Cities are a boon for the environment and as countries develop we see a race between how quickly the urbanisation can take place before they destroy their natural environment because there is a point which it stabilises and is far better. Counter-intuitively while population growth is increasing the amount of births are down by a lot since the peak in 1962. It is the lower mortality rate that accounts for the population growth. Joe Walton has evidence to show that immigration is positive for the environment and closing borders would prove harmful. On a practical level it seems that eating less beef could have a big impact.
Michael Shermer posed a list of phenomena originally put to Steven by Bill Mahr which would seem to refute Steven Pinker’s argument that we have progressed in almost every measure. Steven explained that progress in an area doesn’t mean complete resolution, and rising concern for certain problems (such as bullying) should not be conflated with rising incident.
They tackled how it is that media play to our cognitive bias with seeing problems. Lack of events are not reported and so peace in areas of historical conflict are ignored. Gradual change also slips under our attention; the news could have reported “137,000 people escaped poverty yesterday” every day for the last 30 years. Steven noted that no trend in society is perfectly monotonic and even on a positive graph there are points of regression upon which news outfits focus.