trust. So, trying to grow the site including trying to get people to abandon irrational fears of their neighbors. People often left comments after Meetups expressing surprise at how "friendly" and "normal" the attendees were, revealing their low expectations.)

How different would Americans have felt - still feel - about the neighborhood of Kew Gardens, about Queens, about New Yorkers, about city living, about their own neighbors, about humanity, had that article not been published? It's impossible to know how many subtle demographic and social trends would have turned out differently. And when trust disappears and social capital erodes, it turns these negative myths into self-fulfilling prophecies that then take decades of hard work of community-building to overcome.

Are we in a cultural golden age right now?!?

2010-10-04T07:48:00.002-04:00

Are we living in a cultural golden age? Since this is a blog about positive trends, you've probably guessed I'm going to say the answer is Yes. I go into it quite a bit in The Secret Peace book, a lot of which is based on Steven Johnson's work in Everything Bad is Good For You. I'm revisiting it again here because I just found this interesting article in the A. V. Club, in which Leonard Pierce delves deeply into the issue.

Pierce's main concern is not whether or not we're living in a cultural golden age - to him, as to me, it's just obvious we are. ("… the older I got, the less patience I had for the retro-minded bores of every age who bitched and moaned about how nothing was as good as it was during the years when they just happened to be in college.") His concern seems to be why people don't believe it. After all, "With communications technology, increased globalism, and the seemingly endless proliferation of the Internet, it literally has never been easier to listen to any kind of music, watch any kind of movie, read any kind of literature, or experience any kind of culture you choose. Films that only two decades ago were almost impossible to see outside of big-city festivals or film schools can now show up in your mailbox within a day or two of a request for them. Television shows—in what even the jaded admit is a golden age of television—can now be watched in a variety of ways at almost any time, often without advertising. Technology has made rare books less rare, cult comics less cultish, and global culture more local."

He comes up with some really thoughtful explanations for why it's hard for people to believe we have it good nowadays. Check out the article to find out what they are.

Majority of world now educated

2010-09-19T08:34:00.003-04:00

The WorldWatch Institute reports that educational attainment is steadily rising worldwide. In 2010, worldwide, over 61 percent of adults (15 and older) finished at least some secondary school (high school) during their lifetimes. This had been 36 percent back in 1970 and 50 percent as recently as 1990 (see chart I made.) This leaves now only about 1 in 10 adult males and 1 in 5 adult females worldwide who have had no schooling whatsoever.

Besides the fact that education should be considered an a priori good in and of itself, rising levels of education help push forward so many other secret peace trends. As I mentioned in a recent post, I believe a major force pushing peace forward is the spread of information to a wider base of people. With more information in the world, and more people able to access it and understand it, those people are also now able to process it and generate their own new knowledge, contributing to the virtuous cycle.

Wear your seat belt!

2010-09-11T08:51:00.002-04:00

I never thought I'd be writing this, because I am decidedly not a car person. I moved to NYC and got rid of my car seven years ago because I hate to drive. And a few months ago my wife had her foot run over by a van! Nevertheless, I just got around to reading Superfreakonomics (which was a great read, and, not surprisingly, is being flagged by spellcheck here), and it has some nuggets of positive news about driving.

Nearly 40,000 people died in U.S. traffic accidents in 1950, it says. That's roughly the same number as today, but that masks the good news, which is that we drive a lot more today and there are a lot more cars on the road. So the rate has dropped: the rate of death per mile driven was five times higher in 1950 than it is today.

Seat belts are a huge part of that, and the book describes how Robert McNamara (yes, that Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense one) was the person at Ford who pushed for them originally. Prior to that, they were used in airplanes, but no one had thought to put them in cars. However, turns out it's much easier to install seat belts than it is to get people to wear them, and for decades, they didn't. But the rate of people wearing their seat belts in the U.S. has risen from 11% in the 1970s to 21% in the mid-1980s, 61% in the mid 1990s, and over 80% today. It's estimated that seat belts reduce the risk of death in an accident by as much as 70%; since 1975 they have saved about 250,000 lives. Each seat belt costs about $25 to put in a car, making them one of the most cost-effective lifesaving devices ever invented.

PS> Btw, if we go back even farther in time, transportation was even more dangerous. In 1900, for example, horse accidents killed 200 New Yorkers, 1 in every 17,000 residents. And that's not taking into consideration diseases spread by widespread horse dung (200,000 horses in NYC meant 5 million pounds of horse manure a day.) In 2007, 274 New Yorkers died in car accidents, but with more people that works out to only 1 in every 30,000 residents.

New buses revolutionize my street

2010-09-06T15:11:00.003-04:00

We live in Manhattan between 1st and 2nd Avenues. Over the last two months or so, the city has repaved and repainted those two streets, and it's all part of a big experiment to revolutionize the city's bus system. I read about it in this New York Magazine article.

See, it's simply too expensive and time-consuming to work on the subways now, unfortunately, but the buses are super cheap by comparison, offering great return on transit investment. Recently, cities around the world, such as London and Bogotá, have had a lot of success revamping their bus systems. So New York is trying it out in a few places, including these two avenues now. "These, along with the Bx12 line in the Bronx, are being promoted as trial programs for what [MTA head Jay Walder] hopes will be, by the end of his tenure, a reconfiguration of the city’s streets. 'When the city adopts a world-class ‘Bus Rapid Transit’ system, people are going to have a tough time, efficiency-wise, telling a bus apart from a subway—it’s going to be like a subway with a view,' predicts Kyle Wiswall, general counsel for the Tri-State Transportation Campaign." Here are some of the great ideas they're implementing:

The buses have their own dedicated lanes, reserved exclusively for them, which really improves the overall speed.

New buses are built lower to the ground, making them easier to board and thus speeding up boarding times. They also have two entrances.

You pay before you board, from a vending machine that gives you a receipt.

Bus shelters are larger and hold more people.

Soon, buses will be equipped with signal priority, meaning they can keep traffic lights green as they approach.

There are new exclusive bike lanes, too, and parking has been moved to the other side of them (meaning, curb, bike lane, parking, car driving lanes, bus lane.) So, parked cars form a buffer between the bike lane and the rest of the traffic, which is much safer.

I'm anxious to see how this works and hope it's successful enough to be implemented elsewhere in the city soon. My alternative is waiting for the Second Avenue Subway, which was first proposed in 1929 and still not due to open (in part) till 2016. Until then, I'll happily take the bus.

Photo: You can see the new First Avenue includes speed boosts!

The economic crisis reveals clues to pushing the secret peace forward

2010-08-28T09:00:00.003-04:00

I just finished reading The Big Short, Michael Lewis's account of the subprime mortgage crisis from the perspective of the few rare people who saw it coming and bet on it, shorting the market and eventually making lots of money. It is brilliantly written and fun to read, highly recommended. Listen to this passage, in which he describes one group of those rare investors starting their investigation:

"Typically when they entered a new market - because they'd found some potential accident waiting to happen that seemed worth betting on - they found an expert to serve as a jungle guide. This market was so far removed from their experience that it took them longer than usual to find help. ... Eventually they figured out that language served a different purpose inside the bond market than it did in the outside world. Bond market terminology was designed less to convey meaning than to bewilder outsiders. Overpriced bonds were not "expensive"; overpriced bonds were "rich", which almost made them sound like something you should buy. The floors of subprime mortgage bonds were not called floors - or anything else than might lead the bond buyer to form any sort of concrete image in his mind - but tranches. The bottom tranche - the risky ground floor - was not called the ground floor but the mezzanine, or the mezz, which made it sound less like a dangerous investment and more like a highly prized seat in a domed stadium. A CDO composed of nothing but the riskiest, mezzanine layer of subprime mortgages was not called a subprime-backed CDO but a "structured finance CDO." "There was so much confusion about the different terms," said Charlie. "In the course of trying to figure it out, we realize that there's a reason why it doesn't quite make sense to us. It's because it doesn't quite make sense." ... The subprime market had a special talent for obscuring what needed to be clarified."

If the secret peace were half of a vast historical Manichean struggle, that paragraph would be a perfect description of its evil dark half. In the book, I claim that the main force pushing civilization closer to peace is the snowballing spread of information. If that's true, then theoretically anything that hinders the free flow of information is detrimental to the cause of peace. And here we see a perfect example. The obfuscation described above was a huge contributing factor to the entire economic crisis.

Other examples abound. My wife and I are constantly surprised at how difficult it is to navigate the health insurance system; that's a sign that it was intentionally created that way. For the same reason, some stores make it hard to find prices on products, and some web sites make it hard to unsubscribe from newsletters. These are, sadly, often not accidents or signs of bad design; they are signs of skillful design, at least from the point of view of evil.

But the whole theory of the secret peace is that the good news is outweighing the bad. And that means there are more instances now of people sharing information and being transparent than in the past. So I'll leave you with two quick examples from the NY Times:

Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s
By Gina Kolata

"In 2003, a group of scientists and executives from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the drug and medical-imaging industries, universities and nonprofit groups joined in a project that experts say had no precedent: a collaborative effort to find the biological markers that show the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in the human brain. Now, the effort is bearing fruit with a wealth of recent scientific papers on the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s using methods like PET scans and tests of spinal fluid. More than 100 studies are under way to test drugs that might slow or stop the disease. And the collaboration is already serving as a model for similar efforts against Parkinson’s disease."

In a Twist, Nonprofits Review Technology Failures
By Stephanie Strom

"Technology’s potential to bring about social good is widely extolled, but its failures, until now, have rarely been discussed by nonprofits who deploy it. The experience in Guyana might never have come to light without FailFaire, a recurring party whose participants revel in revealing technology’s shortcomings. ... Behind the events is a Manhattan-based nonprofit group, MobileActive, a network of people and organizations trying to improve the lives of the poor through technology. Its members hope light-hearted examinations of failures will turn into learning experiences — and prevent others from making the same mistakes."

Crime STILL dropping, despite recession

2010-08-18T22:13:00.001-04:00

USA Today: the FBI announced that "violent crime dropped 5.5% last year despite a deep recession that has made millions desperate. It was the third such drop in a row and a continuation of the downward trend going on for almost 20 years. News coverage of the event was perfunctory, the political posturing minimal."

Common sense says that crime would go up when the economy's bad, right? But, "As the Great Recession demonstrates, losing a job doesn't suddenly turn law-abiding people into criminals." Violent crime has dropped more than 40 percent from its peak in the early 1990s.

This raises two questions: Why is crime so low? And, why don't people know it?

As to why crime is so low, there are many theories. From what I've read, I tend to think the three largest contributing factors (there are probably many) are better policing methods, better anti-crime technology (more video cameras, for example, and easier ways to find stolen cars), and more people in prison. Incarcerating a record number of people causes other problems, though, which I get into more in the Secret Peace book.

And why don't people know about the low crime rate? Why do some of mine and my wife's relatives still fear that when we walk around New York City at night, we are really walking around New York City circa 1975? Probably for the same reason everyone doesn't know other Secret Peace trends, too - they're gradual and less easily conceived of as compelling news stories. Here's hoping that word spreads, since having low crime but still living in fear is no fun at all, and diminishes the hard work that the police and others put into getting us here over the last few decades.

Forty billionaires donate to charity instead of buying panda chairs

2010-08-15T20:09:00.002-04:00

This weekend, while furniture shopping in SoHo for my friend, we saw a chair made out of stuffed panda toys. The price tag? $75,000. The rich really are different - and by different, I mean crazy.

But maybe not all of them. Last week, Warren Buffet announced that 40 wealthy individuals and families have signed on to the Giving Pledge, a project he started with Bill and Melinda Gates. This means those rich folks will be giving away more than 50 percent of their wealth (in some cases, much more.)

As this Daily Finance article describes, "Each person who chooses to pledge the bulk of their wealth to charitable causes will make this statement publicly, along with a letter explaining their decision. The Giving Pledge is a moral commitment to give, not a legal contract. It does not involve pooling money or supporting a particular set of causes or organizations. At an annual event, those who take the pledge will come together to share ideas and learn from each other."

The list includes Mayor Bloomberg, Pierre Omidyar, Ted Turner, Paul Allen, and Barry Diller (who is of special interest to me since I just started working for his company, IAC.)

Of course, some pundits must look at everything, even these charitable acts, through a polarized political spectrum. Evan Newmark (WSJ.com) suspects that Buffet is providing cover for President Obama to raise taxes (aka let the Bush tax cuts expire) by reminding us how rich the rich still are. This seems like a stretch. Steven Perlstein points out in The Washington Post that theoretically, these donations actually reinforce "trickle down" theories and make the case that private donations can be more effective than government spending. He thinks that those people donating should focus instead on just paying their full taxes, since the mega-rich often have an easier time dodging their fair share, and the money spent is also then (ideally) accountable to citizens.

But I did a lot of research into Buffet's and the Gates' charitable histories and motivations for my book, and I'm choosing to look at this a lot less cynically. Nothing is forcing these uber-rich people to donate; they could be wasting money on panda chairs. These billionaires all have their own individual reasons and made this commitment as a personal choice. Good for them, and hopefully this continues to set a great example for others.

"The battle for gay rights has been won" ... somewhat

2010-07-31T21:02:00.003-04:00

"The battle for gay rights has been won" ... well, in Britain anyway, as described by Julian Glover in The Guardian, which I read reprinted in The Week. He concludes that since Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative, hosted a big Downing Street reception for "lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender Britain", no single party can now claim to be the natural home of the gay vote. Gays do continue to face some discrimination, but "the fact that someone is gay or lesbian need no longer be their primary defining characteristic."

Public opinion is shifting in America, too. Despite frequent headlines over the past few years about controversy over gay marriage, Americans are becoming more receptive to almost every other issue regarding gay rights. For example, in May, one poll found that 78 percent of Americans would like to see the ban on openly gay soldiers lifted (compare this to a much more closely divided split in the 1990s on the issue.)

In related news, Argentina recently became the first country in Latin America to legalise same-sex marriage, after fierce debate. Actually, it's only the 10th country to do so worldwide (along with Belgium, Canada, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, and some parts of Mexico and the US), although another 20 countries perform civil unions, and they are recognized in a growing number of other places, too.

Shareable interview and IndieReader

2010-07-20T21:29:00.001-04:00

Hey everyone,

Thought you'd be interested in this recent interview on Shareable.net: The Speed of Good Trends. Rachel Botsman (co-author with Roo Rogers of What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption) was kind enough to interview me about The Secret Peace, and came up with some excellent thought-provoking questions. ("It's 2020, how do you think technology will have transformed democracy?" is a good example.)

The book is also now available for sale on IndieReader. if you're reading this, I'm sure you own a copy of my book already, but browse IndieReader for a great variety of books. Each book is vetted and reviewed on the site to ensure quality, and I got a very nice staff review from Kathryn Livingston. Check it out here.

Wow, Hiroshima is doing great! ... Or is it?

2010-07-14T09:55:00.012-04:00

I received the following email forward from a friend. Follow along with me and you can practically smell my skepticism:

SUBJECT: Fwd: THIS IS AN INTERESTING REALITY CHECK

(All caps - already a good sign.)

THIS IS AN INTERESTING REALITY CHECK ...

(Comic Sans, giant font … even better.)

What happened to the radiation that's supposed to last thousands of years?? ... What's The Death Rate? ...

(Are these questions meant to be rhetorical? Sarcastic? A few additional sentences would have helped indicate this was written by someone who can string thoughts together coherently.)

HIROSHIMA 1945

(Now imagine those 3 photos all much larger but completely mismatched sizes.)

We all know that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed in August 1945 after explosion of atomic bombs.

(Almost a grammatically correct sentence.)

However, we know little about the progress made by the people of that land during the past 64 years.

(Yeah, what have the Japanese been up to, anyway? Last I heard from them, some farmers had asked me to come help their tiny feudal village with a bandit problem. It's certainly not like they're the world's 3rd-largest economy or anything.)

HIROSHIMA - 64 YEARS LATER

(Imagine 9 similar photos there, all of the same glittery cotton-candy Tron Vegas wonderland city of the future. Incredibly beautiful photography.)

So, what to do with that? If true, it is awesome, and I could write a Secret Peace blog post about the good news. But, all signs pointed to hoax. So, I looked it up on Snopes.com. Nothing. Good sign (I can't recall Snopes ever failing me before), but I couldn't believe it, so I kept Googling increasingly specific sentences from the email, and sure enough, there was a site debunking it.

It's a hoax: the present-day photos are actually from the city of Yokohama (Japan's 2nd-largest city.)

It's always difficult to discern the motives of hoaxsters. Is the goal here just to make us feel better as Americans in case we have any lingering guilt over being the only country to ever use a nuclear weapon? I mean, it was 65 years ago; myself and most other readers certainly didn't have anything to do with it personally (although it did happen on my birthday.) The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki aren't the most controversial American historical events by far; people may be conflicted about Afghanistan now, or the Vietnam War, but WWII remains fairly non-divisive here.

At any rate, whatever the reasons, the fact remains that's it's a hoax, so there's no Secret Peace news here, right?

I thought so at first, but then I realized several positive ironies I want to point out.

First, why not use an example that's real? How about Tokyo? As Wikipedia puts it, "The bombing of Tokyo in 1944 and 1945, with 75,000 to 200,000 killed and half of the city destroyed, was almost as devastating as the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined." And now Tokyo is inarguably one of the world's largest and most impressive cities. (We know the answer to why they didn't use Tokyo: it's because most Americans aren't familiar with its bombing, and nuclear bombs are more dramatic and compelling.)

Second, Yokohama is still real. Those are still real photos in the email forward. Look at this one:

Nice, right? Hey, even after getting nuked, the "people of that land" (ugh) managed to build this awesome city. Why is that less of an achievement because it happens to be 400 miles east of Hiroshima?

Third, and most ironic of all, I looked up Hiroshima. I would love to find out firsthand what it's like - please chime in if anyone has been there in person - but from what I can tell from Wikipedia and elsewhere, it's a perfectly nice city.

More modest than Yokohama, but wow, what a beautiful place. In other words, the original post could have been 100 percent correct, but they had to overshoot their mark and go for the flashier photos. If I were a Hiroshimian, I'd be offended that they skipped over the hard work I did rebuilding my real city and showcased the gaudy theme park of my neighbor to the east.

Stupid, stupid terrorists!

2010-06-14T22:16:00.003-04:00

An article in The Atlantic this month by Daniel Byman and Christine Fair makes the case that terrorists are, well, stupid. In general, most of their plots are small in scope and even those fail. They're essentially a ragtag bunch of fumbling morons - lucky for us.

I think this might be overstating it a bit - click through and read the comments after the article for a good debate - but it reminded me that I do make a related argument in my book. It's useful to remind ourselves that terrorists, by definition, are not as powerful as we think they are, or as powerful as they claim to be. (The entire reason to use terrorist tactics is because you're not strong enough to use conventional tactics.) So, our fears of terrorism and the reactions we've been taking as a country are practically guaranteed to be overblown.

Of course, you can counter with this argument: better safe than sorry, right? Better to overdo it than to be unprepared.

Not a bad point of course, but nevertheless, keeping the War on Terror expansive does have the nasty side effect of playing right into the terrorists' hands in terms of messaging. Treating them as powerful warriors makes them feel as such, and makes more recruitment possible.

A better attitude? Treat them as petty criminal scum. Vandals, not soldiers. A type of (loosely) organized crime, not a righteous army. The sort of group you'd have to be a nitwit to join up with.

(The Secret Peace delves into this in a lot more detail (hint, hint.))

Image by Frank Stockton

More Improvements in Global Health

2010-06-07T16:27:00.003-04:00

The Health chapter is perhaps the least controversial in my book. It's easy to see how much global health is improving, especially over the long term - the last 100 years, say. Here's another tidbit to add to the list.

A new report revises down the estimates of the number of infants that die every year. An article in the Economist focuses on how this new way of reporting contrasts with past methods, notably the UN's. Some organizations are upset because they feel that if the public thinks that this issue is improving, they'll stop donating, even though obviously there is still a lot of work to be done. That would be a shame if that happened ... you would think it would instead be a good opportunity to say, "Look, what we're doing is working! Keep it up! Donate more and let's beat this."

The irony is that regardless of which statistical method you prefer, the trend is pretty straightforward. Check out this chart I made.

What's even crazier is that this huge decrease is happening while the total world population is still increasing*, making it an even larger success in terms of percentage.

* And no, the world's population growth isn't a big problem. It's slowing down. I talk about that quite a bit in the book.

Thanks again for the book launch!

2010-05-06T01:51:00.003-04:00

Thanks again to everyone who came out a week ago to show their support for my newly released book, The Secret Peace. We were at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum Bookstore, with over 80 people in attendance! So great to see you all and get to share the joy of the book with you.

I put together a little video of the best photos and videos of the event. Take a look (you might be in it.)

Thanks! Jesse

The Secret Peace: Book Launch Party today

2010-04-23T01:41:00.006-04:00

Stop by this evening and celebrate the release of my first book, The Secret Peace! Contrary to the picture above, there won't be fireworks, but there will be wine and snacks, and I'll be selling and signing copies of the book. Have fun mingling and show your support for the result of four hard years of research and writing! (Purchasing a book is optional, but encouraged. If you already have one, bring it and I'll sign it!)

Friday, April 23, 2010 - 7:00-9:00 pm
New York City Tenement Museum Bookstore
108 Orchard Street, Lower East Side, NYC

The Tenement Museum demonstrates a perfect example of the main thesis of the book - that the world is getting better and world history is advancing toward peace. One hundred years ago, so many people in this city lived in squalor unimaginable to us today. The Secret Peace reminds us to be thankful for what we have and to appreciate how far we've come - and then to work harder to spread peace and prosperity to the areas of the world still in need of help.

Feel free to just come by. Guests are welcome, too!

Hope to see you there!
Jesse

Thanks to Classics Book Store!

2010-04-20T09:22:00.003-04:00

My wife Rachel and I traveled down to NJ on Friday so I could do a book signing at Classics Book Store, on scenic Warren Street in Trenton. It was a beautiful day and we set up a table outside.

I sold a bunch of books, we got to chat with some passersby as well as some of our friends who stopped by, and perhaps coolest of all, Rachel handed out almost 300 Secret Peace bookmarks to people. (Turns out everyone walking by was super friendly and polite, and most of them took bookmarks. I guess they don't get as many people handing out things on the street there, like us jaded New Yorkers.)

I want to thank everyone who came by, everyone who bought a book, and especially the kind folks at Classics Books!

Eric, from Classics Books

Breaking news: Earth not sucked into black hole

2010-04-11T20:32:00.002-04:00

From The Week, April 9, 2010:

"World doesn't end: After months of delay, the Large Hadron Collider finally revved into action this week, smashing subatomic particles together at close to the speed of light in a simulation of the Big Bang. The LHC, the world's largest particle accelerator, is a 17-mile-long underground ring that cost $10 billion to build. ... Rolf-Dieter Heuer, head of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which operates the collider, says it will usher in, 'a new period of discovery in the history of mankind.' A few alarmists ... had theorized that the collider could produce a black hole that would swallow Earth and kill all 6.8 billion inhabitants. So far, that has not happened."

There's at least one post-apocalyptic fear debunked. Expect a similar blog post from me on December 22, 2012.

Saved by the Bell: The Secret Peace years

2010-04-01T10:35:00.000-04:00

I had the honor two days ago of being invited to speak at Princeton Day School to high school seniors about my book, careers and general life tidbits. They are in a class that is meant to get them thinking big-picture about their goals in life, including making a personal credo. So, they invite guest speakers in to talk about their own paths.

I focused on the message of The Secret Peace, which in a way is my own credo. I also talked about the process of publishing a book, and where creative industries are in general, since they're changing so much. Overall, I emphasized being flexible and how the careers they'll see in the future will be even more malleable and less linear than today's. After all, I'm now a Product Manager with Meetup - a job that didn't remotely exist when I was in high school.

I got to speak to about 100 kids, answered some good questions, and spoke with some really eager, dedicated students afterward as well. I want to thank Mrs. Walker (also my own teacher waaay back when) for hosting me - it was a blast!

Which New York City would you like to live in?

2010-03-06T20:13:00.000-05:00

1863 New York:

1970 New York:

2010 New York:

Yes, I know the top photo is actually a movie. It's just there for fun. The real point is to contrast the two videos. (The second one, which I took, is actually from Summer 2009.) In 1970, Times Square was a porn den and Washington Square Park was a drug haven. Today there are kids playing in the renovated park spaces of both.

I was in line at the Chipotle on St. Marks behind two guys lamenting the loss of the "old New York" - a common refrain. They could not believe there was a Chipotle on St. Mark's Place.* These are the same type of people upset that there is a Disney Store in Times Square. Me, I'll take consumerism over crime (and grime) any day. You can have too many Disney Stores, or you can have a much higher chance of an early death. Tough choice.

* Of course, they still chose to eat at Chipotle, and not the thousands of independent restaurants still thriving in the city (and on St. Mark's Place.)

The Secret Peace is finally here!

2010-02-21T21:52:00.000-05:00

For anyone who hasn't heard, after all my Facebooking and Twittering, the book is here! Buy it from Amazon today! Seriously, go do it right now. I'll wait.

What's the book about? Well, what if world peace was right around the corner? There's no doubt that countless crises consume the world. But The Secret Peace reveals thousands of pieces of evidence showing how history's true trend is one of advancing health, increasing nonviolence, receding poverty, and expanding equal rights. This isn't an excuse to pat ourselves on the back, however, but a powerful call to action to step up our efforts to spread peace worldwide.

I also want to say thanks for your support!

I'm so grateful for all the support I've received during the last four years of researching and writing The Secret Peace. (Take a look, you might be in the acknowledgments!) If you know me well and want to continue your support, please forward this email along to your friends and acquaintances. Post it to Facebook. Tweet it. Buy multiple copies of the book, so you can read it more than once. And of course it also makes a great gift.

Thanks again, I hope you enjoy it!
- Jesse

PS. Stay tuned for info about the release party!

Collaborative Consumption

2010-01-31T19:06:00.000-05:00

Last week I spoke with Rachel Botsman & Roo Rogers, authors of the upcoming book What's Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. They are tracking the rise of new economies based on sharing, swapping, and lending - democratically distributing ownership. These new economies are being made possible by new technology, and have the potential to radically reduce the costs of certain goods for people as well as lower their environmental impact.

This concept has already upended certain industries. Netflix, which is basically just a better way of sharing DVDs that other people have watched, has eaten into DVD sales. Its ease of use and
recommendation/filtering engine make it superior to old video stores. Ebay and Craigslist have given people much more efficient ways to get rid of products they don't need anymore, without making them go to waste.

Botsman and Rogers point out that the Green movement often emphasizes personal sacrifice and guilt - not the most enticing bandwagon to jump onto. Instead, these new systems have the benefit of being in the users' own self-interest; in fact, that's the only way that they can work.

Several of these programs are on the cusp of going mainstream. Two that could have drastic environmental impact (for the better) are car-sharing (as Zipcar as done) and a smart energy grid, which would allow customers to sell back any energy they generate, and distribute it with less waste.

In the past, economies were small and local because not only was it difficult to communicate across large distances, it was impossible to trust people you didn't know. So, transactions were limited to people in your local circle and couldn't scale. Along came large corporations, which were able to take advantage of economies of scale and drastically mass-produce goods. Great, except in order for that to be efficient, all the goods had to be relatively similar commodities. This introduced a lot of waste as people settled for things not 100% perfect for them. In addition, buying your own copy of something (a lawn mower, say, or a DVD) was the most efficient thing to do, because it was the cheapest option. But the negative externality of environmental harm was never factored into the cost.

Today, technology can allow non-local trust. You can reliably enter into contracts with individuals around the globe, online. This is because people have ratings (think ebay or Amazon resellers.) A positive rating from 100 or 1,000 people becomes equivalent to a first-hand rating of someone we've actually met. Better, perhaps. What the authors predict, and argue for, is an aggregated reputation system across all your web sites and transactions. This becomes a reputation that you can't escape, just as you couldn't escape a bad reputation in a small town in the past. There would be no way to cheat that system.

Those are just some items the authors discussed, along with my own interpretation. I'm definitely looking forward to reading the book.

http://www.collaborativeconsumption.com/

Good (health) news from Massachusetts

2010-01-22T09:18:00.000-05:00

The news is focused on Massachusetts this week, so it made me remember this tidbit below. From The Week magazine:

Smoking has plunged 26 percent among lower-income smokers in Massachusetts, after just two years of an unusual state program targeting tobacco use. Patients enrolled in the state's MassHealth insurance program receive free counseling and medications to help them stop smoking. Anti-smoking advocates said the results suggest that expanding the Massachusetts prgogram nationwide could save tens of thousands of lives. "These findings are extraordinary," said Matthew Myers of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "They hjave major public-health implications as Congress is debating health-care reform."

And of course, this is during a time in which smoking rates in America - as in many developed countries - have been dropping for decades. Currently, less than 19 percent of American adults are smokers, the lowest percentage since at least World War I. In 1964, for example, when Surgeon General Luther Terry wrote a landmark report on the hazards of smoking, 42 percent of Americans were smokers.

"Back in my day, we worked in the coal mine every morning before preschool. And we liked it!"

2009-12-02T22:23:00.000-05:00

An excerpt from my book, a stand-alone piece of good news:

"Another benefit to globalization is the reduction in child labor, as parents become more prosperous and move away from agrarian work. In 1980, an average of 23% of ten to fourteen year old children in developing countries were working. By 2000, that number had dropped in half, to 12%. In China alone, those twenty years saw a drop from 30% of children laboring to a mere 8%. Remember, going back a century ago—let alone longer ago than that—many countries had a majority of their children out working in the fields."

It's impressive that economic growth in the past 30 years (yes, world growth from the past 30 years is still very net positive despite the current economic crisis) is perhaps even more impressive than recorded, when you factor in this removal of people from the labor force at the same time as the growth.

Book is almost here!

2009-11-19T01:53:00.000-05:00

I've been working around the clock (literally) to complete the publication of my book, The Secret Peace. This has been a 3-and-a-half-year process, and a really crazy ride sometimes. I'm proud to say that it's nearly complete, and that the book should be available by the end of the year.

Here's some promo text from the back cover of the book. It's a highlight of the main theme of the book. What's fun are some of the top pieces of "good news" that are included:

Recession. Afghanistan. Global warming. There's no doubt that countless dire crises consume the world. And yet, positive change is also all around us, under the media’s radar. Here is evidence of history’s true trend: a convincing picture of declining war, advancing health, equal rights, revolutionary technology, and more, including the surprising reasons why peace is unfolding. This powerful shift in perspective—not trite “positive thinking” but a realistic look at a hidden truth—is needed now more than ever. The Secret Peace isn’t an excuse to pat ourselves on the back, but a powerful call to action to step up our efforts to spread peace to all corners of the earth.

Did you know?

The world’s nuclear weapons have decreased by almost 75%.

Global life expectancy is 68 years and rising fast.

40% of people in Africa now own a mobile phone.

The world’s literacy rate is 83%.

The number of people killed in wars has been dropping for decades.

And wait until you hear the rest of the good news ...

Jessica Alba is going to have more babies than you

2009-08-28T21:27:00.000-04:00

My thesis with this blog is that everything in the world is getting better. Well, now we know that the human race is even getting more beautiful. In a valiant effort to verify our superficiality, researchers discovered that women rated as "attractive" tended to have 16 percent more children than everyone else, and more girls than boys. This adds up fairly quickly.

My most-likely-wrong math tells me that if we assumed 1% of the population was beautiful at some point in the past (a very conservative estimate) and reproducing at 1.16x the rate of everyone else, after 46 generations, you'd have more than 90% of the population beautiful. Let's say it's 25 years per generation, which means this would take a little more than 1,000 years. But, in the meantime, the most beautiful people out of the now slightly-more-beautiful pool are still reproducing faster. I would need some sort of statistics or calculus class at this point, but suffice to say, I imagine women are much more beautiful now than they were 1,000 or even 100 years ago. (And that's even ignoring the fact that everyone now is healthier, taller, bathes regularly, and has all their teeth.) Isn't this solid proof that the world is getting better?

And what about the other half of us humans? Handsome men showed no difference in their reproductive rates in the study, thus proving that no one really cares what men look like, and that we should just go ahead and wear sweatpants into the office every day. I laugh at the guys on Mad Men, with their slicked-back hair and their fancy ties. Suckers.

photo: Jessica Alba on her way to having 16% more babies than you.

source: "A planet full of Angelina Jolies," The Week, August 14, 2009, p. 22.

If anyone is gooder at math, chime in.

More good trends than you could possibly imagine fitting in only two paragraphs

2009-08-05T00:44:00.000-04:00

Many alleged dangers in the West are secretly trending toward peace, despite everyday worries and media scares. Deaths by fire have declined 50 percent in twenty years, thanks to smoke alarms and other building safety measures. Teen pregnancy is way down in America, which is mostly due to increased birth control, not abortions; the teen abortion rate has been dropping significantly too, as has the overall number of abortions. In fact, the percentage of teenagers having sex has actually decreased over the years, and teens are waiting longer before having sex, not that you'd know it from a panicky media. As reported by The New York Times:

"There's no doubt that the public perception is that things are getting worse, and that kids are having sex younger and much wilder than they ever were," said Kathleen A. Bogle, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University. "But when you look at the data, that's not the case." … "I give presentations nationwide where I'm showing people that the virginity rate in college is higher than you think and the number of partners is lower than you think and hooking up more often than not does not mean intercourse," Dr. Bogle said. "But so many people think we're morally in trouble, in a downward spiral and teens are our of control. It's very difficult to convince people otherwise."

The rates of teens dropping out of high school, smoking, and drinking have also been declining for a decade. For example, the percentage of 12^th-grade boys who reported binge drinking (having five or more alcoholic beverages in a row in the past two weeks) dropped from 52 percent in 1980 to 29 percent in 2007; girls’ rates during that time dropped from 30 percent to 22 percent. Methamphetamine use in the U.S. has dropped significantly in the past few years; the proportion of 18-year-olds using the drug in the past year dropped by two-thirds since 1999, thanks mainly to education efforts. This success surprisingly curtailed a well-publicized growing crisis with crystal meth in rural America. The number of chronically homeless people in the U.S. dropped 30 percent in just two years, from 2005 to 2007, thanks to a new government “housing first” strategy. Traffic accidents—the leading cause of death among young adults—are dropping precipitously. Around 42,000 Americans died in car crashes in 2002, compared to 52,000 in 1970, even though the population density and number of cars rose dramatically. Workplace fatalities are down, too. Safer technology helps prevent accidents, and then our healthcare advances allow a higher number of those who do have accidents to pull through.

And trust me, there's a lot more good news where this came from!

PS. I have sources for all these, of course. If anyone's interested, let me know.

The 3 best pieces of news about trash you'll hear today

2009-07-22T09:22:00.000-04:00

Recent awareness about waste over the last few decades, in the form of recycling, reusing products, and manufacturing better packaging, is paying off. As The Economist reports:

"… the pace at which the rich world churns out rubbish has been slowing. Between 1980 and 2000 the amount of waste produced by the OECD countries increased by an average of 2.5% a year. Between 2000 to 2005 the average growth rate slowed to 0.9% … well behind the rate of economic growth (2.2%)."

The way we get rid of the garbage we do produce might soon be radically changed, too. Lots of new, high-tech disposal methods are being developed. One particularly interesting one is called “plasma gasification,” and uses electricity to make plasma so powerful it can disintegrate any trash into its constituent molecules. We’re talking about banana peels, aluminum cans, dirty diapers, and even chemical weapons. The only output from that process is a black glass that can be used for many different types of construction and a synthetic gas that could be converted into fuel. Even more of a miracle, it’s self-sustaining: electricity gets it going, but then as long as you put in trash the plasma keeps on working.

More down-to-earth technology is partially responsible for the trend to less trash. As the computer age dawned, many people predicted a “paperless office”—but instead, as information was disseminated more easily, printing was in much higher demand. But it’s finally coming true. Since 2001, American office workers’ paper use has been in steady decline. A new generation is entering the workforce, one more comfortable with storing information on their computers, and increasingly, on the Internet. High-end paper remains in demand, for specialty uses such as printing photographs. But using paper for mundane tasks such as forms and memos is increasingly antiquated. Why risk losing a piece of paper when you can store something online, accessible to everyone and easily indexed and searchable? It’s now commonplace to pay bills online, file taxes online, and use Google to find restaurants—unused Yellow Pages books lie lonely in apartment building lobbies.

Sources:
“Less is more,” The Economist, A Special Report on Waste, p. 16, February 28, 2009; Michael Behar, “The Prophet of Garbage,” Popular Science, http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2007-03/prophet-garbage, March 1, 2007; “Not dead, just resting,” The Economist, p. 18, October 11, 2008.

Freeman Dyson has some cool ideas

2009-04-18T09:09:00.000-04:00

I'm a few weeks behind on posting because I'm planning my upcoming wedding, so sorry about that. This article appeared two weeks ago in the NYT magazine. Freeman Dyson is one of the world's foremost physicists and a famously creative thinker. He has some good ideas that parallel some of my thoughts in the Secret Peace.

For example, he says, "The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people’s hopes.”

A large part of the article is about the environment, specifically global warming. Unlike the growing consensus, Dyson thinks global warming isn't a problem. He's not a denier; he knows it's happening, and knows it's man-made. He just doesn't think it will be a big problem, and that it's being blown out of proportion.

I totally agree. Global warming is real and is a problem, and if we had no other problems to worry about, global warming would be worth devoting all our resources to. But there are worse things in the world.

When people say global warming will have "bad" consequences, do they mean harmful to humans, or harmful to nature? I believe protecting nature is important, but humanity must take precedence. The wholesale slaughter of nature is useless and should be condemned, but as for preserving species and climates exactly as they are now, is that intrinsically necessary? Nature is ever-changing with or without us.

Helping the environment is not a bad thing, but I believe the motives to do so should dovetail with helping people. Improving air quality increases our health, developing new fuel sources will take oil money away from dictators, and so on.

Here's the logic:

Global warming is only a potential problem, it's not a full-blown problem yet.
It might not turn out to be as drastic as we think.
even if it is drastic, it might be drastic in a good way.
even if it is drastic and bad, though, we can find ways to deal with it.
even if we can't deal with it, we have plenty of worse problems right now to deal with regardless. These problems are real, rather than potential; and more easily solvable, because we already have experience toward solving them.

Protecting the existing biosphere must take a back seat to addressing the evils of war, poverty, and inequality. These should demand our immediate attention.

It's not easy to get nuclear weapons

2009-02-20T21:36:00.000-05:00

I've got a section in my book about how it's much harder for terrorists to get nuclear weapons than you might think. Here's some more interesting info, from the New York Times: It's also really hard for countries to become nuclear.

This beautifully-designed diagram (click to see it bigger) shows how countries have influenced other countries' proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Very few countries have developed the bomb by themselves in a vacuum. Most have relied on shared information or espionage. Despite over 60 years of existence, only 9 countries have the bomb (represented by the circles above). Since its creation by the U.S., those other 8 countries relied on scientists that migrated or shared information legally or illegally.

Also, a surprising number of countries have started nuclear programs and then stopped: South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Argentina, Brazil, Iraq, and Libya. (And former soviet republics Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine voluntarily gave up their weapons and transferred them to Russia.) These are the hexagons in the chart. Very few countries, in fact, even want nuclear weapons - they're expensive and draw too much heat from the international community.

The threat of nuclear proliferation is real - the boxes in the chart are Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Syria, which are all possibly working on weapons programs, and Iran is a major threat - but it's not an epidemic, as press articles may sometimes imply.

The Coup de Grace to coups

2008-12-27T01:14:00.000-05:00

This great chart from The Economist sums it up - in the '60s through '80s there were an average of 12 military coups or attempted coups a year. 1963 alone saw 25! That's what happens when large swaths of the world (namely Africa and Latin America) tumultously decolonize and don't yet have the capability for stable democracy - they become susceptible to violent military takeovers. But that's been declining, and around 1992, it really started improving fast - especially without the United States and Russia bankrolling distant rebellions against each other. In 2007 there was only one effort. Looks like governments and their peoples have grown less willing to recognize those who shoot their way into office, preferring to use the ballot box instead.

The Top Ten reasons there won't be a Depression

2008-12-07T22:03:00.000-05:00

"Worst economic crisis since the Great Depression" is a phrase getting tossed around a lot these days. While it does seem to be technically accurate, I recently read two books on the Great Depression and New Deal and was surprised to learn two things. One: the reasons for the Depression seem frighteningly similar to some of the reasons for the current economic crisis. That scared me, but then I realized that Two: the reaction, response and consequences are going to be totally different. Here are 10 reasons (counting up to the most important) why the current crisis, as bad as it may become, won't hold a candle to the Great Depression.

10) Information flow: during the Great Depression, investors rarely had accurate information about companies. At best, it was very delayed. The government didn't even have an accurate estimate of GDP. Today, of course, we're swimming in data.

9) 2-income families: women work now. If a husband loses his job, the family still has an income. Not so in the 1930s. (Which put a lot more social and psychological pressure on the man to support his family, as well.)

8) Diversification of labor: when 30% of the country is employed in agriculture, and there is a Dust Bowl (partly because of poor agricultural practices), lots of people are out of work. Comparatively, today only 3% of the nation is employed as farmers, and we're still feeding everyone. So in general, if any one industry crashes, today it affects a smaller number of people. I heard yesterday that the unemployment rate just jumped to 6.7%; this is still lower than most countries have during good times. During the Depression, the US unemployment rate at its height was 26%.

7) Global cooperation. In particular, the economic integration of Europe through the EU enables a high level of coordinated action. Not so much cooperation in the 1930s, to say the least.

6) Our government's willingness to act has been impressive so far. Even if they make mistakes, they’re working on it. Compare this to Hoover, who took public pride in not doing anything: the markets will take care of themselves, after all.

5) To continue that thought, president-elect Obama's getting ahead of the game and doing lots of work before his "100 days" even begins. From the New York Times: “President-elect Barack Obama promised Saturday to create the largest public works construction program since the inception of the interstate highway system a half century ago … Mr. Obama began highlighting elements of the economic recovery program he is trying to fashion with Congressional leaders in hopes of being able to enact it shortly after being sworn in on Jan. 20.”

4) Even with last year’s bump in food prices, commodities are a ton cheaper now than then. We also have a lot more infrastructure, such as our highway system, and people just have a lot more “stuff” too. The average middle-age man in the 1920s could afford just 6 outfits, and ate a lot fewer calories a day (this sounds like a good thing, but it wasn’t.) We have refrigerators, microwaves, and air conditioners. Health care expenses will be one of the major pains that people feel during a recession today, but the quality of health care during the Great Depression was laughable even for the rich. Believe me, it’s better now.

3) Other emerging economies, particularly China and India, spread the problem thinner. The US generates a smaller percentage of world GDP now. While our growth might slow from 3% to 1%, even the worst prediction has China slowing from like 10% to 5%, still pretty amazing. And the government of China has shown initiative and willingness to address the economic crisis so far.

2) 75 years of learning from other financial crises. We've been here before. 8 recessions since WWII, if I'm not mistaken. And we've always pulled out of it. The average length of those recessions, in fact, is only 10 months.

1) Roosevelt was smarter than us. We were stupid enough to repeat another financial mess. But like some sort of cigarette-smoking Hari Seldon, he (and the rest of the government over the years) figured that might happen. The New Deal put programs in place not only to mitigate the Depression, but to prevent future ones. We’ve got the FDIC, Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance, just to name the big ones that come to mind. Imagine living in a world without those.

So, calm down everyone! It might be bad, but it could be worse. A lot worse.

Obama and everyone else - I can't keep up

2008-11-09T23:58:00.000-05:00

I have a chapter in my book entitled Equality. It mainly focuses on gender equality worldwide, as well as race relations in America. It will come to no shock to anyone that after Tuesday night it needs updating. But what amazing times we live in, in that the past couple years I've been working on the book, I've had to keep updating and updating the chapter - almost too fast for me to keep up. It seems we barely saw the first black Secretary of State before seeing the first female black Secretary of State, too. Then Hilary get within spitting distance of a major party Presidential nomination, the first woman to do so. This is not to mention a large number of countries electing women presidents, often for the first time: Germany, Chile, South Korea, Jamaica, Ireland, Liberia, Argentina, India, and maybe Israel. And then we saw the first African-American actually get the US nomination. And then we saw the first woman get a vice-presidential nomination. And now Obama will be president. It's been pretty amazing watching this constantly-surprising period of oneupsmanship in breaking gender and racial barriers.

Is Wealth a Cure for Caste Bias?

2008-09-30T22:24:00.000-04:00

Basically, yes. Although this NY Times article definitely includes counterpoints and caveats, the gist of it is that as India pulls its poor out of poverty and into a broader middle class, the tragic biases in its millennia-old caste system are evaporating. There is debate on whether the primary cause is economic liberalization or something else, but the fact remains that it is happening:

The survey, financed by the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania, finds that Dalits are far less likely to be engaged in their traditional caste occupations — for instance, the skinning of animals, considered ritually unclean — than they used to be and more likely to enjoy social perks once denied them. In rural Azamgarh District, for instance, nearly all Dalit households said their bridegrooms now rode in cars to their weddings, compared with 27 percent in 1990. In the past, Dalits would not have been allowed to ride even horses to meet their brides; that was considered an upper-caste privilege.

Mr. Prasad credits the changes to a booming economy. “It has pulled them out of the acute poverty they were in and the day-to-day humiliation of working for a landlord,” he said.

To prove his point, Mr. Prasad recently brought journalists here to his home district. In one village, Gaddopur, his theory was borne out in the tale of a gaunt, reticent man named Mahesh Kumar, who went to work in a factory 300 miles away so his family would no longer have to live as serfs, tending the animals of the upper caste.

When he was a child, Dalits like him had to address their upper-caste landlords as “babu-saab,” close to “master.” Now it is acceptable to call them “uncle” or “brother,” just as people would members of their own castes.

Click here for the full article, by Somini Sengupta.

Democracy on the March

2008-08-16T11:34:00.000-04:00

Hardly a day passes without some nugget of news about increasing democracy in a far-flung country. Here are five examples from the past couple months alone.

The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has had a century of royal rule, but they just held elections for the first time. Their King, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, voluntarily abdicated and declared the country a constitutional monarchy, with a popularly elected parliament. Most Bhutanese liked their king, but he simply explained that no nation should be in the hands of one person, and that the changeover should happen while the country is peaceful.
The tiny island nation of Tonga is having a similar experience, with their king due to forfeit most of his powers to parliament by 2010.
Turkmenistan’s infamous dictator, Saparmurat Niyazov, died in 2007 and the new ruler has been slowly but surely dismantling the cult of personality around the former ruler. A giant, rotating, gold-plated statue of Niyazov has been removed from the capital, the names of the months have been restored after Niyazov named them after himself and his mother, Internet access is increasingly allowed, and the ban on car radios might even be lifted (Niyazov banned them because they annoyed him.)
Even Cuba, long held tightly in the hands of Fidel Castro, has been slowly allowing freedoms under their new ruler, Fidel’s brother Raúl. “Socialism means social justice and equality, but equality of rights, of opportunities, not of income,” he announced, dramatically reversing his brother’s philosophy. Ordinary Cubans can now own mobile phones, televisions, and computers for the first time, and farmers can decide for themselves what to plant.
Lastly, the Summer Olympics have shown a spotlight on China’s worst anti-democratic impulses, such as its stifling of dissent, but a recent New York Times headline reports that “Despite flaws, rights in China have expanded.” China is a significantly more open place than it was a generation ago, with its citizens able to choose where to live, own some property, travel abroad, and gain access to technology.

AIDS deaths drop by half

2008-07-26T12:11:00.000-04:00

We all know the bad news: Over 33 million people worldwide are living with HIV, making it a pandemic, and some African countries are completely devastated. In South Africa, for example, 18 percent of the population is infected. It is estimated that 1,800 children a day become infected with HIV, mostly newborns. Amidst this dire news, however, glimmers of hope can be seen. Astonishingly, the annual number of AIDS deaths has fallen by half, from 3.9 million in 2001 to 2.1 million just six years later. AIDS is conquerable, and an end to the disease is within sight.

A recent UN report found that the spread of AIDS worldwide is finally slowing. The rate of new HIV infections peaked in 1998 and has been falling ever since then. The world is finally learning how to both treat and prevent the disease. Since we have now had several decades of living with AIDS, we can objectively review the results of international policies. Several countries, such as Cambodia, have been successful in curbing AIDS through a concerted educational effort via the media and schools. In Kenya and Zimbabwe, fewer teenagers are having sex, and condom use has increased, slowing the spread of the disease among fifteen to twenty-four year olds. Some countries, such as Thailand, have seen success by targeting prostitutes with condom education. Other governments have used public ad campaigns to spread facts about AIDS; in many developing countries myths persist about how the disease is contracted. In most countries, blood for transfusions is finally being screened for the disease. In southern India, where large numbers of the population are afflicted, the prevalence of HIV is slowing too. China denied the existence of any cases of AIDS for decades, but it has finally admitted its problem and is concentrating on solving it. The Chinese government is sending volunteers into rural villages to spread information, and it is also broadcasting a series of TV documentaries about AIDS.

After ignoring the disease for so long, the developed world is at last devoting necessary funds to the AIDS crisis. The trick is to use the funds wisely. The Copenhagen Consensus found that combating AIDS and malaria has the best return of any aid investment. Developed countries, charities, and NGOs are now allocating vast resources to fighting both diseases. Research devoted to the treatment of AIDS and malaria has been extraordinarily successful. Thanks to ARVs, anti-retroviral drugs that block HIV’s effects on the immune system, AIDS is no longer a death sentence for many people. The greatest difficulty is supplying the expensive drugs to the masses, though much progress has been made in this area, partly because generic drug manufacturers in India are willing to supply them very cheaply. This is thanks to a coalition of activists led by Bill Clinton, and helped by $15 billion in new funds made available by President Bush. Astonishingly, while in 2002 only 1 percent of Africans who needed the drugs had them, in 2007 28 percent – or 1.34 million people – were able to receive the treatment, and the number is growing. Likewise, one-third of all HIV-positive pregnant women are now receiving drugs that help prevent transmitting the disease to their newborns, compared to one in 10 in 2004. With continued funding, the world will keep seeing incredible progress in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

Study: World gets happier

2008-06-30T23:47:00.000-04:00

Yes, overall the world is much happier than it used to be. 52 countries were studied (there are 193 total), and overall happiness increased in 40 of them between 1981 and 2007. Why? Some probable reasons include:

Low-income countries (particularly India and China) have experienced unprecedented rates of economic growth, pulling millions of people out of poverty;
Democracy has been introduced in many countries, and become stronger and more entrenched in countries that were partially democratic;
Increasing gender equality;
Increased tolerance of ethnic minorities and gays and lesbians in developed societies.

Rich countries tend to be happier than poor countries. And according to University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart, who headed up the survey, "The results clearly show that the happiest societies are those that allow people the freedom to choose how to live their lives."

Of the countries surveyed, Denmark is the happiest and Zimbabwe the most miserable. The US ranks 16th.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080630/...

Turning a corner against terrorism

2008-06-22T01:18:00.000-04:00

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve amassed a larger-than-usual pile of secret peace-ish articles here waiting to be blogged about. Sifting through them, three jump out as mirroring each other. What do they have in common? Surprisingly good news about the war on terror.

Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria talks about the worldwide drop in terrorism over the last few years. Stats that show terrorism on the increase tend to count civilian casualties in Iraq, which doesn’t really make sense. Excluding Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorist attacks and casualties from terrorism are way down. In addition, Islamist terrorist groups stumbled in their recruiting PR by killing too many Muslim civilians; support for their tactics among Muslims has plummeted in recent years.

(This brings up a conservative theory I’ve read which posits that by attracting potential terrorists to fight in Iraq, that country’s invasion has prevented attacks on the US. If true (and how would you prove it?), this is easily the most compelling justification for the war I’ve heard. Of course, it’s still a justification that was thought of long after the fact of deciding to invade.)
Meanwhile, The Week summarizes a number of data sources about the sorry state of al Qaida. Al Qaida is on its last legs in Iraq and Afghanistan, having been backed into a corner in Pakistan, its one remaining stronghold. And we’re getting more effective at fighting them there; rather than just throwing money at Pakistan (and watching it arm itself against India instead), we’re training local Pakistani troops directly.
Lastly, the Economist had a cover story about “The change in Iraq: Is it turning the corner?” Optimism is popping up in the country, thanks to more ceasefires, fewer casualties, more political cooperation, and a bit of restored infrastructure, including a surge in cell phones. The newspaper is quick to explain that it is not trumpeting good news in Iraq as a means to justify the war (it backed the decision to invade); indeed, the war remains a terrible, deadly blunder. However, progress is finally being made out of a bad situation.

The Progress of Crowds

2008-06-01T16:43:00.000-04:00

I read a business article last week by James Surowiecki about Toyota’s success. One interesting point runs parallel to the belief system of my book, The Secret Peace: “defining innovation as an incremental process, in which the goal is not to make huge, sudden leaps but, rather, to make things better on a daily basis. (The principle is often known by its Japanese name, kaizen – continuous improvement.)”

That’s a classic concept of progress that has fallen in and out of favor, but I wholeheartedly believe in it. Sure, there are sometimes dramatic events or inventions that pop up and make a huge change, but many of those that we learn about actually built on previous work that remained under the radar. There are also often missteps backwards, but the good outweighs the bad.

An important aspect of this is how spread out the improvements are among people: “And so it rejects the idea that innovation is the province of an elect few; instead, it’s taken to be an everyday task for which everyone is responsible. … Toyota implements a million new ideas a year, and most of them come from ordinary workers (Japanese companies get a hundred times as many suggestions from their workers as U.S. companies do.)”

Take the same principle and spread it out among the world’s people, and we see civilization improving daily. The vast majority of people are daily trying to make things better for themselves and their families. (Or, they can be lazy and do nothing; but the number of people actively trying to make things worse is very small.) Many mistakes are made, and big mistakes can push many people back at once (like, say, invading Iraq) but adding together all that effort means history practically has no choice but to improve.

It's American to disagree

2008-05-23T21:36:00.000-04:00

So I came across a black-and-white ad in a magazine that shows Rev. Al Sharpton sitting cordially next to Rev. Pat Robertson on a couch. They’re laughing like pals. Weirder, the couch is on the beach, presumably photoshopped on there. The caption: “It’s American to disagree. It’s also American to come together in the face of a challenge. And few challenges are as urgent as global climate change …”

The next day, I saw another ad, this one with Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich, again on a couch, in front of the Capitol building. Looks even more photoshoppy. And where the two good reverends at least look like they’re having fun, these two Speakers look like they’re gritting their teeth and seething behind their smiles. Newt is sinking into his side of the couch while Nancy is perched like a bird next to him.

The ad directs us to www.wecansolveit.org, which, while it’s hard to tell what actions it actually performs, certainly has a nice message about a movement of people to help “solve the climate crisis.”

The ads are funny, and it would be easy for a cynic to mock the sentiment. But when did we subconsciously pass the moment when climate change became a commonly accepted mainstream concept? Was it An Inconvenient Truth? It seems like it was just a few years ago that it was difficult getting any politician or public official to take global warming seriously, let alone Republicans. But today, politicians are leaping over one another to seem environmentally sound, and the majority of products and advertisements tout their environmental accreditations. (I don’t want to imply any of these specific people are insincere; Gingrich did write a book on the environment, after all.)

This is a common Secret Peace trend:

An idea that was once rare or scorned becomes more mainstream.
A tipping point is reached after which it is gauche to disagree with the idea.
People are forced to jump on the bandwagon and pretend to agree with it, even if they harbor doubts or resentments towards the new idea.
Eventually (after a generation at the most), since everyone has been publicly supporting the idea, peoples’ views subconsciously shifts into genuine support.

Examples abound. It happened/is happening with every civil right, with gay rights in the process now. It’s also why Iran and China claim to be democracies. It’s exciting when the pattern happens over a short enough time span that we can notice.

Cabbie Returns Stradivarius

2008-05-10T11:50:00.000-04:00

This is from the New York Times, by Richard G. Jones, spliced a bit by me:

On April 21, Philippe Quint, a Grammy-nominated classical violinist, accidentally left a Stradivarius violin, valued at $4 million, in the back seat of a cab that he took from the airport to Manhattan on his return from a performance in Dallas. After several frantic hours, the Newark police told him the violin had been found and was at the airport taxi stand with the cabdriver who had taken him home. The two connected, and the violin was returned.

The city of Newark awarded Mr. Khalil, who has driven a taxi here since 1985, a Medallion, its highest honor. Mr. Quint gave him a $100 tip when the violin was returned, but he wanted to do more, so he arranged for Tuesday’s concert for about 50 cab drivers in a parking-lot-turned-theater outside Newark Liberty International Airport.

“Anybody out here would have done the same thing,” said the driver, Mohammed Khalil, waving a hand at his laughing, dancing colleagues.

To learn what’s going on in the world, I usually shun “fluff” articles like this one. Anecdotes that illustrate larger trends are useful, but feel-good human interest stories are too small-scale and often irrelevant. It’s a total pet peeve when someone uses anecdotal evidence to prove a point (and they usually do so to prove a negative point.)

But whatever, this one totally got me. It doesn’t prove any larger point or give any real insight … except towards the realization that most of humanity is basically good, and honest. Wait until you’re in a bad mood, and then click here to read the whole article, and see if you don’t suddenly feel like the world isn’t that bad a place. And then there’s that twist in the last sentence, too!

Satyagraha

2008-05-01T22:32:00.000-04:00

On September 11th, in the beginning days of a new century, an unprecedented event took place that changed the course of history. In Johannesburg, South Africa, in the old Empire Theatre, a full house of Indian South Africans stood up and vowed to disobey their country’s unjust racist laws. They took a solemn oath to do so without shedding a drop of their enemy’s blood, though they were prepared to sacrifice their own, “to die but not to submit to the law.” With that act, the diminutive thirty-six year-old lawyer standing onstage created satyagraha. His name was Mohandas Gandhi, and the date was September 11th, 1906.

My fiancée and I saw Philip Glass’s opera Satyagraha at the Met Monday. (If that sounds elitist, I’ll go bowling in Pennsylvania to make up for it.) The opera tells the story of Gandhi’s early activism in South Africa.

Gandhi crafted the word satyagraha, which refers to using peaceful resistance methods for political or social reform, to replace “nonviolence” and “passive resistance,” terms that many people who practice true nonviolence don't like. Why? Because nonviolence is a negative word, defining itself as the opposite of violence, e.g., not-violence. In reality, nonviolence is the active, positive force, while violence should be described as its negative corollary. Nonviolence also carries the stigma of passivity, but according to Gandhi, it is the most active force in the world. Simply not being violent is not practicing true nonviolence — I am not emulating Gandhi just because I refrained from attacking any passersby today. Practicing nonviolence is difficult, certainly harder than practicing violence. As Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “Gandhi resisted evil with as much vigor and power as the violent resister, but he resisted with love instead of hate.” That is why Gandhi described satyagraha as active nonviolence. Satyagraha can be translated as “truth-force,” although Gandhi also described it as “holding to truth,” “pursuing truth,” and “direct action for truth.” He defined the three core principles of satyagraha as truth and fairness, refusal to harm others, and the willingness for self-sacrifice.

Gandhi found that violence sometimes works in the short term, but never in the long term. Sometimes violence quickly solves a problem, only to breed resentment that rears its head with more, and often greater, violence. On the other hand, nonviolence always wins out in the long term, and often brings short-term gains as well. And even in cases when nonviolence does not solve an immediate problem, it causes no harm and sows seeds of peace that are guaranteed to sprout later. As social critic Theodore Roszak wisely put it, “People try nonviolence for a week, and when it doesn’t ‘work’ they go back to violence, which hasn’t worked for centuries.” Gandhi learned that the anticipated end of any problem, and the means for achieving it, couldn’t contradict each other. To build a permanently peaceful society, only peaceful methods are effective.

I consider Gandhi to be a scientist who discovered the new field of satyagraha. As he fully admitted, he only scratched the surface of the techniques and power available. Martin Luther King, Jr., was inspired by Gandhi and built on his work to innovate new methods used in local campaigns. “The whole concept of satyāgraha . . . was profoundly significant to me. . . .It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking for so many months.”

The opera ended with a powerful scene that featured Gandhi and Dr. King on stage together. Gandhi walked on the ground belting out the meditative music, with Dr. King preaching at a podium in the air, seemingly grabbing the music and realizing further dreams with it.

Excerpt: The Path to Prosperity

2008-04-27T20:51:00.000-04:00

Here's a 3-page excerpt from my book. The Economist this week had a special feature on Vietnam, and it reminded me of these pages in The Secret Peace. Take a look:

We frequently hear the discouraging news of the poverty that still exists for billions of people in the world today. But the reduction of the world’s extreme poverty is one of the most dramatic – and surprising – trends leading toward peace. There is a proven path out of poverty, and two examples illustrate it perfectly. Korea and Vietnam share the dubious distinction of being the sites of the United States’ worst wars since World War II. Though Korea and Vietnam are more than two thousand miles apart and have very different cultures, their recent histories are strikingly similar. After World War II, both countries remained occupied against their will. Then, around the same time, they each became embroiled in conflicts that were simultaneously civil wars and proxy battles between the United States and the Soviet Union. Korea and Vietnam each held communist forces in their northern halves supported intermittently by communist Russia or communist China. They each had southern forces supported by the United States and its allies, who were attempting to block the spread of communism. Both wars were waged as opposing sides vied for control of the country’s central parallel. Although both countries began their conflicts under very different circumstances, each ended a vast war—Korea in 1953 and Vietnam in 1975—with hundreds of thousands of casualties, an impoverished citizenry, and a devastated countryside.

Here their histories diverge. North Korea’s communist forces were unable to conquer the southern half of the country and were only able to maintain control of the northern half of the peninsula. North Korea became isolated, and for fifty years it carried out a countrywide experiment in pure communism and totalitarianism. Today North Korea faces economic collapse and widespread famine. Perhaps more than any other country, it is cut off from global civilization. Its people exist in a semifeudal society: hungry, destitute, and scared of being shipped off to labor camps for any dissent. Only top-level Communist Party bosses enjoy luxuries such as cars and foreign food. Every year many North Koreans risk death as they attempt to escape by crossing the heavily armed border. What little wealth their leader Kim Jong Il amasses gets diverted into outdated military forces and giant, solipsistic statues. If you look at the earth at night, North Korea remains dark next to the shining electric wealth of Japan, South Korea, China, and much of the rest of the globe. North Korea remains a pariah, and its desperate attempt to develop nuclear weapons reveals its weaknesses: it has no other power or influence in the world. It relies on energy from China and aid from South Korea. In terms of its economy, the health of its citizens, and its reputation in the world, North Korea is one of the most failed states in modern history.

In contrast to the situation in North Korea, North Vietnam’s communist forces seized control of the entire country. Vietnam united under communism, and the United States, having suffered a terrible loss, expected the worst. Vietnam seemed destined to follow in North Korea’s footsteps. True to form, Vietnam played the role of a strict communist state for a decade. But then something strange started happening. In the mid-1980s, facing potential famine, Vietnam had a change of heart. The government started enacting market reforms under a policy it called doi moi (renovation). It abandoned its attempt to collectivize its industry and agriculture, and it slowly began to allow free-market enterprise. It invited foreign firms into the country to open new factories and provide employment. Private ownership became acceptable. The changes didn’t translate into political freedom; they focused only on the economy. Nevertheless, the people of Vietnam saw their standard of living start to improve. Life expectancy went up, and infant mortality rates went down. The number of Vietnamese living in extreme poverty dropped from 50 percent in 1990 to a scant 10 percent in 2003. The United States restored trade relations with Vietnam in 1994, and in 2006 removed it from a blacklist of countries that suppressed religion. Today Vietnam is engaged with the world community, participating in international law and encouraging tourism, and with a relatively free press. To complete the metamorphosis, Vietnam’s leaders recently unveiled a plan to establish the country as a fully modern, industrial nation by 2020.

Totalitarian, isolationist North Korea is looking more every day like an anachronistic aberration. Meanwhile, different versions of Vietnam’s success story are playing out all over the world.

Jeff Sachs speaks about Common Wealth

2008-04-20T21:20:00.000-04:00

Jeff Sachs is a world-renowned economist, whose book The End of Poverty was a great source for the economics section of The Secret Peace. He was at Barnes & Noble the other day speaking about his new book, Common Wealth.

His theme is sustainable development, and meeting the UN's Millennium Development Goals to alleviate extreme poverty in the world. I think he's a genius. And a great speaker.

The clip here is about the Iraq War. Ironically, this is one issue I'm not sure if I agree with him on, but it was the only video clip I was able to get before my camera ran out of space. I've thought we shouldn't pull out of Iraq ASAP because of the chaos it could leave the country in. However, Sachs's case is simply that being in Iraq is SO expensive that we'd get better bang for our buck using the money to help other countries alleviate poverty, or in developing more sustainable technologies. He makes a good case when you look at the numbers.

McFly, metal detectors don't work over metal

2008-04-19T12:13:00.000-04:00

I came across this bit of presidential trivia about the assassination of President Garfield, written by Richard Lederer:

After James Garfield was shot by Charles Guiteau, he spent 80 days on his deathbed while a team of doctors probed him with unwashed hands and unsanitary medical instruments. They tried to find the bullet with a metal detector invented by Alexander Graham Bell – but the device failed because Garfield was placed on a bed with metal springs, and no one thought to move him. To escape the Washington heat, Garfield was moved to a seaside cottage in New Jersey early in September. There he died on Sept. 19, 1881, succumbing to death by doctors.

So, no, we don't have hoverboards yet, but our technology's pretty amazing. For all our health care problems, if that story doesn’t make you appreciate how far we’ve come, I don’t know what will. That was less than 100 years before we were born. And remember, that’s illustrating the very best care of the time, since it was for the president! So, what do you think medical care will look like in 2081?

A blog devoted to Good News

2008-04-04T22:56:00.001-04:00

Welcome to The Secret Peace, a blog devoted to a new book I’ve written but which is not yet published. The idea to write this book first popped into my brain years ago, when I realized that the overall negativity of news coverage has no exact correlation with the overall state of the world. On any given day, a trillion events happen to the world’s citizens, and the media can only pick a few to report on, so they give us the most sensational and shocking. It’s not unimportant for the media to show us big, negative events – these are news, and highlighting negative issues inspires a focus to change them.

But this means the mass media, especially television, presents a narrow perspective of the state of the world. Retreating from the media’s focus on negative details reveals large trends that are hard to discern but which come together to paint a vivid picture of our secret story. Newspaperman Ben Hecht said it best, “Trying to determine what is going on in the world is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of the clock.” Our short-term preoccupations often eclipse our long-term focus. But once you’ve pulled back to see the big picture and spotted some of the hidden trends, more jump out at you.

The clues point toward a grand secret: we, as a global culture, are moving in a discernible direction. And despite popular opinion, it’s a positive direction. World events are not random, and world peace is not just possible but probable. The world is in better shape than we think, but the inevitability of peace is only half the good news. The real secret is that for much of the world, peace is already here.

I’m not naïve, and I won’t deny the horrors that happen everywhere. But at any given minute, most people are just busy working towards better lives for themselves and their families. The bad news is real, but it already gets plenty of coverage, so we’re going to focus on the good stuff instead. I hope you stop by The Secret Peace regularly to get a nice refreshing break of good news in the middle of your day. The secret is too big and important to be missed.