Empire State Building says congrats on marriage equality

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?

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.

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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

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?

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

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

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

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.