A Rigged Poll
Every few years a market research firm called Ipsos runs a survey called the Perils of Perception. It asks ordinary people in dozens of countries simple factual questions about the state of the world. What share of the population lives in extreme poverty. How many girls finish primary school. Whether life expectancy is rising or falling. The answers, gathered from tens of thousands of respondents across continents and income brackets, form one of the more reliable instruments we have for measuring what people believe about the human condition.
The results are consistent enough to count as a law. People get it wrong, and they get it wrong in the same direction every time. Ask a Frenchman what proportion of the world lives on less than two dollars a day and he will guess something close to a third, sometimes closer to half. The true figure, on the World Bank's own poverty line, has been under ten percent for years. Ask an American whether global poverty has risen or fallen over the past two decades and a majority will say it has risen, or stayed the same. It has, in fact, fallen faster during that period than during any comparable stretch in recorded history. Hans Rosling, the Swedish physician who spent his last years touring the world with these questions and a bag of props, used to give the same quiz to bankers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and, as a control group, chimpanzees. The chimpanzees, selecting bananas at random, did better than the humans. He was not making a joke about chimpanzees. He was making a point about humans: that on this particular subject, our instincts are not merely imperfect, they are worse than useless. A chimp picking blindly gets the trend right about a third of the time, by chance. Sophisticated, well-read people, asked the same question, get it wrong more often than that. Something is filtering the truth out before it reaches them, systematically, in only one direction. Behind that filter sits a fact and a limit. The fact: the world has improved, enormously and measurably, on nearly every axis a life can be counted by, and the improvement has causes that can be named. Steven Pinker documents the climb, Matt Ridley explains the engine that produced it, and Peter Diamandis wagers on where the engine goes next, and about the past, all three are right. The limit: the numbers settle what happened, and they leave the future exactly as open as it was. A graph can prove that the world has been mended before. It cannot promise that anyone will mend it again.
The live question is not whether the world has improved, which is no longer seriously in dispute among people who look at the numbers, but why so few people believe it, and what follows from taking the numbers seriously anyway. There is a temperamental kind of optimism, the sunny disposition that finds a silver lining regardless of the facts, and there is another kind entirely: optimism as a conclusion, arrived at reluctantly, by people who set out mainly to be accurate and found the accurate answer more cheerful than they expected. Call this second kind data optimism. It has no interest in making anyone feel better. It has quite a lot of interest in getting the arithmetic right.
Three books, written over roughly a decade, make this case with unusual force and from three different starting points. Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist, built a five-hundred-page argument out of seventy-five graphs, a pitch meeting one would have liked to attend, to show that nearly every measurable dimension of human welfare has improved, and that the improvement is the earned product of a specific set of ideas rather than a lucky accident. Matt Ridley, a zoologist turned economic historian, went looking underneath the graphs for the mechanism that produces them and found it in the oldest and least glamorous of human activities: trade between strangers. Peter Diamandis, an engineer and entrepreneur with a taste for large prizes and larger claims, argued that the very concept of scarcity, so central to economics and to the human sense of dread, is often nothing more than a temporary failure of technology, waiting to be dissolved by the next exponential curve. The three books do not agree on everything. Ridley's faith in unplanned emergence sits awkwardly next to his own record as a bank chairman during a crisis that unplanned emergence did rather a poor job of preventing. Diamandis's optimism about connectivity looks less innocent now that the connected world has shown what it can do with a rumour. Pinker's Enlightenment, as his critics rightly point out, was tidier on the page than it ever was in life. But read together, the three books make a case sturdier than any one of them makes alone: that human welfare, on nearly every axis we know how to measure, has climbed for two centuries, that the climb has an identifiable cause, and that pessimism about it is not a mark of seriousness but a failure of arithmetic dressed up as one.
What the case demands of a person who accepts it is not comfort. The opposite of comfort, in fact. If the world has been mended before, on this scale and against these odds, then the people who did the mending were not saints or geniuses waiting for permission. They were ordinary people who thought the problem was solvable and set about solving it. That thought turns out to be doing more work than any of the graphs.
Reason, Science, Humanism, Progress
Steven Pinker did not set out to write an inspirational book. He set out to answer a student. Somewhere around 2015, in the ordinary traffic of a professor's inbox, a student wrote to ask him why she should go on living, given the state of the world. Pinker's answer, elaborated over the following three years, became Enlightenment Now, published in 2018 as a kind of grand sequel to his earlier book The Better Angels of Our Nature, which had traced the long decline of human violence from the routine slaughter of tribal societies to the comparatively peaceable present. Where Better Angels made one argument about one variable, Enlightenment Now widens the aperture to nearly everything a human life can be measured by: not just violence, but health, wealth, safety, knowledge, freedom, and the more elusive matter of happiness itself.
The book rests on four commitments that Pinker traces to the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though he is careful to note they were not invented there so much as first articulated there with unusual clarity. The first is reason: the discipline of subjecting belief to argument and evidence rather than to authority, revelation, or tribal loyalty. The second is science, which Pinker treats not as a body of facts but as reason refined into a method, a set of procedures for finding out when you are wrong, an activity for which there has never been much natural demand. The third is humanism, the placing of human flourishing, rather than the glory of a nation, a faith, or a monarch, at the centre of moral concern. The fourth is progress, the conviction, radical when it was first proposed and still resisted by a great many intelligent people today, that knowledge applied with sympathy can make life demonstrably better, on purpose, over time.
Pause on how strange that fourth idea actually is, because familiarity has worn the strangeness off it. For most of human history, the default assumption everywhere was that things did not get better. The Greeks thought in terms of a golden age receding into the past. Christian eschatology looked forward not to improvement but to an ending. Peasants in medieval Europe, in China, in the Andes, expected their children's lives to resemble their own, because for the overwhelming majority of them, they did. The idea that a society could deliberately identify a problem, a treatable disease, a famine, a superstition that kept half the population illiterate, and simply fix it, and that the fix would hold, and that the next generation would inherit not the same world but a better one, is barely three hundred years old as a working assumption of ordinary life. It is easy to forget how recent this is, because we have been living inside its consequences for exactly long enough to think them natural.
Pinker's method is to take this idea seriously as a testable claim and then go and test it, on chart after chart, using the longest and most reliable data series available. He is not, by his own account, telling anyone anything new. Economic historians and development economists have known most of these figures for decades, and had gone on knowing them quietly. What Pinker adds is the act of collecting them in one place and asking a very simple question of the public: did you know this. The answer, established by his own polling and matched by the Ipsos surveys, is almost uniformly no.
The cumulative weight of the figures is the entire argument. For nearly all of human history, life expectancy at birth hovered around thirty years, dragged down less by old age, which people who survived childhood often reached, than by catastrophic rates of infant and child mortality. Today global life expectancy exceeds seventy, and it continues to rise in almost every region, including those that started furthest behind. Extreme poverty, defined by the World Bank as subsistence on roughly two dollars a day adjusted for purchasing power, claimed something like ninety percent of humanity two centuries ago. It is now under ten percent, and the decline has not slowed, it has accelerated, with more people escaping extreme poverty in the past twenty five years than in any prior period of comparable length. Famine, once a recurring feature of ordinary life even in prosperous regions of Europe, has retreated to the margins of active war zones and catastrophic misgovernment, a fact so contrary to the historical norm that a modern reader must make an effort to recall that famine was once a normal hazard of ordinary life rather than the mark of a country gone specifically wrong. Child mortality, which once claimed something close to half of all children born, has collapsed to a small single-digit percentage worldwide. Literacy, restricted for most of history to priests, scribes, and the occasional idle aristocrat, is now close to the global default. War deaths per capita, though two world wars sit inside this same period as vast and terrible interruptions, are far below their mid-twentieth-century levels, and interstate war between major powers, the kind that levelled cities and consumed millions of young men within Pinker's own grandparents' lifetimes, has not happened in eighty years, the longest such stretch in recorded history. Democracy, however imperfectly practised and however loudly contested in the countries that have it, now governs a larger share of humanity than at any previous point.
Pinker's favourite emblem of the whole argument, and it is a good one, is the falling cost of light. For nearly all of human history, producing artificial light meant burning something, tallow, whale oil, wax, and the labour required to earn an hour of that light was punishing. William Nordhaus, the economist who did the underlying calculation, a man prepared to ask what an hour of lamplight cost in ancient Babylon and to be exact about it, worked out that a Babylonian in 1750 BC needed something like fifty hours of labour to buy enough sesame oil for an hour of useful lamplight. A worker in early nineteenth-century England still needed several hours of wages for the same hour of light from a tallow candle. Today an hour of light from an LED bulb costs a fraction of a second of an average worker's earnings. Light, once one of the most expensive things a poor family could buy, has become, in the plainest economic sense, nearly free. Pinker likes this measure because it strips away the argument about which currency, which basket of goods, which era's prices to use, and gets at something closer to the truth beneath all economic statistics: how much of your one, non-renewable life you must spend to obtain a given good. By that measure, almost everything essential to a decent existence, food, light, clothing, information, has become dramatically cheaper in terms of human time, even as the goods themselves have become more abundant and more various.
The line from the book that people remember, and that has by now escaped into general circulation the way only the best one-liners do, is this: "the world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being; and almost no one knows about it." That second clause is doing as much work in the book as the first, and it is where Pinker turns from statistician to something closer to a diagnostician of the press and of the human mind.
His explanation has two parts. The first is a cognitive bias with a name, the availability heuristic, identified by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky: people estimate how common or dangerous something is by how easily examples come to mind, and vivid, dramatic events come to mind far more easily than gradual, undramatic ones, regardless of their actual frequency. A plane crash is available. A slow, steady, forty-year decline in the global rate of dying in plane crashes is not available, it is not even a thing the mind can picture, because nothing happens in a decline, nothing photographs well, nobody is interviewed weeping on the tarmac about a crash that did not occur.
The second part of the explanation is structural, and it belongs to journalism rather than psychology. News, by its nature and its business model, reports events, and improvement of the sort Pinker is cataloguing is not an event, it is the accumulated residue of ten thousand things not happening. Nobody files a story with the headline "137,000 people escaped extreme poverty yesterday," even though, on average across the past quarter century, that number is roughly accurate, and it has been true nearly every single day for twenty five years running. It would in fact be the single most reportable fact in the world if repetition disqualified nothing, because it is happening again today, and it will be happening again tomorrow, at almost exactly the same scale, and no news organisation on earth will run it, because a story that is true every day is not news, it is weather. The old newsroom adage, if it bleeds it leads, is usually quoted as cynicism about editors. Pinker treats it more charitably, and more usefully, as a structural fact about what a story is. A story requires a change, ideally a sudden and legible one, with a victim, a villain if possible, and a clean beginning and end. Gradual improvement supplies none of these. A famine supplies all of them. So the famine gets covered and the forty years of the absence of famine across most of the globe does not, and the reader, entirely reasonably given the diet of information in front of them, concludes that the world is one long famine interrupted occasionally by good news, when the truth is closer to the reverse.
There is a moral dimension to this asymmetry too, one that Pinker names with some bravery given how it will land at dinner parties, which is that pessimism has come, in most educated circles, to carry an unearned association with seriousness, while optimism carries an unearned association with foolishness. To worry aloud about the state of the world is read as a sign of moral attention. To say that things have, on the whole and by the numbers, been getting better, is read as a sign that you have not been paying attention, or that you do not care very much, or that you are trying to sell something. This is backwards, and Pinker is blunt about it being backwards, but he is careful not to overcorrect into the opposite error.
He takes considerable trouble, particularly in the book's final third, to distinguish his argument from the caricature that critics were quick to pin on it, the caricature of Doctor Pangloss from Voltaire's Candide, the tutor who insists, through earthquake, syphilis, and shipwreck, that this is the best of all possible worlds. Pinker's answer to that charge is one of the more carefully worded passages in the book, and paraphrase would soften exactly the qualification that makes the argument defensible: he is not claiming that everything gets better for everyone everywhere all the time, because "that would be not optimism but magic." What he is claiming is narrower and, because it is narrower, considerably harder to knock down: that most things, for most people, most of the time, have gotten measurably better, that the mechanism producing this improvement is identifiable and repeatable rather than mysterious, and that the problems still outstanding, and there are enormous ones, are problems, not verdicts. Climate change gets a long chapter of its own, and Pinker treats it as exactly the kind of grave, urgent, and above all soluble problem that the Enlightenment habit of mind exists to handle: not by denial, and not by despair, but by the same combination of evidence, argument, and applied ingenuity that dealt with smallpox, with the ozone hole, with acid rain. Nuclear weapons get similar treatment, a real and terrible risk, reduced considerably since the depths of the Cold War through deliberate treaty and policy, and requiring continued deliberate attention rather than either denial or fatalism. This is the conditional structure of the whole book, easy to miss if you read it as a cheer and not as an argument: the world has gotten better because people treated its problems as solvable, and it will keep getting better, or stop, depending on whether people go on treating the problems in front of them the same way.
The last third of the book turns from ledger-keeping to something closer to a polemic, and it is here that Pinker makes the most enemies, because he names them. He takes aim at what he calls the culture of relativism among parts of the academic humanities, where the very idea of progress is treated with suspicion as a piece of Western self-congratulation, indifferent to the fact that literacy, vaccination, and the vote have proven rather popular with the non-Western populations who received them. He takes aim at religious critics who regard secular humanism as morally thin, a complaint he answers by pointing to the graphs and asking what, precisely, has been thin about a doubling of the human lifespan. And he takes aim, with the most evident anger in the book, at romantic nationalism, the older and uglier tradition, running from certain strands of nineteenth-century Romanticism through to a great deal of twentieth-century catastrophe, in which the individual counts for nothing beside the destiny of the tribe, the volk, the nation, the race. This is not an abstract target for Pinker. His own family history runs through the twentieth century's worst demonstration of where that idea leads, and the anger in these pages, though controlled, is not performed.
The book ends on a register that is neither triumphant nor tentative, and getting that balance right turns out to be the whole difficulty of writing about this subject at all: "we will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one; but there is no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing." Two clauses, doing two different jobs, and both are load-bearing. The first refuses utopia, which is not a small refusal, given how much twentieth-century horror was committed by people chasing a perfect world and treating the imperfect people in front of them as raw material for it. The second refuses the opposite error, the shrug that says nothing can be done, which turns out, on the evidence, to be simply false.
Pinker's critics have not been shy. John Gray, the English philosopher who has spent a career dismantling the very idea of progress, reviewed Enlightenment Now in the New Statesman with open contempt, the register English philosophers reserve for colleagues they consider worth destroying, and his attack is not a quibble about data. Gray's argument, developed across books like Straw Dogs and The Silence of Animals, is that Pinker has run together two different kinds of progress. Knowledge accumulates: what humanity learns about optics or antibiotics stays learned. Ethics and politics do not accumulate: they are learned, forgotten, and relearned, and their gains can be reversed within a single generation, as anyone comparing the Germany of 1928 with the Germany of 1933 can confirm. On Gray's reading, Pinker's faith in progress is not science at all but a secular religion, Christianity's providential arc with the theology filed off, and the seventy-five graphs are its stained glass. A related charge has a name of its own: Whig history, the term the historian Herbert Butterfield coined in 1931 for the writing of the past as one long ascent toward the enlightened present, with the winners cast as heroes and every defeated alternative as an obstacle cleared. Pinker's answer, implicit on nearly every page, is that he claims no inevitability: the trends are contingent, sustained by institutions and effort, reversible the moment either fails, which is why the book ends in exhortation rather than prediction. That meets part of Gray's charge. It does not entirely meet the deeper part, which is that two centuries, however well documented, is a short stretch on which to hang a claim about the direction of history, and that people living inside a rising trend have always found it easy to mistake the trend for a law.
A second line of attack is statistical. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, working with the statistician Pasquale Cirillo, published a technical analysis of war data arguing that the long peace proves far less than it appears to. War deaths are fat-tailed: most of the historical toll comes from a handful of enormous conflicts, so eighty years without one is statistically consistent with an underlying process that has not changed at all. The decades since 1945 may mark a real transformation, or they may be the quiet stretch between earthquakes, and the data alone, Taleb insists, cannot tell you which. Alongside this runs the cherry-picking charge: that Pinker starts his charts where they flatter the argument, favours the sources that agree with him, and hurries past the measures, anxiety and depression among the young, opioid deaths in America, the welfare of animals in industrial farming, that point the other way. These objections have real force. But none of them touches the central structure of the claim, which is not that everyone everywhere has benefited, a claim Pinker explicitly disowns, and not that improvement is guaranteed to continue, a claim he explicitly denies, but that the aggregate human condition, measured across the widest range of indicators and the longest run of years available, has moved overwhelmingly in one direction. Taleb's objection, the strongest of the technical ones, bites on war, where the tails really are fat, and not on child mortality or literacy, where they are not. A quarrel about where to draw a poverty line is a quarrel about the margin of a trend visible to the naked eye.
The book's afterlife has been unusually productive, in a way that a lot of argumentative bestsellers are not. It helped seed what has come to be called the progress studies movement, a phrase coined in a 2019 essay in The Atlantic by the economist Tyler Cowen and the entrepreneur Patrick Collison, titled, with a directness Pinker himself might approve of, "We Need a New Science of Progress." Cowen and Collison's proposal was that the causes of scientific, technological, and economic advance, why some eras and some institutions produce so much more of it than others, deserve the same kind of dedicated, rigorous, cross-disciplinary study that has been lavished on, say, the causes of poverty or the causes of war, rather than being left to scattered economic historians working in relative isolation, a condition the economic historians had borne with dignity, possibly without noticing. The proposal caught on. Writers like Jason Crawford, whose newsletter and essays trace the specific mechanics of historical breakthroughs, from the Haber-Bosch process to the steam engine, and Johan Norberg, whose own books extend Pinker's charts into fuller historical narrative, have built something like a small intellectual community around the underlying conviction: that progress is not a mystery to be marvelled at but a mechanism to be studied, understood, and, where possible, deliberately reproduced. This is, in its own way, the most Pinkerian idea in the whole movement, more Pinkerian, perhaps, than some of the specific graphs in Pinker's own book: the conviction that even good news is not magic, that it has causes, and that causes, once found, can be worked with.
The Collective Brain
Steven Pinker's graphs describe an effect. They are extraordinarily good at establishing that something happened, less concerned with the mechanism by which it happened, beyond the general claim that reason, science, humanism, and applied knowledge did it. For the mechanism itself, stripped down to something closer to an engineering diagram, the more useful book is Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist, published in 2010, two years after the global financial crisis had put a firm end to whatever residual confidence the developed world still had in its own economic good sense.
Ridley's route into this subject was unusual, and it explains the particular flavour of his argument. He trained as a zoologist at Oxford, taking a doctorate on the mating behaviour of pheasants, a subject that sounds like a punchline but that gave him, as a young scientist, a close and technical education in evolutionary theory: how variation, selection, and recombination, over enough generations, produce complexity nobody designed. He then spent nine years as a journalist and editor at The Economist, learning to write clean, fast, argument-driven prose about economics and policy in a house style that grants its writers anonymity and, in exchange, certainty, before turning to a run of popular science books, The Red Queen, on sexual selection, The Origins of Virtue, on the evolution of cooperation, and Genome, a tour of the human chromosome, one chapter per pair. By the time he sat down to write about economic history, he was not an economist by training at all. He was a biologist who had spent two decades thinking about how complex, adaptive systems generate order without anyone in charge of them, and he simply pointed that same lens at the economy.
The result is a book whose thesis fits in a sentence, and Ridley states it himself in terms that read almost like a personal creed rather than an academic claim: "I am a rational optimist: rational, because I have arrived at optimism not through temperament or instinct, but by looking at the evidence." The mechanism he identifies beneath all the improvement that Pinker later catalogued is not any single genius, any enlightened monarch, any grand government programme, though he does not deny that governments and geniuses have their uses. It is something far older, far less impressive-sounding, and, in Ridley's telling, far more powerful: specialisation coupled to trade.
The logic is simple enough to explain over a meal, which is more or less how Ridley explains it. Imagine one person who is good at making arrowheads and another who is good at gathering berries. If each works alone, each must do both tasks adequately, at the cost of doing either one brilliantly. If instead they specialise, one making arrowheads full time, the other gathering berries full time, and then trade the surplus, both come out ahead. The arrowhead maker gets more berries than she could have gathered herself in the time she spent knapping flint, and the berry gatherer gets better arrowheads than he could have made in the time he spent foraging. Nothing new has been invented. No resource has grown. The improvement is not conjured from nowhere, it comes from the simple fact that a division of labour lets each person become better at one thing, and trade lets the gains from that improvement circulate rather than staying trapped inside one household. Extend this principle across not two people but two thousand, then two million, extend it across not a single village but a trading network spanning continents, extend it across not one generation but two hundred, and you get something that starts to look, from a sufficient distance, exactly like the modern world: an edifice of astonishing material comfort, built by no architect at all, only the compounding of an embarrassingly simple exchange repeated an incomprehensible number of times.
Ridley's most striking move, the one that shows the zoologist still at work underneath the economic historian, is his account of how ideas themselves evolve, and he borrows the vocabulary of his old discipline deliberately and without much apology. In sexually reproducing species, evolution moves faster than in species that merely clone themselves, because sex recombines genetic material from two lineages into new combinations, generating variation on which selection can then act, far more quickly than mutation alone could manage. Ridley's claim, put with the same puckish directness he uses to describe the private lives of pheasants, is that human progress accelerated dramatically once ideas began, in his phrase, having sex, recombining across the boundaries of tribe, language, and nation, rather than being passed down in isolation within a single closed group. A trader who carries a pot from one valley to another is not merely moving an object. Folded invisibly into that object is a technique, a particular way of tempering clay, of shaping a handle, of firing a kiln, and when that pot reaches a potter in the next valley who has never seen it before, that potter's own technique has a chance to recombine with the stranger's, producing something neither of them would have invented working alone. Trade, in this account, is not simply a mechanism for redistributing existing goods more efficiently. It is a mechanism for redistributing knowledge, and knowledge, once redistributed, recombines and multiplies in a way that a finite stock of pots or arrowheads never can. This is Ridley's deepest disagreement with the older, more static kind of economics, the kind that treats an economy as a fixed pie to be divided. In his account the pie itself grows, and it grows specifically because ideas, unlike loaves of bread, are not diminished by being shared. Give away half your bread and you have half as much bread. Give away your idea and you still have the whole idea, and now so does someone else, and the two of you between you can go on to do something neither of you could have managed alone.
The cautionary counter-example Ridley reaches for, and it is an arresting one, is Tasmania. At the end of the last ice age, roughly ten thousand years ago, rising sea levels cut Tasmania off from mainland Australia, stranding a human population on an island with no further contact with the outside world until European ships arrived many thousands of years later. What those Europeans found, and recorded with some puzzlement, was not a society that had continued developing in isolation but one that appeared, by the evidence of its own material culture, to have lost skills its ancestors on the mainland had once possessed: certain kinds of bone tools, fishing technology, techniques that archaeological evidence suggests earlier Tasmanians had used and later Tasmanians had not. Ridley's reading of this, drawing on work by archaeologists who have studied the case in some detail, is that a population small enough and isolated enough can actually lose technology over time, not through any failure of intelligence or industriousness among the people living there, but because a sufficiently small trading network cannot sustain the accumulated complexity that a larger one can. A skill that only a handful of people know how to do is a skill that a single bad winter, a single premature death, a single broken chain of apprenticeship can extinguish. A skill distributed across a network of thousands, each contributing a fragment, refreshed by contact with outsiders bringing fragments of their own, is close to indestructible. Tasmania, on Ridley's reading, is what happens to human ingenuity when you take away the trade that lets it recombine and accumulate: not stagnation, but actual regression, an object lesson in the wrong direction that Ridley clearly relishes for its inconvenience to anyone who thinks isolation is safety.
From this Ridley builds his central metaphor, the one that gives the book its most quoted passage and its clearest image: the idea of the collective brain. Human intelligence, in the sense that actually matters for explaining innovation, does not reside primarily inside any one skull. It resides in the network of exchange that connects many skulls together, none of which needs to hold more than a fragment of the total picture. Ridley's illustration, borrowed originally from the economist Leonard Read's 1958 essay "I, Pencil", which is narrated in the first person by the pencil, a device Read maintains with total composure, and put to vivid use here, is the ordinary wooden pencil. No single person on earth knows how to make a pencil entirely from scratch. Someone has to fell the cedar tree, and that requires someone else to have made the saw, and the saw requires steel, which requires someone to have mined the ore and someone else to have built the furnace. The graphite has to be mined, in Ridley's account often from a completely different continent than the wood. The rubber for the eraser has to be tapped, treated, and vulcanised, a process itself dependent on a nineteenth-century chemical discovery involving sulphur and heat. The yellow paint, the metal ferrule that holds the eraser in place, the glue: each is its own small universe of specialised knowledge, held by people who, in the overwhelming majority of cases, have never met each other, do not know they are collaborating, and could not, individually, produce a pencil if their lives depended on it, which, mercifully, they never do. And yet pencils are, and have been for well over a century, so cheap that a person can buy one for a few coins and lose it without a second thought. That cheapness, and the mind-boggling distributed complexity that underlies it, is Ridley's collective brain made visible in an object small enough to fit behind an ear.
The bulk of the book's middle chapters function as a kind of chronicle of predicted disaster, marshalled with evident relish, because Ridley is at his best as a writer when he is needling a confident prophet of doom. Thomas Malthus, writing at the end of the eighteenth century, calculated with what seemed at the time like unanswerable rigour that population, growing geometrically, must eventually outstrip food supply, growing only arithmetically, guaranteeing recurrent famine as a permanent feature of the human condition. He was writing at almost precisely the moment that agricultural innovation, and later the Haber-Bosch process for synthesising nitrogen fertiliser from thin air, a piece of chemistry that alone is credited with allowing something like half the world's current population to be fed, was about to make his arithmetic obsolete. Paul Ehrlich, in his 1968 book The Population Bomb, revived the Malthusian argument for the twentieth century with predictions of mass starvation in the 1970s and 1980s so severe that hundreds of millions would die, a forecast that failed spectacularly, not because population stopped growing but because the Green Revolution, driven by plant breeders like Norman Borlaug, roughly tripled global grain yields over the following decades. The Club of Rome's 1972 report The Limits to Growth modelled the imminent exhaustion of key resources, oil, copper, and much else, on trajectories that, again, failed to materialise, the copper in particular declining to run out on schedule, in large part because rising prices, arriving just as each resource grew scarcer, supplied the incentive that spurred exploration for new reserves, more efficient extraction, and, crucially, substitution: new materials or new techniques that made the original scarcity beside the point. Ridley's point in walking through this catalogue of confident, well-credentialed, and wrong predictions is not that scarcity never bites, or that resources are infinite in some literal physical sense. His point is narrower and, again, harder to dismiss for being narrower: that every one of these predicted catastrophes assumed a static picture of human capability, a snapshot of what people could do at the moment the prediction was made, projected forward as though it would simply remain fixed while the underlying pressure, population, demand, consumption, kept rising. What actually happened, again and again, is that the very scarcity that was supposed to prove fatal instead supplied the incentive for someone, somewhere, to solve it, and the collective brain, given a sufficiently large and well-connected population of people trying, has an extremely good record of doing exactly that. This is the sense of Ridley's own summary line, blunt enough to double as the book's epitaph: "the greatest resource of all is the resourcefulness of humans."
There is a contemporary edge to Ridley's argument that has sharpened rather than dulled since 2010. Global trade, comfortably ascendant for most of the postwar period, is once again politically contested in a way it had not been for a generation, with tariff walls rising in major economies, supply chains being deliberately reshored for reasons of national security as much as economics, and a renewed, often bipartisan, appetite in Western politics for self-sufficiency over exchange. It is one of the few appetites the two sides have discovered they share. Ridley's book, though written well before any of this, functions almost as a pre-emptive warning against exactly this reflex. If the deep mechanism of two centuries of improvement really is specialisation coupled to trade across an ever-widening circle of strangers, then policies that deliberately narrow that circle, however well-intentioned their stated aims of security or resilience, are working directly against the engine that produced the abundance those same policies are typically trying to protect. This is not a claim that trade has no costs, or that no community has ever been painfully hollowed out by a factory relocating overseas; that would be exactly the kind of overreach the fairer critics of Pinker rightly object to, and Ridley, to his credit, does not make it. It is a claim about where, on balance and across the widest possible view, the credit for two centuries of rising material comfort actually belongs, and Ridley's answer, non-negotiably, is that it belongs to openness rather than to the closing of doors.
Ridley is not an uncomplicated messenger. From 2004 until the autumn of 2007, Ridley was non-executive chairman of Northern Rock, a British mortgage bank whose reliance on short-term wholesale funding left it fatally exposed when the credit markets froze. The result, in September 2007, was the first run on a British bank in well over a century, depositors queuing around the block, and, within months, nationalisation. Ridley resigned that October, and the parliamentary committee that examined the collapse concluded that the board had failed to grasp the risks the bank was running. Three years later he published a book arguing, in effect, that decentralised markets solve problems better than any central planner. The juxtaposition is awkward in a way no charity can smooth, a champion of emergent, unplanned market wisdom presiding over an institution whose own emergent, unplanned behaviour required a government rescue. His critics have never let him forget it. It is also, strictly speaking, an ad hominem argument: the truth of a claim about trade networks does not depend on the biography of the man making it, and a reader who dismisses the collective brain because of Northern Rock has confused the messenger with the mechanism. The substantive critiques cut deeper. The economist Mariana Mazzucato, in The Entrepreneurial State, argued that accounts like Ridley's give markets credit that belongs partly to governments: the technologies inside a smartphone, the internet's underlying protocols, GPS, the touchscreen, were incubated by state-funded research programmes over decades before any entrepreneur assembled them into a product, and a story of innovation as pure bottom-up exchange quietly writes those decades out. Trade may recombine ideas, the objection runs, but someone has to pay for the slow, unprofitable science that generates the ideas in the first place, and historically that someone has very often been a state. Ridley has also taken a markedly more sanguine line on climate change than the mainstream of climate science supports, questioning the urgency of the problem in ways that working climate scientists have rebutted directly and, on the merits, correctly. These are real marks against his judgment, on banking, on the sources of invention, on climate risk, and a reader is right to hold them in mind. What they do not do is dissolve the mechanism itself. Specialisation, exchange, and the recombination of ideas across the boundaries of tribe are documented across archaeology, economic history, and anthropology by scholars who never chaired a bank and hold no view whatsoever on Ridley's climate opinions. The fair verdict is probably this: Ridley described the engine correctly and left out the chassis it sits in, the laws, courts, and publicly funded laboratories without which the engine seizes.
Scarcity as a Solved Problem
If Ridley supplies the mechanism beneath Pinker's outcomes, Peter Diamandis and his co-author Steven Kotler supply something closer to a wager about where the mechanism is heading next. Their 2012 book Abundance is the most polarising of the three, and deliberately so: it is less a work of historical reconstruction than a manifesto, written by a man whose professional life has been organised, with unusual single-mindedness, around the proposition that problems widely believed to be intractable are usually just problems nobody has yet applied the right technology to.
Diamandis's own biography reads like a character sketch for exactly this kind of book. Trained in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering at MIT, and later earning a medical degree at Harvard that he has said he pursued mainly to keep his parents happy rather than out of any intention to practise medicine, which is at least a more candid account of medical school than most of its graduates supply, he founded the XPRIZE Foundation in 1994, an organisation built on a single, elegantly simple mechanism: offer a large cash prize for the first team to achieve some specific, extremely difficult, and ostensibly impossible technical feat, and let the prize summon competitors who will collectively spend many times the prize money in pursuit of it, because the prestige and the underlying technology are worth more than the purse itself. The first XPRIZE, ten million dollars for the first non-government team to launch a reusable crewed spacecraft twice within two weeks, was won in 2004 by a team funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and designed by the aerospace engineer Burt Rutan, and it is generally credited with helping kick-start the private spaceflight industry that eventually produced SpaceX and Blue Origin. Diamandis went on to co-found Singularity University in 2008 with the futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, an institution built explicitly around the study of exponentially accelerating technologies and their implications, backed in its early years by Google. By the time he sat down to write Abundance, Diamandis was not a detached commentator observing progress from a university office. He was, and remains, an active participant in trying to manufacture it, on the theory that the surest way to know whether a given technological leap is possible is to go and fund an attempt at making it.
The book's central claim, stated with the same unguarded confidence that runs through most of Diamandis's public career, is that within a single generation humanity will possess the tools to raise the basic material standard of living of every person on earth above what is currently considered a comfortable, middle-class threshold. This is an enormous claim, considerably more ambitious than anything Pinker or Ridley ventures, and Diamandis and Kotler know it, which is why the bulk of the book is spent trying to make the claim seem less outlandish by breaking it down into a series of smaller, more defensible technological trajectories.
The book's most useful conceptual move, and the one that has aged the best of everything in it, is its reframing of the very idea of scarcity. In standard economics, scarcity is treated as close to a bedrock fact about the physical world: there is only so much land, so much oil, so much of any given resource, and economics is largely the study of how societies allocate that fixed pool of scarce things among unlimited wants. Diamandis and Kotler argue that this picture, while not wrong exactly, mistakes a temporary condition for a permanent one far more often than people realise. Scarcity, in their account, is frequently not a fact about the physical world at all but a fact about the current state of technology, and a fact that changes, sometimes with startling speed, whenever the technology changes. Their favourite illustration is aluminium, and it is a good one, precise enough to survive repetition. Aluminium is, by weight, one of the most abundant metals in the earth's crust, more abundant than iron. But for most of the nineteenth century it was fantastically difficult to refine from its ore, requiring a costly chemical process, and as a result it was, gram for gram, more expensive than gold or silver. Napoleon III is said to have reserved a set of aluminium cutlery for his most honoured dinner guests, while lesser guests made do with gold. The lid of the Washington Monument, completed in 1884, was capped in aluminium specifically because the metal was rare and prestigious enough to be a fitting crown for a national monument, a use that reads, to a modern eye used to buying aluminium foil by the enormous roll for a few dollars, as almost comically extravagant. Then, in 1886, two young chemists working independently on opposite sides of the Atlantic, Charles Martin Hall in Ohio and Paul Héroult in France, each aged twenty-two and apparently unaware of the other's work, discovered essentially the same electrolytic process for refining aluminium cheaply using electric current. Within a few years the price of aluminium collapsed by more than ninety percent, and within a few decades it had become so cheap and so ordinary that it is now the material a supermarket wraps a sandwich in and throws away without a second thought. Nothing changed about the amount of aluminium in the earth's crust between Napoleon III's dinner table and the sandwich wrapper. What changed was the technology for getting at it. Scarcity, on this reading, is not a fixed feature of a resource. It is a temporary feature of ignorance, and it dissolves, sometimes abruptly, whenever the ignorance is resolved.
The pattern by which this dissolution tends to happen, Diamandis argues, follows a specific and counter-intuitive shape that he calls deceptive, then disruptive. A technology that really is improving exponentially, doubling in capability, or halving in cost, on some regular cycle, looks for a long stretch of time like it is barely improving at all, because the early doublings, however impressive in percentage terms, are doublings of a very small number, and a small number doubled twice is still small enough to be beneath most people's notice. This is the deceptive phase, and it can last a decade or more, long enough that plenty of sober, well-informed observers conclude the technology is a curiosity rather than a serious contender. Then, at some point in the sequence of doublings, the numbers cross a threshold where they become large enough to matter, and from that point onward the same exponential curve that looked flat for a decade suddenly looks vertical, and an entire industry can be transformed within a handful of years. Diamandis later formalised this pattern into a six-stage sequence he calls the Six Ds, alliteration being, in his world, less a stylistic choice than a load-bearing material: a technology is digitised, becomes deceptive in its early growth, becomes disruptive once it crosses the threshold, gets demonetised as costs collapse, dematerialised as it swallows functions that used to require separate physical objects, and finally democratised as it becomes cheap and simple enough for almost anyone to access. The smartphone is the cleanest illustration available, though it postdates the book's own examples: a device that took over a decade of deceptive, unglamorous improvement in processors, batteries, and screens before crossing a threshold, after which it demonetised and dematerialised, in the space of about ten years, the separate cameras, camcorders, music players, road atlases, alarm clocks, calculators, flashlights, voice recorders, and landline telephones that a reasonably well-off household would previously have owned as distinct physical objects, most of which now survive chiefly in kitchen drawers, and then democratised the whole bundle to the point where a majority of humanity, including a large share of the poorest households on earth, now carries some version of it.
The organising structure of the book's practical argument is what Diamandis and Kotler call the Pyramid of Abundance, borrowed loosely, and with some liberties, from Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. At the base sit the most fundamental physical requirements of a human life: food, water, shelter. Above that sits a middle tier: energy, education, access to information. At the summit sit freedom and health, the conditions Diamandis regards as the true purpose of the whole exercise, since abundance of food and water is instrumental, a means to the end of a life with meaningful choices and reasonable prospects of good health, rather than an end in itself. For each tier the book marshals a set of concrete technological examples meant to show the pyramid being climbed in real time. Vertical farms, growing crops in stacked, climate-controlled indoor layers, are presented as a route to producing far more food per acre of land and per litre of water than conventional agriculture, freeing up land for other uses and insulating food supply from weather and drought. Desalination technology, and in particular a machine called the Slingshot, developed by the inventor Dean Kamen, best known for the Segway, itself a tidy lesson in the distance between a working prototype and a changed world, capable of turning almost any contaminated water source, including raw sewage, into clean drinking water for a fraction of a cent per litre using relatively little power, is offered as an answer to a resource whose scarcity has driven wars and will drive more of them if left unaddressed. Solar power and other forms of distributed, decentralised energy generation are presented as an escape route from the geopolitics of fossil fuel scarcity, an argument that has looked considerably more credible with each passing year since 2012, as the cost of solar photovoltaic generation has fallen along a trajectory even steeper than Diamandis and Kotler themselves projected.
The example the book returns to most often, and the one that carries the most force, is the mobile phone, which Diamandis and Kotler describe, not without some justification, as the single most consequential poverty-fighting device ever invented. Their argument is that a basic mobile phone, and increasingly a smartphone, delivers to a person with no bank branch, no doctor's surgery, and no library within reach, a functioning substitute for all three at once: mobile banking services, of the kind pioneered in Kenya by M-Pesa, allow people with no access to a physical bank to save, borrow, and transfer money securely; basic telemedicine and health information services put a rough approximation of medical guidance in the hands of someone who would otherwise have to travel days to see a doctor; and access to markets, weather forecasts, and crop prices lets a subsistence farmer make decisions that a farmer a generation earlier, cut off from all of that information, simply could not make. The book's most quoted illustration of this point, striking enough to survive well past its original context, is the claim that a Maasai herdsman in rural Kenya, standing in the open with nothing but a basic mobile phone, commands access to more real-time information, about weather, about markets, about the wider world, than the President of the United States possessed a quarter of a century earlier. It is the kind of claim that sounds too neat to be entirely fair, and it probably is slightly too neat, since access to information is not the same thing as the power to act on it, and a herdsman's phone does not come attached to an air force. But the underlying point survives the exaggeration: the gap between what a rich and a poor person can know about the world, once an enormous gap, has narrowed with a speed that has no real historical precedent, because the cost of the device that closes it has fallen far faster than almost any other technology in human history.
Diamandis and Kotler organise the causes of all this into four forces they see converging for the first time in human history. The first is exponential technology itself, already discussed. The second is what they call the DIY innovator, the observation that a single motivated individual, working from a garage or a bedroom, now has access, via cheap computing power, open-source software, and crowdfunding platforms, to tools that a generation earlier would have been available only to a well-funded national laboratory, meaning that the population of people capable of attempting a serious technical breakthrough has expanded from a small credentialed elite to something approaching anyone with sufficient curiosity and a laptop. The third is the technophilanthropist, the wealthy individual, often having made a fortune in the technology sector itself, who redirects a significant share of that fortune not toward traditional, incremental charity, which works slowly and announces nothing, but toward audacious, high-risk attempts at solving global-scale problems: malaria eradication, universal vaccination, education technology for the developing world. The fourth, and in some ways the most important to Diamandis's own moral framing of the book, is what he calls the rising billion, the newly connected poor of the developing world, whom the book insists on treating not primarily as recipients of aid, the passive beneficiaries of other people's technophilanthropy, but as a vast and largely untapped reservoir of inventors, entrepreneurs, and problem-solvers in their own right, who need connectivity and opportunity far more than they need charity, and who, once connected, will contribute their own share of solutions rather than merely consuming solutions invented elsewhere.
The book's tone throughout is closer to a pitch than to an argument, and the difference separates Diamandis's book from the other two. Pinker and Ridley are, for all their differences, fundamentally backward-looking writers, building their case for optimism about the future out of a careful reconstruction of what has already, verifiably happened. Diamandis is a forward-looking writer, and a great deal of his evidence is necessarily speculative, a bet on trajectories continuing rather than a report of trajectories completed. He writes about the future with the assurance of a man showing visitors around a house that has not yet been built. The line that best captures the register of the whole book, and it is one Diamandis has repeated in most of his subsequent work, adapted from the computer scientist Alan Kay's original formulation, is "the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself," which is a fine motto for an entrepreneur and a considerably less reliable guide for an essayist trying to assess whether the future in question will actually arrive on schedule.
Abundance was published in 2012, which by now gives it a track record long enough to check, and the results divide cleanly into bets that paid off and questions that were never asked. On the credit side, the book's specific bet on solar energy has been vindicated more thoroughly than almost anything else in it: the cost of solar photovoltaic electricity has fallen by something close to ninety percent since the book's publication, a decline so steep that solar is now, in many parts of the world, the single cheapest source of new electricity generation, fossil fuels included, a fact that would have sounded like a fantasist's daydream in 2012 and is now a routine line in utility company financial filings. Genomic sequencing has followed a similarly startling trajectory: the cost of sequencing a full human genome, which ran into the tens of millions of dollars in the early 2000s, has fallen below a few hundred dollars, a decline that has outpaced even Moore's Law for computer chips and has made genomic medicine, once a research curiosity, into an increasingly ordinary clinical tool. And the smartphone's spread into the hands of a majority of humanity, including large majorities of people living below traditional poverty lines, has proceeded largely as the book predicted, transforming banking, information access, and market participation across the developing world in ways that Diamandis and Kotler, in 2012, described with what now reads as more or less appropriate confidence rather than exaggeration.
On the debit side, the book's weaknesses are less about facts that turned out wrong than about questions it simply did not think to ask, and those omissions have mattered. Abundance has almost nothing to say about who governs the platforms and the infrastructure on which its whole vision of abundance depends, a silence that has aged badly given how much of the last decade's political and social turbulence has concerned exactly that question: who controls the algorithms deciding what a billion newly connected people see and believe, who owns the data those people generate, and what recourse those people have when the platform's incentives diverge from their own interests. The book also treats connectivity as an unambiguous good, a simple multiplier of opportunity, without seriously reckoning with the fact that the same networks carrying medical information, market prices, and educational content to a previously isolated village carry misinformation, fraud, and social division with exactly the same efficiency, and often rather more of it, since outrage and falsehood tend to travel faster online than sober correction. There is also a fair question, raised by critics from very different political traditions, about concentration: a handful of technology companies now hold an amount of practical power over global information flows, commerce, and increasingly artificial intelligence itself that has no close historical precedent outside of states, and Diamandis's optimistic framework, tuned as it is to celebrate the abundance these companies help generate, has comparatively little to say about the governance question that abundance on this scale actually raises. There is a name for this whole family of blind spots, coined as an accusation by the critic Evgeny Morozov: solutionism, the habit of recasting complex social and political conditions as neatly defined problems awaiting a technological fix, and of assuming that because a tool can be built, the situation it addresses has been understood. Clean water is a problem a machine can solve. The politics of who controls the well is not, and a filtration device delivered to a village without any account of those politics has a long record, in development work, of ending up broken, unmaintained, or captured by the local strongman. The charge lands hardest on exactly the passages where Abundance is most exhilarating, the ones that leap from a working prototype to a transformed world without pausing over the institutions, incentives, and vested interests standing between the two. Kamen's Slingshot worked as engineering; getting it manufactured, distributed, and maintained at scale has gone far more slowly than the book's cadence implied, and that gap between demonstration and deployment is precisely the part of the problem that solutionism trains its believers not to see.
To Diamandis's credit, he has not treated Abundance as a one-off manifesto to be filed away and forgotten, and his subsequent career shows a sustained conviction rather than a marketing exercise. Three further books, from BOLD in 2015 to Life Force in 2022, extend the same framework into entrepreneurship, transport and the biology of ageing. One of them, The Future Is Faster Than You Think, carries a title that forecloses one of the two available outcomes. Whatever one makes of the specific claims in these later books, and some of them, particularly around longevity, are considerably more speculative than the solar and genomics examples that have already been vindicated, the pattern across Diamandis's whole body of work is one of consistent conviction rather than opportunism: he has spent three decades betting, with his own money and reputation, that scarcity is a solvable engineering problem rather than a fixed feature of the world, and enough of those bets have paid off, on schedule, for the underlying instinct to deserve serious respect even where individual predictions have not yet been, or may never be, borne out.
A Method, Not a Mood
Set the three books side by side and a shape emerges that none of them, taken alone, quite states outright. Pinker's seventy-five graphs, Ridley's pencil, and Diamandis's Pyramid of Abundance are not really three flavours of the same cheerful disposition. They are three independent applications of the same underlying method, arrived at by a psychologist, a zoologist, and an engineer working from almost entirely separate starting points, and the fact that three such different minds converged on the same basic posture toward the evidence is itself a datum. Pinker documents the climb, Ridley explains the engine, Diamandis wagers on where the engine goes next: the same argument, conducted in three tenses.
The method is not complicated, which is exactly why it is so rarely applied. It consists of asking, of any claim about the state of the world, two plain questions: compared to what, and measured how. Most alarming claims about the world, on inspection, turn out to be missing an answer to at least one of these questions, and once the missing answer is supplied, the alarm frequently dissolves, or at least resizes itself to something more proportionate. Told that crime is out of control, ask compared to what year, and discover that violent crime in most Western countries has fallen sharply since the early 1990s, even if it has ticked up in some places over the past several years relative to a historic low. Told that the planet cannot sustain a growing population, ask measured how, and discover that the relevant constraint has never once, across two centuries of confident predictions to the contrary, turned out to be the fixed physical limit it was assumed to be, because the limit keeps moving as the technology for exploiting a given resource, or substituting for it, keeps improving. This is not a rhetorical trick for making bad news disappear. Applied in good faith, the same method sometimes confirms the alarm rather than dissolving it: ask compared to what of a claim about, say, the collapse of certain insect populations or the acidification of the ocean, and the honest answer, on the current evidence, is that things really have gotten measurably worse, and no amount of clever framing changes that. More often it delivers the answer Pinker's seventy-five graphs deliver: better than you think, not as good as it should be, and not automatically going to stay that way. The method is not a device for manufacturing comfort. It is a discipline for finding out which alarms are proportionate and which are not, and the discipline has to be willing to go either way or it is not a discipline at all, it is simply cheerfulness wearing a lab coat.
Pessimism, in most educated company, gets a pass that optimism does not, and the asymmetry is real, not merely imagined by people who are annoyed at being called naive. A shrug will not explain it. Part of the explanation is evolutionary, and defensible on its own terms: a species that survives by noticing danger has every reason to weight bad news more heavily than good news, because missing a predator is fatal in a way that missing a bumper harvest is merely disappointing, and that asymmetric wiring, built for a world of predators and cliffs, has not updated itself for a world where the more relevant dangers are statistical and slow-moving. Part of the explanation is social rather than biological: expressing worry costs a person very little and signals a great deal, since the worried person is implicitly claiming to have looked closely enough at a problem to be troubled by it, while the person expressing satisfaction with how things are going risks sounding either complacent or, worse, as though they have simply not been paying attention. Nobody at a dinner party has ever lost social standing by saying, gravely, that the state of the world worries them a great deal. A surprising number of people have felt the room cool slightly on hearing the opposite.
None of this amounts to an argument that worry is never warranted, and it would be a bad-faith reading of Pinker, Ridley, or Diamandis to claim that any of them think so. All three are, in fact, considerably more anxious about specific, named problems, nuclear proliferation, catastrophic climate change, the governance of powerful new technologies, than the average newspaper reader gives them credit for, precisely because their anxiety is targeted rather than diffuse. The data optimist's complaint is not that people worry too much. It is that people worry about the wrong things in the wrong proportion, spending their limited stock of concern on vivid, rare, dramatic risks that make good television while spending almost none of it on the slow, undramatic, cumulative risks, and cumulative opportunities, that actually govern most of what happens to most people's lives. A diffuse, generalised sense that everything is getting worse is not a form of moral seriousness. It is closer to the opposite: a failure to do the harder work of finding out which specific things are actually getting worse, so that a person's finite attention and finite resources for actually doing something can be aimed at those specific things rather than dissipated across a vague and inaccurate fog of dread about everything at once.
A further asymmetry, less often discussed than the availability heuristic and the news cycle, concerns what each side of the argument is actually risking by being wrong. A pessimist who turns out to be mistaken pays almost no price for the mistake. Nobody goes back, ten years after a confidently predicted famine or resource exhaustion fails to occur, and asks the pundit who predicted it to account for the error; the news cycle has long since moved on to the next confident prediction, and the previous one is simply forgotten, unindexed, uncorrected. Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 predictions of mass 1970s and 1980s starvation were wrong by an almost unimaginable margin, continued to be treated as a serious voice on population and resources for decades afterward, collecting prizes at roughly the rate his predictions failed, because being wrong about a catastrophe that does not arrive carries essentially no professional cost, while being wrong in the other direction, promising an improvement that then fails to materialise, is remembered, mocked, and used to discredit the entire school of thought the promiser represented. This is not a small bias. It means that, quite apart from the psychological and journalistic pressures already discussed, there is a plain asymmetry of incentive at work: predicting doom is close to a free option, while predicting improvement is a bet you can actually lose in public. It should not be surprising, given that asymmetry, that so many more people take the free option.
What the Optimists Do Not Claim
The sharpest objections to data optimism are more damaging than the lazy charge of Panglossian naivety, which Pinker pre-empted in his own text. A case that cannot survive its own weak points is not worth making, and this one, on balance, survives, though not without bruises.
The first and most persistent objection concerns averages, and it is the strongest one on the table. A global chart showing that extreme poverty has fallen from ninety percent of humanity to under ten percent is, in the most literal sense, entirely true, and it is also, in a different and equally real sense, a kind of anaesthetic. It describes a planet, not a person. The specific coal miner in a specific hollowed-out town in Appalachia or the Ruhr or South Wales, whose own community's prospects have narrowed sharply over the same decades that the global average brightened, gains nothing from being told that humanity in aggregate is doing better, and it would be a cruelty, not merely an argumentative weakness, to wave a global graph in that person's face as though it settled anything about his own situation. The honest response to this objection is not to retreat from the global data, which remain true and remain important, but to insist that global improvement and local devastation are not actually in tension as facts, however much they are in tension as feelings. Both can be true at once, and a great deal of political dysfunction over the past two decades, in the United States, in Britain, across much of industrialised Europe, has come precisely from elites who had absorbed the global optimist story so thoroughly that they failed to notice, or failed to take seriously enough, the specific losses being sustained by people left behind within their own countries even as the world beyond those countries improved. Data optimism, practised in good faith, has to hold both facts in the same hand: the world, on the whole, has gotten dramatically better, and some specific places and some specific people, including within the wealthiest societies on earth, have gotten worse, and telling the second group about the first fact is not an answer to their situation, it is a failure to have listened to the question.
The second objection concerns the metrics themselves, and it is a real objection even though it is, in the end, a weaker one than the first. Poverty lines are drawn somewhat arbitrarily, and reasonable economists disagree about whether the World Bank's two-dollar and change threshold, adjusted for purchasing power, actually captures what it feels like to be poor in a given place, since a fixed dollar figure buys wildly different bundles of goods, and confers wildly different degrees of real security, depending on local prices, local climate, local social safety nets, and local corruption. Similarly, GDP per capita, life expectancy, and most of the other headline figures in Pinker's graphs are each, individually, contestable in their construction, subject to measurement error, revision, and methodological dispute among the economists and demographers who compile them. This is all true, and bad metrics do mislead. But notice what kind of objection this actually is. Quarrelling over whether the correct poverty threshold is one dollar ninety a day or two dollars twenty a day is a quarrel about the ninth decimal place of a trend that is visible, by any reasonable threshold anyone has proposed, across a chart spanning two centuries. Change the poverty line by twenty percent in either direction and the shape of the curve, ninety percent of humanity destitute in 1820, under ten percent destitute today, does not change in any way that would alter the conclusion a reasonable person draws from looking at it. Metric quarrels are the right and proper business of specialists refining a measurement, and specialists are right to have them, which is fortunate, because nothing so far discovered can stop them. They are not, on their own, grounds for doubting the underlying trend that the measurement, however imperfectly, is tracking.
The third objection is the most political of the three, and in some ways the most uncomfortable, because it concerns not the accuracy of the data but the uses to which comfortable graphs get put by people with an interest in comfort rather than in accuracy. A chart showing that the world has, on the whole, been getting better can be, and has been, wielded by people who wish to excuse inaction on a specific, urgent problem in front of them right now: a factory owner citing the general decline of global poverty while resisting a specific improvement to wages or safety conditions in his own factory; a government citing the general decline of extreme deprivation while declining to address a specific and remediable failure in its own health system; a fossil fuel company citing the general historical pattern of technological solutions to resource scarcity as a reason not to take the specific and urgent problem of carbon emissions seriously today. This is a real hazard, and precisely the kind of misuse that gives pessimists their best rhetorical ammunition against the entire data optimist case, and the ammunition is not entirely undeserved. But be precise about what the hazard actually indicts. It indicts the misuse of the data by people acting in bad faith, not the data itself, and not the good-faith argument that Pinker, Ridley, and Diamandis are actually making, all three of whom treat their own worst-case problems, climate change chief among them, as urgent and unsolved rather than as settled matters to be waved away. That is more than can be said for some of the people who quote them.
The fourth objection concerns what these books, particularly Pinker's, leave out of their own account of the Enlightenment they are celebrating. The historical Enlightenment was not a clean philosophical movement that produced only Kant's essays on perpetual peace and Condorcet's optimistic sketches of human progress. It was also the intellectual moment that produced elaborate, confident pseudo-scientific taxonomies of race, used within decades to justify colonial rule over the very populations whose eventual gains in life expectancy and literacy now appear as triumphant data points on Pinker's charts. No single caveat disposes of it. It means that the instruments of reason and science that Pinker credits with the whole of humanity's improvement were, for a substantial stretch of the very period he is describing, also the instruments of some of that period's worst cruelties, wielded by people who considered themselves every bit as rational and as scientific as the abolitionists and reformers on the other side of the same intellectual tradition. A fair-minded reader of Pinker has to hold this tension rather than resolve it too neatly in either direction: reason and science are not, by themselves, a guarantee of good outcomes, they are tools, and tools can be turned to cruel purposes by people convinced of their own rationality just as readily as to humane ones. What actually seems to have mattered, across the historical record, is not reason alone but reason harnessed specifically to Pinker's fourth commitment, humanism, the deliberate placing of the welfare of actual, individual human beings, including human beings outside one's own tribe, at the centre of moral concern. Reason without that humanist commitment produced eugenics and colonial administration with the same confident, empirical, chart-making energy that, pointed in a different direction, produced vaccination campaigns and the abolition of slavery.
The Ledger, Updated
It would be a strange sort of intellectual cowardice to make this argument entirely from a decade or more of remove, quoting a 2010 book here and a 2012 book there, without asking what the ledger actually shows now, from the vantage of the middle of the 2020s, with the benefit of everything that has happened since these books went to press: a global pandemic, a war in Europe of a scale and duration that most Western commentators had confidently declared obsolete, a resurgence of great-power rivalry, and the sudden, disorienting arrival of large language models and generative artificial intelligence as a subject of daily conversation rather than science fiction, an arrival greeted, as these arrivals are, with an immediate oversupply of confident prediction. The honest exercise is to run the same method, compared to what, measured how, against the present moment, rather than resting the whole argument on graphs that stop conveniently before anything inconvenient happened.
Start with what has continued to improve, because a great deal has, and the more dramatic material tends to bury it. Global extreme poverty, despite a painful setback during the acute phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the World Bank estimated that as many as ninety million additional people were pushed below the extreme poverty line in a single year, the first sustained rise in a quarter of a century, resumed its decline once the pandemic's economic shock passed, and the long-run trend line remains sharply downward. Child mortality has continued falling in almost every region, including sub-Saharan Africa, the region that started the twenty-first century furthest behind and has in some respects made the fastest relative progress since. Global literacy continues to rise. Vaccination campaigns, using mRNA technology developed and deployed at a speed that would have seemed like fantasy to a scientist working even a decade earlier, brought Covid-19 under a degree of control within roughly a year of the virus's emergence, a scientific achievement so rapid it is at real risk of being under-appreciated precisely because it worked, exactly the pattern Pinker describes: a catastrophe averted does not make the news the way a catastrophe realised does. Solar power generation costs have continued falling roughly along the trajectory Diamandis bet on in 2012, and solar, combined with battery storage whose own costs have fallen just as steeply, is now frequently the cheapest source of new electricity generation in sunny parts of the world, a largely unheralded technological triumph unfolding in real time. Global internet access has continued expanding, bringing the total number of people online past five billion, the overwhelming majority of them for the first time via a mobile device rather than a desktop computer, exactly the pattern of leapfrogging Diamandis described, in which poorer countries skip the intermediate stage of infrastructure that wealthier countries had to build first.
Set against this are real reversals and new dangers that a book written in 2010 or 2012 did not, and largely could not, foresee. Democracy's advance, which Pinker's chapter treated as one of the more secure long-run trends, a judgment the following decade set about testing, has stalled and in a number of countries reversed over the past decade, with organisations that track these things, Freedom House among them, recording more countries moving toward authoritarian governance in most recent years than moving toward greater freedom, a troubling break from the pattern of the preceding several decades. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 brought the largest land war in Europe since 1945, a direct and violent contradiction of the comfortable assumption, widely held in the West through the 2000s and 2010s, that interstate war of this kind belonged to history rather than to the present, and it has been accompanied by a level of nuclear sabre-rattling not seen since the tensest moments of the Cold War, a sharp reminder that the nuclear risk Pinker called serious but manageable requires active, continuing management, not a one-time victory to be filed away as settled. Global carbon emissions, despite remarkable progress in the cost and deployment of clean energy, have not yet peaked and begun the sustained decline that avoiding the most dangerous levels of warming requires, meaning the climate chapter of this ledger remains the one where the gap between what is technically possible and what has actually been achieved is widest and most consequential. And the arrival of powerful generative artificial intelligence systems over the past several years has introduced an entirely new axis of both opportunity and risk that none of the three books, all written before this technology existed in its current form, could have addressed: the possibility of extraordinary gains in scientific discovery, medical diagnosis, and education delivered at a cost approaching zero, sitting uneasily alongside deep uncertainty about labour market disruption, the erosion of shared factual reality through synthetic media, and the concentration of an unprecedented kind of power in a small number of firms and states capable of building the largest systems.
What should a reasonable person do with a ledger this mixed. The temptation, intellectually the lazier of the available responses, is to pick a side: either to treat the good news as the whole story and wave away the war, the democratic backsliding, and the stalled emissions curve as noise around an unstoppable trend, or to treat the bad news as proof that the entire data optimist case was a temporary illusion, a decade of good luck between 2010 and 2020 that has now conclusively ended. Both responses fail the discipline that Pinker, Ridley, and Diamandis, at their best, are actually recommending. The honest response is to hold the mixed ledger as a mixed ledger, to notice that most of the deep structural drivers of the long improvement, rising scientific capability, falling technology costs, expanding trade networks, are still operating and still compounding, even while specific and serious political failures, above all the retreat of democratic governance and the persistence of interstate war as a live option rather than a historical curiosity, are actively working against those drivers in ways that were not supposed to still be possible in the twenty-first century.
The Discipline of Noticing
Return, for a moment, to the chimpanzees. Hans Rosling's control group, picking bananas at random and outperforming bankers and journalists on questions about the state of the world, was never really a joke about the intelligence of chimpanzees, or even primarily a joke about the ignorance of bankers and journalists. It was a demonstration of something colder and more useful: that human beings, left to their spontaneous instincts on this particular subject, are not merely uninformed but actively, systematically misinformed, in one direction, by forces that have nothing to do with the actual state of the world and everything to do with how the human mind processes vivid danger and how a news industry decides what counts as a story. Getting the right answer, on this subject, is not a matter of talent or education. It requires overriding an instinct, deliberately, with a method. That is the entire content of data optimism, a phrase that loose use will wear smooth unless somebody pins it down.
It does not mean a sunny disposition. Pinker, Ridley, and Diamandis are three markedly different personalities, a cognitive scientist prone to careful qualification, a zoologist with a taste for needling confident prophets of doom, an engineer who talks in the confident cadences of a man used to raising money for audacious bets, and none of them would describe themselves, first and foremost, as cheerful people; one of them, additionally, is English. What they share is not a temperament but a habit, the habit of asking compared to what and measured how before allowing themselves an opinion, and then following the answer wherever it leads, including, as all three do at various points, toward genuine alarm about specific, named problems that the data show are not yet solved. A mood cannot be wrong. A conclusion can be. This is the discipline that separates data optimism from wishful thinking, and it is also, not coincidentally, the discipline that separates good journalism from bad, good science from bad, and, at the smaller scale of an individual life, a useful worry from a useless one.
And return, finally, to the question the whole exercise began with, the one Pinker's student asked him: why should I live, given the state of the world. It is not a frivolous question, and it deserves a better answer than a chart. The chart's real use is not to settle the question by force of arithmetic, as though enough graphs could make despair irrational by definition. Its use is to correct a specific and remediable error that despair often rests on without knowing it: the belief that the world has never been mended before, that suffering is the baseline condition to which everything eventually reverts, and that any particular effort to improve it is therefore likely to be futile, one more candle lit against a permanent darkness. The data say otherwise, plainly and repeatedly, on subject after subject, across a longer run of years than any single life can directly witness. The world has been mended before. Not by magic, not by a handful of geniuses acting alone, and not automatically, but by ordinary people applying reason to specific problems, trading with strangers they would never meet, and betting real money and real years of their working lives on the proposition that a given form of scarcity was an engineering problem rather than a life sentence. Smallpox, which killed hundreds of millions of people across the twentieth century alone, does not exist anymore, anywhere, outside a couple of high-security freezers. That is not a metaphor for progress. It is progress, achieved, finished, and now so thoroughly taken for granted that most people alive today have never had to think about it at all.
This is the responsibility that follows from taking the evidence seriously, and it is a considerably heavier one than the comfortable, passive cheerfulness that critics of Pinker sometimes mistake his argument for. If the world really has been mended before, on this scale, against odds that looked at the time exactly as intractable as today's, then mending it further is not a matter of hoping, or waiting for someone else, or wringing one's hands attractively at a dinner party about how bad things have become. It is a matter of doing the specific, unglamorous work that mended it the previous times: applying reason to a defined problem, building the trade and knowledge networks that let a good solution, once found anywhere, spread everywhere, and treating scarcity, whether of food, of light, of clean water, of information, or of opportunity, as a temporary failure of technology and organisation rather than a fixed feature of the universe to be mourned rather than fixed. Gratitude for what has already been mended and ambition about what remains broken are not, on this account, in tension with each other, whatever their reputations at that dinner party might suggest. They are the same discipline, applied to two different tenses of the same underlying evidence: gratitude is what a person owes the past for proving the job can be done at all, and ambition is what a person owes the future for actually doing it again.
Rosling used to end his talks with the props he was famous for, the boxes he stacked to represent income distributions, the globe he peeled apart to show population growth, and he would tell his audiences, with the particular warmth of a man who had spent his career as a doctor in some of the poorest parts of the world and had therefore earned the right to say it without sounding glib, that the world was neither as bad as they feared nor as good as it could be, and that both halves of that sentence were true at once, and neither excused the other. It is as good a summary as any of what the data optimists, for all their differences of field and temperament and, in at least one case, of judgment on other matters entirely, are actually arguing. Not that the work is finished. Only that the work, demonstrably, across two centuries and against every confident prediction to the contrary, gets done.