Summary: Many common economic misconceptions stem from evolved psychological instincts shaped in small, zero-sum tribal environments rather than modern market systems. These “folk-economic beliefs” lead people to misinterpret trade, immigration, profit, and regulation in ways that conflict with core economic principles, often resulting in support for counterproductive policies. Because these intuitions are predictable products of human evolution, they help explain why flawed policy ideas persist. Recognizing their origins can help counteract misleading instincts while reinforcing those that support cooperation, openness, and exchange.

Economic models, rooted in assumptions of rational agents maximizing utility under constraints, have long provided elegant frameworks for understanding human behavior in markets and societies. Yet, a persistent friction exists between these idealized portrayals of human beings and the ways humans actually navigate economic choices. People frequently champion policies that contravene basic economic principles, including minimum wages presumed to boost income without increasing unemployment, rent controls expected to enhance housing affordability without reducing supply, or tariffs that run counter to comparative advantage and affordability. 

People also often harbor counterproductive intuitions, including a belief that markets erode social bonds, despite evidence that markets foster cooperation and thus generate wealth. Those tendencies stem not primarily from information deficits or irrationality, but from our evolutionary psychology. Our economic intuitions were shaped over thousands of years in a world of tight-knit coalitions and zero-sum intergroup rivalry, rendering modern market dynamics counterintuitive. As such, markets are often rejected even when they are beneficial.

Perhaps the most parsimonious theory explaining why people often behave in economically harmful ways is the evolutionary cognitive model of folk-economic beliefs, proposed by anthropologist Pascal Boyer and political scientist Michael Bang Petersen. Folk-economic beliefs are those convictions about economics held by laypeople untrained in the discipline, which frequently diverge from fundamental economic tenets. These encompass mental representations of varied topics, from prices, taxes, and tariffs to welfare and immigration policies. 

Economists have traditionally critiqued those as irrational beliefs or mere byproducts of ignorance, but an evolutionary lens reveals them as predictable outcomes. Ensuring fairness in trade, sustaining social ties, forming stable coalitions, and resolving ownership disputes are all responses to ancestral challenges.

If this theory is right, both actual economic behavior and theories generated to explain one’s own economic behavior are predictable outputs shaped by evolution. When folk-economic beliefs are wrong, they are wrong in predictable ways. We talk about impersonal markets as if they were tribal conflicts. We treat economies built on innovation and surplus as if they were competitions over a fixed pile of resources.

Consider the intuition that international trade is harmful because another country’s gain must come at our expense. From the perspective of standard economics, this belief contradicts the well-established principle of comparative advantage. People benefit from specializing in what they produce most efficiently relative to other goods, even if a trading partner could produce everything more cheaply in absolute terms. For example, a surgeon who happens to type faster than his or her secretary still benefits from hiring the secretary and devoting more time to the operating room. Likewise, America could manufacture its own consumer electronics, but every dollar and worker devoted to assembling phones is one not devoted to designing the software, chips, and financial services where American companies dominate globally. The result is more total output and mutual gain. 

But our evolutionary psychology wasn’t built for comparative advantage, especially not across nations or tribes. Human groups historically competed for territory, food, and status in genuinely zero-sum ways. If a rival coalition grew stronger, it often meant danger for one’s own group. When modern individuals read that another nation is exporting more goods to us or running a trade surplus, our tribal instincts activate automatically. Nations are cognitively represented as tribes, and the success of one tribe is interpreted as a threat to another. The idea that both sides could benefit simultaneously—one of the central insights of the founder of economics, Adam Smith—runs against these deeply ingrained intuitions.

The same coalitional logic helps explain folk intuitions about immigration. People opposed to immigration often claim that immigrants steal jobs from native workers while also claiming that immigrants siphon welfare benefits without working. At the level of policy argument, these beliefs are apparently contradictory. But at the level of psychology, it is an expression of a single concern: Outsiders are draining scarce resources, whether the resource is employment or benefits. Humans evolved in groups where membership conferred access to shared resources—food, protection, or status—and where vigilance against free riders was essential to sustaining cooperation. Newcomers were therefore automatically treated with suspicion until they proved themselves contributors rather than exploiters. 

When this ancestral heuristic is applied to modern societies, it produces the intuition that outsiders must be consuming resources that properly belong to the in-group. Whether the imagined resource is employment or welfare benefits—or even whether the resources are truly being drained at all—matters less than the perceived threat that group boundaries are being crossed without reciprocal contribution.

The psychology of free-rider detection also helps explain the peculiar ambivalence that many people feel toward welfare programs. While people readily endorse the idea that society should help those who fall on hard times through no fault of their own, they also often worry that welfare encourages laziness or dependency. These views appear inconsistent only if one assumes that the public is applying a unified economic theory. In reality, they reflect two separate intuitions inherited from ancestral exchange systems. 

Communal sharing evolved as a form of insurance against bad luck—injury, illness, or an unsuccessful hunt—where helping unlucky group members benefited everyone in the long run. But the same systems also evolved to punish individuals who accepted benefits without contributing. Modern welfare debates, therefore, activate both intuitions simultaneously: compassion toward the unlucky and hostility toward perceived free riders.

Another common folk-economic belief concerns the relationship between labor and value. Many people feel instinctively that hard work should determine how much something is worth. In the hunter-gatherer economy that prevailed throughout most of human history, where the value of goods was closely tied to the labor required to obtain them, strenuous physical effort was intrinsically linked to value production itself. Hunting, gathering, building shelter, or crafting tools all involved visible effort, and individuals who contributed more effort typically produced more resources. When applied to modern economies, however, the same intuition can generate confusion. A programmer writing code, an entrepreneur coordinating supply chains, or an investor allocating capital may create enormous value without performing visible physical labor. Yet because our ownership psychology is sensitive to effort and physical transformation, profits earned through organization or innovation are often framed as morally suspect, particularly in socialist ideology, as if they are thought to represent extraction rather than creation.

Some common opposition to the profit motive itself is explained by evolutionary psychology. In face-to-face exchange within small groups, unusually large gains might indeed signal exploitation or hoarding of limited resources, especially since producing anything of value typically required communal effort. Someone who consistently benefited more than others from trades might be suspected of manipulating information or violating norms of fairness. Modern markets, however, often reward individuals precisely when they discover new ways to produce value—whether by inventing technologies, improving logistics, or coordinating complex networks of production. Because these gains arise in impersonal systems where the beneficiaries are distant strangers rather than known partners, the profits they generate can appear less like the rewards of innovation and more like evidence of exploitation. Our evolved moral intuitions struggle to track value creation in dispersed and opaque market economies. 

Likewise, many popular beliefs about regulation reflect ancestral intuitions that authorities can directly control outcomes. If the chieftain declared that food should be shared in a particular way, the order could be enforced through social pressure or direct monitoring. Everyone knew everyone else, contributions were visible, and deviations from the rule could be punished immediately. This experience makes it intuitively plausible that governments—which our minds intuitively represent as tribal coalitions—can simply command economic results. If rents are too high, they can seemingly be capped. If wages are too low, they can seemingly be raised. In naive folk economic theories, prices behave like promises: If the authority decrees a new price, the outcome should follow.

Take rent control. The intuition behind it is straightforward and morally compelling. If landlords raise rents beyond what tenants can afford, people may feel exploited: The owner of a scarce resource is extracting more money without providing more housing. A government rule limiting rents, therefore, appears to be a simple act of fairness. Ostensibly, the authority steps in, declares that rents may not exceed a certain level, and housing becomes affordable again. But in a large market economy, rent is not just a moral claim between two parties; it is also a signal that coordinates investment and construction of new housing. When rents are capped below market levels, the signal changes. Developers build fewer apartments, landlords convert rental units into other uses, and maintenance becomes less attractive when returns are limited. Over time, the supply of housing shrinks, and the shortage intensifies the very scarcity that drove up rents in the first place. The policy fails because the mechanism through which housing supply adjusts is invisible to the mental model that produced the intuition.

The same dynamic appears in debates over minimum wages. If workers are paid very little for difficult or unpleasant jobs, the situation feels unfair. But in a modern labor market, wages also function as signals that coordinate hiring decisions across the entire economy. When the legal wage floor rises above the productivity level of some jobs, employers do not simply pay the higher wage and continue as before. They reduce hiring, substitute machines for labor, or restructure tasks so fewer workers are needed. When the price signal changes, behavior adjusts in ways that the regulation does not anticipate. That often results in the direct opposite of the desired effect.

Our minds are not utility-maximizing computers that simply deviate from optimal choice due to insufficient information or computing power. They are toolkits. Our brains have evolved specialized cognitive inferences, or intuitions, that solved specific recurrent problems in our ancestral environments: “Who is trustworthy enough for exchange?”; “Who belongs to us, and who is a rival?”; “Who is contributing, and who is free riding?”; “Who owns what, and by what right?” These intuitions can be triggered by modern economic situations that resemble ancestral ones, even when the actual circumstances are entirely new. 

Folk-economic beliefs persist not because people are irrational, but because they are reasoning with tools that evolved for cooperation in small bands rather than coordination among millions of strangers. The challenge for modern societies is therefore not simply to correct mistaken beliefs, but to build policies that work with—rather than against—the grain of human psychology. 

Modern market societies represent one of humanity’s most remarkable cultural achievements. They sprang into existence by harnessing a set of different ancient social instincts—ones that enable cooperation on an unprecedented scale. Systems of property rights, contract enforcement, and voluntary exchange allow millions of strangers to coordinate their efforts in mutually beneficial ways. 

The claim here is not that markets are infallible. It is that our evolved intuitions often misidentify the nature of the problem and thus point us toward remedies that make matters worse. In modern economies, visible losses are concentrated, immediate, and emotionally salient, while gains are diffuse, gradual, and spread across millions of consumers and workers. A serious defense of markets should therefore acknowledge adjustment costs and real harms without conceding the larger error: namely, the belief that mutual gain, price signals, profit, and exchange are themselves forms of exploitation.

Some of our evolved instincts—like valuing reciprocity, rewarding contribution, and building reputations for trustworthiness—remain essential foundations of prosperous societies. Markets themselves depend on these deeply rooted norms of cooperation and exchange. Other intuitions, however—such as zero-sum thinking about trade, suspicion toward profitable innovation, or faith that authorities can simply command prices—reflect cognitive shortcuts suited to environments of scarcity and small-group control rather than decentralized abundance.

Recognizing that distinction should not slide into a blanket dismissal of public concern. Not every market outcome is benign, and not all economic anxieties are mere illusions. Trade, technological change, and broader shifts from manufacturing to services can impose real, concentrated losses on particular workers, firms, and regions, especially on lower-skill laborers whose jobs are exposed to offshoring or displaced by new forms of production. A person who loses a job to foreign competition is not simply trapped by faulty intuition. He is often responding to a real personal setback, even if the economy as a whole still becomes more productive and prosperous. The same is true in recessions or cases of fraud and negative externalities. 

The question, then, is how societies can address those real costs without defaulting to the very intuitions that misdiagnose their causes. 

Human beings are unusual among species in our ability to revise intuitive judgments through abstract reasoning and accumulated knowledge. Economic theory, empirical evidence, and institutional experimentation provide ways of testing whether our intuitions about markets actually match the systems we inhabit. Over time, societies that learn to distinguish between intuitions that promote cooperation and those that misread economic signals tend to design more effective institutions. 

Much of the progress of the last two centuries reflects this process of institutional learning precisely. Expanding trade networks, protecting property rights, encouraging innovation, and allowing prices to coordinate decentralized decisions have produced levels of prosperity that would have been unimaginable in the environments where our economic intuitions evolved. Understanding the evolutionary roots of folk-economic beliefs, therefore, helps explain why certain policy ideas remain politically attractive despite poor outcomes—and why sustained progress often depends on institutions that counteract some of our most natural intuitions while reinforcing others that support cooperation, openness, and exchange.

This article was originally published at The Dispatch on 4/21/2026.

Summary: Many people today feel that life in New York has become uniquely difficult. Some imagine that the city was cleaner, safer, and more livable in the distant past. Historical reality tells a different story: Preindustrial New York was marked by extreme filth, unsafe water, rampant disease, pervasive poverty, and living conditions that made everyday life harsh and dangerous compared to contemporary times.

Discontent fueled the 2025 New York City mayoral election and Zohran Mamdani’s victory. A common theme echoed across the five boroughs: New York is a hard place to live. “We are overwhelmed by housing costs,” said Santiago, a 69-year-old retiree, outside a Mamdani rally. Those opposed to Mamdani had their own complaints. María Moreno, a first-time voter from the Bronx who supported Andrew Cuomo, lamented, “Now everything’s dirty, and our neighborhood does not feel safe.”

Today’s voters have legitimate grievances. The city’s housing costs, quality-of-life issues, and perceptions of disorder weigh heavily on residents’ minds. But it’s important to keep things in perspective. Different voters may romanticize different eras, but many seem to share a sense that if they could travel back far enough in time, they’d find a New York that was once clean, safe, and affordable. When Americans were polled in 2023, almost 20 percent said that it was easier to “have a thriving and fulfilling life” hundreds of years ago. Across the country, as one writer put it, people are engaged in an “endless debate around whether the preindustrial past was clearly better than what we have now.” In fact, Mamdani’s politics are grounded in an ideology that first arose from the frustrations of the early industrial era.

If Americans could go back in time to preindustrial New York City, however, they’d likely be horrified and possibly traumatized. Despite today’s real challenges, most New Yorkers would not trade places with their predecessors.

Long before the rise of factories and industry, New York City was a bustling port, founded by the Dutch as New Amsterdam in order to trade furs in the early seventeenth century. As early as 1650, local authorities enacted an ordinance against animals roaming the streets to protect local infrastructure—but to no avail. Then, in 1657, according to the Dutch scholar Jaap Harskamp:

New Amsterdam’s council attempted to ban the common practice of throwing rubbish, ashes, oyster-shells or dead animals in the street and leave the filth there to be consumed by droves of pigs on the loose. When the English took over the colony from the Dutch, pigs and goats stayed put. . . . Pollution persisted. The streets of Manhattan were a stinking mass. Inhabitants hurled carcasses and the contents of loaded chamber pots into the street and rivers. Runoff from tanneries where skins were turned into leather flowed into the waters that supplied the shallow wells. The (salty) natural springs and ponds in the region became contaminated with animal and human waste. For some considerable time, access to clean water remained an urgent problem for the city. . . . The penetrating smell of decomposing flesh was everywhere.

Into the early twentieth century, urban living in the United States felt surprisingly rural and agrarian, with an omnipresent reek to match. As late as the mid-nineteenth century, pigs roamed freely through New York City streets, acting as scavengers, and nearly every household maintained a vegetable garden, often fertilized with animal manure.

Indoor air quality was no better. A drawing from Mary L. Booth’s History of the City of New York depicts a seventeenth century New Amsterdam home with smoke from the fireplace swirling through the room. Indoor air pollution remains a serious problem today in the poorest parts of the world, as smoke from hearths can cause cancer and acute respiratory infections that often prove deadly in children. One preindustrial writer railed against the “pernicious smoke [from fireplaces] superinducing a sooty Crust or furr upon all that it lights, spoyling the moveables, tarnishing the Plate, Gildings and Furniture, and Corroding the very Iron-bars and hardest stone with those piercing and acrimonious Spirits which accompany its Sulphur.”

That said, before industrialization, though inescapable filth coated the interiors of homes, the average person owned few possessions for the corrosive hearth smoke and soot to ruin. By modern standards, New Yorkers—like most preindustrial people—were impoverished and lacked even the most basic amenities. According to historian Judith Flanders, in the mid-eighteenth century, “fewer than two households in ten in some counties of New York possessed a fork.” Many were desperately poor even by the standards of the day and could not afford housing. One 1788 account lamented how in New York City, “vagrants multiply on our Hands to an amazing Degree.” Charity records suggest that the “outdoor poor” far outnumbered those in almshouses.

Water quality was infamously awful. In seventeenth-century New Amsterdam, as Benjamin Bullivant observed, “[There are] many publique wells enclosed & Covered in ye Streetes . . . [which are] Nasty & unregarded.” A century later, New York’s water remained as foul as Bullivant had described. Visiting in 1748, the Swedish botanist Peter Kalm noted that the city’s well water was so filthy that horses from out of town refused to drink it. In 1798, the Commercial Advertiser condemned Manhattan’s main well as “a shocking hole, where all impure things center together and engender the worst of unwholesome productions; foul with excrement, frogspawn, and reptiles, that delicate pump system is supplied. The water has grown worse manifestly within a few years. It is time to look out [for] some other supply, and discontinue the use of a water growing less and less wholesome every day. . . . It is so bad . . . as to be very sickly and nauseating; and the larger the city grows the worse this evil will be.”

In 1831, a letter in the New York Evening Journal described the state of the water supply:

I have no doubt that one cause of the numerous stomach affections so common in this city is the impure, I may say poisonous nature of the pernicious Manhattan water which thousands of us daily and constantly use. It is true the unpalatableness of this abominable fluid prevents almost every person from using it as a beverage at the table, but you will know that all the cooking of a very large portion of the community is done through the agency of this common nuisance. Our tea and coffee are made of it, our bread is mixed with it, and our meat and vegetables are boiled in it. Our linen happily escapes the contamination of its touch, “for no two things hold more antipathy” than soap and this vile water.

In 1832, New York experienced a devastating outbreak of cholera, a bacterial disease that typically spread through contaminated water and killed with remarkable speed. A person could wake up feeling well and be dead by nightfall, struck down with agonizing cramps, vomiting, and diarrhea. The epidemic killed about 3,500 New Yorkers.

The initial actions taken to protect city water supplies were often private in nature. In fact, throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, private businesses generally supplied urban water infrastructure. Despite such efforts, drinking water remained generally unsafe, even after industrialization, until the chlorination of urban water supplies became widespread.

The pervasive grime took a visible toll on New Yorkers. Between drinking tainted water, eating contaminated food, inhaling smoke-filled air, and living with poor hygiene, the average resident sported visibly rotten teeth. One letter from 1781 described an acquaintance: “Her teeth are beginning to decay, which is the case with most New York girls, after eighteen.”

The dental practices of the time were often as horrifying as the effects of neglect. The medieval method of using arsenic to kill gum tissue, providing pain relief by destroying nerve endings, remained common until the introduction of Novocain in the twentieth century. As late as 1879, the New York Times ran a story with the headline “Fatal Poison in a Tooth; What Caused the Horrible Death of Mr. Gardiner. A Man’s Head Nearly Severed from His Body by Decay Caused by Arsenic Which Had Been Placed in One of His Teeth to Deaden an Aching Nerve—an Extraordinary Case.” The story detailed the gruesome demise of a man in Brooklyn, George Arthur Gardiner, who died “in great agony, after two weeks of indescribable suffering.”

Preindustrial New York City wasn’t uniquely miserable for its time. Life was harsh everywhere, and cities around the world contended with the same foul smells, filth, poor sanitation, and grinding poverty. Rural villages were no better. Peasant families often brought their livestock indoors at night and slept huddled together for warmth. In many cases, rural peasants were even poorer than their urban counterparts and owned fewer possessions. Farm laborers frequently suffered injuries and aged prematurely from backbreaking work, while fertilizing cesspits spread disease and filled the air with an inescapable stench.

Though they may have been slightly better off than their rural counterparts, the struggles of early New Yorkers are worth remembering. However daunting the problems of today may seem, a proper historical perspective can remind us of how far we’ve come.

This article was originally published in City Journal on 1/13/2026.

Listen to the podcast or read the full transcript here.

Today, I’m pleased to have with me Steven Pinker, a world-renowned Harvard University psychologist and author of best-selling books including The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Enlightenment Now, and of course, most recently, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows. Highly recommend all of them.

Let’s start at a high level and look at how Americans think about the country. Gallup shows that 80 percent of Americans are either satisfied or very satisfied with their lives, but only 20 percent are satisfied with the way that America is going. That’s a bit of a discrepancy.

What does a psychologist have to say about that?

It’s a fascinating phenomenon that pollsters have known about for decades. They call it “the optimism gap.” It appears in just about any question.

“What is the quality of education in this country?”

“It’s terrible.”

“What’s the quality of your child’s school?”

“Well, not bad.”

“How safe is the country?”

“Oh, you can’t walk anywhere. You’ll get mugged.”

“How safe is your neighborhood?”

“Oh, I feel perfectly fine.”

Part of it is that, because none of us can experience the entire country ourselves, our opinions are based on media coverage, and the media have a number of negativity biases. The nature of news selects for negative events because it reports what’s new and discrete enough to be a story. New, discrete events are more likely to be bad than good because there are many more ways for things to go wrong than for things to go right. And while bad things, like a terrorist attack or natural disaster, can happen quickly, positive things tend to be things that don’t happen or things that happen gradually, like the long-term decline in extreme poverty, the rise in literacy, and many other trends that you’ve written about.

Editors also feel more responsible if they emphasize negative stories over positive ones. I’ve heard one editor say, “Well, negative news is journalism, and positive news is advertising.” I think it was Stewart Brand who once said, more generally, that a pessimist sounds like he’s trying to help you, while an optimist sounds like he’s trying to sell you something. So, our picture of the country and the world as a whole is distorted both deliberately and accidentally by the very nature of news.

Let me mention one other thing. There really are problems in the world, to put it mildly, and some things have gotten worse in the last 10 or 20 years. But one has to have a quantitative, statistical, probabilistic view of the world to acknowledge the reality that things can get worse while still being better than they were historically, and that some things can get worse while other things are getting better.

You don’t conclude from something that genuinely has gotten worse that everything has gotten worse or that we’re in a worse situation now than we ever have been.

You mentioned literacy. Recently, I’ve been reading about freshmen entering university without basic reading and math skills. People are reading fewer books. Are we getting dumber, and is education an example of something that is worse than it was 40 or 50 years ago?

Yes, and it’s not the only example. The world’s democracy score has gone down in the last couple of decades. War deaths are worse now than they were 20 years ago, although still better than they were in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and most of the ’90s. But yeah, educational scores have gone down. The Flynn effect, by which IQ scores rose for about three points a year for almost a century, has now gone in the other direction.

Now, that doesn’t mean that we’re back to the level that we were 100 years ago, but there’s been a bit of a droop. It may be that there are pathologies in our educational system, that the drive for equity and especially for equity across all racial groups has led to bringing down the top rather than raising the bottom. It could be that our schools of education have been training teachers to use the wrong methods. There’s also the fact that, while reading and literacy are good things, they are cognitively unnatural. We didn’t evolve with print; it’s a recent invention, and we’ve seen, especially in the last 10 years, that a lot of people prefer listening and watching to reading. Thanks to the massive availability of video, people may no longer be putting the effort into developing literacy, which we have reason to believe was one of the drivers of the Flynn effect and of cognitive sophistication in general.

My understanding is that the decline of reading and math scores is most severe at the low end. The smart students have not declined much, but weaker students have. So, it is a problem, and I think it’s a problem that ought to be addressed.

When it comes to the decline in reading books, there may be one other factor: the optimal length of a work of text may no longer be a book. I have found that, as a curious person, I can get lost in reading about things on Wikipedia like the history of the potato chip or transatlantic travel or planets. There’s just a flood of information out there and it’s all really interesting. And I say this with some embarrassment because I write books, and sometimes very long books, but for some kinds of information, it may be that a book has diminishing returns.

Let’s now look at other criticisms of human progress.

You and I had an article in The Free Press pushing back against the “crisis of meaning.” Have you ever seen any hard evidence suggesting that people’s lives are more meaningless in rich countries versus poor countries or that lives are less meaningful today than they used to be?

No, I haven’t.

We don’t have survey data on “How meaningful do you think life is?”, but meaning and happiness seem to be partially correlated. So, in general, people who are happier say their lives are more meaningful. But some sources of meaning are not the same as sources of happiness, and vice versa. Just to give a couple of examples, if you’re dedicating your life to some cause, there can be setbacks and frustrations that make you less happy, but you say your life is more meaningful compared to a life of pleasure and leisure. Time spent with friends is more pleasurable, while time spent with family is more meaningful. So, meaning and happiness are not perfectly correlated, but they are partially correlated.

Over the course of history, if you look at the whole range of countries, there has been more of an increase in happiness than a decrease. In countries that are very affluent, like the United States, there has not been an increase in happiness. We may be close to the ceiling. But overall, across the world, there’s reason to believe that happiness has increased, so that would suggest but not prove that there has not been a decline in meaningfulness.

Anecdotally, there have been complaints that life is meaningless as far back as you go. Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Henry David Thoreau in 1854: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” T.S. Eliot, 1920s: “We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men.” So, it’s a constant complaint, and the fact that people say it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. It’s always tempting to think that life is meaningless. We like to think that there is a plan to the universe, and we get disillusioned when we find out there isn’t one. The laws of nature don’t tell any story with an ending. There are things built into the evolutionary process that guarantee that life is going to appear meaningless. There’s the law of entropy. Things fall apart and decay. We die, we get older, we weaken. Even our closest relationships are never perfect.

Now, I think the answer to that is to focus on human purposes, like not dying young, not getting shot, knowing more, experiencing art and culture, experiencing friendship, and seeing the world. But one has to reorient and realize that those are the goals of life and not expect that the universe itself tells a satisfying story.

People often look at proxies for meaning, such as anxiety and suicide. There seems to be some evidence that rich countries have higher rates of anxiety than poor countries. Of course, definitions can change and expand. Trauma used to mean being bombed by the Germans; today, it may be that you are breaking up with your boyfriend or girlfriend.

Do you have any sense as to how reliable the data on anxiety and trauma is?

There’s certainly been some diagnostic category creep. I’ve seen this in my own students. There’s an eagerness to diagnose oneself, sometimes with bogus diagnoses like autism for introversion. There’s a funny kind of cachet to having a pathology. But looking retrospectively at surveys, I think there probably has also been, on top of that, some increase in anxiety since the late 1950s.

Some of that may be that we’re taking on more responsibilities and adding to our anxiety burden. When I think back to my parents in the 1950s, there were a lot of things that they just never thought about. Are they getting enough exercise? Are they exposing themselves to skin cancer risk by going out in the sun? The state of the climate, inequality. Most people didn’t think about these things.

Jean Twenge and Jon Haidt have been trying to make the case that social media, especially through smartphones, has led to a genuine rise in anxiety, particularly in younger people. There’s some controversy there over cause and effect—maybe anxious and depressed kids turn to social media—but there seems to be at least some evidence that suggests causation.

Let me offer to our listeners what I consider to be the strongest argument in favor of rational optimism.

The clearest sign of unhappiness is when you kill yourself. Here in the United States, we’ve had an increase in suicides, but suicides are dropping in most, if not all, other rich countries. So, it seems there is a particular American pathology rather than a general pathology in prosperous countries. What’s wrong with this argument?

When I report on violence, I usually concentrate on homicide, simply because homicide is the most objective measure of violence. A dead body is hard to argue away, and people record homicides pretty accurately, so it’s the best indicator of violence. By extension, one might think that suicide would be the best indicator of unhappiness. But, partly to my surprise, that doesn’t seem to be right.

There is more ambiguity in how officials record suicide deaths. For example, when there’s a stigma against suicide, they’re often classified as accidents. Also, as best as we can tell, there’s not an excellent correlation between the suicide rate and national unhappiness. There’s even what some researchers call the suicide-unhappiness paradox, which is that countries where people are happier can sometimes have higher suicide rates, partly for the same reason that suicide rates increase around Christmas: if you look around and everyone is happy and you’re not, then you really think you’re a loser.

Suicide rates are also driven by contagion and by how easy it is to commit suicide. I quote the rather macabre poem by Dorothy Parker: “Guns aren’t lawful, nooses give, gas smells awful, you might as well live.” Suicide went way down in Britain when they changed the composition of cooking gas from coal gas to methane, which is not toxic.In developing countries, access to pesticides, a common method of suicide, has a big effect on actual rates. And in the United States, the availability of guns seems to be one of the drivers.

So, there are a lot of puzzles with suicide rates. But generally, I think it’s important to point out, as you do, that suicide rates are actually dropping globally, especially in poorer countries, but also in many rich countries. The United States is something of an anomaly. Since the 1990s, when the Global Burden of Disease project began to collect data, suicide has gone down by about 40 percent. A lot of that is thanks to urbanization. When a woman is put into an arranged marriage and leaves her village for the village of her husband, where she is dominated by her in-laws and has no friends and no way of escaping, that leads to a lot of suicides. In a more modern urban culture where you kind of have more freedom, there’s less desperation. So globally, modernization and urbanization have led to falling suicide rates.Even in the United States, suicide rates went down until the mid to late 1990s. That was a low point, and they’ve been rising since then, but it’s not as if they’ve been inexorably rising over the last century.

Those are very good caveats, thanks for introducing that nuance.

One thing that you and I discussed in our Free Press article was the criticism that meaninglessness in the West is driven in part by falling religiosity. A defender of religion might say that religion is essentially a cognitive or cultural technology for producing responsibility, happiness, restraint, and gratitude. So, if you remove religion, you may be making people more irresponsible, more unhappy, less restrained, and less grateful.

What do you think about that argument?

There is a need for community institutions and organizations that bring people together, that discuss meaning and morality, and that are a locus for collective action. The problem is that if you bundle that with theology, miracles, scripture, and invisible agents, it just isn’t going to be convincing anymore.

Religion wasn’t taken away from people; people left religion. In every developed country, there’s been a move away from organized religion. The churches are still around, and no one’s stopping people from attending; they just don’t find that religion gives them meaning and purpose. This is partly because the institutions themselves have not been sources of morality or meaning. The Roman Catholic Church with its sex abuse scandals, evangelical Protestantism in the United States with its embrace of far-right politics, the subordinate role of women in the more conservative religions like Orthodox Judaism—these are just turn-offs.

I’m gonna quote G. K. Chesterton, who is supposed to have said that when men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. A 2021 national survey found that young Americans are more likely to believe in witchcraft, luck, black magic, and spell casting.

What do you make of the argument that Christianity keeps the belief in black magic and witchcraft at bay?

A few things. The witch hunts of the 16th century were a Christian movement. I mean, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” is in the Christian Bible. I also think Chesterton was wrong about the idea that people who are more religious are also more open to astrology, ESP, the paranormal, crystal healing, and other kinds of New Age woo-woo. I don’t think it’s true as a general correlation.

The data that you cite on openness to paranormal beliefs is interesting. I’ve never reported this, but I’ve looked at trends in the belief in devils, ESP, precognition, curses, and all kinds of paranormal things. As best as I can tell, it’s been pretty flat since the 1970s.

Something to be aware of is that there are different ways in which societies can change, and quantitatively, it’s not always easy to tell them apart. There can be a cohort effect, that is, as one generation replaces another, that generation has beliefs that they carry with them as they age; a period effect, where everyone changes their beliefs; or a life cycle event where, as people age, they change their beliefs. As best I can tell, what you cited is largely an age effect. Younger people are more open to woo-woo and magic than older people. So, I think those data are correct, but don’t necessarily mean that societies have become more open to the paranormal.

One way or another, there is a sizable chunk of the population that is attracted to the supernatural or transcendental, the so-called God-shaped hole in the human heart. Critics say that irreligious people are offering a meaningless, cold universe without a purpose, and that people really need some form of transcendence to make sense of their lives.

What do you think of that argument?

I think it’s literally wrong in the sense that people’s craving for meaning and purpose isn’t shaped like a God. In fact, that argument is sometimes used to explain the rise of wokeness, that religion was replaced with the idea that differences between groups are a moral emergency, and you have to find the oppressors responsible and punish them. There’s no God in any of that.

Granted, many people do search for transcendence, but kids like to believe in Santa Claus. That belief doesn’t have to be indulged. Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment was man’s escape from his self-imposed childhood. Part of growing up involves some hard lessons, like the universe is a cold place, and it doesn’t care about you. That does not mean life is meaningless, because the fact that the universe doesn’t care about you doesn’t mean that other humans don’t care about you or that we don’t have to care about other humans. We have a purpose, which is to make people as well off as possible, to increase flourishing, to increase knowledge, life, health, freedom, and safety. These are really meaningful goals that I don’t think should leave you empty.

Without religion, what is the basis of morality? Where does morality come from if not from man being created in the image of God?

Well, man being created in the image of God doesn’t give you a whole lot of morality. If you look at the Old Testament, God is commanding the Israelites to rape, massacre, and mutilate their enemies, while there are religious prescriptions against mixing linen and cotton, lighting a fire on Saturday, and other crazy stuff that has nothing to do with morality as we could argue for it.

Conversely, I think the obvious source of morality is some kind of Golden Rule. The way we teach kids to be moral is we say, “How would you like that if someone did that to you?” The logical basis of mortality is that, as long as I’m not the galactic overlord and my fate depends on other people, I’ve got to agree to some sort of social contract that treats us as equivalent. That’s why versions of the Golden Rule have been independently discovered by many different cultures.

Here’s the most common counterargument I hear to that point of view: it is very well for an intelligent professor who reads a lot of books to derive moral principles from reciprocity, reason, and self-interest, but ordinary people don’t think like that.

What’s wrong with just picking an oven-ready set of moral norms off the shelf, like those presented by modern Christianity, which have been made more humane over time? You don’t have to do much thinking, for which you might not have time or ability.

Well, I think that could be a means to an end, but one must keep in mind what the end is, which is humanistic morality that we can justify. As we know, religions can contain off-the-shelf moralities such as “kill anyone who insults the prophet Muhammad,” “execute blasphemers or gay people,” or “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

Now there are religions guided by humanistic, enlightenment, universalist principles, such as some of the liberal Protestant denominations and Reform Judaism. I don’t oppose keeping some symbolism and ritual if the institution has moved in a humanistic direction. Maybe that would be a good thing.

A somewhat different criticism of progress has to do with status competition, essentially the idea that no matter how much things get better, ultimately, as you once again put it in your book, men don’t contend with the dead but with the living.

Are our efforts at Human Progress bound to fail because people care about relative rather than absolute improvements in life?

I love that Hobbes quote. He introduces it by saying there’s a natural reverence for antiquity because men contend with the living, not with the dead. That is, intellectuals and moralists will tend to revere earlier eras and bemoan the present era because complaining about the present is another way of complaining about your contemporaries, who are your rivals. That’s another reason there is a negativity bias.

That’s an aside on elite status competition, but we all compare ourselves to others. So, in that sense, there won’t ever be a utopia. People will always compare themselves to others and be less happy than they ought to be. Still, it’s worth working toward progress. Even if you’re a spoiled first-world brat, it’s still better that you live to 80 instead of 55. It’s still better that your kids don’t die. It’s still better to travel the world instead of being confined to your village.

There’s a quote on my wall from a psychologist called Richard Layard that reads, “One secret of happiness is to ignore comparisons with people who are more successful than you are. Always compare downwards, not upwards.”

How do we go about explaining to people that it’s okay that there is always going to be somebody who is taller, smarter, and more handsome than you are?

You’re right that this is a piece of wisdom we’d be better off having, but it’s not easy to engineer. Some features of culture are very bottom-up. They can be influenced by education and by the messages that we give children, but no one’s really in charge; it’s the result of millions of people interacting with each other every day. However, we shouldn’t abdicate our responsibility for what we teach kids. We can do our part and try to nudge them in the right direction.