Enlightenment Now

by Steven Pinker

  But all this changed in a version of the experiment in which the treatment was switched from boring skin cream to incendiary gun control (a law banning citizens from carrying concealed handguns in public), and the outcome was switched from rashes to crime rates. Now the highly numerate respondents diverged from each other according to their politics. When the data suggested that the gun-control measure lowered crime, all the liberal numerates spotted it, and most of the conservative numerates missed it—they did a bit better than the conservative innumerates, but were still wrong more often than they were right. When the data showed that gun control increased crime, this time most of the conservative numerates spotted it, but the liberal numerates missed it; in fact, they did no better than the liberal innumerates. So we can’t blame human irrationality on our lizard brains: it was the sophisticated respondents who were most blinded by their politics. As two other magazines summarized the results: “Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math” and “How Politics Makes Us Stupid.”29

  Researchers themselves are not immune. They often trip over their own biases when they try to show that their political adversaries are biased, a fallacy that can be called the bias bias (as in Matthew 7:3, “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”).30 A recent study by three social scientists (members of a predominantly liberal profession) purporting to show that conservatives were more hostile and aggressive had to be retracted when the authors discovered that they had misread the labels: it was actually liberals who were more hostile and aggressive.31 Many studies that try to show that conservatives are temperamentally more prejudiced and rigid than liberals turn out to have cherry-picked the test items.32 Conservatives are indeed more prejudiced against African Americans, but liberals turn out to be more prejudiced against religious Christians. Conservatives are indeed more biased toward allowing Christian prayers in schools, but liberals are more biased toward allowing Muslim prayers in schools.

  It would also be an error to think that bias about bias is confined to the left: that would be a bias bias bias. In 2010 the libertarian economists Daniel Klein and Zeljka Buturovic published a study aiming to show that left-liberals were economically illiterate, based on erroneous answers to Econ 101 items like these:33

  Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable. [True]

  Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services. [True]

  A company with the largest market share is a monopoly. [False]

  Rent control leads to housing shortages. [True]

  (Another item was “Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago,” which is true. Consistent with my claim in chapter 4 that progressives hate progress, 61 percent of the progressives and 52 percent of the liberals disagreed.) Conservatives and libertarians gloated, and the Wall Street Journal reported the study under the headline “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” with the implication that left-wingers are not. But critics pointed out that the items on the quiz implicitly challenged left-wing causes. So the pair ran a follow-up with equally elementary Econ 101 items designed this time to get under the skin of conservatives:34

  When two people complete a voluntary transaction, they both necessarily come away better off. [False]

  Making abortion illegal would increase the number of black-market abortions. [True]

  Legalizing drugs would give more wealth and power to street gangs and organized crime. [False]

  Now it was the conservatives who earned the dunce caps. Klein, to his credit, retracted his swipe at the left in an article entitled “I Was Wrong, and So Are You.” As he noted,

  More than 30 percent of my libertarian compatriots (and more than 40 percent of conservatives), for instance, disagreed with the statement “A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person”—c’mon, people!—versus just 4 percent among progressives. . . . A full tabulation of all 17 questions showed that no group clearly out-stupids the others. They appear about equally stupid when faced with proper challenges to their position.35

  * * *

  If the left and right are equally stupid in quizzes and experiments, we might expect them to be equally off the mark in making sense of the world. The data on human history presented in chapters 5 through 18 provide an opportunity to see which of the major political ideologies can explain the facts of human progress. I’ve been arguing that the main drivers were the nonpolitical ideals of reason, science, and humanism, which led people to seek and apply knowledge that enhanced human flourishing. Do right-wing or left-wing ideologies have anything to add? Do the seventy-odd graphs entitle either side to say, “Bias, shmias: we’re right; you’re wrong”? It seems that each side can take some credit while also missing big parts of the story.

  Foremost is the conservative skepticism about the ideal of progress itself. Ever since the first modern conservative, Edmund Burke, suggested that humans were too flawed to think up schemes for improving their condition and were better off sticking with traditions and institutions that kept them from the abyss, a major stream of conservative thought has been skeptical about the best-laid plans of mice and men. The reactionary fringe of conservatism, recently disinterred by Trumpists and the European far right (chapter 23), believes that Western civilization has careened out of control since some halcyon century, having abandoned the moral clarity of traditional Christendom for a decadent secular fleshpot that, if left on its current course, will soon implode from terrorism, crime, and anomie.

  Well, that’s wrong. Life before the Enlightenment was darkened by starvation, plagues, superstitions, maternal and infant mortality, marauding knight-warlords, sadistic torture-executions, slavery, witch hunts, and genocidal crusades, conquests, and wars of religion.36 Good riddance. The arcs in figures 5-1 through 18-4 show that as ingenuity and sympathy have been applied to the human condition, life has gotten longer, healthier, richer, safer, happier, freer, smarter, deeper, and more interesting. Problems remain, but problems are inevitable.

  The left, too, has missed the boat in its contempt for the market and its romance with Marxism. Industrial capitalism launched the Great Escape from universal poverty in the 19th century and is rescuing the rest of humankind in a Great Convergence in the 21st. Over the same time span, communism brought the world terror-famines, purges, gulags, genocides, Chernobyl, megadeath revolutionary wars, and North Korea–style poverty before collapsing everywhere else of its own internal contradictions.37 Yet in a recent survey 18 percent of social science professors identified themselves as Marxist, and the words capitalist and free market still stick in the throats of most intellectuals.38 Partly this is because their brains autocorrect these terms to unbridled, unregulated, unfettered, or untrammeled free markets, perpetuating a false dichotomy: a free market can coexist with regulations on safety, labor, and the environment, just as a free country can coexist with criminal laws. And a free market can coexist with high levels of spending on health, education, and welfare (chapter 9)—indeed, some of the countries with the greatest amount of social spending also have the greatest amount of economic freedom.39

  To be fair to the left, the libertarian right has embraced the same false dichotomy and seems all too willing to play the left’s straw man.40 Right-wing libertarians (in their 21st-century Republican Party version) have converted the observation that too much regulation can be harmful (by over-empowering bureaucrats, costing more to society than it delivers in benefits, or protecting incumbents against competition rather than consumers against harm) into the dogma that less regulation is always better than more regulation. They have converted the observation that too much social spending can be harmful (by creating perverse incentives against work and undermining the norms and institutions of civil society) into the dogma that any amount of social spending is too much. And they have translated the observation that
tax rates can be too high into a hysterical rhetoric of “liberty” in which raising the marginal tax rate for income above $400,000 from 35 to 39.6 percent means turning the country over to jackbooted storm troopers. Often the refusal to seek the optimum level of government is justified by an appeal to Friedrich Hayek’s argument in The Road to Serfdom that regulation and welfare lay out a slippery slope along which a country will slide into penury and tyranny.

  The facts of human progress strike me as having been as unkind to right-wing libertarianism as to right-wing conservatism and left-wing Marxism. The totalitarian governments of the 20th century did not emerge from democratic welfare states sliding down a slippery slope, but were imposed by fanatical ideologues and gangs of thugs.41 And countries that combine free markets with more taxation, social spending, and regulation than the United States (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Western Europe) turn out to be not grim dystopias but rather pleasant places to live, and they trounce the United States in every measure of human flourishing, including crime, life expectancy, infant mortality, education, and happiness.42 As we saw, no developed country runs on right-wing libertarian principles, nor has any realistic vision of such a country ever been laid out.

  It should not be surprising that the facts of human progress confound the major -isms. The ideologies are more than two centuries old and are based on mile-high visions such as whether humans are tragically flawed or infinitely malleable, and whether society is an organic whole or a collection of individuals.43 A real society comprises hundreds of millions of social beings, each with a trillion-synapse brain, who pursue their well-being while affecting the well-being of others in complex networks with massive positive and negative externalities, many of them historically unprecedented. It is bound to defy any simple narrative of what will happen under a given set of rules. A more rational approach to politics is to treat societies as ongoing experiments and open-mindedly learn the best practices, whichever part of the spectrum they come from. The empirical picture at present suggests that people flourish most in liberal democracies with a mixture of civic norms, guaranteed rights, market freedom, social spending, and judicious regulation. As Pat Paulsen noted, “If either the right wing or the left wing gained control of the country, it would fly around in circles.”

  It’s not that Goldilocks is always right and that the truth always falls halfway between extremes. It’s that current societies have winnowed out the worst blunders of the past, so if a society is functioning halfway decently—if the streets aren’t running with blood, if obesity is a bigger problem than malnutrition, if the people who vote with their feet are clamoring to get in rather than racing for the exits—then its current institutions are probably a good starting point (itself a lesson we can take from Burkean conservatism). Reason tells us that political deliberation would be most fruitful if it treated governance more like scientific experimentation and less like an extreme-sports competition.

  * * *

  Though examining data from history and social science is a better way of evaluating our ideas than arguing from the imagination, the acid test of empirical rationality is prediction. Science proceeds by testing the predictions of hypotheses, and we all recognize the logic in everyday life when we praise or ridicule barroom sages depending on whether events bear them out, when we use idioms that hold people responsible for their accuracy like to eat crow and to have egg on your face, and when we use sayings like “Put your money where your mouth is” and “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.”

  Unfortunately the epistemological standards of common sense—we should credit the people and ideas that make correct predictions, and discount the ones that don’t—are rarely applied to the intelligentsia and commentariat, who dispense opinions free of accountability. Always-wrong prognosticators like Paul Ehrlich continue to be canvassed by the press, and most readers have no idea whether their favorite columnists, gurus, or talking heads are more accurate than a chimpanzee picking bananas. The consequences can be dire: many military and political debacles arose from misplaced confidence in the predictions of experts (such as intelligence reports in 2003 that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons), and a few percentage points of accuracy in predicting financial markets can spell the difference between gaining and losing a fortune.

  A track record of predictions also ought to inform our appraisal of intellectual systems, including political ideologies. Though some ideological differences come from clashing values and may be irreconcilable, many hinge on different means to agreed-upon ends and should be decidable. Which policies will in fact bring about things that almost everyone wants, like lasting peace or economic growth? Which will reduce poverty, or violent crime, or illiteracy? A rational society should seek the answers by consulting the world rather than assuming the omniscience of a bloc of opinionators who have coalesced around a creed.

  Unfortunately, the expressive rationality documented by Kahan in his experimental subjects also applies to editorialists and experts. The payoffs that determine their reputations don’t coincide with the accuracy of the predictions, since no one is keeping score. Instead, their reputations hinge on their ability to entertain, titillate, or shock; on their ability to instill confidence or fear (in the hopes that a prophecy might be self-fulfilling or self-defeating); and on their skill in galvanizing a coalition and celebrating its virtue.

  Since the 1980s the psychologist Philip Tetlock has studied what distinguishes accurate forecasters from the many oracles who are “often mistaken but never in doubt.”44 He recruited hundreds of analysts, columnists, academics, and interested laypeople to compete in forecasting tournaments in which they were presented with possible events and asked to assess their likelihoods. Experts are ingenious at wordsmithing their predictions to protect them from falsification, using weasely modal auxiliaries (could, might), adjectives (fair chance, serious possibility), and temporal modifiers (very soon, in the not-too-distant future). So Tetlock pinned them down by stipulating events with unambiguous outcomes and deadlines (for example, “Will Russia annex additional Ukraine territory in the next three months?” “In the next year, will any country withdraw from the Eurozone?” “How many additional countries will report cases of the Ebola virus in the next eight months?”) and having them write down numerical probabilities.

  Tetlock also avoided the common fallacy of praising or ridiculing a single probabilistic prediction after the fact, as when the poll aggregator Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight came under fire for giving Donald Trump just a 29 percent chance of winning the 2016 election.45 Since we cannot replay the election thousands of times and count up the number of times that Trump won, the question of whether the prediction was confirmed or disconfirmed is meaningless. What we can do, and what Tetlock did, is compare the set of each forecaster’s probabilities with the corresponding outcomes. Tetlock used a formula which credits the forecaster not just for accuracy but for accurately going out on a limb (since it’s easier to be accurate by just playing it safe with 50-50 predictions). The formula is mathematically related to how much they would win if they put their money where their mouths were and bet on their predictions according to their own odds.

  Twenty years and twenty-eight thousand predictions later, how well did the experts do? On average, about as well as a chimpanzee (which Tetlock described as throwing darts rather than picking bananas). Tetlock and the psychologist Barbara Mellers held a rematch between 2011 and 2015 in which they recruited several thousand contestants to take part in a forecasting tournament held by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (the research organization of the federation of American intelligence agencies). Once again there was plenty of dart-throwing, but in both tournaments the couple could pick out “superforecasters” who performed not just better than chimps and pundits, but better than professional intelligence officers with access to classified information, better than prediction markets, and not too far from the theoretical maximum. How can we expl
ain this apparent clairvoyance? (For a year, that is—accuracy declines with distance into the future, and it falls to the level of chance around five years out.) The answers are clear and profound.

  The forecasters who did the worst were the ones with Big Ideas—left-wing or right-wing, optimistic or pessimistic—which they held with an inspiring (but misguided) confidence:

  As ideologically diverse as they were, they were united by the fact that their thinking was so ideological. They sought to squeeze complex problems into the preferred cause-effect templates and treated what did not fit as irrelevant distractions. Allergic to wishy-washy answers, they kept pushing their analyses to the limit (and then some), using terms like “furthermore” and “moreover” while piling up reasons why they were right and others wrong. As a result, they were unusually confident and likelier to declare things “impossible” or “certain.” Committed to their conclusions, they were reluctant to change their minds even when their predictions clearly failed. They would tell us, “Just wait.”46

  Indeed, the very traits that put these experts in the public eye made them the worst at prediction. The more famous they were, and the closer the event was to their area of expertise, the less accurate their predictions turned out to be. But the chimplike success of brand-name ideologues does not mean that “experts” are worthless and we should distrust elites. It’s that we need to revise our concept of an expert. Tetlock’s superforecasters were: