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

by Steven Pinker

Poverty has no causes,” wrote the economist Peter Bauer. “Wealth has causes.” In a world governed by entropy and evolution, the streets are not paved with pastry, and cooked fish do not land at our feet. But it’s easy to forget this truism and think that wealth has always been with us. History is written not so much by the victors as by the affluent, the sliver of humanity with the leisure and education to write about it. As the economist Nathan Rosenberg and the legal scholar L. E. Birdzell Jr. point out, “We are led to forget the dominating misery of other times in part by the grace of literature, poetry, romance, and legend, which celebrate those who lived well and forget those who lived in the silence of poverty. The eras of misery have been mythologized and may even be remembered as golden ages of pastoral simplicity. They were not.”