Re: Not always joking, it seems

In article 
<d039bc79-e45e-4e34-b564-74d55eb5a974@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
 Willie.Mookie@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:

....

> I was reflecting on what Skinner said about society being like a big
> Skinner machine you cannot escape. The whole of society becomes a
> large reinforcement schedule that promises rich rewards throughout but
> in reality, takes everything from you that you've got and play ends
> when you are broke.
> 
> The more efficient we become along this path, the bleaker things will
> be - and in the end, large populations of lucky and unlucky folk alike
> will have become desensitized to the messages used to fleece them - by
> and large those messages are the fabric that holds society together.
> At that point all hell will break loose.

How, on this theory, do you explain that by any objective measure--life 
expectancy, real income, calorie consumption, health--things have been 
getting generally better in most of the world for the past several 
centuries? Murder rates have gone up and down, and historical data on 
crime rates isn't all that good, but it seems clear that murder is much 
less common than it was five or six hundred years ago.

-- 
 http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
 Author of _Harald_, a fantasy without magic.
 Published by Baen, in bookstores now