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At a White House press event yesterday, President Barack Obama
dropped some real wisdom on the youts during
his answer to the last question from the crowd of Tumblr
users (starting at around 49 minutes): 

The truth of the matter is that for all the challenges we face,
all the problems that we have,…if you had to choose any moment to
be born in human history, not knowing what your position was going
to be, who you were going to be, you’d choose this time. The world
is less violent than it has ever been. It is healthier than it has
ever been. It is more tolerant than it has ever been. It is better
fed then it’s ever been. It is more educated than it’s ever
been.

Terrible things happen around the world every single day, but
the trend lines of progress are unmistakable. 

Amen. 

Just ask Stephen Pinker, who wrote a whole book about the
decline of violence and the rise of tolerance and learning in human
history, The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker
spoke
with Reason‘s own Ronald Bailey a couple of years ago
about the thesis of his book:

reason: Let’s go through some of the
reasons and processes by which the world became less violent. It
began with what you call the pacification process, which involved
the creation of states.

Pinker: The first states seemed to have in
their wake a massive reduction of death in tribal raiding and
feuding, basically because it’s a nuisance to the overlords. So you
have things like the Pax Romana, the Pax Islamica, the Pax Sinica,
in China, where the emperors would much rather have the peasants
alive to stock their tax rolls and armies, and be slaves or serfs.
So they had a selfish interest in preventing too much internecine
feuding among their subject peoples and basically kept them from
each other’s throats. Not that it was a life that we would consider
particularly pleasant. You’re substituting a lot of violence among
tribes and villages and clans for a lesser amount—but still a
brutal form of violence—from the state against its
citizens. 

The next transition, after you have the government preventing
people from committing violence against each other, you now have
the problem of preventing the government from committing violence
against its own peoples. And that was, basically, the advent of
democracy and the various reforms of the Enlightenment.

reason: The next reduction in violence
occurred as a result of what you call the civilizing process.

Pinker: It’s a term that I borrowed from
the German sociologist Norbert Elias, in his book by that name,
where he figured out—even in the absence of quantitative data —that
Europe had become a less violent place in the transition from the
Middle Ages to modernity. We now know that he was right, now that
historical criminologists have gathered the quantitative data. But
he had noticed it just from narrative accounts of what daily life
was like. Just people cutting off each other’s noses, stabbing each
other over the dinner table in response to an insult—there seems to
be less now than there was then. He had an immediate explanation
and an ultimate explanation. The immediate explanation was a
psychological change. Namely that people exercise more self-control
and more empathy. They counted to 10 and swallowed their pride
rather than lashing out with a dagger when they’d been insulted.
They tried to get inside the heads of other people in general, to
figure out what they wanted. 

Or check in with another Reason
interviewee Lenore Skenazy as she advocates giving kids
more freedom and responsibility in her great Free-Range Kids blog
and book. One objection she often hears is that the world is more
dangerous for kids than it used to be. But that’s just not true,
says Skenazy in
this post from 2012 (and over and over on her
blog):

This is the first time in 45 years that homicide is not among
that top 15 causes of death in America. Put in Free-Range Kids
terms: The murder rate was higher when most of us parents were
growing up than it is now, for our kids. And since I know someone
will say, “So what? That just means kids are safer because we are
keeping them inside, or GPS’ing them, or making sure they are
supervised at all times!” let me quickly note that murder is down
among adults, too, and it’s not because we are
helicoptering them. Moreover, the murder rate is
lower than it has been for almost two generations, which means it
is lower now than even before parents began
hovering….

Our parents didn’t feel guilty or terrified when they let us
play outside and the murder rate was higher. Today’s kids deserve
the even-less-risky chance to enjoy a Free-Range
childhood. 

As for being better fed, here’s Bailey again, reviewing
Ramez Naam’s The Infinite Resource: 

Take agriculture. 10,000 years ago it took an average of 3,000
acres to feed one hunter-gatherer; farmers today can feed one
person using less than one-third of an acre. “Our innovation in
farming technology has multiplied the value of a plot of land by
nearly 10,000,” Naam notes. If crop yields per acre had remained
stuck at their 1960 level, half of the world’s remaining forests
would have been plowed down
by now.

Obama frames this good news as a plea against cynicism.
Reason prefers a spin that makes the broader case for
individual freedom and human ingenuity. But good news no matter
which way you slice it. 

Education reformers
and their teachers union foes seemed equally stunned on
Tuesday by Los
Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu’s
ruling that found California’s teacher tenure system—which
makes it nearly impossible for public schools to fire teachers—to
be an affront to the equal protection clause in the state
constitution.

This may be just the first step in a long legal process that
pits a group of poor kids and reformers against the state, the
powerful California Teachers Association, and its allies in the
legislature, but this was big national news—and the latest volley
in an ongoing debate about education reform, writes Steven
Greenhut.

If the ruling is upheld, the legislature will need to defy the
CTA and revisit teacher dismissal laws. But real change needs to
come from the grassroots, argues Greenhut with the public demanding
that the state start putting the education of kids above the job
security demanded by the unions representing those kids’
teachers.

View this article.

It’s a weird weed world out there these days. While the federal
War on Drugs—including medical marijuana—persists, we’re starting
to see cracks. Congress is well on its way to forbidding
the Drug Enforcement Agency from interfering with medical
marijuana operations in states where it’s legal. And FBI
Director James
Comey says the agency needs to be able to hire pot smokers
for some positions. Meanwhile, culturally, we’re seeing all sorts
of interesting experiments in legal marijuana: Cannabis
cafes; weed-friendly symphony
concerts; organizations that grow free
marijuana for vets; food trucks for cannabis
edibles. 

In February, Reason published a
state-by-state guide to marijuana legalization and
decriminalization. Since then, some states have seen pro-pot
successes, some have seen failures, and some new bills and
initiatives have cropped up. Elizabeth Nolan Brown looks at the
state of state marijuana laws circa summer 2014.  

View this article.

As Peter Suderman
pointed
out yesterday, one of the major fauxplanations for House
Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s stunning primary loss to David Brat
is that Cantor was “soft”
on immigration. Exactly what that means is anybody’s guess,
given that Cantor wanted a militarized, wall-defended border with
Mexico and got a 100 percent rating from the anti-immigration group
FAIR.

As I argue in
this Daily Beast column, Cantor’s sins against the
ideals of limited government are long and numerous. Fact is, since
taking office in 2001, he never missed an opportunity to vote for
every major expansion of government power he was given, as long as
a Republican was in the White House. No Child Left Behind, Medicare
Part D, extension of the Patriot Act, TARP, auto bailouts, endless
war: It’s all there in his record. As a self-styled (read: sad and
pathetic) “Young Gun,” he also pushed the GOP’s Path to Prosperity
budget, which would grow annual spending over the next decade from
about $3.7 trillion to $5 trillion. On top of that, of course, he
hit all the sour notes possible on social issues: He was dismissive
of marriage equality, loved the drug war, and anti-abortion all the
way. 

In other words, Cantor represents big government conservativism
in its most fulsome manifestation. And it’s this package of B.S.,
not anything related to immigration, that has driven voter
identification with the GOP down to 25 percent according to Gallup.
Until Republicans understand that they cannot mix libertarianish
rhetoric about reducing the size, scope, and spending of government
with a massive buildup of spending and regulation and a buttinsky,
intolerant attitude toward social issues, they will keep losing
elections.

Either own the fact that you are in favor of slightly less
spending than Democrats and want to marginalize social outgroups or
start living up to your rhetoric. Voters, it seems, are neither
stupid nor receptive to lies.

When it comes to immigration specificially, Sen. Rand Paul
(R-Ky.) is right that Republicans have become “trapped” by their
rhetoric on the topic, especially regarding the concept of
“amnesty.”

“We’ve been somewhat trapped by rhetoric and words, and
amnesty’s a word that has kind of trapped us,” he said, adding that
some people think it means giving undocumented immigrants a right
to vote, while others say it means allowing them to obtain legal
status without a penalty….

Paul is no champion of open borders or even last year’s Senate
immigration-reform bill (he explains his vote against
the plan here). But he is already being attacked by “real”
Republicans for even talking about immigration in
less-than-apocalyptic terms, especially by people who are quick to
say Eric Cantor got crushed because he was “soft” on
immigration.

As it happens,
64 percent of Republicans nationwide favor immigration reform.
They are joined by 71 percent of independents and 78 percent of
Democrats. Within Cantor’s own district,
a large majority of voters (as many as 72 percent) favored
immigration reform.

If the Republicans decide that
being virulently anti-immigrant and immigration reform is a way to
succeed, they will be on the losing side of not just that issue but
history.

Even though polls routinely show that immigration is actually
not a particularly important issue for voters, hostility to
immigrants confirms in many people’s mind a vision of the
Republicans as mean, intolerant, and white. That simply doesn’t
play well in an increasingly diverse and globalized America.

More to the point, large numbers of voters—including 65 percent
of the independents who decide all national elections—think that
government “has too much power.”
A majority of voters (55 percent) think the “government is
doing too much.” These are not new findings or recent turnarounds.
Voters have been saying the government does too much and spends too
much
for a long time.

The Republican Party, especially its doltish leadership, keeps
saying, “Yeah, yeah, we hear you, we’re on your side, shrink the
state, stop spending, we get it.” And yet when it is power it
cranks up spending and regulation like LBJ’s bastard child. And
when it is in opposition, it still proposes to spend more money in
the future and refuses to abide by its attractive libertarian
rhetoric by going on and on about abortion, drugs are bad mmkay,
gays need fixing, immigrants scare me, and all the rest. Think
about it, Republicans: Large majorities of Americans keep saying
they want a government that spends less and does less. Large
majorities are also favorably disposed to immigrants and
immigration. And you’re seriously fixating on keeping immigrants
out of country as a successful electoral ploy while laying out
budgets that increase spending by at least 35 percent over the
coming decade? Run the numbers again, pal.

As much as a single person could personify everything that sucks
about the contemporary GOP—a patently fake commitment to small,
limited government, a lack of social tolerance, and uncritical
support for a military-industrial complex that has lost the last
two wars it foisted on Americans—that person was Eric Cantor. Good
riddance.

Republicans who sound like him and legislate like him won’t be
any more successful come this November or in any other future
elections either.

News flash: Voters dislike Republicans (and Democrats, too) not
despite their policies and the way they wield power but
because of their policies and the way they wield
power.