Enlightenment Now

  64. Ebola vaccine: Henao-Restrepo et al. 2017. False predictions of catastrophic pandemics: Norberg 2016; Ridley 2010; M. Ridley, “Apocalypse Not: Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Worry About End Times,” Wired, Aug. 17, 2012; D. Bornstein & T. Rosenberg, “When Reportage Turns to Cynicism,” New York Times, Nov. 14, 2016.

  65. Bet on bioterror with Martin Rees: http://longbets.org/9/.

  66. Reviews of nuclear weapons today: Evans, Ogilvie-White, & Thakur 2014; Federation of American Scientists (undated); Rhodes 2010; Scoblic 2010.

  67. World’s nuclear stockpile: Kristensen & Norris 2016a; see also note 113 below.

  68. Nuclear winter: Robock & Toon 2012; A. Robock & O. B. Toon, “Let’s End the Peril of a Nuclear Winter,” New York Times, Feb. 11, 2016. History of nuclear winter/autumn controversy: Morton 2015.

  69. Doomsday Clock: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 2017.

  70. Eugene Rabinowitch, quoted in Mueller 2010a, p. 26.

  71. Doomsday Clock: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “A Timeline of Conflict, Culture, and Change,” Nov. 13, 2013, http://thebulletin.org/multimedia/timeline-conflict-culture-and-change.

  72. Quoted in Mueller 1989, p. 98.

  73. Quoted in Mueller 1989, p. 271, note 2.

  74. Snow 1961, p. 259.

  75. Address to the incoming graduate students, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, September 1976.

  76. Quoted in Mueller 1989, p. 271, note 2.

  77. Close call lists: Future of Life Institute 2017; Schlosser 2013; Union of Concerned Scientists 2015a.

  78. Union of Concerned Scientists, “To Russia with Love,” http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-weapons/close-calls#.WGQC1lMrJEY.

  79. Skepticism on close-call lists: Mueller 2010a; J. Mueller, “Fire, Fire (Review of E. Schlosser’s ‘Command and Control’),” Times Literary Supplement, March 7, 2014.

  80. The Google Ngram Viewer (https://books.google.com/ngrams) indicates that in 2008 (the most recent year displayed) mentions of nuclear war in published books were outnumbered by mentions of racism, terrorism, and inequality tenfold to twentyfold. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/) indicates that in American newspapers in 2015, nuclear war appeared 0.65 times per million words of text, compared with 13.13 times for inequality, 19.5/million for racism, and 30.93/million for terrorism.

  81. Quotes taken from Morton 2015, p. 324.

  82. Letter dated 17 April 2003 to the Security Council, written when he was the US representative to the UN, quoted in Mueller 2012.

  83. Collection of terror predictions: Mueller 2012.

  84. Warren B. Rudman, Stephen E. Flynn, Leslie H. Gelb, and Gary Hart, Dec. 16, 2004, reproduced in Mueller 2012.

  85. Quoted in Boyer 1985/2005, p. 72.

  86. Scare tactics backfiring: Boyer 1986.

  87. From a 1951 editorial in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, quoted in Boyer 1986.

  88. What motivates activism: Sandman & Valenti 1986. See chapter 10, note 55, for similar observations on climate change.

  89. Quoted in Mueller 2016.

  90. Quoted in Mueller 2016. The term nuclear metaphysics comes from the political scientist Robert Johnson.

  91. Disarmament without treaties: Kristensen & Norris 2016a; Mueller 2010a.

  92. Odds next to zero: Welch & Blight 1987–88, p. 27; see also Blight, Nye, & Welch 1987, p. 184; Frankel 2004; Mueller 2010a, pp. 38–40, p. 248, notes 31–33.

  93. Nuclear safety features prevent accidents: Mueller 2010a, pp. 100–102; Evans, Ogilvie-White, & Thakur 2014, p. 56; J. Mueller, “Fire, Fire (Review of E. Schlosser’s ‘Command and Control’),” Times Literary Supplement, March 7, 2014. Note that the common claim that the Soviet navy officer Vasili Arkhipov “saved the world” during the Cuban Missile Crisis by overruling an embattled submarine captain who was about to fire a nuclear-tipped torpedo at American ships is cast in doubt by Aleksandr Mozgovoi’s 2002 book Kubinskaya Samba Kvarteta Fokstrotov (Cuban Samba of the Quartet of Foxtrots), in which Vadim Pavlovich Orlov, a communications officer who took part in the events, reports that the captain had spontaneously backed off from his impulse: Mozgovoi 2002. Note as well that a single tactical weapon detonated at sea would not necessarily have escalated into all-out war; see Mueller 2010a, pp. 100–102.

  94. Union of Concerned Scientists 2015a.

  95. The history of chemical weapons after they were banned following World War I suggests that accidental and one-time uses don’t automatically lead to mutual escalation; see Pinker 2011, pp. 273–74.

  96. Predictions of nuclear proliferation: Mueller 2010a, p. 90; T. Graham, “Avoiding the Tipping Point,” Arms Control Today, 2004, https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_11/BookReview. Lack of proliferation: Bluth 2011; Sagan 2009b, 2010.

  97. States that gave up nukes: Sagan 2009b, 2010, and personal communication, Dec. 30, 2016; see Pinker 2011, pp. 272–73.

  98. Evans 2015b.

  99. Quoted in Pinker 2013a.

  100. Poison gas from airplanes: Mueller 1989. Geophysical warfare: Morton 2015, p. 136.

  101. The USSR, not Hiroshima, made Japan surrender: Berry et al. 2010; Hasegawa 2006; Mueller 2010a; Wilson 2007.

  102. Nobel to the nukes: Suggested by Elspeth Rostow, quoted in Pinker 2011, p. 268. Nuclear weapons are poor deterrents: Pinker 2011, p. 269; Berry et al. 2010; Mueller 2010a; Ray 1989.

  103. Nuclear taboo: Mueller 1989; Sechser & Fuhrmann 2017; Tannenwald 2005; Ray 1989, pp. 429–31; Pinker 2011, chap. 5, “Is the Long Peace a Nuclear Peace?” pp. 268–78.

  104. Effectiveness of conventional deterrence: Mueller 1989, 2010a.

  105. Nuclear states and armed burglars: Schelling 1960.

  106. Berry et al. 2010, pp. 7–8.

  107. George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, & Sam Nunn, “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 4, 2007; William Perry, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, & Sam Nunn, “Toward a Nuclear-Free World,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 15, 2008.

  108. “Remarks by President Barack Obama in Prague as Delivered,” White House, April 5, 2009, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-barack-obama-prague-delivered.

  109. United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (undated).

  110. Public opinion on Global Zero: Council on Foreign Relations 2012.

  111. Getting to zero: Global Zero Commission 2010.

  112. Global Zero skeptics: H. Brown & J. Deutch, “The Nuclear Disarmament Fantasy,” Wall Street Journal, Nov. 19, 2007; Schelling 2009.

  113. The Pentagon has reported that in 2015 the US nuclear stockpile contained 4,571 weapons (United States Department of Defense 2016). The Federation of American Scientists (Kristensen & Norris 2016b, updated in Kristensen 2016) estimates that about 1,700 of the warheads are deployed on ballistic missiles and at bomber bases, 180 consist of tactical bombs deployed in Europe, and the remaining 2,700 are kept in storage. (The term stockpile usually embraces both deployed and stored missiles, though sometimes it refers just to the stored ones.) In addition, approximately 2,340 warheads are retired and awaiting dismantlement.

  114. A. E. Kramer, “Power for U.S. from Russia’s Old Nuclear Weapons,” New York Times, Nov. 9, 2009.

  115. The Federation of American Scientists estimates the 2015 Russian stockpile at 4,500 warheads (Kristensen & Norris 2016b). New START: Woolf 2017.

  116. Stockpile reductions will continue in tandem with modernization: Kristensen 2016.

  117. Nuclear arsenals: Estimates from Kristensen 2016; they include warheads that are deployed or kept in storage and deployable; they exclude warheads that are retired, and bombs that cannot be deployed by the nation’s delivery platforms.

  118. No imminent new nuclear states: Sagan 2009b, 2010, and personal comm
unication, Dec. 30, 2016; see also Pinker 2011, pp. 272–73. Fewer states with fissile materials: “Sam Nunn Discusses Today’s Nuclear Risks,” Foreign Policy Association blogs, http://foreignpolicyblogs.com/2016/04/06/sam-nunn-discusses-todays-nuclear-risks/.

  119. Disarmament without treaties: Kristensen & Norris 2016a; Mueller 2010a.

  120. GRIT: Osgood 1962.

  121. Small arsenal, no nuclear winter: A. Robock & O. B. Toon, “Let’s End the Peril of a Nuclear Winter,” New York Times, Feb. 11, 2016. The authors recommend that the United States reduce its arsenal to 1,000 warheads, but they don’t say whether this would rule out the possibility of nuclear winter. The number 200 comes from a presentation by Robock at MIT, April 2, 2016, “Climatic Consequences of Nuclear War,” http://futureoflife.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Alan_Robock_MIT_April2.pdf.

  122. No hair trigger: Evans, Ogilvie-White, & Thakur 2014, p. 56.

  123. Against launch on warning: Evans, Ogilvie-White, & Thakur 2014; J. E. Cartwright & V. Dvorkin, “How to Avert a Nuclear War,” New York Times, April 19, 2015; B. Blair, “How Obama Could Revolutionize Nuclear Weapons Strategy Before He Goes,” Politico, June 22, 2016; Long fuse: Brown & Lewis 2013.

  124. Takes nukes off “hair trigger”: Union of Concerned Scientists 2015b.

  125. No First Use: Sagan 2009a; J. E. Cartwright & B. G. Blair, “End the First-Use Policy for Nuclear Weapons,” New York Times, Aug. 14, 2016. Rebuttals of arguments against No First Use: Global Zero Commission 2016; B. Blair, “The Flimsy Case Against No-First-Use of Nuclear Weapons,” Politico, Sept. 28, 2016.

  126. Incremental pledges: J. G. Lewis & S. D. Sagan, “The Common-Sense Fix That American Nuclear Policy Needs,” Washington Post, Aug. 24, 2016.

  127. D. Sanger & W. J. Broad, “Obama Unlikely to Vow No First Use of Nuclear Weapons,” New York Times, Sept. 4, 2016.

  CHAPTER 20: THE FUTURE OF PROGRESS

  1. The data in these paragraphs come from chapters 5–19.

  2. All declines calculated as a proportion of their 20th-century peaks.

  3. For evidence that war in particular is not cyclical, see Pinker 2011, p. 207.

  4. From the Review of Southey’s Colloquies on Society, quoted in Ridley 2010, chap. 1.

  5. See the references at the end of chapters 8 and 16; here and here of chapter 10; here of chapter 15; and the discussion of the Easterlin paradox in chapter 18.

  6. Average of the years 1961 through 1973; World Bank 2016c.

  7. Average of the years 1974 through 2015; World Bank 2016c. Rates for the United States for these two periods are 3.3 percent and 1.7 percent, respectively.

  8. Estimates are of Total Factor Productivity, taken from Gordon 2014, fig. 1.

  9. Secular stagnation: Summers 2014b, 2016. For analysis and commentaries, see Teulings & Baldwin 2014.

  10. No one knows: M. Levinson, “Every US President Promises to Boost Economic Growth. The Catch: No One Knows How,” Vox, Dec. 22, 2016; G. Ip, “The Economy’s Hidden Problem: We’re Out of Big Ideas,” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 20, 2016; Teulings & Baldwin 2014.

  11. Gordon 2014, 2016.

  12. American complacency: Cowen 2017; Glaeser 2014; F. Erixon & B. Weigel, “Risk, Regulation, and the Innovation Slowdown,” Cato Policy Report, Sept./Oct. 2016; G. Ip, “The Economy’s Hidden Problem: We’re Out of Big Ideas,” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 20, 2016.

  13. World Bank 2016c. American GDP per capita has grown in all but eight of the past fifty-five years.

  14. Sleeper effect in technological development: G. Ip, “The Economy’s Hidden Problem: We’re Out of Big Ideas,” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 20, 2016; Eichengreen 2014.

  15. Technologically driven age of abundance: Brand 2009; Bryce 2014; Brynjolfsson & McAfee 2016; Diamandis & Kotler 2012; Eichengreen 2014; Mokyr 2014; Naam 2013; Reese 2013.

  16. Interview with Ezra Klein, “Bill Gates: The Energy Breakthrough That Will ‘Save Our Planet’ Is Less Than 15 Years Away,” Vox, Feb. 24, 2016, http://www.vox.com/2016/2/24/11100702/billgatesenergy. Gates casually alluded to the “‘peace breaks out’ book that was written in 1940.” I’m guessing he was referring to Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion, commonly misremembered as having predicted that war was impossible on the eve of World War I. In fact the pamphlet, first published in 1909, argued that war was unprofitable, not that it was obsolete.

  17. Diamandis & Kotler 2012, p. 11.

  18. Fossil power, guilt-free: Service 2017.

  19. Jane Langdale, “Radical Ag: C4 Rice and Beyond,” Seminars About Long-Term Thinking, Long Now Foundation, March 14, 2016.

  20. Second Machine Age: Brynjolfsson & McAfee 2016. See also Diamandis & Kotler 2012.

  21. Mokyr 2014, p. 88; see also Feldstein 2017; T. Aeppel, “Silicon Valley Doesn’t Believe U.S. Productivity Is Down,” Wall Street Journal, July 16, 2016; K. Kelly, “The Post-Productive Economy,” The Technium, Jan. 1, 2013.

  22. Demonetization: Diamandis & Kotler 2012.

  23. G. Ip, “The Economy’s Hidden Problem: We’re Out of Big Ideas,” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 20, 2016.

  24. Authoritarian populism: Inglehart & Norris 2016; Norris & Inglehart 2016; see also chapter 23 in this book.

  25. Norris & Inglehart 2016.

  26. History of Trump through his election: J. Fallows, “The Daily Trump: Filling a Time Capsule,” The Atlantic, Nov. 20, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/11/on-the-future-of-the-time-capsules/508268/. History of Trump in his first half-year as president: E. Levitz, “All the Terrifying Things That Donald Trump Did Lately,” New York, June 9, 2017.

  27. “Donald Trump’s File,” PolitiFact, http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/. See also D. Dale, “Donald Trump: The Unauthorized Database of False Things,” The Star, Nov. 14, 2016, which lists 560 false claims he made in a span of two months, about twenty per day; M. Yglesias, “The Bullshitter-in-Chief,” Vox, May 30, 2017; and D. Leonhardt & S. A. Thompson, “Trump’s Lies,” New York Times, June 23, 2017.

  28. Adapted from the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

  29. S. Kinzer, “The Enlightenment Had a Good Run,” Boston Globe, Dec. 23, 2016.

  30. Obama approval: J. McCarthy, “President Obama Leaves White House with 58% Favorable Rating,” Gallup, Jan. 16, 2017, http://www.gallup.com/poll/202349/president-obama-leaves-white-house-favorable-rating.aspx. Farewell address: Obama referred to the “essential spirit of innovation and practical problem-solving that guided our Founders” that was “born of the Enlightenment” and which he defined as “a faith in reason, and enterprise, and the primacy of right over might” (“President Obama’s Farewell Address, Jan. 10, 2017,” The White House, https://www.whitehouse.gov/farewell).

  31. Trump ratings: J. McCarthy, “Trump’s Pre-Inauguration Favorables Remain Historically Low,” Gallup, Jan. 16, 2017; “How Unpopular Is Donald Trump?” FiveThirtyEight, https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/; “Presidential Approval Ratings—Donald Trump,” Gallup, Aug. 25, 2017.

  32. G. Aisch, A. Pearce, & B. Rousseau, “How Far Is Europe Swinging to the Right?” New York Times, Dec. 5, 2016. Of the twenty countries whose parliamentary elections were tracked, nine had an increase in the representation of right-wing parties since the preceding election, nine had a decrease, and two (Spain and Portugal) had no representation at all.

  33. A. Chrisafis, “Emmanuel Macron Vows Unity After Winning French Presidential Election,” The Guardian, May 8, 2017.

  34. US election exit poll data, New York Times 2016. N. Carnes & N. Lupu, “It’s Time to Bust the Myth: Most Trump Voters Were Not Working Class,” Washington Post, June 5, 2017. See also the references in notes 35 and 36 below.

  35. N. Silver, “Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vot
e for Trump,” FiveThirtyEight, Nov. 22, 2016, http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/; N. Silver, “The Mythology of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support: His Voters Are Better Off Economically Compared with Most Americans,” FiveThirtyEight, May 3, 2016, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/. Confirmation from Gallup polls: J. Rothwell, “Economic Hardship and Favorable Views of Trump,” Gallup, July 22, 2016, http://www.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/193898/economic-hardship-favorable-views-trump.aspx.

  36. N. Silver, “Strongest correlate I’ve found for Trump support is Google searches for the n-word. Others have reported this too,” Twitter, https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/703975062500732932?lang=en; N. Cohn, “Donald Trump’s Strongest Supporters: A Certain Kind of Democrat,” New York Times, Dec. 31, 2015; Stephens-Davidowitz 2017. See also G. Lopez, “Polls Show Many—Even Most—Trump Supporters Really Are Deeply Hostile to Muslims and Nonwhites,” Vox, Sept. 12, 2016.

  37. Exit poll data: New York Times 2016.

  38. European populism: Inglehart & Norris 2016.

  39. Inglehart & Norris 2016; based on their Model C, the one with the combination of best fit and fewest predictors, endorsed by the authors.

  40. A. B. Guardia, “How Brexit Vote Broke Down,” Politico, June 24, 2016.

  41. Inglehart & Norris 2016, p. 4.

  42. Quoted in I. Lapowsky, “Don’t Let Trump’s Win Fool You—America’s Getting More Liberal,” Wired, Dec. 19, 2016.

  43. Populist party representation in different countries: Inglehart & Norris 2016; G. Aisch, A. Pearce, & B. Rousseau, “How Far Is Europe Swinging to the Right?” New York Times, Dec. 5, 2016.

  44. Tininess of the alt-right movement: Alexander 2016. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz notes that Google searches for “Stormfront,” the most prominent white nationalist Internet forum, have been in steady decline since 2008 (other than a few news-related blips).

  45. Young liberal, old conservative meme: G. O’Toole, “If You Are Not a Liberal at 25, You Have No Heart. If You Are Not a Conservative at 35 You Have No Brain,” Quote Investigator, Feb. 24, 2014, http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/24/heart-head/; B. Popik, “If You’re Not a Liberal at 20 You Have No Heart, If Not a Conservative at 40 You Have No Brain,” BarryPopik.com, http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/if_youre_not_a_liberal_at_20_you_have_no_heart_if_not_a_conservative_at_40.