A Review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

REVIEWED BY JIM DAVIES

Viking, 2018. 576 pp. 75 graphs and tables. $35 ISBN-13: 978-0525427575

ASK JUST ABOUT ANY NON-HISTORIAN you know, and they’ll tell you what they think is common sense: the world is a mess and getting worse. If you don’t agree, you probably haven’t been reading the news, which has been reporting darker and darker stories as the decades pass.

According to Steven Pinker and enough graphs to choke a CNN news anchor, the world has, in almost every way, gotten better. The first part of the book takes a chapter for each way the world could be getting better or worse—poverty, inequality, environmental quality, violence, and so on—and casts a careful eye on the long view. Is the world getting better or is it getting worse? In general, the answers are pretty rosy.

Let’s take poverty as an example. In the last two hundred years, the rate of extreme poverty has dropped from 90 to 10 percent—with nearly half that happening in the last 35 years. In America, the poor are getting richer even faster than the rich are.