It is on sale, by the way outside the room here. John has long been one of the leading voices on the intersection of science and Public Policy. And make no mistake, however calmly, reasonably expressed, his is a very contrary invoice. It was johns New York Times column, the big city, which ran from the mid 90s until 2002, that first made me a fan of his work. There, he took on any number of prevailing myths about cities. From the efficacy of rent control to the root causes of homelessness to environmental policy. One remarkable column was his irritation at Rosie Odonnells relentless public criticism of mayer Rudy Giulianis use of Law Enforcement to get the homeless off of new york city sidewalks back in the 90s. So how would odonnells, hometown deal with a similar problem john wondered . So he let his beard grow for a few days, he did not shower, then he dressed himself up in dirty clothes in a torn parka and headed up where he plopped himself down on the sidewalk right in front of odonnells manchin. [laughter] well within minutes of course, a Security Guard was confronting him and asking them actually threatening him to move along. Soon the cops arrived and he was then taken down to the station. Point proved about a certain kind of elite hypocrisy which these days recall virtual signaling. Another piece he wrote for the times, an essay, recycling is garbage. His titles capture the provocative argument holds the record for the most hate mail ever generated by a New York Times article. [laughter] [applause] now johns journalism has appeared not just in the times where he remains an occasional contributor, but in the wall street journal, atlantic, esquire, washington post, many other leading publications. Since joining city journal, john, has continued to illuminate an enraged writing about other things that counter productivity of anti vaping, Public Health measures, how drugs get developed in price, why the left is actually raging the real war on science. And the latest issue, a piece that is almost guaranteed to drive everyone insane, white plastic bags are in fact better for the environment than all of the alternatives. [applause] but this piece, like his other work, really again shows his talent for exploding widely accepted views as fallacies. The john stossel broadcasting city journal based on johns work science essay has incidentally had more than 2 million views since we released it. His new book, the power of bad how the negativity effect rules us and how we can rule it which was also coauthored was sold an impressive 350,000 copies since its release a couple of years ago. It is so popular, as i was telling john, you can find it airports, which is really a sign youve got it made. Has established true of or will be true soon, of the power of bad, the previous book explores the biological and psychological aspects of human will. The new book, i mentioned it is useful, studies what psychologists say negativity bias. The human propensity to focus disproportionately on unpleasant events and emotions, bad news. Its the reason that one word of criticism can seem more powerful to us in the paragraph of praise. As john and roy argue in this book, this is an irrational side to human nature, but it can also be crippling and lead to inimitable actions in life and a Public Policy. The good news is it can be mastered and the power of bad shows how. But i do not want to anticipate john stott, so without more for me, i give you john tierney. Thank you. [applause] guest thanks very much, thank you very much brian for those kind words it has been great working with you as an editor. I want to thank the Manhattan Institute for holding this lunch and also for Everything Else theyve done. When i started writing the big city column for the New York Times, i found this was the one voice of sanity on urban policy. I have always given city journal and the Manhattan Institute the lions share of credit for turning around new york city. And i am so impressed with them, that i think theyre going to save us even from. [inaudible] [laughter] today i would like to suggest how to save the rest of the world. Missions as you may have guessed, that you all need to buy my book. The power of bad is about the fact of life thats just now becoming clear to sciences. The universal tendency of bad events and bad emotions to affect us more strongly. In short, bad is stronger than good. That was a titled a famous paper of my coauthor, since he published it, there have been hundreds of studies looking at the negativities impact on just about all parts of our life. In the book we wrote this book in order to show people how to deal with that and how does negativity bias in our brains affect our romantic relationships, parenting, religion, sports, business, you know mass media, social media, and just about Everything Else. We argue that the negativity effect underlies the most important problem in politics and Public Policy. Its a problem that has really bothered me since i got my first inkling of it and want to my first jobs in journalism when i was a summer intern at the philadelphia bulletin. Now his low man on the totem pole i got the dread assignment one friday night to write the weather story there is a heat wave in philadelphia that weekend, which is not exactly, an unprecedented phenomenon in july. But i had to find something new to say about it. So, there were a lot of philadelphians going to the beach so i called the Police Station down at the jersey sure and i begged for some news from the desk sergeant he said really nothing going on, we have heavy traffic, thats all. I said was the traffic and usually heavy . [laughter] and he goes zero no no, its always like this on fridays. In july. Now as i said, i was a young reporter very inexpensive that point. Some primal journalistic instinct told me that this was not the right answer. [laughter] so i started calling Police Stations up and down the jersey shore asking them is this the worst traffic youve ever seen . [laughter] and they kept till me know, its a friday night in july its always like this. So finally about a half dozen phone calls, i hit pater. The one desk sergeant said to me well, i guess it is the worst ive ever seen. [laughter] now for all i knew it was the guys first week on the job. [laughter] but that did not matter. I had my lead, and i had my headline. In the story got great play in the paper so i considered it really a great success. But i also felt guilty. I know how sleazy this was. I wondered why did i fabricate this beach traffic crisis, you know . Why did my editor reward me for . Why did people want to read this kind of story . So i kept wondering about these questions and the rest of my career. I kept being assigned to write about suppose and crises. The population crisis the Energy Crisis the kansas epidemic crisis the recycling crisis, whenever i looked into them, i just kept saying that these are basically grand diversions of my beach story. The reporters were trying some isolated problem and then they would go hunting for some alleged expert that would declare this the omen of a global catastrophe. You know, it didnt matter how often these doomsday airs have been wrong before. They kept getting quoted. I just kept wondering, why dont we, journalist, keep crying wolf . Why do people keep listening to us . So i never could get a satisfied answer and till i read Roy Baumeister paper, bad is stronger than good. After previous researchers had noticed and reported that you people cared more about financial losses than financial gains, the colleges had found that a bad First Impression has much more impact than a good First Impression. And so roy wondered, what gives vat its power in those situations. He looks for counterexamples for other situations were good was strong. And he scoured the research and just all kinds of disciplines, and to his surprise, he could not find any counterexamples. But come by accident almost he stumbled onto this major phenomenon that extended into so many fields, that nobody had noticed the overall pattern. Bad was relentlessly stronger than good. As brian said, word of criticism has so much more impact than praise. Penalties are much more effective in motivating people than prizes. A bad employee has much more impact than good employee. Bad parenting can seriously hurt children, but being a really super great parent doesnt make much difference. [laughter] thats good news. In the book we talk about being a good enough parent you dont have to be perfect. And the success of marriages, depends mainly on how spouses assign the good things to do it depends mainly on how spouses deal with negativity. That holds true for other relationships. We pride ourselves on many good things we do for our family and friends, going the extra mile for our customers and for clients. But what really matters is what we dont do. Of avoiding bad is much more important than doing good. You dont get much extra credit it all 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 wind is useful and how to overcome it when it is not. We offer guidelines like the rule of four its a rough guideline but its pretty useful that it typically takes four good things to overcome one bad thing. So if you are late for one meeting, you are not going to make up for for being early next time. You say one hurtful think your partner, you better plan on the lot more than one complement to makeup for. Now theres an upside to the negativity effect which is his power to motivate and to teach. You can see this clearly at schools in new york and other cities that are been inspired by an educational reform that really started here at the Manhattan Institute with abigail and stephan thermos term. They advocated in an alternative to the everybody gets a trophy philosophy of the educational establishment. The kind that was causing schools, schools and high school, colleges grade schools to inflight grades and to eliminate penalties for failure. The reformers they start a movement called no excuses schools. This is where both students and teachers pay price for poor work. The results have just been astonishing, Charter Schools like success academy. These students come from the poorest neighborhoods in new york city and they outscore every School District in the state. It is really proof, there are various reasons but one of the main ones as they are harnessing the negativity effect. Theyre using prizes penalties instead of prizes to motivate kids and kids are learning faster and more. Now the downside of the negativity effect, as its power to warp our perspective and skew our decisions. It leads to it roy and i consider the most prevalent form of addiction which is in addiction to safety. This is why football coaches make the same stupid decision week after week. They are faced with forethought in short, the analyst tells them they should go for. But over and over they refuse to go for, they punch because they are so afraid of failure and so afraid of being blamed for failure. Now in the book we talk about one High School Coach in arkansas, who actually use it took a rational look at the numbers and he made a decision never to punt. Even if these on his own 1 yard line its fourth and 30, he goes for. [laughter] and his team wins the state championship year after year. [laughter] now he is still pretty much of an outlier other you may have noticed during the super bowl that the Kansas City Chiefs coach did go for it on fourth down and helped him win the game. I feel confident that he mustve read our book. [laughter] now these coaches are following the basic strategy that we advise for everyone. Use your rational brain to overcome the irrational power of bad in your personal life and your professional life. And also, in 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 worldview. An international service, it is people in the richest countries who sound the most pessimistic. The global rates of poverty and hunger, and disease, and violence help in plummeting, to most people in the United States and europe thanks theyve gotten worse. We are blinded to the progress going on because of the negativity bias and because we are just bombarded by bad news. By what i call the crisis crisis. This is this never ending series of heightened threats that leave the public needlessly frightened and angry. And nearly half of americans worry that they, or family member, will die in a terrorist attack. The actual odds, are the same of climbing into a bathtub. Children cant walk by themselves to school and they cant go to playgrounds by themselves because their parents have been so frightened about stories about stranger danger. The actual risk of fatal abduction is lower than the risk of being struck by lightning. Apocalyptic predictions have become so common, there is one survey of preteen children in america who were asked with the world would be like when they grow, with the earth to be like. Nearly one out of three of the children said they feared the earth would no longer exist. This is before anyone had heard of gratitude berg. Now obviously, there are some real problems of the world. The coronavirus for instance is a new threat. But a city journal just pointed out, and a rare piece that actually offered perspective, the threats on the new virus to americans is minuscule compared to the ordinary flu virus. With truly novel about this new virus is how quickly we are responding to it. Used to take decades to develop a vaccine. Now they are talking about one in several months. But we dont see that progress because of our brains and negativity by an. We focus on the scare stories and the worstcase scenarios that we keep seeing in the news. That is the crisis crisis. It is promoted, by journalist, by politicians, but the health of academics and activists and other special interest. There is a whole crisis industry, emergence of bad as i call them. You find them on both the left and right side of the political spectrum. They start moral panics, they stoke fears about new technologies, foreign enemies, drugs, immigrants, what ever will instantly trigger the brains alarm circuits. They promote a class warfare they poison politics, not call on the emergence of that but i dont mean theyre all in it just for the money. Many of them are genuinely alarmed. The most effective doomsayers of the people who believe their own prophecies. You know chicken little, was truly convinced the sky and trent sky was falling. It wasnt her sincerity but her interpretation of this acorn fell on her head. And the plan for dealing with it. She and the other animals sought shelter from the sky crisis. They did that by going into the den of the fox who promptly made a meal of them. That is a cautionary lesson from that fable. That it applies to the crisis crisis. There are a lot of hungry foxes out there. They know just what immanuel meant when he said you never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Over and over, they hide threats, in order to promote the careers and policies that help special interest and Public Officials will causing general harms the the rest of us. A few examples, the Energy Crisis of the 1970s and the fear mongering by european power led to policy that caused creation of a lots more coal power plants. The result is we have more Carbon Dioxide in the air. And iraq, we were so afraid of it imaginary danger, sit on weapons of mass this direction we had a chaos which allowed worst to happen the spread of isis. The muchpublicized death the people from vaping had nothing to do if they had continued cigarettes. But journalists and activists because such a panic and put up so much misleading information that most americans have come to believe that e cigarettes are worse than smoking. The result is millions of smokers have been dissuaded with most families i could go on and give you examples like panic that brian talked about. Whats really most damaging about the crisis is one thing is the cumulative impact. The continual crisis leads to the condition known as demo sclerosis. The brilliant economists identified as the greatest obstacle to freedom and prosperity in democratic society. This is the clogging of the economic arteries by the gradual accumulation of favors and subsidies and regulations. The benefits special Interest Groups slow down Everything Else. As olson said, it is death by 1000 cuts. Here in york city for instance, developers used to be able to build homes for the middleclass and the poor. But today, they can afford to only build for the affluence because so many different regulations and obstacles have built up over the years. And the biggest obstacles are the rent control rules which were 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. And that is absolutely typical of a crisis crisis. The economist, robert haigs documented in his classic book, crisis and leviathan on, he shows what really drives government growth as it expands after crisis. Them in a crisis is over, it never shrinks back to its former size. That is why i see the crisis crisis is really the greatest problem in Public Policy and politics. I am not trying to exploit the negativity effect and sake the brandnew threat to human survival, people have always been vulnerable to crisis monitoring. The modern barrage of negativity is especially intense, we just see it 24 7 on our screens. But people have always been vulnerable. In 1918, long before cable news and the web, and jo