Enlightenment Now

Pinker's grand tour to prove to all of us that our innate negative recency-bias is deceptive and that our world has indeed progressively been getting better and better and better. He shows and explains detailed stats for humanity metrics like life expectancy, wars, safety, knowledge, happiness and all curves are (and always have been) climbing upwards. The connections he ties, between countries turning into democracies, and them consequently showing improvements in all other aspects of life, are obvious yet good to see in numbers.

All the stats are impressive and convincing, even though they maybe could have used a little less detail in the end, as it starts to get repetitive. But his last section, three chapters on reason, science and humanity, is really inspiring again, where he tries to entangle why factions of society (religion, politics,..) sometimes try so hard to combat reason/science in its quest to improve humanity. And how politicising of any causes to improve our quality of life (or nature) is counterproductive in today's society.

Obviously this is a direct response to Trump's slogan of returning to better times, and he doesn't shy away from occasionally addressing his followers and claims head-on. But even though it's a lot US/elite-countries based (mainly because there's a limited amount of countries that have been collecting all these statistics over time) it does try to make a point to keep it global, which I appreciated.