Category: reason

Remember when the Census Bureau was telling us the United States would soon be a majority-minority country? The bureau projected in 2015 that non-Hispanic whites would constitute less than half of the U.S. population by 2044. But this was demographic nonsense: As I explained six years ago, by the middle of this century the children of Hispanic parents will be as socially “white” as the children and grandchildren of early-20th-century Italian, Irish, Polish, Greek, Jewish, and German immigrants are today.

Sure enough, Hispanic identity is already fading away for the children and grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants. What’s more, an increasing number of Americans refuse to be pigeonholed into just one ethno-racial category on their Census forms. Although the Census Bureau actually parses its ethno-racial data six different ways, the 2015 projections that it chose to highlight were based on definitions that exclude Hispanic or mixed-race Americans from the “white” category.

Now a new study by two political scientists, Dowell Myers and Morris Levy of the University of Southern California, considers what this means for the country. In a Washington Post op-ed drawing on their paper, Myers and Levy point out that using a more inclusive definition that “counts as white anyone who so identifies (even if they also identify with another race or ethnicity), the white population is not declining; it’s flourishing. The Census Bureau’s inclusive projections show a white population in excess of 70 percent of the total for the foreseeable future.”

In their study, Myers and Levy surveyed 2,600 non-Hispanic white Americans to see how they would react to Census Bureau projections about the future ethno-racial make-up of the U.S. population:

Our respondents were randomly assigned to read one of two simulated news stories that reported the bureau’s 2015 race projections. The first mimicked the conventional narrative about the decline of non-Hispanic whites. The second detailed the growth of Hispanic and Asian American populations, but it also mentioned the rise of intermarriage and reported the Census Bureau’s alternative projection of a more diverse white majority persisting the rest of the century.

When asked how the story they read made them feel—angry, anxious, hopeful or enthusiastic—results were clear-cut. Forty-six percent of white Democrats and a whopping 74 percent of Republicans expressed anger or anxiety when reading about the impending white-minority status.

But these negative emotions were far less frequent when participants read the second story about a more inclusive white majority. Only 35 percent of white Democrats and 29 percent of white Republicans expressed anger or anxiousness about this scenario.

The results imply that nearly a quarter of the Democrats and two-thirds of the Republicans who might be agitated about the imminent-white-minority narrative also have positive feelings about a more inclusive and enduring white majority.

Myers and Levy also report that reading the story using the more inclusive definition of white ethnicity promoted a modest reduction in opposition to immigration relative to those respondents assigned the story using the more exclusive definition. In addition, people exposed to the inclusive version were more likely to support a hypothetical school bond that would have increased property taxes to support public schools.

They conclude:

Projections of racial demographics should reflect the great changes in the meaning of race in America. But stories about the impending demise of white America are rooted in outmoded notions of racial exclusivity. These stories of white decline obscure the ongoing changes to America’s color line, and they serve only to divide. Fortunately, the white American public seems far more content with the more inclusive future that is actually destined to emerge.

I believe that Americans of whatever ancestry living in 2050 will look back and wonder why anyone cared about the ethnic makeup of the American population. America is an ideal, not a tribe.

A person in Virginia was recently issued a ticket for smoking in the car with a child present.

Fox News reports that the Virginia Police Department fined the smoker $100. But it wasn’t enough to simply extract a Benjamin from the puffer. The department went on Twitter to warn others: “Protect your children and keep $100 in your pocket!” Then it used the hashtags #NoSmoking and #WeAreWatching.

First of all, I think that people are still allowed to smoke, so “No Smoking” seems a bit much. But “WeAreWatching” is worse. Watching all the time? Everything a parent does that is sub-optimal—like giving the kid a bag of Fritos before dinner?

My mom smoked all the time in the car and I hated it. I made all the coughing sounds, and put notes in the ashtray, and rolled my window down with Oscar-worthy gasps. But do I wish she’d been hounded by the cops? No. Do I think she would have quit if she could? Yes.

Maybe the cops who are #watching should #watch for something else, like people driving recklessly.

Los Angeles firefighter Donn Thompson had a busy year in 2017. If his pay stubs are to be believed, he literally never stopped working.

Data obtained by Transparent California, a project of the Nevada Policy Research Institute, show that Thompson pulled down $300,000 in overtime pay during 2017, on top of his $92,000 salary. Over the past four years, Thompson has earned more than $1 million in overtime, according to Transparent California’s database. Thompson’s ability to work so many hours “boggles the mind,” says Robert Fellner, director of research at the institute.

To earn that much in overtime pay, Thompson would have had to work more hours than actually exist in a single year. Either the highly paid firefighter found a way to stretch the space-time continuum or something fishy is going on.

Here’s how the math breaks down. Thompson, like all firefighters in Los Angeles, works 2,912 hours every year. With a base salary of $92,000, that comes to an hourly rate of $31.60. That means Thompson would earn overtime pay at a rate of $47.40 per hour—that’s one and a half times the base rate. But earning $302,000 at a rate of $47.40 per hour would require working more than 6,370 hours. Add that to the 2,912 hours he worked as a salaried employee, and you get more than 9,280 hours worked, despite the fact that there are only 8,760 hours in a year.

Thompson is probably taking advantage of contract provisions that boost overtime pay above the typical rate, says Fellner, though it’s unclear for now how that affects the calculations. (Transparent California is awaiting more payroll data from the fire department.)

Cashing in on the Los Angeles Fire Department’s generous overtime rules is nothing new for Thompson, who might very well be the highest paid firefighter in American history. A 1996 Los Angeles Times story highlighted Thompson as a prime example of what the paper called “paycheck generosity” at the department. From 1993 through 1995, the Times found, Thompson made $219,649 in overtime pay. At the time, the department was spending more than $58 million annually on overtime, an amount the paper called “budget-wrenching”; it far surpassed what fire departments in other big cities were paying. The Fire Department of New York, for example, at the time paid about a third as much in overtime.

In 2009, when the Los Angeles Daily News reported that the L.A. fire department’s overtime budget had grown by more than 60 percent in a decade, Thompson was once again riding high. He had earned “$173,335 in overtime in addition to his nearly $100,000 base salary while working at Fire Station 19 on Sunset Boulevard in Brentwood,” the paper reported, citing 2008 figures.

In 2014, when the San Diego Union-Tribune featured Thompson in a story about runaway overtime costs at California fire departments, he told the paper that he “basically lived at the station” and didn’t go home very often.

“The first thing [people] think of is firefighters sitting around at the station, but they’re not just handing out free money over here,” Thompson said. “I’m working hard.”

The Los Angeles Times found quite the opposite when it investigated overtime. In the 1996 article, the Times said most overtime hours are not connected to “fires or other emergencies. Instead, most of it goes for replacing those who are out because of vacations, holidays, injuries, training, illnesses or personal leaves.”

While Thompson’s payouts are certainly eye-popping, he’s hardly the only firefighter in L.A. reaping huge taxpayer-funded earnings. During 2017, the Los Angeles Fire Department had 512 employees who cashed in with at least $100,000 in overtime pay, according to Transparent California. That’s a tenfold increase over the 51 employees who got six-figure overtime pay as recently as 2012. Thompson was one of 26 employees to get at least $200,000 in overtime pay last year, when the department reported spending $198 million on overtime pay—a 74 percent increase since 2012.

Perhaps the only silver lining for the taxpayers is the fact that overtime pay can no longer be factored into pension benefits, a consequence of a 2012 pension reform bill signed by Gov. Jerry Brown. It is perhaps not surprising that a dramatic increase in overtime payouts began the same year Brown signed that bill.

So here’s whoever’s manning the official account of a New York Police Department union complaining in a comically misworded tweet that he’s afraid to arrest a random guy who isn’t doing anything wrong:

Now @ Penn Station a man is on the steps as hundreds of people pass smoking marijuana. With over 20 years as a cop I wondered should I arrest him, what if he’s illegal, will I get in trouble if he resist, oh Community policing? Will the NYPD back me? NOT! So I justed walked away. pic.twitter.com/B9Ty0tRpMG

— SBA (@SBANYPD) May 18, 2018

This was on the official account of the Sergeants Benevolent Association (SBA), headed by Ed Mullins. The borderline-incoherent typos are a recurring theme with the group’s Twitter feed.

To attempt to clarify, the tweet appears to be complaining about the one guy smoking marijuana while sitting on the steps, and does not intend to state that hundreds of people passing by are also smoking marijuana, even if that’s how it reads.

The cop is not suggesting that the man is doing anything to harm anybody other than smoking marijuana. He is complaining that the smoker might be in the country illegally (what does that have to do with anything?), and he is concerned that a cop could get into trouble if the guy resists arrest. He doesn’t seem interested in asking the man to move so that he’s not blocking the stairs. To the SBA, apparently, the only two policing options are to arrest or totally walk away.

I guess this must be the SBA’s response to the news that the New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio will “reform” how the city enforces marijuana laws and to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.’s announcement that his office will decline to prosecute marijuana possession and smoking cases.

Today the New York Daily News reports that de Blasio is going to order the New York Police Department to stop arresting people for smoking marijuana in public as the city prepares for the increasing likelihood that the state will legalize recreational marijuana soon.

Those announcements came on the heels of a New York Times report last week that showed minorities are far more likely to be busted for marijuana possession than whites. This was not a matter of there being more open marijuana use in parts of the city with higher percentages of minorities. The story compared the rates of complaints to the police about public marijuana use in predominantly white and predominantly minority communities; even when the rate of complaints were similar, arrests were far more likely in minority neighborhoods.

Even after the state decriminalized personal possession of marijuana to a citable offense, New York cops continued for years to arrest people for possession. The numbers have finally started to fall as the police started treating decriminalization seriously: The city’s total plunged from 50,000 arrests in 2011 to about 17,000 in 2017. Yet this reduction has not caused a crime wave. Frankly, this SBA cop should be grateful he doesn’t have to spend his time arresting this harmless gentleman and can focus on responding to criminal complaints that involve injury to others or their property.

But then again, this is the same union Twitter account that recently had a public freakout at the very suggestion that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution required police to get a warrant to legally search a person.

Dennis Perry, principal of Cherry Hill High School East in New Jersey, has apologized for an insensitive message on the tickets for this year’s prom: “party like it’s 1776.”

That’s problematic, since students of color would definitely not have felt like partying if they were alive in 1776, when slavery was still legal.

“It was insensitive and irresponsible not to appreciate that not all communities can celebrate what life was like in 1776,” said Perry in a letter to the community.

Please read this letter of apology to the East Community. pic.twitter.com/BnokMF0n9Q

— Dr. Dennis Perry (@drperryateast) May 18, 2018

It’s not clear whether any students were actually bothered by the message. Tthe local news stories don’t quote any angry kids, or even concerned parents. The offended parties seem to be local activists, who said the incident was just another example of Cherry Hill ignoring the needs of students of color:

Lloyd Henderson, president of the Camden County NAACP East chapter, also praised the principal’s immediate response but called the incident “another example” of a school culture in which “the African American students’ needs are not considered along with the rest of the school.”

Two points. First, the prom will take place at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center. Given that the Constitution wasn’t actually created in 1776—that would be the Declaration of Independence—perhaps Perry should have suggested his students “party like its 1787.” This call to action would have bothered the same people, but with the added benefit of being historically accurate.

Second, is there any point in history during that would feel safe for all students to party? The original line is “party like it’s 1999,” from the Prince song “1999.” But gay and trans students might not have felt welcome at the party then. We could “party like it’s 2018,” but only if we were prepared to ignore undocumented students’ fears. I guess everybody just has to “party like it’s some unspecified point in the idealized future.” I wonder if that fits on Cherry Hill’s prom tickets, which are being reprinted with the offensive message scrubbed.

Over at Bloomberg View, former Reason editor Virginia Postrel cops to (indirectly) causing the current housing crisis in California.

Turns out that when she and her husband—along with millions of others—moved to Los Angeles back in the go-go 1980s, native Golden Staters responded by making it increasingly difficult for developers to build housing easily, especially in established cities. A number of state-level downturns and national recessions later, California is starved for housing stock, making it increasingly difficult for younger people to live there.

Los Angeles County grew by 1 million people in the 1960s, 445,000 in the ’70s, 1.4 million in the 1980s, 656,000 in the 1990s, and just 299,000 in the 2000s. Most of the growth in the 1980s, Postrel notes, came from childless migrants, not births. Anti-growth policies in big cities had the effect of pushing people further out of established metropolitan zones, creating longer commutes. She quotes a demographer who says, “In the longer view of things, the 1980s boom was quite the exception.” But restrictive housing policies cast a long shadow:

Outsiders are no longer flocking to California. For the first time in its history, a majority of the state’s residents are natives. But native-born Californians tend to want to stick around—preferably not in their old bedrooms. To form their own households, millennials need places to live. The growth restrictions put in place by residents upset by newcomers like me are putting houses and apartments out of reach for all but the richest of the younger generation. If California doesn’t want to turn into an expensive retirement village, it needs to make room for its children.

More here.

The smart money is on California becoming the New York of the 21st century. Once the Empire State was the center of the United States in economic and cultural terms. California overtook it in 1962 to become the most populous state in the country. But by 2050, Texas may well be bigger, with a projected population of 54.4 million to California’s 50 million. Whether that happens, there’s little question that California is sucking wind in all sorts of ways and the political emphysema is only going to get worse once Jerry Brown leaves Sacramento. Yes, the same Jerry Brown who the Dead Kennedys mocked in “Californa Über Alles” for ushering in a era of “Zen fascism.” As Steve Greenhut writes,

For all of Gov. Moonbeam’s flaws, those of us with conservative, libertarian or moderate leanings know that the state government is losing the last adult in charge. The next governor will be less willing to serve as a backstop against a Legislature that’s gone far to the left.

The two leading candidates for governor are Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, each of whom seems committed to spending lots more money that the state doesn’t have.

In her next column at Bloomberg View, Postrel will explore politically viable ways to add to the housing stock, which is always tricky due to the relative power held by the haves over the have-nots. California’s future may depend on it.

Related: In 2017, Erica Grieder argued that California should be more like Texas.

Also Related: In 2016, Reason TV’s Alexis Garcia looked at young proponents of “YIMBYism” (Yes In My Back Yard) in San Francisco, one of the planet’s most expensive cities.

After seizing serious attention in 2014 and 2015, criminal justice reform has languished at the federal level (even as officials in some states continued to do good work). But the issue could be gaining momentum again, after getting a boost from such unlikely sources as Donald Trump and Jared Kushner.

President Trump told a White House forum on Friday that if legislators can get him a prison reform bill, “I will sign it.”

One of the bills being kicked around in Congress right now (with a push from Kushner) focuses on programs to help prisoners reintegrate to outside life. “The single biggest thing that we want to do is really define what the purpose of a prison is,” Kushner said at Friday’s event. “Is the purpose to punish, is the purpose to warehouse, or is the purpose to rehabilitate?”

The measure certainly falls short of many much-needed reforms to federal sentencing guidelines and other areas—there are whole sectors of justice reform that the Trump administration and its allies won’t even touch. But the bill being pushed now could do some good for those in prison, and could help inject some salience back into criminal justice reform overall. It is literally called the First Step Act, and it includes such things as prohibiting the shackling of women while they give birth and saying that prisoners must be housed within 500 miles of their family.

At Friday’s event, Trump “gave a rare display of empathy,” says The New York Times editorial board. “A friend of mine told me that when people get out of prison, they’re all excited,” he said. “And then they go and they have that stigma; they can’t get a job. People don’t want to hire them. They can’t get that chance. When we talk about our national program to hire American, this must include helping millions of former inmates get back into the work force as gainfully employed citizens.”

The Times editorial goes on to excoriate federal lawmakers who have thwarted their colleagues’ attempts at overhauling federal sentencing guidelines, drug laws, and prison policies.

For more than a decade, states of every political hue—from Texas and Louisiana to Connecticut and California—have been overhauling their criminal justice systems, to reverse the effects of decades of harsh and counterproductive policies. But Congress has watched this revolution from the sidelines, thanks to reactionary lawmakers, including Mr. Sessions when he was in the Senate. Comprehensive federal legislation has been foiled again and again, as states forge ahead, reducing both prison populations and crime rates through bipartisan reforms.

Another bill before Congress right now, Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley’s Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, has drawn Sessions’ ire for reducing some sentences and giving judges more discretion over sentencing.

Sessions is out of step not just with fellow Republican politicians but with the party’s evangelical base, which has embraced the issue. “The incarceration rate in this country is just insane,” evangelical leader Johnnie Moore told NPR after attending Friday’s White House forum. “And because of that, most evangelicals, myself included, have a connection to the issue…we’ve seen it with our own eyes. And now’s the time to speak up.”

It’s Democrats who are holding up the House’s First Step Act. Some in the party say the Dems should embrace the bill as a good start, while others—including Sen. Kamala Harris of California, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas—opposing the bill because it doesn’t go far enough. Whatever their reasoning, it puts Harris, Booker, and Lee in the company of the Bureau of Prisons union and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.).

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) slammed the letter they sent in opposition, saying it was “riddled with factual inaccuracies and deliberately attempts to undermine the nationwide prison reform effort.” With a Republican President and Republicans in control of both the House and the Senate, “it is not clear how exactly the opposition proposes to achieve comprehensive criminal justice reform without first considering the bipartisan prison reform legislation pending in the House,” Jeffries wrote.

According to a new report from the Vera Institute for Justice, the total U.S. prison population fell to a little under 1.5 million in 2017, down about 16,000 inmates from the year prior. About 1.3 million inmates were in state prisons last year and around 183,000 in federal prisons.

FREE MINDS

Posting ads on Facebook now requires picture ID, Social Security number, and mailing address. CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan tried out the new system:

Under new Facebook rules, if you want to buy a political or an issue ad (more on what’s an issue later) in the US on Facebook you have to prove you are a permanent resident or a citizen here. I went through the process to see how it works. pic.twitter.com/jcBc9CJK0f

— Donie O’Sullivan (@donie) May 20, 2018

Check out the whole thread for a full accounting of the insanity. The new rules don’t just apply to political ads or ads that advocate directly for or against candidates and issues. As O’Sullivan notes, “you’re going to have to prove your identity if your ad mentions…any of these issues“: abortion, the budget, civil rights, crime, the economy, education, energy, environment, foreign policy, government reform, guns, health, immigration, infrastructure, military, poverty, Social Security, taxes, terrorism, or “values.”

FREE MARKETS

NAFTA now or later. “The president is determined that we renegotiate” the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said on Fox News Sunday yesterday. But “whether we pass it in this Congress or we pass it in the new Congress” isn’t a concern, he ad ded.

“I’m not saying he’s willing to let it spill over, he has all his alternatives,” Mnuchin continued. “I’m just saying right now we are focused on negotiating a good deal and we’re not focused on specific deadlines. We’re still far apart but we’re working every day to renegotiate this agreement.”

Mnuchin also announced yesterday that Washington would be “putting the trade war [with China] on hold.”

QUICK HITS

• “I hereby demand…that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes,” Trump tweeted Monday morning.
• Scott Pruitt’s regulatory rollbacks at the Environmental Protection Agency are in question after activists have questioned the validity of sources cited to justify the deregulation.
• Surprise! Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro has won another term as president.
• Saudi women are allowed to drive…but not quite yet.
• According to Bill Gates, Trump doesn’t know the difference between HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and HPV, a virus that can be vaccinated against and that causes genital warts.

Hacker interrupts virtual congressional debate with gay porn https://t.co/Xt0AEaoQPH pic.twitter.com/0t6CsMPnIu

— The Hill (@thehill) May 19, 2018

• Damon Linker calls out “the irredeemable irresponsibility of The Federalist.”
• Cathy Young tackles the “Intellectual Dark Web.”
• Against “security nihilism.”

Capitalism has been the most dynamic force for economic progress in history. Over the past century, it has delivered billions of people out of miserable poverty, raised living standards to once-unimaginable heights, and enabled an unprecedented flourishing of productive creativity. But among young Americans, it finds itself on trial.

As Steve Chapman observes, the University of Chicago’s GenForward Survey of Americans ages 18 to 34 finds that 62 percent think “we need a strong government to handle today’s complex economic problems”—and 45 percent have a positive view of socialism.

View this article.

I spent most of my Sunday playing the just-released Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition for the Nintendo Switch. While the game is Legend of Zelda themed, and features characters, music, items, and settings from the beloved Nintendo franchise (“Hyrule” is Princess Zelda’s kingdom), it isn’t a proper Zelda game. Instead, it belongs to Tecmo Koei’s Dynasty Warriors series—a family of video games highly relevant to last night’s Westworld episode, which finally saw several main characters enter the much-anticipated “Shogun World.”

Dynasty Warriors takes place in Three Kingdoms era China (roughly 180-280 A.D.), following the collapse of the Han Dynasty. Players take control of one of dozens of characters based on fictionalized versions of historical persons—like the ambitious politician Cao Cao, cunning strategist Zhuge Liang, or invincible yet arrogant warrior Lu Bu—and then must fight their way through a series of battles based on events that actually happened centuries ago. Obviously, things don’t always turn out the way they did in real life: Cao Cao was defeated at the Battle of the Red Cliffs in 208 A.D., but if you’re playing as him in Dynasty Warriors, you have to win that one or its game over.

Hyrule Warriors isn’t the only Dynasty Warriors spin-off game. (I’m getting to Westworld, I swear.) There’s also Samurai Warriors, which takes place during Japan’s Edo period in the 17th century, which saw the warlord Ieyasu Tokugawa consolidate the nation under his control. Tokugawa is an important figure in Japanese history: his shogunate effectively ruled Japan until the emperor’s authority was re-asserted in the mid 1800s.

In “Akane No Mai,” the fifth episode of Westworld‘s second season, “woke” Maeve and her entourage make their way into “Shogun World,” where the eponymous shogun murders an innocent young geisha and then forces her mother figure to dance for him, with predictably vengeful results. Some reviewers evidently thought it was problematic to depict a stereotypically eastern world sprung from the imaginations of white people—even though the show has clearly positioned the white people who designed the park as the bad guys. Just as Westworld the park isn’t completely faithful to the American old west, instead relying on various cowboy tropes, so too is Shogun World a combination of realism and fantasy.

But back to the shogun: he’s clearly supposed to be some version of Ieyasu Tokugawa. The shogun mentions that he “killed 2,000 men in the Siege of Osaka,” which was the ultimate showdown between the historical Tokugawa and his last rival for dominance, Hideyori Toyotomi. I only know this because the Siege of Osaka is the final battle for the relevant characters in Samurai Warriors. (It’s a lot easier to win on Tokugawa’s side.)

I’ve written previously that Westworld is in many respects an ode to video games. (It’s also occasionally a reflection on modern society’s fear of data breaches, a straightforward robot uprising tale, a clone of Jurassic Park, and perhaps most bizarrely, a love letter to Lost­—another sci fi TV series beloved by this reviewer.) “Akane No Mai” makes this even clearer. We literally watch Maeve performing the seminal video game task of “grinding”: fighting weaker enemies over and over again until she has sufficiently boosted her stats and is ready for stronger foes. This is frequently a necessary task in the Dynasty Warriors series, and countless other games. At first, Maeve needs to give vocal commands to overpower the shogun’s foot soldiers; by the end of the episode, she has learned to soundlessly control them. She’s leveling up before our very eyes.

Of course, with real video games, there’s a person controlling the character, pressing the buttons that make their guy (or girl) swing a sword, or fire a gun, or step on a Goomba. What’s fun about Westworld is that the video game characters seem like they are finally controlling themselves. There’s a bit of uncertainty there, though. Is Maeve really rebelling against her programming, or is she merely following a path that the deceased (but probably not gone, if last week’s revelations about the potential for immortality are any indication) Robert Ford laid out for her?

Maeve ends the episode by declaring, “I’ve found a new voice.” In a literal sense, she means that she’s discovered an inner voice with which she can control the other hosts—though the line recalls Ford’s explanation of the “bicameral mind” theory of consciousness from season one, which supposed that entitites needed to hear their own thoughts in their heads, as if the gods were speaking to them. Dolores claimed to have discovered her own voice inside her head, and this revelation had something to do with her awakening as a supposedly automonous, fully conscious being. She’s now ostensibly following her own path, and one that increasingly seems like it will lead her to erase the less-well-developed consciousnesses of every other host in the park. (The dead hosts that will be pulled out of the water after whatever calamity befalls them have blank minds, we learn in a flashforward to the near future.) And yet I still can’t shake some nagging suspicion that this new voice is neither Dolores’s, nor Maeve’s, but someone else’s. As impressive and powerful as these video game characters may seem, there’s always somebody holding the controller.

Steven Pinker is famous for observing that human material well-being has undergone tremendous, and vastly underrated, improvement over the last few hundred years. “We’ve got this problem called obesity,” the famous Harvard linguist and psychologist wryly notes. “Historically, as problems go, that’s a pretty good one to have compared to the alternative of mass starvation.”

In 2012’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker argued persuasively that we’re “living in the most peaceful moment in our species’ existence,” with war, crime, and abject poverty all at historic lows. Microsoft founder Bill Gates called it “the most inspiring book I’ve ever read.”

Many people assume this all means Pinker sees advancements as inevitable, irreversible. Not so, he insists: “We’re always in danger of losing them,” particularly if we forget the principles and commitments that have made possible the miracle of modern life.

In his telling, the world as we know it grew out of the Enlightenment, a philosophical movement that dominated Europe’s culture in the 18th century and directly informed the great American idea that all people have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But these all-important values are fragile, he explains in a new book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (Viking), and the presumption in their favor is fraying under pressure from both left and right.

Pinker has been named among the 100 most influential public intellectuals by both Time magazine and Foreign Policy, though he may be even better known as the first nominee to the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists, a project of the satirical Annals of Improbable Research. In March, he visited Reason‘s Washington, D.C., office to talk with Nick Gillespie about his work. See the whole interview at the link below.

View this article.