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The follow-up to Pinker's groundbreaking The Better Angels of Our Nature presents the big picture of human progress: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. Far from being a naive hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against...
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"Today, many believe that progress is a word to be avoided, a relic from a past, the dangerous product of an era of intellectual naivety that would be best forgotten. Yet, the idea of progress is rooted in a human impulse that is both profound and essential, a way of interpreting history without which our ability to plan the future, our very identity would be at stake. Written just before the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic-which is now putting...
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Is civilization teetering on the edge of a cliff? Or are we just climbing higher than ever? Most people who read the news would tell you that 2017 is one of the worst years in recent memory. We're facing a series of deeply troubling, even existential problems: fascism, terrorism, environmental collapse, racial and economic inequality, and more. Yet this narrative misses something important: by almost every meaningful measure, the modern world is better...
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""The quality of [his] thinking and [his] writing is...second to none in the world of finance."--Jack Bogle, founder, Vanguard "That great explainer of everything to everybody." --Richard Flannery, CEO, The Investment Fund for Foundations Our world is burdened with disappearing economic growth, a deteriorating environment, limited natural resources, and not just too many people, but too many old people. Really? While such pessimism may mark you as...
6) Broken Icarus: the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, the golden age of aviation, and the rise of fascism
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"In Broken Icarus, author David Hanna tracks the inspiring trajectory of aviation leading up to and through the World's Fair of 1933, as well as the field of flight's more sinister ties to fascism domestic and abroad to present a unique history that is both riveting and revelatory"--
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Combining the deft social analysis of Where Good Ideas Come From with the optimistic arguments of Everything Bad Is Good for You, Steven Johnson's Future Perfect argues that a new model of political change is on the rise, transforming everything from local governments to drug research to arts funding and education. Johnson paints a compelling portrait of this new political worldview - influenced by the success of the Internet but not dependent on...
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In 2393, a historian of the Second People's Republic of China reviews the "Penumbral Age" (1988-2093), when politicians, corporations, and scientists ignored the statistical significance of climate disaster. Carbon dioxide warming the planet, deadly summer heat and fires, and the collapse of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet lead to a second Black Death and "the Great Collapse" of the Western world.
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When President Roosevelt took the oath of office in March 1933, he was facing a devastated nation. Four years into the Great Depression, a staggering 13 million American workers were jobless and many millions more of their family members were equally in need. Desperation ruled the land. What people wanted were jobs, not handouts-the pride of earning a paycheck. And in 1935, after a variety of temporary relief measures, a permanent nationwide jobs...
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Its on the televisions, in the papers and in our minds. Every day were bludgeoned by news of how bad everything is financial collapse, unemployment, growing poverty, environmental disasters, disease, hunger, war. But the rarely acknowledged reality is that the economic and social progress of the past few decades has been unprecedented and that by almost any index you care to identify, things are markedly better now than they have ever been for almost...
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"Deirdre McCloskey is one of our best-known economic historians and an advocate for free market capitalism and the power of ideas in shaping our economy. Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich collects the provocative arguments put forward by McCloskey in a trilogy published by the Press that mounts a vigorous defense of capitalism as told through the story of the rise of the bourgeois. Co-authored with Art Carden, Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You...
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The future of business, work, and the economy in a digital world. In recent years, computers have learned to diagnose diseases, drive cars, and win at Jeopardy!. Advances like these have created unprecedented economic bounty, but in their wake median income has stagnated and the share of the population with jobs has fallen. MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee reveal the technological forces driving this reinvention of the economy and chart a...
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