Enlightenment Now
Steven Pinker's 500-page empirical survey of progress across 15 dimensions: health, wealth, equality, safety, knowledge, quality of life. Explicitly frames market economies and Enlightenment liberalism as the institutional sources of that progress. Has been criticized for cherry-picking metrics and underweighting catastrophic risks; the data itself is worth engaging with regardless.
Summary
Pinker assembles data across seventy-five charts to argue that measures of human wellbeing have improved substantially, and attributes the improvement to the application of reason, science and humanism. The domains include life expectancy, child mortality, disease, famine, wealth, inequality, environmental quality, peace, safety, terrorism, democracy, equal rights, literacy, leisure and happiness.
The empirical section is the book's substance and the numbers are largely uncontroversial in direction. Global extreme poverty has fallen dramatically, life expectancy has risen everywhere, child mortality has collapsed, literacy is near-universal among the young, and violent death rates have fallen over centuries.
The second half is argument rather than data. Pinker defends Enlightenment values against critics on both the political right and left, attacks what he calls declinism in intellectual culture, argues that pessimism is systematically overrepresented because news reports events rather than trends, and addresses the objections from existential risk, climate change and inequality.
The criticisms are substantial. Pinker's causal attribution of the improvements to Enlightenment ideas is asserted rather than demonstrated, and the same data supports other explanations including fossil energy, colonial extraction and specific institutional developments. His treatment of climate change is thinner than the risk warrants and his dismissal of degrowth arguments is brisk. Critics including John Gray argue that the intellectual history is a caricature. The environmental chapter has aged least well. The data compilation is genuinely useful; the causal story should be treated as one interpretation among several.
Key takeaways 8
- Measures of human wellbeing including life expectancy, child mortality, literacy, poverty and violent death have improved substantially over the last two centuries.
- Global extreme poverty has fallen dramatically within living memory, faster than at any previous point in history.
- Perceptions of decline come from news reporting events rather than trends, since gradual improvement produces no reportable moments.
- Progress is not automatic and results from specific applications of knowledge to human problems, which means it can stop.
- Inequality within countries has risen while inequality between countries has fallen, and the two are frequently conflated in public argument.
- Environmental quality on several measures has improved in wealthy countries, which Pinker attributes to technology and wealth rather than to reduced consumption.
- Pinker's attribution of the improvements to Enlightenment reason is asserted rather than demonstrated, and the data supports other explanations.
- The treatment of climate change and of existential risk is brief relative to the weight those risks carry in the argument.
Who should read it
Readers who want the assembled data on long-run improvement, with the causal argument and the environmental chapters treated as contested.
Where it sits in the reference 2
Who recommended it 5 · 1 direct
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