Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

29. Democracy and human rights: Mulligan, Gil, & Sala-i-Martin 2004; Roser 2016b, section II.3.

30. Quotes from Sikkink 2017.

31. Human rights information paradox: Clark & Sikkink 2013; Sikkink 2017.

32. History of capital punishment: Hunt 2007; Payne 2004; Pinker 2011, pp. 149–53.

33. Death penalty on death row: C. Ireland, “Death Penalty in Decline,” Harvard Gazette, June 28, 2012; C. Walsh, “Death Penalty, in Retreat,” Harvard Gazette, Feb. 3, 2015. For current updates, see “International Death Penalty,” Amnesty International, http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/death-penalty/international-death-penalty, and “Capital Punishment by Country,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_country.

34. C. Ireland, “Death Penalty in Decline,” Harvard Gazette, June 28, 2012.

35. History of the abolition of capital punishment: Hammel 2010.

36. Enlightenment arguments against the death penalty: Hammel 2010; Hunt 2007; Pinker 2011, pp. 146–53.

37. Southern culture of honor: Pinker 2011, pp. 99–102. Executions concentrated in a few Southern counties: Interview with the legal scholar Carol Steiker, C. Walsh, “Death Penalty, in Retreat,” Harvard Gazette, Feb. 3, 2015.

38. Gallup poll on the death penalty: Gallup 2016. For current data, see the Death Penalty Information Center, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/.

39. Pew Research poll reported in M. Berman, “For the First Time in Almost 50 Years, Less Than Half of Americans Support the Death Penalty,” Washington Post, Sept. 30, 2016.

40. Death of the death penalty in the United States: D. von Drehle, “The Death of the Death Penalty,” Time, June 8, 2015; Death Penalty Information Center, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/.

CHAPTER 15: EQUAL RIGHTS

1. Evolutionary basis of racism and sexism: Pinker 2011; Pratto, Sidanius, & Levin 2006; Wilson & Daly 1992.

2. Evolutionary basis of homophobia: Pinker 2011, chap. 7, pp. 448–49.

3. History of equal rights: Pinker 2011, chap. 7; Shermer 2015. Seneca Falls and the history of women’s rights: Stansell 2010. Selma and the history of African American rights: Branch 1988. Stonewall and the history of gay rights: Faderman 2015.

4. Ranking for 2016 by US News and World Report, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/the-10-most-influential-countries-in-the-world-have-been-revealed-a6834956.html. These three nations are also the most affluent.

5. Amos 5:24.

6. No increase in police shootings: Though direct data are scarce, the number of police shootings tracks the rate of violent crime (Fyfe 1988), which, as we saw in chapter 12, has plummeted. No racial disparity: Fryer 2016; Miller et al. 2016; S. Mullainathan, “Police Killings of Blacks: Here Is What the Data Say,” New York Times, Oct. 16, 2015.

7. Pew Research Center 2012b, p. 17.

8. Other surveys of American values: Pew Research Center 2010; Teixeira et al. 2013; see reviews in Pinker 2011, chap. 7, and Roser 2016s. Another example: The General Social Survey (http://gss.norc.org/) annually asks white Americans about their feelings toward black Americans. Between 1996 and 2016 the proportion feeling “close” rose from 35 to 51 percent; the proportion feeling “not close” fell from 18 to 12 percent.

9. Successive cohorts more tolerant: Gallup 2002, 2010; Pew Research Center 2012b; Teixeira et al. 2013. Globally: Welzel 2013.

10. Generations carry values with them: Teixeira et al. 2013; Welzel 2013.

11. Google searches and other digital truth serums: Stephens-Davidowitz 2017.

12. Searches for nigger as an index of racism: Stephens-Davidowitz 2014.

13. There seems to be no systematic decline in searches for jokes in general, such as in the search string “funny jokes.” Stephens-Davidowitz points out that searches for hip-hop lyrics and other appropriations of the word nigger almost entirely use the spelling nigga.

14. African American poverty: Deaton 2013, p. 180.

15. African American life expectancy: Cunningham et al. 2017; Deaton 2013, p. 61.

16. The last year for which the US Census reports illiteracy rates is 1979, when the rate for blacks was 1.6 percent; Snyder 1993, chap. 1, reproduced in National Assessment of Adult Literacy (undated).

17. See chapter 16, note 24, and chapter 18, note 35.

18. Disappearance of lynching: Pinker 2011, chap. 7, based on US Census data presented in Payne 2004, plotted in figure 7-2, p. 384. Hate crime homicides of African Americans, plotted in figure 7-3, fell from five in 1996 to one per year in 2006–8. Since then the number of victims stayed at an average of one per year through 2014, then spiked to ten in 2015, nine of them killed in a single incident, a mass shooting in a church in Charleston, South Carolina (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2016b).