The Virtue of Radical Honesty<br />Our numbers look bad because so much of our health care spending is funneled through employers,<br />but when you add this private social spending to state social spending, America has the second-highest level of such spending of the 35 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, after France.<br />That is to say, Pinker doesn’t spend much time on the decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal<br />mentalities, the rise of narcissism, the decline of social capital, the rising alienation from institutions or the decline of citizenship and neighborliness.<br />There is a mood across America, but especially on campus,<br />that in order to show how aware of social injustice you are, you have to go around in a perpetual state of indignation, negativity and righteous rage.<br />“When poverty is defined in terms of what people consume rather than what they earn, we find<br />that the American poverty rate has declined by 90 percent since 1960,” Pinker writes.<br />For example, we’re all aware of the gloomy statistics around wage stagnation and income inequality, but Pinker contends<br />that we should not be nostalgic for the economy of the 1950s, when jobs were plentiful and unions strong.<br />This week I asked a group of students at the University of Chicago a question I’m asking students around the country: Who are your heroes?<br />The big problem with his rationalistic worldview is<br />that while he charts the way individuals have benefited over the centuries, he spends barely any time on the quality of the relationships between individuals.<br />Pinker has data like this in sphere after sphere, marking the progress we’ve made in health, the environment, safety, knowledge and overall happiness.
