Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

by Steven Pinker

populist movements that blatantly repudiate the ideals of the Enlightenment.1 They are tribalist rather than cosmopolitan, authoritarian rather than

The peace researcher Johan Galtung pointed out that if a newspaper came out once every fifty years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy.10

For many people the greatest fear raised by the prospect of a longer life is dementia, but another pleasant surprise has come to light: between 2000 and 2012, the rate among Americans over 65 fell by a quarter, and the average age at diagnosis rose from 80.7 to 82.4 years.15

The researchers who assembled these conservative estimates calculate that more than five billion lives have been saved (so far) by the hundred or so scientists they selected.

Elephantiasis, river blindness, and blinding trachoma, whose symptoms are as bad as they sound, may also be defined in the past tense by 2030, and measles, rubella, yaws, sleeping sickness, and hookworm are in epidemiologists’ sights as well.

In the mid-19th century it took twenty-five men a full day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain; today one person operating a combine harvester can do it in six minutes.17

Those two chemists top the list of the 20th-century scientists who saved the greatest number of lives in history, with 2.7 billion.18

Thanks to the Green Revolution, the world needs less than a third of the land it used to need to produce a given amount of food.

Of the seventy million people who died in major 20th-century famines, 80 percent were victims of Communist regimes’ forced collectivization, punitive confiscation, and totalitarian central planning.

Poverty has no causes,” wrote the economist Peter Bauer. “Wealth has causes.”

The first is the decline of communism (together with intrusive socialism). For reasons we have seen, market economies can generate wealth prodigiously while totalitarian planned economies impose scarcity, stagnation, and often famine.

Radelet’s second explanation of the Great Convergence is leadership.

third cause was the end of the Cold War.

fourth cause is globalization,

(Common sense is less likely to appreciate a corollary called comparative advantage, which predicts that, on average, everyone is better off when each country sells the goods and services that it can produce most efficiently even if the buyers could produce them still more efficiently themselves.)

It is all very well for us, sitting pretty, to think that material standards of living don’t matter all that much. It is all very well for one, as a personal choice, to reject industrialisation—do a modern Walden if you like, and if you go without much food, see most of your children die in infancy, despise the comforts of literacy, accept twenty years off your own life, then I respect you for the strength of your aesthetic revulsion. But I don’t respect you in the slightest if, even passively, you try to impose the same choice on others who are not free to choose. In fact, we know what their choice would be. For, with singular unanimity, in any country where they have had the chance, the poor have walked off the land into the factories as fast as the factories could take them.42

The last, and in many analyses the most important, contributor to the Great Convergence is science and technology.

In the richest country two centuries ago (the Netherlands), life expectancy was just forty, and in no country was it above forty-five. Today, life expectancy in the poorest country in the world (the Central African Republic) is fifty-four, and in no country is it below forty-five.56

richest one percent grew from 8 percent in 1980 to 18 percent in 2015, while the share going to the richest tenth of one percent grew from 2 percent to 8 percent.4

as they get richer they become more munificent, a phenomenon called Wagner’s Law.

In 2013 the Gini index for American market income (before taxes and transfers) was a high .53; for disposable income (after taxes and transfers) it was a moderate .38.49

Figure 9-6:

Poverty, US, 1960–2016 Sources: Meyer & Sullivan 2017a, b. “Disposable

When poverty is defined in terms of what people consume rather than what they earn, we find that the American poverty rate has declined by ninety percent since 1960, from 30 percent of the population to just 3 percent. The

As Indira Gandhi said, “Poverty is the greatest polluter.”29