Quotes About Development

secure base." Out of Bowlby's attachment theory.

Psychologist Robert Kegan,8 chair of adult development at Harvard, has a term for unzipping those costumes. He calls it "the subject-object shift" and argues that it's the single most important move we can make to accelerate personal growth.

That thrust was now being expressed in new forms, based on steel-frame construction, which allowed newspaper offices and insurance buildings to rise above the towering spire of Trinity Church; and Martin imagined great structures hundreds of stories high, each a city in itself, rising across the land.

The idea that boys want to sleep with their mothers strikes most men as the silliest thing they have ever heard. Obviously, it did not seem so to Freud, who wrote that as a boy he once had an erotic reaction to watching his mother dressing. But Freud had a wet-nurse, and may not have experienced the early intimacy that would have tipped off his perceptual system that Mrs. Freud was his mother. The Westermarck theory has out-Freuded Freud.

The very concept of imitation is suspect to begin with (if children are general imitators, why don't they imitate their parents' habit of sitting quietly in airplanes?)

the nature of progress that we know and they didn't. Those ideas, I suggest, are entropy, evolution, and information.

Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren't built in a day, and as they unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle. The peace researcher John Galtung pointed out that if a newspaper came out once every fifty years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy.10

The Gross World Product today has grown almost a hundredfold since the Industrial Revolution was in place in 1820, and almost two hundredfold from the start of the Enlightenment in the 18th century.

it's a fallacy to think that people "need resources" in the first place.17 They need ways of growing food, moving around, lighting their homes, displaying information, and other sources of well-being. They satisfy these needs with ideas: with recipes, formulas, techniques, blueprints, and algorithms for manipulating the physical world to give them what they want.

Though these developments were sometimes linked to the word progress, the usage was ironic: "progress" unguided by humanism is not progress.

There are Stone Age societies, but there is no such thing as a Stone Age language.

We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naive to work toward a better one.

Complex organs evolve by small steps for the same reason that a watchmaker does not use a sledgehammer and a surgeon does not use a meat cleaver.

It's often said that the Stone Age did not end because the world ran out of stones, and that has been true of energy as well.

Max Roser points out that if news outlets truly reported the changing state of the world, they could have run the headline NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY every day for the last twenty-five years.)

The team that brings clean and abundant energy to the world will benefit humanity more than all of history's saints, heroes, prophets, martyrs, and laureates combined.

Max Roser's Our World in Data, Marian Tupy's HumanProgress, and Hans Rosling's Gapminder.

Poverty has no causes," wrote the economist Peter Bauer. "Wealth has causes.

The African AIDS dip is a reminder that progress is not an escalator that inexorably raises the well-being of every human everywhere all the time.

Charles Kenny's Getting Better.17

That's a quarter of the number of children who did not die last year alone who would have died had they been born fifteen years earlier.

Life expectancy in Kenya increased by almost ten years between 2003 and 2013," Norberg writes. "After having lived, loved and struggled for a whole decade, the average person in Kenya had not lost a single year of their remaining lifetime. Everyone got ten years older, yet death had not come a step closer.

Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren't built in a day, and as they unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle.

Graphs like figure 5-2 display a triumph of human well-being whose magnitude the mind cannot begin to comprehend.