He shows that life expectancy has increased almost everywhere, health and nutrition have improved, and wealth and living standards have skyrocketed. The environment has improved. The destruction caused by war—and war itself—have decreased. Safety has increased and terrorism is a tiny problem. Literacy has increased. People have become generally more tolerant of others’ differences and people are happier.
He attributes this progress to the Enlightenment, the four pillars of which—as the book’s subtitle suggests—are reason, science, humanism, and progress. In laying out the facts and his argument, Pinker also shows a knack for the punchy, and often humorous, turn of phrase. Although he occasionally slips, as when he criticizes libertarianism, his slips are few and far between.
Longer lives, better lives / He opens his case by discussing why, despite the enormous improvement in human life, many people think conditions are regressing. He follows psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in attributing this to the “availability heuristic.” Most people estimate the probability of an event by how easily instances come to mind. A murder happens in your neighborhood? Murder must be on the rise. A horrible terrorist incident happens in an Orlando night club? Terrorism must be a huge problem. As a result, writes Pinker, even though the “world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being … almost no one knows about it” (his emphasis).
Is there a way around the availability heuristic? Yes, and Pinker gives it: “The answer is to count” (his emphasis). Check the data—which is what he does.
Start with life expectancy. Just 200 years ago, the average life expectancy in the world was 29 years; in Europe and the Americas it was around 35. Today the average for the world has more than doubled—71.4 years—and for Europe and the Americas the number is about 80. Even Africa, the most troubled of the world’s continents, has done well. Pinker writes, “An African born today can expect to live as long as a person born in America in 1950.”
What about the idea that for people in the richer countries, the added years of life in the last few decades aren’t worth much because for most of them we are sick? Wrong. Pinker cites a study that finds that of the 4.7 years of life expectancy gained between 1990 and 2010 in the richer countries, 3.8 of them are healthy years.
In making this case, he points to doctor and public intellectual Leon Kass’s claim that those added years aren’t that worthwhile. In his 2004 book Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity, Kass asked, “Would professional tennis players really enjoy playing 25 percent more games of tennis?” This was presumably a rhetorical question, but my own answer would have been, “Obviously yes.” And Kass is not just some unknown misanthrope; he was chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics. Today Kass is a ripe 79; I wonder if his view of old age has changed.
Not surprisingly, given that life expectancy has increased in the last two centuries, so has human health. Two of the biggest breakthroughs were vaccination and wide acceptance of the germ theory of disease. Much later, on April 12, 1955, when scientists announced that the Jonas Salk vaccine against polio was safe, there were moments of silent tribute. There were also the opposite: bells ringing, horns honking, and factory whistles blowing in celebration. I was just 4 at the time, but my sister had had polio three years earlier and my father 12 years earlier. I wouldn’t be surprised if there had been much joy in the Henderson household.
Pinker highlights some scientists whose names most readers won’t recognize but who saved tens of millions of lives—or more. One, Karl Landsteiner, discovered blood groups and thereby saved a billion lives.
Abundance / A major contributor to health and life expectancy has been developments in food production and distribution. The percentage of people in the world’s poor countries who are undernourished fell from 35% in 1970 to 13% in 2015. Worldwide deaths from famine were above 600 per 100,000 people as recently as the 1920s, but they aren’t even detectable on a graph for the years 2010–2016.
Pinker points out that this advancement spectacularly contradicts the prediction made by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 book The Population Bomb. Ehrlich claimed that between then and the 1980s, 65 million Americans and 4 billion non-Americans would starve to death. Now, many of us, including me, have the opposite problem: too many calories.
Ehrlich’s type of thinking led to some abhorrent public policies. Pinker notes that Robert McNamara, while president of the World Bank, “discouraged financing of health care” not because it wouldn’t work, but because of his fear that it would work too well, leading to greater population.
But why did the food supply grow so much? One main factor was fertilizer, invented and perfected by chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, respectively, in the early 20th century. Another was the Green Revolution, initiated in the 1950s and 1960s by Norman Borlaug. Borlaug, the most important practitioner of genetic modification of wheat, “turned Mexico and then India, Pakistan, and other famine-prone countries into grain exporters almost overnight.” Incidentally, Pinker points out, contra the anti-biotechnology movement, “there is no such thing as a genetically unmodified crop.” One result of this huge progress is that we may have already reached “Peak Farmland”—the amount of acreage needed to feed humanity. To produce a given amount of food now takes less than a third of the land it took before the Green Revolution.
Wealth and income inequality / Sometimes you have to remind yourself that Pinker is not a bona fide economist because he certainly understands some of the basics of economics. In a chapter on wealth, he points out how moves toward freer markets in Eastern Europe, China, India, Indonesia, and other countries have increased wealth enormously and caused poverty to drop like a stone. He quotes a great line from Georgetown University economist Steven Radelet: “In 1976, [Chinese communist] Mao single-handedly and dramatically changed the direction of global poverty with one simple act: he died.” In 2000, Pinker notes, the United Nations was thought to be overly optimistic in vowing to cut the 1990 global poverty rate by 50% by 2015. They were off, but in the other direction: that goal was reached five years early.
What about income inequality? Hasn’t that increased? Actually, no. International income inequality fell slightly from 1950 to 1990, and then fell a lot from 1990 on. Economic growth in poorer countries has been high, due in part to freer markets domestically and to increased international trade, part of which is the result of vastly lower shipping costs brought about by containerization.
Within America, notes Pinker, income inequality did grow between 1979 and 2004. But over that same time, the percentage of Americans with incomes (for a family of three) between $0 and $30,000 (in 2014 dollars) fell from 24% to 20%, the percentage with incomes between $30,000 and $50,000 fell from 24% to 17%, and the percentage in the middle class fell slightly from 32% to 30%. Where did those people go? There’s only one direction left: up. What he calls the upper middle class—families with an income of $100,000 to $350,000—rose from 13% to 30% of the population.
He also cites Brookings Institution economist Gary Burtless’s finding that between 1979 and 2010, real disposable incomes for the lowest four income quintiles grew by 49%, 37%, 36%, and 45% respectively. And it’s important to note that poverty and income inequality are two separate things. Also, if we measure poverty by what people consume rather than by their income, Pinker notes, the U.S. poverty rate has fallen from 30% in 1960 to only 3% today.
Greener world / Surely the environment has suffered as higher population and higher living standards have caused more pollution, dirtier lakes, and fewer forests, right? Wrong. Pinker references an Environment Performance Index that measures the quality of air, water, forests, fisheries, farms, and natural habitats. Of 180 countries that the index has tracked for a decade or more, 178 show an improvement.
Why did this occur? It’s not despite higher incomes, but because of them. As people grow wealthier, they want more environmental quality, not less. They get it by either providing it themselves—donating land to a trust, for instance—or pushing for regulations to reduce pollution.
One area about which Pinker worries more than I do is climate change. He admits that there are “judicious climate skeptics,” such as Judith Curry, who accept mainstream science but are optimistic about outcomes. He worries that they are wrong and that warming could be catastrophic. To his credit, though, he doesn’t do what many climate change believers do: advocate a slowdown in growth in the poorest parts of the world in order to cut carbon emissions. Instead, he advocates a solution that has worked in pretty much every area of life: technological improvement. He advocates a carbon tax, which, if you need to do something now (I’m not convinced that we do), would certainly help reduce carbon usage. But he also advocates nuclear power, arguing that regulatory hurdles in the United States have kept us from enjoying the huge improvements in nuclear technology that have been successful elsewhere. Pinker is also open to geoengineering, such as adding alkali to clouds or the oceans to dissolve more carbon dioxide in water.
War / Pinker, who has written extensively elsewhere about war, writes a brief chapter on it in this book. The bottom line is that the last “great-power war,” the Korean War between the United States and China, occurred over 60 years ago. Wars today are both smaller and much less bloody. That doesn’t mean there are no current tragedies of war, such as the misery of the 4 million refugees from Syria. But that is less than the 10 million displaced by Bangladesh’s’ war of independence in 1971.
Crime and terrorism / One of his outstanding discussions is on public safety. Pinker provides data showing that homicides have fallen dramatically almost everywhere over the last few centuries. Also, more recently, the U.S. murder rate—though it rose in the late 1960s and early 1970s—is now lower than it was before that increase.
He presents fascinating data showing how granular the homicide rate is. It makes no sense, he shows, to think in terms of a high homicide rate in a country or even a state or province. You need to drill down to cities and even, within cities, to neighborhoods. He cites, as one example among many, his hometown of Boston, where 70% of the shootings take place in 5% of the city. Pinker notes that effective policing, combined with improvements in technology that take away opportunities for crime (e.g., people carrying credit cards instead of large amounts of cash are not attractive targets) have made robbing people far less appealing.
Some other notes on crime: In the United States, violence against wives and girlfriends fell by about 75% between 1995 and 2014. Rape and sexual assault fell by over 70% during the same period.
What about deaths from terrorism? Surely those are a huge problem today. Not in America. In 2015, for example, an American was 350 times as likely to be killed in a standard homicide as in a terrorist attack, and 800 times as likely to be killed in a car crash. Pinker notes that, fortunately, terrorism virtually never works in achieving the terrorists’ strategic goals, although, of course, it does terrify many of us. Surprisingly, while Pinker positively cites Ohio State University political scientist John Mueller in many other places in the book, he doesn’t cite—where it would have seemed de rigeur—Mueller’s Fall 2004 Regulation article “A False Sense of Insecurity,” in which he makes the case that Pinker makes.
Safety / Motor vehicle fatalities per million miles driven have fallen almost steadily over time and were doing so long before 1960s regulations required safer cars. Ford, he notes, offered in 1956 a safety package that included seatbelts, a padded dashboard, a safer steering wheel, and other features that would become mandatory a decade later. Deaths from airplane crashes, fire, drowning, and occupational hazards—and even from natural disasters—have fallen fairly steadily.
How did those advances in safety come about? Pinker attributes them to “grassroots activists, paternalistic legislators, and an unsung cadre of inventors, engineers, policy wonks, and number-crunchers.” While he’s right about the inventors, engineers, and number crunchers, he misses the most important factor: economic growth. Safety, like environmental quality, is a normal good: the higher our income, the more safety we want. And the market responds. Safety in workplaces, for example, is not due mainly to government agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; it’s due to workers becoming wealthier and demanding more safety. Employers who ignore this demand in their decisions about workplace safety will find themselves paying huge wage premiums to compensate for risk. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, recognized that fact 242 years ago.
Liberal society / Are you tired of all this good news? Pinker’s not. He shows that there has been a rise in freedom of speech, the openness of the political process, and constraints on leaders’ power in democracies since 1800. There was a big fall in the 1920s and 1930s (thanks to people like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler), an increase after World War II, and then a fall in the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, the index measuring these liberal protections has climbed dramatically.
If I had more space, I could elaborate even more on the ways Pinker shows that life has improved.
Are there downsides? Yes. Pinker worries that one small mistake could lead to nuclear war and the devastation it would entail. Even here, though, he notes the decline in nuclear weapons since they reached their peak in the late 1980s. Pinker’s thoughts on how to avoid nuclear war are terse and well worth reading. One way is to announce a policy of No First Use.
Criticizing libertarians / In his last few chapters, Pinker makes a nuanced and largely persuasive case for reason, science, and humanism that is well worth reading but difficult to summarize. One discordant note, though, is his attack on “radical libertarianism.” Radical libertarians—I count myself as one—would seem to be Pinker’s strongest allies. He often positively quotes, for example, Cato Institute senior fellow Johan Norberg’s 2016 book Progress. But Pinker goes out of his way to attack them without giving sufficient citations to help the reader evaluate his criticisms.
In the conflict over climate policy during the Obama administration, for example, he writes that evangelicals opted for “radical libertarianism over stewardship of the Creation.” His cited source doesn’t even mention libertarianism; instead it discusses religious liberty. Elsewhere he writes that “right-wing libertarians” in “their 21st-century Republican Party version” have claimed that “raising the marginal tax rate for income above $400,000 from 35 to 39.6 percent means turning the country over to jackbooted storm troopers.” Although I, like virtually all of the hundreds of libertarians I know (right-wing or otherwise), opposed that tax hike, I don’t recall any libertarian making that claim. Moreover, in a book with 1,288 endnotes, Pinker gives no citation for it. One might think he is exaggerating to make a point. That’s possible, but one of the many virtues of his book is how he eschews exaggeration.
Conclusion / I mentioned earlier that Pinker has a knack for the pithy quote. One example is his response to Henry David Thoreau’s famous claim that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Pinker writes, “How a recluse living in a cabin on a pond could know this was never made clear, and the mass of men beg to differ.”
I’ll close with this. A friend recently asked me why I’m optimistic in the face of recent bad political news. I told him that I had just finished reading every page of Enlightenment Now.
