The price of destructive power has been falling for as long as we've had economic growth. As societys become wealthier, they also find destructive power is cheaper. The amount of violence that we see is not limited by a cost of technology. Is limited by the number of people who think it it would be a good idea to blow things up - and no one wants to do it.
Steven Pinker has spent an entire academic career thinking deeply about language, cognition, and human nature. Driving it all, he says, is an Enlightenment belief that the world is intelligible, science can progress, and through rational inquiry we can better understand ourselves.
He recently joined Tyler for a conversation not only on the power of reason, but also the economics of irrational verbs, whether violence will continue to decline, behavioral economics, existential threats, the merits of aerobic exercise, photography, group selection, Fermi’s paradox, Noam Chomsky, universal grammar, free will, the Ed Sullivan show, and why people underrate the passive (or so it is thought).
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