Do Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead

At the dawn of Western civilization the ancient Greeks invented a form of theatre called tragedy. And the point of tragedy was to remind a city-state of its constant vulnerability and, therefore, of its need for extreme modesty in the face of the unknown.

Most of the good news is gradual and most of the bad news is sudden

Journalists report plane crashes, not planes that take off.

noted what the solution is: there has to be carbon pricing, so that people will be incentivized to innovate, conserve, and switch to low-carbon energy sources; and there has to be R&D in transformational technologies, such as carbon capture, battery technology, and a new generation of nuclear power.

Monday. The curve is really one of an ascending sawtooth: there are setbacks, and there’s no magical law that raises us ever higher. But on average the long-term trajectory is unmistakable, even if there are local delays.

These are all cumulative directional forces, and there’s no reason that they will evaporate overnight.

MATT RIDLEY: Most of the good news is gradual and most of the bad news is sudden. That’s why television news is dominated by bad things and good things go unreported. That’s why after a century dominated by world wars and genocides we ended up better off than we were before, because the gradual goes

And because of the Internet, people can cross-fertilize their ideas quicker than ever, and that’s bound to lead to solutions to whatever problems we encounter.

The great dream of the Enlightenment was that through education, people would abandon prejudice, rotten ideas, and bad impulses, and that these things would melt away like fog on a sunny day under the light of reason. It doesn’t happen. And we’ve seen conflict after conflict in educated populations, so education is not a panacea.

You don’t end financial dissatisfaction merely by enriching a people.