Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker ****

This is how I imagine the creation of this book:

Random MIT professor (RP): What do you think of Trump?

MIT professor Steven Pinker (SP): Hate him.

RP: You should write a book.

SP: What kind of book.

RP: I like books with lots of complex analysis and numbers.

SP: Me too! I’ll write a book like that. That’ll show Trump!

They walk off laughing.

Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker is in three phases. First Pinker extols the benefits of the obvious progress over the recent couple of centuries. This phase covers improvements to public health, medicine, manufacturing, and technology. People are healthier, live longer, and have many helpful things not even imagined a short while ago.

The second phase attempted to show similar progress in the areas of psychology, terrorism, and climate change. These arguments are presented with the same confidence as those in the first phase, but the assumptions, data, and logic are not as convincing.

 Finally, Pinker outlines a program to combat Trump. I found this barely readable.

The first two parts of the book are packed with interesting data and observations. Some include:

One of the themes in the book is religion vs. humanism. Religion values souls, while humanism values lives.

Pinker makes a point by asserting that there are 3x as many words with k as the third letter compared to words starting with k. The scrabble Internet reports about 1,500 in the first set (awkward) and 3,000 in the second set (king), reversing Pinker’s claim of 3:1 to be 1:2. This feels like a trend as Pinker makes more tenuous assertions with shaky arguments.

Poverty is the natural state of humanity and has been for millennia. “Poverty has no causes. Wealth has causes.”

Often inequality brings hope to the poor, not jealousy.

The average family in a small town saves $2,300 per annum when Walmart arrives. I noticed this when driving across the country and saw many Walmarts in isolated locations.

Technology is not abandoned when resources are depleted (the predicted end of oil), but when the technology is replaced by better technology. Laugh line: the stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stones.

Technology is dematerializing many consumer goods. No videotapes, or CDs, or books, or photographic film, or alarm clocks, or Day-Timers®, or newspapers, etc.

Progress is to be retired at 62 instead dead at 51.

An important research result which has been shown over and over in many different situations: money buys happiness!

Returning to our two MIT professors and their vendetta against Trump. Pinker asserts and proves with this book: “I claim no competence in the dark arts of mass persuasion.”

If you would like to read a comprehensive analysis of the progress over the last two centuries, this is a great book with lots of research and graphs. You can stop reading about 2/3 of the way through this 400+ page book.

Check out https://amazon.com/shop/influencer-20171115075 for book recommendations.