The Covid Tonic with Marian L. Tupy

Dr. Debra Lieberman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Miami. Her research aims to understand how evolution has shaped the social mind. To this end, Dr. Lieberman applies theoretical tools from evolutionary biology to develop hypotheses regarding function, generates information-processing models that specify how the functional mechanism operates, and then empirically tests the validity of these models. Dr. Lieberman studies a range of phenomena including kinship, altruism, sexuality, disgust, morality, and, gratitude.  

For more, visit: https://people.miami.edu/profile/[email protected]

Original release date: Oct 12, 2020

Think the world is getting worse? If so, you’re wrong. The world is, for the most part, actually getting better. But 58 percent of people in 17 countries who were surveyed in 2016 thought that the world is either getting worse or staying the same. Americans were even more glum: 65 percent thought the world is getting worse and only 6 percent thought it was getting better. The uncontroversial data on major global trends in this book will persuade you that this dark view of the state of humanity and the natural world is, in large part, badly mistaken.  

World population will peak at 8–9 billion before the end of this century, as the global fertility rate continues its fall from 6 children per woman in 1960 to the current rate of 2.4. The global absolute poverty rate has fallen from 42 percent in 1981 to 8.6 percent today. Satellite data show that forest area has been expanding since 1982. Natural resources are becoming ever cheaper and more abundant. Since 1900, the average life expectancy has more than doubled, reaching more than 72 years globally.  ​

Of course, major concerns such as climate change, marine plastic pollution, and declining wildlife populations are still with us, but many of these problems are already being ameliorated as a result of the favorable economic, social, and technological trends that are documented in this book. 

You can’t fix what is wrong in the world if you don’t know what’s actually happening. Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know will provide busy people with quick-to-read, easily understandable, and entertaining access to surprising facts that they need to know about how the world is really faring. 

https://www.tenglobaltrends.org/

Michael McCullough is an experimental psychologist who is concerned primarily with the cognitive foundations of human sociality. In addition to his pioneering work on forgiveness, gratitude, prosocial behavior, and morality, for twenty years he has studied the effects of empathy on how we treat others. Additionally, McCullough has also worked in recent years to shed light on scientific puzzles about self-control and about the social effects of a mammalian hormone known as oxytocin. 

Learn more: https://psychology.ucsd.edu/people/profiles/mmccullough.html

HumanProgress.org

Think the world is getting worse? 

Grab a copy of our new book and explore the data about human progress through more than 70 global trends that will change your perception of the world. 

Learn more about our new book at tenglobaltrends.org 📚🌍📈  

Ronald Bailey is the science correspondent for Reason, where he writes a weekly science and technology column. Bailey is the author of the book  The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century (July 2015) and Liberation Biology: The Moral and Scientific Case for the Biotech Revolution (Prometheus, 2005), and his work was featured in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004.

For more, visit: https://reason.com/people/ronald-bailey/

If you enjoyed this episode of The Covid Tonic, check out William von Hippel's 2018 book, The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy. 

Available at: https://www.amazon.com/Social-Leap-Evolutionary-Science-Where/dp/0062740393/

William von Hippel grew up in Alaska, got his B.A. at Yale and his PhD at the University of Michigan, and then taught for a dozen years at Ohio State University before finding his way to Australia, where he is a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland. He has published more than a hundred articles, chapters, and edited books, and his research has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today, The Economist, the BBC, Le Monde, El Mundo, Der Spiegel, and The Australian. He lives with his wife and two children in Brisbane, Australia.  

Learn more: https://psychology.uq.edu.au/profile/3034/bill-von-hippel

Chelsea Follett is the Managing Editor of Human​Progress​.org, a project of the Cato Institute which seeks to educate the public on the global improvements in well‐​being by providing free empirical data on long‐​term developments. Her writing has been published in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Newsweek, Forbes, The Hill, The Washington Examiner and Global Policy Journal. She was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list for 2018 in the category of Law and Policy. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Government and English from the College of William & Mary, as well as a Master of Arts degree in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia, where she focused on international relations and political theory. 

Learn more: https://www.cato.org/people/chelsea-follett

Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the host of the Science Salon Podcast, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University where he teaches Skepticism 101. For 18 years he was a monthly columnist for Scientific American. He is the author of New York Times bestsellers Why People Believe Weird Things and The Believing Brain, Why Darwin Matters, The Science of Good and Evil, The Moral Arc, and Heavens on Earth. His new book is Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist.  

Learn more: https://michaelshermer.com/

Joel Mokyr is a Netherlands-born American-Israeli economic historian. He is a professor of economics and history at Northwestern University, where he has taught since 1974. In 1994, he was named the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences. He is also a Sackler Professorial Fellow at the University of Tel Aviv's Eitan Berglas School of Economics.

Learn more: https://www.history.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/core-faculty/joel-mokyr.html

Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” Green Book Award Winner, and author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (Harper Collins, June 30, 2020). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and other publications. His TED talks have been viewed over five million times.

For more, visit: https://environmentalprogress.org/founder-president

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Steven Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. He is the author of The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), The Stuff of Thought (2007), The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) and Enlightenment Now (2018). 

For more, visit: https://stevenpinker.com/.

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Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/HumanProgress.org/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/HumanProgress/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/HumanProgressorg/

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