Talks about us policy in the region and the recent confrontation between the us and iran. Watch booktv this week and every weekend on cspan2. If i could have everybodys attention we would like to get started. I am brian anderson, editor of city journal and i want to welcome you on behalf of the Manhattan Institute. It is with great pleasure that i introduce john tierney, a contributing editor at city journal and coauthor of the fascinating and useful new book the power of bad how the negativity effect rules us and how we can rule it. It is on sale outside the room here. John has long been one of the nations leading voices on the intersection of science and Public Policy and make no mistake, no matter how calmly, reasonably expressed, his is a very contrarian voice. It was johns New York Times column the big city which ran from the mid90s until 2002 that first made me a fan of his work. There he took on any number of prevailing this about cities from rent control to the root causes of homelessness to environmental policy. One remarkable column was born from johns irritation of Rosie Odonnells relentless public criticism of mayor Rudy Giulianis use of Law Enforcement to get the homeless off of new york city sidewalks in the 90s. How would odonnells hometown deal with a similar problem he wondered. So he let his beard grow for a few days, didnt shower and he dressed himself up in dirty clothes and a torn parka and headed up to nyack where he plopped himself on a sidewalk in front of odonnells mention. Within minutes, Security Guard was aggressively confronting him asking him to move along or threatening him to move along and soon the cops arrived and he wound up being taken down to the station. Point proved about a certain elite hypocrisy, what we call today virtues signaling. Another pc but sometimes, an essay, recycling is garbage whose title captures its provocative argument holds the record for the most hate mail ever generated by a New York Times article. [applause] johns journalism appeared not just in the times where it remains a contributor but in the wall street journal, the atlantic, esquire, new york, Washington Post and many other leading publications. Since joining city journal john has continued to illuminate and enrage, writing about, among other things, the counter productivity of anti vaping measures, the left is waging the real war on science and in the latest issue, a piece that is guaranteed to drive everybody insane, white plastic bags are better for the environment than all of the alternatives but this piece like his other work shows his talent for exploding widely accepted views, the john stossel broadcasting city journal based on his science essay had more than 2 million views since it was released. His new book the power of bad how the negativity effect rules us and how we can rule it follows on willpower which was coauthored by bombmeister and sold 350,000 copies since its release a couple years ago. It is so popular as i was telling john you can find it at airports which is really a sign that youve got it made. It will be true of the power of bad how the negativity effect rules us and how we can rule it. The previous book it for the biological and psychological aspects of human will. The new book i mentioned it is useless that is what psychologists call negativity bias is the human propensity to focus disproportionately on unpleasant events and emotions and bad news. It is the reason one word of criticism can seem more powerful to us than a paragraph of praise. They argue in this book this irrational side to human nature has its uses but it can also be crippling and lead to intimate couple actions in life and in Public Policy. The good news is it can be mastered and the power of bad how the negativity effect rules us and how we can rule it shows how but i dont want to anticipate a stocks it without more from me i give you john tierney. [applause] thanks very much, brian, for those kind words, it is great working with you as an editor. I want to thank the institute for holding this lunch and also for everything else. When i started writing big city column for the New York Times i found that this was the one voice of sanity and i have always given city journal and the Manhattan Institute the lions share of the credit for turning around new york city and i am so impressed with them that i think theyre going to save us even from the current mayor. Today i would like to suggest how to save the rest of the world and a mission as you may have guessed that involves michael. The power of bad how the negativity effect rules us and how we can rule it is about a fundamental fact of life that is just becoming clear to scientists, the universal tendency of bed events, bad emotions to affect us more strongly than good ones. In short, bad is stronger than good. That was the title of the famous paper by my coauthor who was a social psychologist. Since he published it there have been hundreds of studies looking at the negativitys impact on just about all parts of our life and in the book, we wrote this book to show people what has been found out and how to deal with that and how this negativity bias in our brains affect our romantic relationships, parenting, education, religion, sports, business, mass media, social media and just about everything else. We argue that negativity effect underlies the most important problem in politics and Public Policy. It is a problem that has bothered me since i got my first inkling and one of my first jobs in journalism when i was a summer intern at the philadelphia bulletin. As low man on the totem pole i got the dread assignment one friday night to write the weather story and there was a heat wave in philadelphia that weekend and not exactly an unprecedented phenomenon in july but i had to find something new to say about it. There were a lot of philadelphians going to the beach so i called the Police Station at the jersey shore, begs for news from the desk sergeant and he said there is nothing going on. We have heavy traffic, that is all. I said is the traffic unusually heavy . And he goes no, it is always like this on fridays in july. I was just a young reporter, very inexperienced at this point but some primal journalistic instinct told me that this was not the right answer. So i started calling Police Station this asking them is this the worst traffic you have ever seen and they kept telling me know, it is friday night in july. After half a dozen phone calls i hit pay dirt was the desk sergeant said to me i guess it is the worst i have ever seen. For all i knew it was the guys first week on the job but that didnt matter. I had my lead and my headline. The story got great play in the paper so i considered the Great Success but i also felt guilty. I knew how silly this was. Why did i fabricate this traffic crisis . Why did my editors reward me for . Why did people want to read this kind of story . I kept wondering about this the rest of my career, kept being assigned to write about supposing crises, population crisis, the Energy Crisis, the cancer epidemic crisis, the recycling crisis and whenever i looked into them i kept seeing that these were basically grander versions of my traffic story, the reporters would find some isolated problem and go hunting for some alleged experts who would declare this the omen of a global catastrophe. It didnt matter how often these doomsayers have been wrong before. They kept getting quoted and i kept wondering, why do we journalists keep crying wolf and why do people keep listening to us . I never got a strong answer into i read that paper bad is stronger than good. He wrote this after previous researchers reported people cared more about financial losses and financial gains, psychologists found a bad First Impression has more impact than a good First Impression. What gives bad its power in those situations . He looks for other situations where good was stronger. He scoured the research, all kinds of disciplines. To his surprise he couldnt find any counterexamples. By accident he stumbled onto this major phenomena and that extended into so many fields that no one had noticed the overall pattern. Bad was relentlessly stronger than good. As brian said, a word of criticism has more impact than praise. Penalties are much more effective than prizes. A bad employee has much more impact than a good employee, bad parenting can seriously hurt children but being a super great parent doesnt make much difference. That is the good news, be a good enough parent, you dont have to be perfect. The success of marriage depends mainly on how spouses, it is not on the good things they do but mainly how spouses feel with negativity. We pride ourselves on many good things we do with our family and friends, going the extra mile what really matters is what we dont do. Avoiding bad is more important than doing good. You dont get extra credit for going beyond what you promised but you pay a big price for falling short. In the book we explain how to harness the power of bad and overcome when it is not. We offer guidelines like the rule of four. A rough guideline but pretty useful that it typically takes four good things to overcome one bad thing. If you are late for one meeting you are not going to make up for it by being early the next time. If you say one hurtful things your partner you better plan on a lot more than one complement to make up for it. There is an upside to the negativity which is the power to motivate and teach. You can see this clearly at schools in new york and other cities that have been inspired by an education reform that started at the Manhattan Institute with abigail and stefan burns from. They advocated an alternative to the everybody gets a trophy philosophy that was causing schools in high school and colleges, grade schools to inflate grades and illuminate penalties for failure. The reformers started a movement called no excuses schools where both students and teachers pay a price for poor work and the result has been astonishing at Charter Schools like success academy. The students come from the poorest neighborhoods in new york city and outscore every School District in the state. There are various reasons, one of the main ones as they are harnessing the negativity effect. They are using penalties instead of prizes to motivate kids. Kids are learning faster and more. The downside of the negativity effect is its power to warp our perspective and skew our decisions. It leads to the most prevalent form of addiction which is addiction to safety. This is why football coaches make the same stupid decision week after week. When they are faced with fourthdown and short the analyst tells them they should go for it but over and over they refuse to go for it, they punt because they are so afraid of failure and so afraid of being blamed for failure. In the book we talk about one High School Coach in arkansas who took a rational look at the numbers and made a decision never to punt even if he is on his own, 1yard line, it is fourth and 30 he goes forth and his team wins the state championship year after year. He is pretty much an outlier though you may have noticed during the super bowl the Kansas City Chiefs coach did go for it on fourth down and it helped him win the game. I feel confident he must have read our book. These coaches are following the basic strategy we advise for everyone. Use your rational brain to overcome the irrational power of bad in your personal life and professional life and how you look at the world. By any rational standard, we are the luckiest people in history. Every measure of Human Welfare has been dramatically improving except for one, hope. We are lucky but we feel cursed. The healthier and wealthier we become the gloomier our world view. The global rates of poverty and hunger and disease and violence have been plummeting but most people think they have gotten worse. We are blinded to the progress going on because of the negativity bias and because we are bombarded by bad news, the crisis crisis, neverending series of threats that leave the public needlessly frightened and angry. Nearly half of americans worry that they or a Family Member will die in a terrorist attack. The actual odds are higher for climbing into a bathtub. They cant go to playgrounds by themselves because their parents have been so frightened by stories about stranger danger but the risk of a fatal abduction is lower than the risk of being struck by lightning. Apocalyptic predictions have become so common there was one survey of preteen children in america who were asked what the world would be like when they grew up, what the earth would be like and one of 3 of the children said they feared the earth would no longer exist and this was before anyone had heard of greta thunberg. Obviously there are some real problems in the world. The coronavirus is a new threat but city journal just pointed out in a rare piece that offered some perspective the threat from this new virus to americans is minuscule compared to the threat from the ordinary flu virus. What is novel about this new virus is how quickly we are responding to it. It used to take decades to develop a vaccine. Now they are talking about when in several months. But we dont see that progress because of the brains negativity bias. We focus on the scare stories and worstcase scenarios we keep seeing in the news and that is the crisis crisis and it is promoted by journalists, politicians with the help of academics and activists and other special interests. There is a whole crisis industry, the merchants of bad. You find them on both sides of the political spectrum. They start moral panics, stoke fears about new technology, foreign enemies, drugs, immigrants, environmental threats, whatever triggers the brains alarm circuit and a promote class warfare, tribalism, poison politics and elected demagogues. I call the merchants of bad but i dont mean they are all in it just for money. Many of them are genuinely alarmed. The most effective doomsayers are the ones who actually believe their own prophecies. Chicken little was truly convinced the sky was falling. The issue wasnt her sincerity but her interpretation of the acorn that fell on her head and her plan for dealing with it. She and the other animals saw shelter from the sky crisis by going into the den of the fox who made a meal of them. That is the cautionary lesson. That applies the crisis crisis. There are a lot of hungry foxes out there. They know what emmanuel meant when he said you never want a serious crisis to go to waste. To hype threats to promote policies that help special interests and the power of Public Officials while causing general harm to the rest of us. A few examples. The Energy Crisis of the 1970s, the fear mongering of a Nuclear Power led to the policies that caused creation of a lot more coal power plants and the result is we have more Carbon Dioxide in the air. In iraq we were so afraid of an imaginary dinner, saddams weapons of mass destruction we foster the chaos that allow both spread of isis. Last summer muchpublicized death of people from vaping have nothing to do with nicotine cigarettes like juul but they put out so much misleading information that most americans have come to believe that e cigarettes are worse than smoking and the result is millions of smokers have been dissuaded from making a switch that could save their lives. What is most damaging. I could give you these examples like the plastic panic brian talked about but what is most damaging about the crisis crisis is a cumulative impact, the continual crisis mongering leads to demo sclerosis which the brilliant economist mansur olson identified as the greatest obstacle to freedom and prosperity in democratic societies. Demo sclerosis is fogging of the economic arteries by the gradual accumulation of favors and subsidies and regulations that benefit special Interest Groups but slow down everything else. As olson said it is death by 1000 cuts. Here in new york city for instance developers used to be able to build homes for the middle class and the poor but today they can afford to build only for the affluent because so many regulations and obstacles have built up over the years. The biggest obstacles are rentcontrolled rules which originally passed at the end of world war ii as a temporary measure in response to housing emergency. After the war ended, after the emergency ended the regulations never went away. That is typical of what happened in the crisis crisis. The economist robert higgs documented this in his classic book crisis in leviathan. What drives government growth is it expands during a crisis and when the crisis is over it never shrinks back to its former size. That is why i see the crisis crisis as the greatest problem in Public Policy and politics. Im not trying to exploit the negativity effect by telling your brandnew threat to human survival. People have always done crisis monitoring. The modern rise of negativities intense, we see a 24 7 on our screens that people have always been vulnerable. In 1918, long before cable news and the web, journalist hl minkin describe Public Discourse as a combat of praises. He truly diagnosed the fundamental problem in politics. The whole aim of practical politics, minkin said, is to keep the populace alarmed and clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins most of them imaginary. This is a tough problem that will always be with us. The negativity bias is wired into our brains and i dont expect my fellow journalists and other merchants of bad will not put them out of selves business voluntarily. There are ways to deal with it. We propose some policies that will reduce some of the financial prophets of doom and we think the rise of social media offers promising alternatives. Contrary to what you heard, social media is less negative than the mass media. There is a way we can use that to curate what we see and go on a low bad diet. However you get your news we advise looking at the news today, keep three principles in mind with the crisis crisis. Number one, the world will always seem to be in crisis. Number 2, the crisis is never as bad as it sounds, number 3, the solution could easily make things worse. I would be happy to go into more detail in the q and a. I dont want to end on a negative note myself. For all the problems we document for the negativity effect, we really are optimistic for the longterm. We expect the world to keep getting better. We think the earth will still exist when kids grow up. We want more people to see that. The negativity effect isnt going away but the more we understand it, the more we learn about it more capable we become of dealing with it. But we are confident that good will ultimately prevail. As long as enough people buy this book. [laughter] [applause] thank you. Thank you, john. We have a lot of time for plenty of questions and why dont i start right here. Just identify yourself before you ask great speech. John, is a possible the negativity bias as evolutionary origins . That is, in early may and it was very important to be aware of all possible threats and so on for mere survival. Could that be a possible basis . Youre right. Theres a very good adaptive reason why the evolutionary, why the negativity bias the ball. The ancestors who survived the more attention to threats because as we say in the book, life has to with everyday. Death only has to win once. Its much more important to pay to be on the lookout for predators. It serves a t purpose. Badd does it teach you more. It motivates you more and its useful in lots of places that the comparison we make is it was adaptive on the ancestral savannah to fatten up during lean times in order to survive. But when youre surrounded all day by fattening foods and junk food, then its not so adaptive and that the situation were in today where were w surrounded y all these very skilled merchants of bad houthi got good ways to scarce overtime and how to manipulate us. Thereim are still great uses a bad. One thing we talked about in the book is younger people are much more sensitive to the negativity bias because its more important when youre younger children. Youve got a lot more to learn. He got to do this. As people get older they use these natural defenses against the better we have chapter called pollyanna principle, that older people make better decisions because they dont focus so much on the bad and they learn to savor good moments. They use techniques like nostalgia to make basically be more positive about life and to enjoy it more. Theres a lot of these things people can do. Fantastic talk, thank you. How doo you distinguish before the fact between a real crisis and a a manufactured crisis . Clearly in the last two and jeers at the very least there been some very real crises, whether its the rise of anarchism or communist ideology, dashes him, the chinese cultural revolution. At the time one mightve thought anybody whos raising an alarm about that was exaggerating the threat and thishr would all go away. Possibly some of the things we want about today whether its divisive poisonous identity politics are manufactured or maybe they are civilization changing. How do you tell . To answer to that. One is in general when there some sort of, if you claim theres an apartment a problem, a health problem. The i important thing is are running out of the Weight Energy the way everyone believe in the 70s. The best thing to do look at the longerterm trend. When you t look at longterm trends for most of these, for all of them, theyve improved. For instance, in the 70s like the economist julian simon a look at longterm transeven l said we were run out of oil by the year 2000. Julian look at the long trend treatment said no, oil will be cheaper in 2000 that it is today. Thats one way to try to evaluate problems like that. Political problems you talk about, there isnt some, but i would argue things like the cultural revolution, insight communism in general. Karl marx talked about the crisis of capitalism. He basically invented this crisis that income inequality is this awful today we see this that income inequality is this crippling problem we have to deal with. If you look at the data about how much inequality there is, about how people feel about you average person under capitalism, life is getting much better. We dont need to drastically reengineer society in order we dont need these revelations to do it. Revolutionaries arere the ones o love to look at crises and say we have to completely redo society to do that. I do think politics led to cultural revolution bike communism. Politics can stop progress but where this great enrichment for the last two centuries but it stops when people come whats they discover the crisis of capitalism so we have to just throw it out. Why dont we go to the back of the room there. H yes. As part of the negativity, all these political ads that are all negative, none are positive and yet we still listen to it or going back to the population bomb. It was one thing that made one of the worst miscalculations in history but i understand he still getting audiences to listen to what he sang. How does that happen . Its amazing. About we talk about paul ehrlich and john holdren who will, they predicted these mass famines in the the 1980s from overpopulation and a food shortage. When the famous payments didnn there predicting by 2,021,000,000,000 people would be dead from Climate Change. When holdren during the nomination hearings to be obamas sites advised he said it was still ahe possibility. Its shocking when you h look bk at what he and ehrlich were proposing. They were advocating, there ws thing the government has a right and the duty to limit family size. It talked about proposals like when f young women reach pubert, they should be implanted with a sterilizing capsule that can be removed only with official permission. Its shocking anybody would do that and get thatss also one of the things the crisis crisis and these doomsayers is they rarely pay penalties foray their mistakes. Heres holdren who is completely wrong for his whole career about when one issue after another picky advocates deny a fundamental human right and we just over it because there is this codependency between journalists and doomsayers. Theres a professional courtesy we extended them. We know they were all wrong before but we need their alarmist predictions to make stories, so wed tolerate it. Kyle smith, national review. John, you mentioned the incentive structure foror journalistsiv is one reason they might be pushed towards reporting bad news. Might there be another incentive at the other end . Might it be that the phlegmatic and pessimistic personalities of the journalists working at the newspaper on eighth avenue my pushed them to seek out and celebrate badad news . I think its possible. It also attracts people, you know, i mean most journalists that ive known Mainstream Media tend to be liberal. I think liberals tend to want to expandan the government and have lots, solve lots of problems. To do that you want to say theres a crisis. As rahm emanuel said you dont want to let a crisis go to waste. Asked was whether journalists on more, theyre just more negative inal general, im not sure about that. It was noted psychologists had suffered from an extreme negativity bias for the First Century of psychology, that they publish more than twice as many papers and twice as much space in textbooks to analyze people problem rather than look at ways people can become happier. They said because psychologists are medicus or sadists and will enjoy studying problems, and their explanation was the reason psychologist did this was because that is a much stronger than good, its much easier to measure bad events and much more visible, and so its easy to study them. I would think the main reason journalists do it is its ultimately a marketdriven thing, we know its the easiest way to get attention. Thats especially true in the mass media because when youre trying to reach a a mass audie, the easiest way to do that is to appeal to something thats universal emotion. We all share the same kind of basic fears of dying, of sickness, of violence. Its easy to appeal to that, and the reason i more helpful about social media, and a talk to George Gilder about this in the 90s. Record of indie book. He was optimistic while everyone was saying the new internet will be terrible. He was saying the mass tends to be negative because our buddy shares of those, but people pay for excellent for the things come for cultural achievement, for history, science. Those kind of interests tend to be more niche interest. You cant appeal to them with a mass audience but on facebook you get these groups come on you to bend that all these different events that can appeal to the peoples positive interests to their desire to share knowledge. Theres some hope there for going more with social media. The other thing thats interesting is social media get such a bad rap for the vitriol thats there, for the twitter wars, and that does go on but its not the norm. People on social media Share Positive stories much more than they read negative stories on mass media. They dont want to send their friends photographs of School Ground massacres. They tend to Share Positive step and theyre been interesting studies about who gets followers one twitter, that tweeting positively get you more followers and positive tweets, they dont give a tweet it as as the negative ones, start one of these cancel culture wars but they tend to spread more widely. In thatt theres hope as with less mass media and more social media, that there could be less negativity. Stanley wright appear. Just wait, wait for the mic. Stanley goldstein, that talk was so good that people who were thinking of buying the book may not buy it. They got the whole story. You have had the best part yet. I left most of it up. I want to pick up on at on e mcdonalds question but identifying early on the real crisis. Inin the World Investment theres a group called contrarians where everyone is selling tobacco stocks, theyre buying tobacco stocks and they do pretty well. I wonder how we use your kind of analysis to find out when theres a mob psychology effect and is one is overreacting, and if you sense that, that is very valuable. Its an interesting question. Looking at longterm trends and data instead of get feelings, theres some Interesting Research industry looking atth financial markets, where there are a couple of measures that are released that are peculiarus to australia. They, twice a month and someone said to have a stock market reacted to it there. They found the negative effect the basically when theres bad news in those indicators, stocks were down. When it was good news they didnt want todo go up. People still probably overreact to bad news and, therefore, theres a gut feeling, i got through it. Thats one example of the way you could use it. The other thing is theres the effect that economists study about people hate to take losses so much soh that hold onto a stock way too long and it takes someone else toal come in and jt take the pain, take the loss. People hate to admit that so theres one obvious way. John, my daughter says to me yeah, you keep saying all these crises went nowhere but Climate Change is different. You have so many serious people really worried about this one. This one is different. Guest i agree that Climate Change is different from things like the Energy Crisis. The Energy Crisis was something marcus could solve comes a price of will goes up people look for new sources. In Climate Change is a commons problem. Its a collective action problem. Its a genuine threat. I think we should be doing more research on it, and looking for ways to get more low Carbon Energy. Its also a great example of a crisis crisis. Because hey theres just been a ridiculously high people will be dead by 2020 or we have ten more years before the earth you know its a genuine threat and i am confident that in the long run we are going to come up with new, low Carbon Energy sources and adapt to every have to. The less carbon we put in the atmosphere, the better. But the other aspect of it is, the policies they are promoting are awful. They basically are enriching the Energy Companies are not doing any good. The main statistics i have seen is that the United States has withdrawn from paris they love to have conferences and sign treaties it creates a lot of work for them. We dont see any impact of these treaties. The United States is actually reducing Carbon Emissions more than germany is. Germany signs a treaty, they have all these subsidies for green energy. But theyre actually behind schedule and meeting the treaties. The u. S. Is ahead. The reason is because we have not succumb to the panic of banning starting the closed Nuclear Power plants with germany is done. Also, the main reason we are reducing emissions i liked some of these socalled green countries is we have fracking and we are changing those coal plants and natural gas. I think we lead the world last year in producing carmen emissions. Thats never gets written about because it does not fit the narrative of green. We have to have more wind main windows are fined to bill but theyre not going to make any difference in the long run. We need to get new, largescale sources of low Carbon Energy. Most of these policies that are being promoted or just not going to do that. At the moment, the only two practical ways to reduce Carbon Emissions or Nuclear Power and substituting natural gas or coal. Much of the environmental establishment opposes both of them. According to the democratic candidates, which is just insane. So basically theyre not doing anything, chronic changes basically an excuse to adopt other policies that they like to reward the politically correct companies. Theyre basically pushing an agenda this not helping the rest of us. In light of that response say little bit about the plastic bag issue. It is fascinating. Stop shop is banning plastic bags. Oh thank god we are all safe now. The plastic panic goes back to 70s their people who want to ban these Plastic Products because they know were running petroleum are going to run out of it we dont wasted on plastic theres new reason now the latest thing is theres plastic in the ocean. Its true, there is growing Plastic Waste in the ocean and it is a serious problem. It is not because of her throwaway society. In fact, you recycle plastic, you increase the chances that you are putting that plastic in the ocean. Because contrary to what people think, there is absolutely no market for recycled plastic. An awful lot of it thankfully get sent off to the landfill. But some of it, but theyve been doing for years the shipping into asia. Went to china note its been going more to malaysia and vietnam. These countries do a terrible job managing their waste. They are the largest source of missed managed waste the gift to the ocean. In the Great Pacific garbage patch, more than half of it comes from phishing votes. We should do a better job of stopping phishing votes from littering. Almost all the rest comes from asia and south america and africa. Its not coming to the United States and europe. The other aspect is crazy about the band is that when you ban Plastic Grocery bags you are increasing Carbon Emissions. All the substitutes paper bags, tote bags, they ultimately involve more Carbon Emissions because theyre so much heavier, takes more energy to transport them and ship them. I know calculations that said San Francisco bag Plastic Grocery bags and may have doubled its greenhouse emissions. As a result of that. In the piece i talk about, i picked the one original contribution on this people written some of this before. As i think the explanation of this, you have to go back to the laws of the middle ages when nobles pass all these laws about who could wear what, who could use what. Again, these laws are fully ineffective. Historians wonder why they keep passing these laws it never did any good . The answer was it gave these people a great killing of power, made them feel virtuous and kept commoners in their place. That is really the old cement thing thats plastic, they are sort of our modern ability to fine plastic packing and likes to tell other people what to do. And in the process, theyre making life lots more inconvenient for everyone. There also hurting the environment. See when we might have time for one or two more questions. John, i fully by your point that its very powerful, they have a very strong urge to survive, we really want to make sure we dont die in most cases this really optimism in there, life is good, life is worth living so therefore thats a great point, there are some tendencies this pollyanna principal theres a lot more words for negative things like pain and pleasure. Reuse the positive words more often we do that to boost our spirit. Theres also this phenomenon called the optimism bias. The way it works is may look at the outside world, the negativity rules may overestimate dangers we focus on we walk into a room we focus on the hostile face rather than a happy. We pay more attention to the criticism than the praise. We also have this opposite bias, we look inward. People really overestimate their own virtues. There is this hilarious study where they surveyed people serving time in a penitentiary for sort of crimes, they asked them to rate themselves on various things. On moral standards, on selfcontrol, on their consideration for others. And theyve rated themselves above average. All these convicted criminals rated themselves above average on every single trade except the one and that is the trait of being lawabiding. On that they rated themselves only average. [laughter] so, we have that. It is that optimism bias that an enables us to go forward. He had that feeling that i know most businesses fail, but mine is going to work. That really does enable us to go forward. This optimism by itself is part of the crisis crisis. We overestimate the dangers out there. The war in iraq, we also talk about world war i as an example. You the germans overestimated a threat and just like we over estimated threat from saddam. The same time we overestimate our own ability to install a democratic government. Get this combination of hyping the threat, and also overestimating the capacity to deal with it. And then it just makes for disaster. He went last question. And listening to your talk, i cant help but wonder if this addiction to a crisis mentality explains the recent halftime super bowl show. By that i mean while i naively expected a celebration of america and its freedom, maybe a thank you to a military and athletic prowess and said what we witnessed was a set pornographic show of debauchery and misogyny should. I didnt even know what the connection was to the super bowl. I cant help but think maybe your whole theory about the negativity and the decline and despair, is really what we are witnessing on a cultural level you want to comment on that . Guest theres certainly a tendency common certainly its been written about the cultural lead today to be down on american be down to western civilization and down on traditional morality and celebrate. With deviancy in that sense. The other thing with the crop shot of the super bowl thats a new basic mass appeal. Its like negativity, people all respond to that. I think we saw that. See went alright thank you for much, john tierney. Thank you all for coming. [applause] thank you all for coming. Available outside. Youll enjoy it. Thanks, john. [inaudible conversations] weeknights this week we are featuring booktv programs showcasing whats available and weekend on cspan2. Tonight, books on the middle east. Watch booktv this week and every weekend on cspan2. All right. Good evening, everybody. We will get started. Welcome to the American Enterprise institute. On yuval levin, and its my great pleasure to welcome you to a discussion of an important new book on my good friend done cawley, michael strain. Michael is the director of economic studies here at aei. Hes a widely published