Tag: hit&run

Whether they’re looking for a fresh start after a run-in with the law, trying to relocate across state lines, or merely hoping to operate a hairdryer without first getting the government’s permission, the first half of 2019 brought good news for workers. Licensing reforms have been on the march in state capitols across the country, as lawmakers from both major parties embrace an issue that libertarians have been talking about for years.

“Heavily Democratic states are passing similar legislation to what’s being passed in Republican-controlled states,” says Zach Herman, a research analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).

That bipartisan spirit was on full display in Oklahoma City in April, when a significant licensing reform sailed through the state legislature with only two “nay” votes. The new law eliminates so-called “good character” provisions—which effectively rule out any applicant with a criminal history—from all the state’s occupational licensing laws. Now, each licensing board will have to publish a list of specific disqualifying offenses.

Letting Oklahomans with criminal records work in licensed professions “will help them find jobs and contribute to society, which will increase employment opportunities and public safety while decreasing recidivism,” says Jenna Moll, deputy director for the Justice Action Network, which pushed for the bill’s passage.

Meanwhile in Arizona, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey oversaw the bipartisan passage of a first-in-the-nation bill to require Arizona licensing boards to accept out-of-state licenses. He also signed a repeal of a ludicrous requirement that hair stylists at “dry bars”—that is, people who use blow-dryers and curling irons but do not cut, color, or perm hair—receive 1,000 hours of training before being able to get a job.

In all, more than 1,000 occupational licensing bills have been introduced across the U.S. this year, according to NCSL’s database, up from about 750 last year. That doesn’t include everything; the organization only tracks proposals that affect professions licensed in at least 30 states, and more bills may yet be proposed in 2019.

Not every legislative effort has been pointed in the right direction. New Jersey lawmakers are trying to license pet groomers, and Massachusetts lawmakers have proposed licensing interior designers. But the tide appears to be turning. While organizations like the Institute for Justice have been winning lawsuits against bad licensing laws for years, legislators are finally doing what the courts shouldn’t have to: letting America work.

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Thieves stole all four tires from Karen and Dan Dow’s car, leaving it propped on milk crates outside their San Francisco home. As soon as they discovered the problem, Karen called for a tow truck. But while she was on the phone, parking enforcement left a $79 ticket on the car for being parked on the street during sweeping. After local media picked up the story, the city rescinded the ticket.

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The terrorist mass shooter who killed some twenty people in El Paso yesterday was motivated by a combination of racism and xenophobia and seemingly left-wing concerns about protecting the environment and expanding the welfare state. The “manifesto” he wrote combines elements of both. It attacks racial mixing and condemns Hispanic immigrants as “invaders,” but also seeks to bar them in order to protect the environment, expand the welfare state, and curb the supposedly malign influence of corporations. Graeme Wood of the Atlantic summarizes:

The author of the manifesto pronounced himself in “general” agreement with the Christchurch murderer. He opposed racial mixing; he thought America was committing suicide by letting Hispanics “invade….”

The very few noteworthy sections of the manifesto are the ones that reveal a broader range of influences than one might suspect. The author reserves his greatest rage not for Hispanics, but for “the takeover of the United States by unchecked corporations.” The corporations, he says, are pro-immigration and befoul our natural environment. Once automation spreads and causes mass unemployment, Hispanic invaders will demand government freebies—specifically a universal basic income (UBI)—and will cause civil unrest if not placated. Oddly enough, the author shares some of these goals, for white people anyway: “Achieving ambitious social projects like universal healthcare and UBI would become far more likely to succeed if tens of millions of dependents are removed…”

Many of these ideas, including some of the most stupid and craven ones, come not from the right, as traditionally conceived, but from the left as well. The left has peddled conspiracies of corporations as diabolical puppeteers (while the right has credulously promoted corporations as angelic job creators). Lack of confidence in job markets’ ability to digest and repurpose displaced workers is typically a concern of the left, and, of course, the Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang has been the most vocal figure on the subject of job loss due to automation. UBI and health care have been proposed by Swedish-model Democrats and ridiculed by Republicans. The belief that poor immigrants would, if given the chance, fill our welfare rolls and capsize the ship of state—that’s the position not only of the Trump adviser Stephen Miller but also of Bernie Sanders and a long tradition of labor leftists eager to keep “American jobs” safe from immigrants. Combine these ideas, which have traction now in both major parties, with straightforward racism and xenophobia, which have traction in one major party, and you get what we saw yesterday in El Paso.

Wood argues (correctly, in my view) that Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric contributes to this ideological potpourri in a more reprehensible way than that of current American left-wing politicians. He is likely right on that point. But that should not lead us to ignore the left-wing side of this equation, especially since the problem is far from confined to the US, and in many ways predates Trump’s unexpected rise to power.

As Wood notes, the El Paso killer’s ideology resembles that of the shooter who killed over fifty Muslims in New Zealand earlier this year. Indeed, the former even cited the latter’s manifesto in his own. While some of the combination of right and left-wing ideology in both men’s worldviews is eccentric, both also have deeper roots in a world-view common to many on both the nationalist right and the socialist left: the assumption that the world is a zero-sum game where some groups can only prosper and succeed at the expense of others. What I wrote in March after the New Zealand shooting remains just as relevant today:

Some may find it surprising that the perpetrator of the recent horrific New Zealand terrorist attack that killed fifty Muslim worshipers in two mosques, combined seemingly right-wing nationalism with seemingly left-wing socialism and environmentalism….

But in this case, the terrorist’s worldview is less unusual than it might seem. A similar combination of views is evident in many xenophobic nationalist movements, both past and present. Socialists and nationalists have their differences. But they also have much in common, including a zero-sum view of the world.

Anti-immigrant nationalist parties in Europe often combine hostility to nonwhite immigration with support for extensive government control of the economy. That’s true of such cases as the National Front in France (now renamed as the “National Rally”) and the AfD in Germany. Such parties often also often blame immigrants for real and imagined environmental degradation, just as the perpetrator of the New Zealand attack does….

Similarly, the perpetrator of the New Zealand attack argues that environmentalism and immigration restriction “are the same issue [because] the environment is being destroyed by over population,…” Some influential far-left environmentalists have also advocated coercive population control, including defending China’s cruel “one child” policy….[note: the El Paso killer also uses the supposed need for population control as a justification for keeping out immigrants].

Racial nationalists and socialist far leftists share a common zero-sum view of the world under which some groups can succeed and prosper only at the expense of others. It is easy to see how that sort of world view often leads adherents to believe that drastic action—including violence—is essential to ensure that the “right” people end up as winners in this cruel zero-sum world. I discussed this crucial commonality in greater detail here…

Zero-sum thinking need not always lead to racial and ethnic hostility, or xenophobia. It is also often channeled in other directions, such as hostility to the wealthier members of one’s own ethnic group or society. In some cases, it leads to a combination of both fear of foreigners and fear of the wealthy.

For example, unexpectedly popular Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders echoes Donald Trump’s hostility to international trade, while simultaneously arguing that ordinary Americans can only be economically successful by redistributing vast wealth from “the 1 percent.” Until recently, he also expressed considerable hostility towards immigration, denouncing the idea of free migration of labor as a plot by “the Koch brothers” and other malevolent billionaires, which would impoverish the working class and end up “doing away with the concept of a nation state.”

“Lone wolf” terrorist attacks like those in New Zealand and El Paso are far from the only dangers of zero-sum thinking, or even the most significant. The far bigger danger is the impact of these ideas on “mainstream” politics and public policy—an impact that goes well beyond a few extremist killers:

Fortunately, most nationalists and socialists aren’t willing to go so far as to personally commit acts of terrorism. But all too many are willing to advocate large-scale coercion that inflicts great harm on large numbers of people, in order to ensure that they and their preferred causes don’t end up as losers in a zero-sum world. Everything from barring migrants fleeing horrible oppression, to separating immigrant children from parents in order to deter them from entering, to coercive population control, to massive expropriation of property, and repression of “capitalists” in order to transfer the nation’s wealth to “the people.” The list can easily be extended.

There is no easy antidote to the spread of dangerous zero-sum ideas. But perhaps the beginning of wisdom is to recognize the danger they pose, and understand why they are wrong:

Far from enriching natives, immigration restrictions often end up undermining their freedom and prosperity as well as that of potential immigrants. Standard economic estimates indicate that free migration throughout the world would double world GDP, with many of the gains going to natives, not just migrants. Natives lose the gains from trade with immigrants, and also suffer from the civil liberties violations inherent in efforts to keep out and deport migrants. Rich and poor are not locked in a zero-sum game either. To the contrary, they can prosper together through mutual exchange, and historically often have.

Pollution and global warming are genuinely serious problems. But addressing them does not require massive coercion or keeping millions of people in poverty. Historically, increasing wealth has actually led to reductions in pollution (after an initial increase early in the process of industrialization), as wealthy societies can more easily afford to invest in reducing pollution. Even when it comes to the particularly difficult challenge of climate change, there are ways to combat that simultaneously increase prosperity rather than stifle it. They include reducing regulatory obstacles to using nuclear power, cutting back on zoning restrictions that make it hard to build denser housing, and offering prizes for the development of new “clean” energy technologies. Where regulation is needed to cut back on carbon dioxide emissions, it should take the the scalpel form of a revenue-neutral carbon tax, rather than the meat cleaver of coercive population control and government takeovers of huge portions of the economy.

It would be naive to imagine that zero-sum games never occur. But they are far less common than either the far left or the nationalist right imagine. The more people come to understand that, the better.

 

NOTE: Because perpetrators of terrorist attacks often undertake them in large part to gain fame and media attention for themselves and their ideas, I have refrained from mentioning the names of the men who committed the New Zealand  and El Paso’s attack or linking to their “manifestos.” I have instead linked to others’ summaries of their ideas.  But both the names and the manifestos are easily found online, for those who wish to read them for themselves. Ultimately, the reason to focus on these types of ideas is not so much that they motivated these terrorists, but that they have a much broader pernicious influence on political discourse and public policy.

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Five Truman State University (TSU) undergraduate students killed themselves during the 2016-2017 academic year. Four were Alpha Kappa Lambda (AKL) frat brothers and one was a female victim about whom less is known. The parents of two of the male victims (of death by hanging), have filed a lawsuit in a Missouri state court against the university, the frat, and a frat brother named Brandon Grossheim who appears to have been linked to all five victims. Unlike in the Michelle Carter case in Massachusetts (about which I blogged here, here, and here), no criminal charges were filed against Grossheim for playing a role in the suicides.

The facts are currently somewhat murky. Grossheim appears to have had access to the living quarters of the victims, was in the proximity of some of them around the time of their deaths, allegedly took some victims’ items like money or drugs, and had spoken to at least some of the victims about their depression and suicidal thoughts. According to the suit:

Defendant Grossheim had the intent to aid or encourage Mullins and Thomas to commit self-harm in that he “counseled” them and gave “step-by step-instructions to them on how to “deal with their depression,” make peace and “do their own free will” thereby implying that he counseled them to commit suicide.

The plaintiffs accuse the defendants of “negligence, misrepresentation, and other wrongful conduct”. The lawsuit states in part:

Defendants AKL and TSU had a legal duty to use ordinary care to protect its members, including Plaintiffs from a person, known to be violent, who was present on the premises or an individual who was present who has conducted himself so as to indicate danger and sufficient time exists to prevent injury.

Defendants breached their duty to Plaintiffs by failing to intervene in Grossheim’s dangerous behavior and/or failing to warn or protect Plaintiffs.

What role Grossheim played in the suicides and whether TSU and AKL failed to fulfill their duties should become clearer as the facts unfold. At this stage, the plaintiffs likely have a long way to go before they meet their legal burdens.

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Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America, by Erika Lorraine Milam, Princeton University Press, 408 pages, $29.95

Today, self-help books and relationship gurus invoke evolution to explain everything from marital infidelity to the paleo diet. Our early ancestors’ survival needs echo through our ideas today. But this is not the first time our hominid ancestry’s role in our culture and character has played a major role in Western popular culture.

Following the nightmare of the Second World War, the idea of a universal humanity had great appeal. The Holocaust and the atom bomb had proven that human beings have not only destructive impulses but a devastating ability to carry them out. But were these impulses something we were born with, or were they created by our culture? Answering this question became a driving focus of popular anthropology. With Creatures of Cain, the Princeton historian Erika Lorraine Milam explores this period of intellectual debate.

The high-minded internationalism of the postwar period sought to promote a sense of brotherhood, as in the “Family of Man” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955—photographs showing the lives of people around the world. (This still, rather parochially, treated the nuclear family as the center of all cultures.) Anthropology hadn’t covered itself in glory in the previous 50 years: Some of its biggest names, such as Earnest Hooton and Eugen Fischer, had gone all in on the “race science” that drove Nazism and eugenics. The S.S. doctor Josef Mengele even received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation before he went to Auschwitz. So after the war, many scholars believed the path to peace (and academic redemption) was to celebrate the universal family of man, playing down differences and pointing to humankind’s immense achievements, from agriculture to rocket science. Violence was aberrant and abhorrent; our true nature was to cooperate. Some scientists, such as Margaret Mead, even argued that behavior, whether cooperative or competitive, was entirely learned. We are made by our cultural environment, so cultures could create peace.

In the ’50s and ’60s, magazines like National Geographic and Scientific American published stories on various “Stone Age” cultures still alive in the world, from the Kalahari Bushmen to the tribes of New Guinea. The stories highlighted the idea that such peoples represented the lives of our hominid ancestors and focused on how they lived in harmony with nature. There was also a sense of urgency to study these groups before they were changed by contact with the rest of the world.

This idealization of tribal peoples was hardly new—some of that fawning coverage could have been written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Unfortunately, other studies offered less comforting visions in which these “primitive” groups turned out not to be soft-focus prelapsarian Adams after all. Indeed, some of them were pretty violent.

Meanwhile, other scientists treated baboons, chimpanzees, or gorillas as analogs to early man, using them to look for clues to our ancestral patterns. But Jane Goodall’s research found that life among chimps was not idyllic either. Territorial warfare, murder, and infanticide were part of their world too.

So the idea that our species is naturally cooperative was changing by the mid-1960s. The “Killer Ape” thesis, popular from about 1966 to 1975, held that human beings are violent because of our genes. Milam argues that Americans’ understanding of human nature shifted rapidly “from seeing humanity as characterized by our unique capacity for reasoned cooperation to emphasising, even lauding, our propensity for violence.”

One key advocate of this view was the science writer Robert Ardrey, who published The Territorial Imperative in 1966. He argued that competition for territory was part of human character. Around the same time, Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression and Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape appeared in bookstores.

Morris’ focus was on sexual behavior, which he argued was different from that of other primates due to humans’ relative hairlessness, which rendered our primary and secondary sexual characteristics more visible. He argued that breasts had developed for sexual signaling as well as for feeding infants and that sexual selection had favored men with large penises. The Naked Ape‘s message was in keeping with the sexual revolution, and the book became a bestseller, reaching readers well beyond the kinds of people who would normally buy books on anthropology. (A Johnny Carson interview with Morris was, by Milam’s account, the first time the word penis was said on live American television.)

A number of the experts involved were also focused on public communication. Milam suggests that a sharp line cannot be drawn between the “colloquial” and academic discussions taking place, since several scientists were participating in the public sphere. Their books were published by commercial presses; they appeared on TV; the debate played out not just in Nature but in the letters page of Playboy. (Hugh Hefner liked The Naked Ape and even sponsored a film adaptation of the book. The idea that promiscuity was biologically determined obviously played well with much of Hef’s audience.)

It is worth noting that some of the prominent figures in this intellectual debate had no advanced credentials in the field. Ardrey, who was well-known as a Hollywood screenwriter, had no training beyond an undergraduate degree in anthropology. Jane Goodall had not been to college at all when she began her chimpanzee research. (She would later complete a Ph.D. after being admitted directly to a graduate program on the basis of her published work.) Those who did have advanced degrees and university appointments could suddenly attract the kind of attention most academics only dream of. Lionel Tiger, the Rutgers anthropologist who wrote Men in Groups (1969), was profiled like a rock star in The New York Times. Tiger argued that homosocial groups of men formed the foundation of human society. (It was Tiger who introduced the phrase male bonding to common conversation.) The writer Kate Millett called it “a genetic justification of the patriarchy”—and it wasn’t only feminists who found the idea of such innate social behavior depressing.

The popularity of these human evolution books made them ripe for parody, by writers such as Elaine Morgan in The Descent of Woman (1972) and Antony Jay in Corporation Man (1971). In his witty account of businessmen (Homo sapiens corporalis), Jay—the future co-writer of the TV show Yes, Minister—mocked the participant-observer anthropologist, saying that he was “accepted so completely by the objects of my study that my presence in no way inhibited or modified their behaviour. Indeed, there were times when I could honestly say that I felt I was one of them myself.” Morgan similarly suggested that readers try to observe “specimens of Homo sapiens in his natural habitat. It shouldn’t be difficult because the species is protected by law and in no immediate danger of extinction.”

This wave of books would give way to further, more nuanced discussions of evolution and its impact on human behavior. E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology(1975) attempted to synthesize group and individual selection pressures, including cooperative as well as competitive traits. Richard Dawkins entered the fray in 1976 with The Selfish Gene, the most popular book about the new evolutionary theories. Dawkins’ work focused on individual genetic survival, explaining even cooperation as a strategy for gene transmission. More recently, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate (2002) came close to capturing the kind of crossover appeal of the Killer Ape genre.

Today, evolution is widely accepted as an explanation not just for how we got here but for how we are. But the understandings of it among the public are not always what scholars have intended. Far from promoting equality, it can be used to justify division. Just as religions could be interpreted as endorsing hierarchies, so evolution could be used to denigrate certain groups who were seen to be at “different stages of development,” an idea that appeared soon after Darwin published The Origin of Species.

This mindset was especially widespread in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From the Enlightenment view of “savages” as less culturally developed, evolution allowed Westerners to see them as less biologically developed too, an idea that was weaponized in various forms of colonial oppression. This “scientific racism” was not eradicated with notions of universality. When scholars themselves point to “primitive” tribes as representing how our ancestors might have lived, it’s not hard to see how the average reader would interpret that as meaning these indigenous groups were less far along the evolutionary track than Westerners.

Today, DNA testing is widespread—for criminal investigations, for medical diagnoses, for genealogical research. The idea that our genome offers something of a road map for our behavioral characteristics is widely accepted, although the nature/nurture debate does continue.

But the idea that we would instinctively fight and fornicate, were it not for the moderating influence of modern civilization, wasn’t created by the Killer Ape theorists. It was the general understanding of the Christian world. We were creatures of Cain. Our ability to control our behavior—our higher consciousness—was what separated us from the animals. Whether we label those instincts “DNA” or “original sin,” the idea is the same.

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Dear television newscasters of the world: Don’t do what Fox News Channel Host Jon Scott did this afternoon while reporting on this afternoon’s deadly shooting at an El Paso Walmart:

Af El Paso mass shooting, Fox News anchor tries to link video games to mass shootings. pic.twitter.com/hdkjwbgbU1

— John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) August 3, 2019

Scott wonders if these guys “raised on a diet of violent video games—if they actually start pulling the trigger of a real weapon and they see real death and they find it’s not as satisfying as it was when they’re playing on a television screen.” He wonders out loud if this is why the alleged shooter, Patrick Crusius, stopped shooting.

Poor criminal defense attorney Ted Williams. Asked to respond to this blind stab at speculation, he wisely points out that it’s too soon to guess at why the shooter acted. He also pointed out that it’s “rare” that video game players “act out like this.” (As I’m writing this blog post, another talking head has come on Fox News Channel to blame it on Fortnite and bad parenting.)

That’s a nicely diplomatic response to Scott’s utter nonsense. Reason‘s Ron Bailey has written regularly how the studies continue to show no relationship between video game violence and real world aggression.

This may have been an attempt to deflect away from people who use mass shotings to justify additional gun controls. The National Rifle Association has often tried to blame video games in order to push attention away from guns. But you don’t have to throw the First Amendment under the bus to defend the Second Amendment. And I suspect we will find that tougher gun control laws won’t have made a difference here either—we seem to be stuck in a loop where politicians propose gun regulations after a shooting that would not have stopped the shooting, as Reason‘s Jacob Sullum has frequently noted.

In any case, the speculations on Fox today were irresponsible. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that video games caused this awful rampage.

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Hours before he allegedly attacked shoppers at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, Patrick Crusius published a hate-filled diatribe in which he called Hispanics “invaders” and criticized the supposed takeover of the U.S. government by pro-immigrant corporations.

At least 20 people are dead in El Paso and more than two dozen others were wounded, according to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. The alleged shooter, a 21-year old man, is in custody.

Law enforcement has not yet confirmed that the shooter wrote the manifesto, but NBC News (and others) report that multiple police sources indicated a connection between the document and the shooting.

In the four-page manifesto published on 8chan, the alleged shooter wrote that he was responding to the “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and called on others to similarly take up arms against “low-hanging fruit”—lightly guarded, soft targets. He lauded the lauded the man who killed 51 in a pair of Mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March—a shooting that was also accompanied by an anti-immigrant screed posted online.

The El Paso’s shooters alleged manifesto is racist, anti-corporate, anti-automation, and especially anti-immigrant, and it reflects a general hatred for many aspects of American society. Crusius hails from the Dallas area, according to police, but it seems likely that he targeted El Paso because the city has a large immigrant population.

The manifesto claims that he was acting in defense of his country, but gunning down innocent people as they peacefully shop is the act of a madman, full stop. That’s true whether the shooter wrote the manifesto or not.

President Donald Trump tweeted about the attack, and several 2020 Democratic candidates have renewed calls for gun control measures. It is unknown at this time whether the shooter’s weapons were purchased legally.

Texas is an open-carry state and Walmart allows customers to open-carry inside their stores in such states, as long as store staffers can verify proper documentation. At least one shopper told local media that he attempted to engage the shooter with his own firearm.

 

 

 

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A N.C. gun store put up this billboard:

Rep. Rashida Tlaib responded:

How the hell is this not inciting violence? https://t.co/rgdDloiePq

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) July 31, 2019

No, calling politicians idiots isn’t “inciting violence” or “encouraging gun violence.” It is urging people to dislike the politicians—a basic right of every American. That’s so when people criticize President Trump or the Republican Congressional leadership or the left wing of the Democratic party or anyone else. It’s so regardless of what groups those politicians belong to.

It’s true that some tiny percentage of listeners may react to such criticism by deciding to violently attack its targets, whether the targets are on the Left or on the Right. But one basic premise of free speech isn’t that we don’t treat speech as “inciting violence” (a label for constitutionally unprotected speech, see Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969)), and suppress its communication to the 99.9999% of people who don’t act violently because of it, just because of a risk that 0.0001% would act violently.

And that’s so even for much harsher speech, such as calling people traitors or fascists or other such labels that some might see as morally justifying attacks. It is even more clearly true of simply calling them idiots. That’s true, I think, not just a matter of law but also of political ethics: There’s no basis for morally condemning such speech as supposedly “inciting violence.” (One might mildly condemn it as being nonsubstantive, but that condemnation would of course apply to a vast range of common criticism, and of common praise, of political figures from both sides.) It most certainly does not “NEED[] TO COME DOWN.”

Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ayanna Pressley have set themselves up as leaders of the left wing of the Democratic Party. They have achieved national prominence, not just individually but as a group. In my view, their policies and views merit criticism; but even if you agree with them, surely others have a right to disagree. People have a right to criticize them as a group and not just individually. People have a right to continue to criticize them even when the politicians had gotten threats from third parties (as Omar, Tlaib, and Ocasio-Cortez, and Pressley reportedly have, and as I’m sure many other politicians have as well).

People have a right to criticize them disrespectfully and not just respectfully. They have a right to criticize them with slogans and not just substantively, again just as they do with President Trump or Republican Congressional leaders or anyone else. And of course they have a right to call them “idiots.”

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New York City, always in the running for the title of Earth’s culinary capital, appears set to relinquish its claim by banning foie gras.

The bill to ban foie gras was introduced in January by City Councilor Carlina Rivera (D), who represents parts of six Manhattan neighborhoods—the East Village, Gramercy Park, Kips Bay, Lower East Side, Murray Hill, and Rose Hill—and at least a handful of restaurants that serve foie gras.

“No person, or any agent thereof, shall sell or offer for sale, or in any foodservice establishment provide or offer to provide by sale or any other manner, any force-fed product,” Rivera’s killjoy bill orders. Violators could face steep fines and up to a year in jail for violating the ban.

Rivera told the New York Post in February that she introduced the proposed ban because, the paper reports, “the foie gras production process is ‘egregious’ and has been wrongly ‘tolerated’ for ‘far too long’ in the Big Apple.” Rivera told the Post last month that foie gas is “a luxury product that we don’t need in New York City.”

Unfortunately, many of Rivera’s colleagues on the city council appear to agree with her. Crain’s last month reported at least twenty of New York City’s 51 city councilors have signed on to co-sponsor the ban. That number now stands at 28, which would give the ban the majority it needs to become law.

A city council committee debated the bill last month. There’s no word yet on when—or even if—the full council will vote on the ban. Meanwhile, the Post reported last month that neither New York City Mayor (and soon-to-be-former presidential candidate) Bill de Blasio nor City Council President Corey Johnson has taken a stand on the proposed ban.

The Robb Report noted last month that many New York City chefs oppose the bill.

“We’re both opposed to the ban,” said Arjuna Bull, who plans to open a restaurant in New York City’s East Village this summer with fellow chef Nahid Ahmed. “It’s quite an exquisite ingredient. We love to eat it, we love to work with it. It’s so versatile. All the chefs we know are opposed to [the ban].”

Last decade, Chicago lawmakers passed a foolhardy and short-lived foie gras ban. California’s statewide foie gras ban, which is the subject of a court challenge in which I’ve played a role, took effect in 2012.

The loss of foie gras in New York City, coupled with California’s ban, would make it illegal to sell foie gras in—depending on the source of your rankings—anywhere from four of the top 10 to six of the top 15 food destinations in America.

That’s likely by design. Killing off foie gras in America begins and ends with banning it in California and New York.

A foie gras ban would have been inconceivable to many in New York even a decade ago.

Eleven years ago, I attended the “Duckathlon,” a strange and wonderful competition for chefs that took place in and around Chelsea Market in lower Manhattan. The raucous event—held a short walk from Rivera’s Manhattan district—was sponsored by D’Artagnan, the country’s top purveyor of foie gras.

In a subsequent piece for Reason, I discussed how New York City’s unique place in America’s culinary hierarchy was increasingly in jeopardy. “There is probably no better place in America to hold an event celebrating and defending haute cuisine—and the chefs who cook it—than in New York City,” I wrote. But I also noted that the city that’s home to many of the best restaurants in the country had also become a burgeoning food nanny state.

Others I spoke with at the Duckathlon disagreed with that assessment—at least as it pertained to haute cuisine.

“I don’t think, in its upper reaches, New York City is a food nanny state at all,” the late food writer Josh Ozersky told me. Ozersky, like foie gras’ greatest American promoter and defender, fellow New Yorker Anthony Bourdain, is dead. Their energy and leadership are sorely missed today.

I spoke this week with staffers (and even a customer, a foie gras-loving comedy actor from Los Angeles) at one restaurant that serves foie gras and is located in Councilor Rivera’s district. They told me they were entirely unaware of both Rivera and her proposed ban.

That’s worrisome. Unless opposition to the ban crystallizes and chefs unite to push back against it, foie gras could soon be no more in New York City. But the impact of these bans extends far beyond foie gras—a point I made here last year.

“Banning foie gras ducks would not only dramatically impact those producing it today, but logically could lead to banning all domestic poultry,” D’Artagnan founder and CEO Ariane Daguin wrote in an email to me this week. “We believe there is risk of a much larger industry precedent being set here, one that ultimately could affect our daily meals.“

The Wall Street Journal‘s Anne Kadet, who doesn’t eat foie gras, toured the Hudson Valley Foie Gras farm in Upstate New York recently at the invitation of the farm’s owners. The tour, she writes, didn’t convince her to become a foie gras eater. Neither, though, did it make her a supporter of New York City’s proposed ban.

“I’m personally opposed to the ban because it unfairly singles out a small segment of the meat/poultry industry that is an easy target,” Kadet told me this week in an email.

Kadet’s principled opposition to banning a food she doesn’t eat is music to my ears. Hers is also a mindset I hope New York City lawmakers can both understand and embrace.

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Most of you think that the world, in general, is getting worse. You are wrong. Citing uncontroversial data on major global trends, I will prove to you that this dark view of humanity’s prospects is, in large part, badly mistaken.

First, though: How do I know most of you believe that things are bad and getting worse? Because that’s what you tell pollsters. A 2016 survey by the public opinion firm YouGov asked folks in 17 countries, “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better or worse?” Fifty-eight percent answered worse, and 30 percent chose neither. Only 11 percent thought things are getting better. In the United States, 65 percent thought that the world is getting worse and 23 percent said neither. Only 6 percent responded that the world is getting better.

A 2015 study in the journal Futures polled residents of the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and Australia; it reported that a majority (54 percent) rated the risk of our way of life ending within the next 100 years at 50 percent or greater, and a quarter (24 percent) rated the risk of humans being wiped out in the next 100 years at 50 percent or greater. Younger respondents were more pessimistic than their elders.

So why are so many smart people like you wrong about the improving state of the world? For starters, almost all of us have a couple of psychological glitches that cause us to focus relentlessly on negative news.

Way back in 1965, Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge of the Peace Research Institute Oslo observed “a basic asymmetry in life between the positive, which is difficult and takes time, and the negative, which is much easier and takes less time.” They illustrated this by comparing “the amount of time needed to bring up and socialize an adult person and the amount of time needed to kill him in an accident; the amount of time needed to build a house and to destroy it in a fire, to make an airplane and to crash it, and so on.” News is bad news; steady, sustained progress is not news.

Smart people seek to be well-informed and so tend to be more voracious consumers of news. Since journalism focuses on dramatic events that go wrong, the nature of news thus tends to mislead readers and viewers into thinking that the world is in worse shape than it really is. This mental shortcut is called the availability bias, a name bestowed on it in 1973 by the behavioral scientists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. “People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media,” explains Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Another reason for the ubiquity of mistaken gloom derives from evolutionary psychology. A Stone Age person hears a rustle in the grass. Is it the wind or a lion? If he assumes it’s the wind and the rustling turns out to be a lion, then that person does not live to become one of our ancestors. We are the descendants of the worried folks who tended to assume that all rustles in the grass were dangerous predators. Due to this instinctive negativity bias, most of us attend far more to bad rather than to good news.

Of course, not everything is perfect. Big problems remain to be addressed and solved. As the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker says, “it’s essential to realize that progress does not mean that everything gets better for everyone, everywhere, all the time. That would be a miracle, that wouldn’t be progress.”

For example, man-made climate change arising largely from increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide released from the burning of fossil fuels could become a significant problem for humanity during this century. The spread of plastic marine debris is a big and growing concern. Many wildlife populations are declining, and tropical forest area continues to shrink. And far too many people are still malnourished and dying in conflicts around the globe.

But many of those problems are already in the process of being ameliorated. For example, the falling prices of renewable energy sources offer ever-stronger incentives to switch away from fossil fuels. And hyperefficient agriculture is globally reducing the percentage of people who are hungry—while simultaneously freeing up land, so that forests are now expanding in much of the world.

The fact that we denizens of the early 21st century are much richer than any previous generation accounts for much of the good news. Thanks to technological progress and expanding global markets, the size of the world’s economy since 1820 has grown more than 100-fold while world population grew somewhat less than eightfold. In concrete terms, world gross product grew from $1.2 trillion (in 2011 dollars) to more than $116 trillion now. Global per capita GDP has risen from $1,200 per year in 1820 to more than $15,000 per person currently.

The astonishing result of this increase in wealth is that the global rate of absolute poverty, defined as living on less than $1.90 per person per day, fell from 84 percent in 1820 to 55 percent in 1950. According to the World Bank, 42 percent of the globe’s population was still living in absolute poverty as late as 1981. The latest World Bank assessment reckons that the share of the world’s inhabitants living in extreme poverty fell to 8.6 percent in 2018. In 1990 about 1.9 billion of the world’s people lived in extreme poverty; by 2018, that number had dropped to 660 million.

In Christian tradition, the four horsemen of Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death usher in the apocalypse. Compared to 100 years ago, deaths from infectious diseases are way down; wars are rarer and kill fewer people; and malnutrition has steeply declined. Death itself is in retreat, and the apocalypse has never looked further away.

Death

Average life expectancy at birth hovered around 30 years for most of human history. This was mostly due to the fact that about a third of all children died before they reached their fifth birthday. Demographers ​estimate that in 16th century England, 60 out of 100 children died before age 16. ​Some fortunate people did have long lives, but only 4 percent of the world’s population lived to be older than 65 before the 20th century.

In 1820, global average life expectancy was still about 30 years. Then, remarkably, life expectancy in Europe and North America began rising at the sustained rate of about 3 months annually. That was largely a consequence of better nutrition and the rise of public health measures such as filtered water and sewers.

During the past 200 years, global life expectancy more than doubled, now reaching more than 72, according to the World Bank. Worldwide, the proportion of folks who are 65 years and older has also more than doubled, to 8.5 percent. By 2020, for the first time in human history, there will be more people over the age of 64 than under the age of 5.

Even in the rapidly industrializing United States, average life expectancy was still only 47 years in 1900, and only 4 percent of Americans were 65 years and older. U.S. life expectancy is now 78.7 years. And today 15.6 percent of Americans are 65 or older, while only 6.1 percent are under age 5.

The historic rate of rising life expectancy implies a global average of 92 years by 2100. But the United Nations’ medium fertility scenario rather conservatively projects that average global life expectancy at the end of the century will instead be 83.

A falling infant mortality rate accounts for the major share of increasing longevity. By 1900, infant mortality rates had fallen to around 140 per 1,000 live births in modernizing countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States. Infant mortality rates in the two countries continued to fall to around 56 per 1,000 live births in 1935 and down to about 30 per 1,000 live births by 1950. In 2017, the U.K. and U.S. infant mortality rates were 3.8 and 5.9 per 1,000 live births, respectively. Since 1900, in other words, infant mortality in those two countries has fallen by more than 95 percent.

Infant mortality rates have also been falling steeply ​in the rest of the world​. The World Health Organization estimates that the global infant mortality rate was just under 160 per 1,000 live births in 1950. In 2017, it was down to 29.4 per 1,000 live births, about the level of the U.K. and the U.S. in 1950. Vastly fewer babies are dying today because rising incomes have enabled improved sanitation and nutrition and more resources for educating mothers.

According to the World Bank, the global crude death rate stood at 17.7 per 1,000 in 1960. That is, about 18 people out of every 1,000 persons in a community would die each year. That number has fallen to 7.6 per 1,000 in 2016. The global death rate has fallen by more than half in the last 60 years.

Famine

Food production since 1961 has essentially quadrupled while global population has increased two and half times, according to the World Bank. As a result, the Food and Agriculture Organization reports, the global average food supply per person per day rose from 2,225 calories in 1961 to 2,882 calories in 2013. As a general rule, men and women need around 2,500 or 2,000 calories per day, respectively, to maintain their weight. Naturally, these values vary depending on age, metabolism, and levels of physical activity, among other things.

Food availability, of course, is not equally distributed across the globe. Nevertheless, rising agricultural production has caused undernourishment in poor developing countries to fall dramatically. The Food and Agriculture Organization regularly estimates the “proportion of the population whose habitual food consumption is insufficient to provide the dietary energy levels that are required to maintain a normal active and healthy life.” It reports that this undernourishment fell from 37 percent of the population in 1969–71 to just under 15 percent by 2002, reaching a low of 10.6 percent in 2015 before ticking up to 10.9 percent in 2017.

Famines caused by drought, floods, pests, and conflict have collapsed whole civilizations and killed hundreds of millions of people over the course of human history. In the 20th century, the biggest famines were caused by communist regimes in the Soviet Union and mainland China. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s famines killed up to 10 million people; China’s despot, Mao Zedong, starved 45 million between 1958 and 1962.

In the 21st century, war and political violence are still major causes of hunger around the world. Outbreaks of conflict in Syria, Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria are largely responsible for the recent uptick in the rate of global undernourishment. In other words, famines have disappeared outside of war zones. Much progress has been made, and the specter of famine no longer haunts the vast majority of humankind.

Pestilence

Prior to its eradication in 1979, smallpox was one of humanity’s oldest and most devastating scourges. The disease, which can be traced all the way back to pharaonic Egypt, was highly contagious. A 1775 French medical textbook estimated that 95 percent of the population contracted smallpox at some point during their lives.

In the 20th century alone, the disease is thought to have killed between 300 and 500 million people. The smallpox mortality rate among adults was between 20 and 60 percent. Among infants, it was 80 percent. That helps explain why life expectancy remained between 25 and 30 years for so long.

Edward Jenner, an English country doctor, noted that milkmaids never got smallpox. He hypothesized that the milkmaids’ exposure to cowpox protected them from the disease. In 1796, Jenner inserted cowpox pus from the hand of a milkmaid into the arm of a young boy. Jenner later exposed the boy to smallpox, but the boy remained healthy. Vacca is the Latin word for a cow—hence the English word vaccination.

The World Health Organization estimates that vaccines prevented at least 10 million deaths between 2010 and 2015 alone. Many millions more lives were protected from illness. As of 2018, global vaccination coverage remains at 85 percent, with no significant changes during the past few years. That said, an additional 1.5 million deaths could be avoided if global immunization coverage improves.

Improved sanitation and medicine account for many of the other wins against pestilence. Before the 19th century, people didn’t know about the germ theory of disease. Consequently, most people did not pay much attention to the water they drank. The results were often catastrophic, since contaminated water spreads infectious diseases, including diarrhea, dysentery, typhoid, polio, and cholera.

From 1990 to 2015, access to improved water sources rose from 76 percent of the world’s population to 91 percent. Put differently, 285,000 people gained access to clean water each day over that time period.

As a result of growing access to clean water and improved sanitation, along with the wider deployment of rehydration therapy and effective rotavirus vaccines, the global rate of deaths from diarrheal diseases stemming from rotavirus, cholera, and shigella has fallen from 62 per 100,000 in 1985 to 22 per 100,000 in 2017, according to The Lancet‘s Global Burden of Disease study that year. And thanks to constantly improving medicines and pesticides, malaria incidence rates decreased by 37 percent globally and malaria mortality rates decreased by 60 percent globally between 2000 and 2015.

War

Your chances of being killed by your fellow human beings have also been dropping significantly. Lethal interpersonal violence was once pervasive. Extensive records show that the annual homicide rate in 15th century England hovered around 24 per 100,000 residents, while Dutch homicide rates are estimated as being between 30 and 60 per 100,000 residents. Fourteenth century Florence experienced the highest known annual homicide rate: 150 per 100,000. The estimated homicide rates in 16th century Rome range from 30 to 80 per 100,000. Today, the intentional homicide rate in all of those countries is around 1 per 100,000.

The Cambridge criminologist Manuel Eisner notes that “almost half of all homicides worldwide occurred in just 23 countries that account for 10 per cent of the global population.” Unfortunately, medieval levels of violence still afflict such countries as El Salvador, Honduras, and South Africa, whose respective homicide rates are 83, 57, and 34 per 100,000 persons.

Nonetheless, the global homicide rate is falling: According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, it has dropped from 6.4 per 100,000 in 1990 to 5.3 per 100,000 in 2016. That’s a reduction of 17 percent during a remarkably short period of 26 years, or 0.7 percent per year.

Another way to measure the general decline in violence is the global battle death rate per 100,000 people. Researchers at the Peace Research Institute Oslo have documented a steep post–World War II decline in the rate at which soldiers and civilians are killed in combat. The rate of battle deaths per 100,000 people reached a peak of 23 in 1953. By 2016, that had fallen by about 95 percent.

Apocalypse Later?

Some smart people acknowledge that considerable social, economic, and environmental progress has been made but worry that the progress will not necessarily continue.

“Human beings still have the capacity to mess it all up. And it may be that our capacity to mess it up is growing,” claims Cambridge political scientist David Runciman in The Guardian. He adds, “For people to feel deeply uneasy about the world we inhabit now, despite all these indicators pointing up, seems to me reasonable, given the relative instability of the evidence of this progress, and the [unpredictability] that overhangs it. Everything really is pretty fragile.”

Runciman is not alone. The worry that civilization is just about to go over the edge of a precipice has a long history. After all, many earlier civilizations and regimes have collapsed, including the Babylonian, Roman, Tang, Mayan, and, more recently, Ottoman and Soviet empires.

Yet there are good reasons for optimism. In their 2012 book Why Nations Fail, economists James Robinson of the University of Chicago and Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology persuasively outline an explanation for the exponential improvement in human well-being that started about two centuries ago.

Before then, they argue, most societies were organized around “extractive” institutions—political and economic systems that funnel resources from the masses to the elites. In the 18th century, some countries—including Britain and many of its colonies—shifted from more extractive to more inclusive institutions.

“Inclusive economic institutions that enforce property rights, create a level playing field, and encourage investments in new technologies and skills are more conducive to economic growth than extractive economic institutions that are structured to extract resources from the many by the few,” the authors write. “Inclusive economic institutions are in turn supported by, and support, inclusive political institutions.”

Inclusive institutions are similar to one another in their respect for individual liberty. They include democratic politics, strong private property rights, the rule of law, enforcement of contracts, freedom of movement, and a free press. Inclusive institutions are the bases of the technological and entrepreneurial innovations that produced a historically unprecedented rise in living standards in those countries that embraced them, including the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and Australia.

While uneven and occasionally reversed, the spread of inclusive institutions to more and more countries is responsible for what the University of Illinois at Chicago economist Deirdre Nansen McCloskey calls the “Great Enrichment,” which has boosted average incomes 10- to 30-fold in those countries where they have taken hold.

The most striking examples of social disintegration—Roman, Tang, Soviet—occurred in extractive regimes. Despite crises such as the Great Depression, there are no examples so far of countries with long-established inclusive political and economic institutions suffering similar collapses.

In addition, major confrontations between relatively inclusive regimes and extractive regimes, such as World War II and the Cold War, have been won by the former. That suggests that liberal free market democracies harbor reserves of resilience that enable them to forestall or rise above shocks that destroy countries with brittle extractive systems.

If inclusive liberal institutions can continue to be strengthened and if they further spread across the globe, the auspicious trends documented here will extend their advance, and those that are currently negative will turn positive. By acting through inclusive institutions to increase knowledge and pursue technological progress, past generations met their needs and hugely increased our generation’s ability to meet our needs. We should do no less for future generations. That is what sustainable development looks like.

This article is based on data and analysis drawn from the author’s forthcoming book Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know (Cato), co-authored with HumanProgress.org editor and Cato Institute Senior Policy Analyst Marian L. Tupy.

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