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