Conspicuous by their absence from the list of what works are bold initiatives like slum clearance, gun buybacks, zero-tolerance policing, wilderness ordeals, three-strikes-and-you’re-out mandatory sentencing, police-led drug awareness classes, and “Scared straight” programs in which at-risk youths are exposed to squalid prisons and badass convicts.

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress, New York, 2018, p. 176