 Thank you. When I was a kid, my mother would take me to the grocery store and then as now adults get excited when yogurt is 20% off. But as a kid, this was just aisles of boredom punctuated by two interesting things. The first was a toy aisle and by aisle I mean six feet of space that contain things like sling shots and cap guns and hand buzzers and whoopee cushions. It was a veritable arsenal of items that would put a modern public school into lockdown. The second interesting place in this desert of entertainment was the checkout line. At the checkout line I could check up on news that my parents were keeping from me. Things like the headless body found in the topless bar. Being a pre-internet kid, I had no way of knowing what a topless bar was. However, I was very familiar with headless bodies. They had populated the Saturday morning cartoons. There was the man who sneezed so hard he blew off his wife's hair. There was the guy who was getting his hair cut when his head exploded. Who then presumably made his way to the nearest topless bar. As I aged, I realized these weren't newspapers. They were tabloids and tabloids are publications of lies. In fact, probably the only truth on the tabloid was the sticker price. Fast forward to today and we still have tabloids and they sell lies. They sell entertaining lies and people happily give their money knowing that they are lies because they're entertaining. But what's happened is the mainstream media has had to evolve in a way tabloids didn't because with the internet information now is virtually costless. The mainstream media had to find a way that it could convince people to hand over their money like the tabloids are doing. And so what it decided to do was to sell not news but entertaining news. The problem here is that what we find entertaining generally is bad news. And so you can go to CNN.com where you find stories of warships and military aircraft and teens facing execution and slowing economy and children dying and couples being beaten and terror plots and sickness and what you come away with as you look at all of this is the image of a world of fire. Now alternatively you could go to a place like goodnewsnetwork.com where you can read about teenagers helping the disabled, food forests, neighbors sending their mailmen on vacation, people giving to the poor, teens raising money for environmental causes, all of which paints a picture of a world of peace and harmony. The problem is we don't want to hear news like that. How do I know? Well CNN is the 24th most popular website in the United States. Goodnewsnetwork.com is 20,158. There's a website you can find it's called ismycomputeron.com and if you go to ismycomputeron.com you see this. That's it. That's the website. ismycomputeron.com is the 58,000th most popular website in the country. In terms of internet traffic, goodnewsnetwork.com is much more similar to ismycomputeron than it is to CNN. And so we have this mainstream media that's selling us entertaining truths and because they're selling truths we believe rightly so what they say. The problem is we then go one step further and don't believe what they don't say. What are some of the things we believe? Well we believe that the nation is awash in gun violence. The Pew Research Center conducted a study over the past 25 years asking Americans do you think gun violence has increased or decreased in the country over the past year? And over the 25 years they asked this question. In 23 of those years Americans said yes gun violence has gotten worse. But if you look at the actual data you find that gun violence only got worse in eight of those 25 years. We believe that we have spent the past two and a half decades with gun violence increasing virtually every single year when in fact it declined in two thirds of the years. Now you respond to that yes but the bad years have been really bad. How do you know this? Well we know this because the media tells us and what does the media do? It looks at the data and it reports but it only reports the news we want to hear and what do we want to hear? We want to hear the bad news. And so what we hear from the media is when gun crime gets worse gun crime got worse and when gun crime gets better we don't hear anything because they make money from selling the bad news. So if you look at the data you'll find something like this. This is firearm homicides per capita over the past whatever that is 20, 30 years. Back to 1993 gun homicides in this country are down 50% since the 1990s. Now you might respond to that and say rightly so. There are all sorts of crimes that are committed with guns even if people don't die. That is the non-fatal gun violence rate. It's down 80%. Gun violence over the past 30 years in this country has been declining tremendously. So much so that you are three times more likely to die from choking on your dinner this evening than you are to die in a mass shooting. What else do we believe? Well we believe that wages have stagnated. If you look at the data this is wages adjusted for inflation going back to 1979. Wages are up adjusted for inflation by 6%. People often quote this number and they always refer back to 1979 when they do it. 1979 happened to be a peak year for wages. If you look back not to 1979 but to the early 1980s you find that real wages and these are median wages right so it's not the average being pulled up by Bill Gates. It's the guy in the middle. Real wages are up 13% since the 1980s. Now the fact of the matter is wages have not stagnated. There's the data. But on the other hand 6%, 13% that's not very compelling is it? Except we're looking at the wrong thing. Workers aren't paid wages. They are paid compensation. Only part of which is wages. Part of which is the employer's contribution to the worker's retirement fund or his health insurance all sorts of things like that. If you look at compensation adjusted for inflation, what you find is it's up 45% since 1979. The median worker today earns almost 1.5 times after inflation what the median worker earned back in 1979. What else do we believe? Americans believe that the middle class is disappearing. Oddly, 70% of those same Americans believe they're in the middle class. Now I'm going to show you a bunch of data that comes from the Census Bureau and the Census Bureau divides households in the United States into groups. Think about the poor, the middle class, and the rich. And I'm going to show you a bunch of bars. The height of the bar indicates the fraction of American households in that income group. So for example, here's 1970 and these are all adjusted for inflation. In 1970, 16% of U.S. households earned what today we would call $35,000 to $50,000. In that same year, 1970, 24% of households earned what we would call today between 50 and 75,000 and 14% earned what we would call 75 to 100,000. That's the United States in 1970. 54% of households in the U.S. were what we consider middle class. In that same year, 35% of households were in the poor classes, 12% of households were in the rich classes. 1970. Now, remember what I'm about to show you is adjusted for inflation. I'm going to move time forward and watch what happens to these bars. As you move forward to 2017, the last year for which we have data, what do you find? You find that the number of households in the middle class has fallen from 54% to 41%. The media is right. The middle class is disappearing. This is the evidence. But the unstated implication when we hear the middle class is disappearing is that the middle class is somehow migrated into poverty. But the data indicate that's not the case. From 1970 to the present, the fraction of households in the poor classes have dropped also from 35% to 30%. Where have all these American households gone? They've entered the rich classes. Over this period, the percentage of rich households in the United States has risen from 12% to almost 30%. Almost one third of us are now considered rich. Now, people will respond to this and say things like, Yeah, but I'm worse off than my parents and grandparents. I get a lot of people who say this to me, and this is after I show them all this data, right? And I say, OK, well, tell me how is it that you are worse off than your parents and grandparents? And many, many people will say things like, I have to pay for things today that my parents and grandparents didn't. And so I say, well, tell me what? And they say things like, well, I've got to pay for my streaming media and my internet and my cell phone and pay more for electricity and gas than they did and, of course, health insurance, all these things. And if you add it all up, that's like $9,000 a year the average American is paying that his parents or grandparents did not pay. Well, here's the thing. You can do away with all those costs immediately. Cancel your Netflix subscription, cancel your Amazon Prime. Cancel your Comcast, cancel your cell phone. Don't use electricity. Everywhere you go, walk or take the bus and refuse all medical treatment that didn't exist prior to 1970. If you do all of that, you will attain the same cost of living that your grandparents had. Now, of course, nobody wants to do that. And that's the point. If you're able to do that and you choose not to, it indicates that the value you are receiving from all of these things exceeds in your mind the $9,000 they cost. So at least with respect to these things, this is not evidence you're worse off, it's evidence you're better off. So to dive into the numbers a little bit, let's talk about a middle-class American 100 years ago compared to a middle-class American today. 100 years ago, this middle-class American earned 20 cents an hour. The middle-class American today earns over $18 an hour. A minimum wage per person just for comparison earns 614 after taxes. Now, of course, things were cheaper 100 years ago, so the interesting question is this, how long did this person 100 years ago have to work to be able to afford various things he would buy? So here you see. The middle-income American 100 years ago had to work about six minutes to afford a first-class stamp, 20 to 45 minutes to afford a loaf of bread, a movie ticket, a gallon of gas, and an hour and a half to two hours to afford a gallon of milk, a pound of coffee, a pound of butter, these sorts of things. If you look at a middle-class American worker today, what you find is that across the board here, his standard of living is way better. The first-class stamp only costs him two minutes of work. The loaf of bread, the gallon of gas costs less than ten minutes. These things that our middle-class worker 100 years ago took 90 minutes to two hours to buy. This guy can purchase those things after only 15 minutes or less of work. One thing that he has to pay more for is movie tickets. But what do you get? At the movies today, you get this, all kinds of special effects and sound and all this business. 100 years ago, what did you get for a movie? You got this. There's no recorded sound here. Forget about special effects, they don't even have effects. And if you look at the minimum wage worker, something fascinating comes out. The minimum wage worker is worse on movies, but look at the minimum wage worker compared to the middle-class worker 100 years ago. In all these various ways, the minimum wage worker today has a higher standard of living than the middle-class worker did 100 years ago. Now, these are all staple goods. The same argument with respect to bigger ticket items. Here's a car 100 years ago. It took four full years of wages to buy a car. Today, the same middle-class worker 10 months. The minimum wage worker only two and a half years to raise enough money to buy a car. And what do you get today when you buy a car? You get this. You get anti-lock brakes, skid control, DVD, GPS, collision warning, rear view camera, cruise control, airbags, seat belts, electric windows, Bluetooth, power steering, power brakes, power seats, heated seats, climate control, 12-volt outlets, roadside assistance, road keys, automatic transmission, fatigue detection, and automatic high beams. What did you get 100 years ago when you bought a car? No horse. It's the same story with housing. All of the minimum wage worker has to pay more than the worker 100 years ago. But look what you get for housing. You get this versus 100 years ago. 100 years ago, typical housing, no electricity, no running water, no indoor toilet, no HVAC. The minimum wage worker today cannot buy housing like that. Not because it's unaffordable, but because it's illegal. So what's happened here is what we call poverty today is actually a higher standard of living than what we called middle-class 100 years ago. And if we continue to grow in this fabulous way for the next 100 years, our grandchildren will be debating the morality of the poor having to live in suburban houses with two cars and send their kids to private schools when the middle class own yachts and fly between their multiple mansions and private jets. The story here isn't confined to the United States. It's also true for the world. Worldwide, deaths due to war down 95%, extreme poverty is down 80%, labor rates are down 50%, gender inequality is down 15%, income inequality is down 10%, longevity in education up 20%, real per capita income up 40%. The world we believe we live in is as unreal as the sneezed-off hairwife. Why does any of this matter? It matters because to take the next steps to improving our world, to making the world a better place requires that we embrace humility. Yes, the humility to admit what we've done wrong and to stop doing it, but importantly, the humility to appreciate what we have done well and to keep doing it. The first steps along that path require that we develop an appreciation of and a thankfulness for the fact that the world has become a better place. Thank you.