Enlightenment Now Review, Pinker’s Data Wins and His History Stumbles

Enlightenment Now is Steven Pinker’s 2018 argument that the world has become dramatically better since the 18th century, and that reason, science, and humanism are the reasons why. Most readers remember it for its charts.

I remember it mostly for a question a student once asked Pinker after a lecture, “Why should I live?”, and for how seriously he takes it. After reading all 23 chapters closely and checking its biggest claims against what has happened since 2018, my verdict is split: Pinker’s data on health, wealth, and safety is mostly solid and still humbling, but his version of history, and his treatment of the people who disagree with him, is far weaker than his graphs.

If you want to know whether Enlightenment Now deserves its reputation, what every chapter says, and where the critics land real punches, this review gives you all of it.

Reader Recommendation for Enlightenment Now

You will probably love it if you:

• enjoyed Factfulness by Hans Rosling or The Better Angels of Our Nature;
• feel worn down by doom-heavy news and want numbers instead of moods;
• work in policy, public health, development, or data journalism;
• want one book that explains why the modern world is richer and healthier than any before it.

You will probably bounce if you:

• dislike long stretches of statistics (Pinker counts about six dozen graphs);
• expect a careful history of Enlightenment philosophy; this is not that book;
• hold religious, Romantic, or strongly left-environmentalist views and dislike being argued with bluntly;
• want a balanced treatment of Nietzsche, Heidegger, or postmodern critics. Pinker fights them; he does not sit with them.

Introduction

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress is a nonfiction book by Steven Pinker, published by Viking (Penguin Random House) in 2018. The book contains 576 pages and Viking moved its release forward from February 27 to February 13, 2018, after Bill Gates called it his new favorite book. Gates’s own blog post, still titled “My new favorite book of all time,” is on GatesNotes, and CNBC covered the endorsement on January 29, 2018.

Context. The genre is big-picture nonfiction, sitting where history, economics, cognitive psychology, and moral philosophy meet. Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, according to his official biography, and a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist.

He is best known for The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, and The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011). Enlightenment Now is effectively the sequel to Better Angels: where that book showed violence declining, this one widens the lens to every measurable part of human well-being.

Purpose. Pinker states his aim directly in the preface. The book is “my attempt to restate the ideals of the Enlightenment in the language and concepts of the 21st century,” and to defend them “with data.” His central thesis fits in one line from that same preface: “The Enlightenment has worked,” which he calls “perhaps the greatest story seldom told.”

He adds a moral warning I found worth underlining. The gifts of modern life, from newborns who will live past eighty to “pills that erase a painful infection,” are “human accomplishments, not cosmic birthrights.” In other words, what people built, people can also lose.

Background: Why Did Pinker Write Enlightenment Now in 2018?

Pinker wrote Enlightenment Now because he believed the reaction to The Better Angels of Our Nature showed that people resist the very idea of progress, not only the numbers. In chapter 4 he writes that his “parade of graphs” did not cure audiences of pessimism, because “the very idea that things can get better just doesn’t compute.”

The political timing matters too. The book was written through 2016 and 2017, the years of the Brexit vote (52 percent voted to leave, as Pinker notes) and Donald Trump’s election. Pinker says he “resisted pressure from readers of earlier drafts to end each one by warning, ‘But all this progress is threatened if Donald Trump gets his way.'” He then admits in chapter 20: “Threatened it certainly is.”

There is also a personal thread. The book is dedicated to his father, Harry Pinker (1928 to 2015), described as an “optimist,” and to a baby born in 2017, Solomon Lopez, “and the 22nd century.” That dedication, pointing backward and forward at once, tells you the spirit of the whole book.

Enlightenment Now Summary

The book is divided into three parts. Part I (chapters 1 to 3) defines the Enlightenment and the science that supports it. Part II (chapters 4 to 20) is the data section, one chapter per area of life. Part III (chapters 21 to 23) defends reason, science, and humanism against their critics. Here is everything that matters, chapter by chapter.

Part I: What Are the Four Enlightenment Ideals?

Chapter 1, “Dare to Understand.” Pinker opens with Immanuel Kant’s 1784 essay “What Is Enlightenment?”, which defined it as “humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity.” He then names the four themes that tie the era together: reason, science, humanism, and progress.

• Reason comes first, and Pinker is blunt: “Reason is nonnegotiable.” His argument is clever. The moment you try to persuade anyone of anything, you have already accepted that reasons matter.
• Science is “the refining of reason to understand the world.” He quotes historian David Wootton’s list of what an educated Englishman believed in 1600: witches who sink ships, werewolves in Belgium, a unicorn’s horn he has seen. A century and a third later, his educated descendant believed none of it.
• Humanism puts the well-being of individual people above “the glory of the tribe, race, nation, or religion.”
• Progress is not the Romantic belief in mystical forces pushing history upward. It is trial and error applied to laws and institutions. He even warns that “progress” without humanism, like mid-century urban planning that bulldozed neighborhoods, “is not progress.”

He also points out a common misreading. The Enlightenment thinkers did not believe humans are perfectly rational. Kant, Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, and Adam Smith knew our minds are full of “irrational passions and foibles,” and that is exactly why they wanted deliberate reason.

The chapter closes by admitting the philosophers were men and women of the 18th century. “Some were racists, sexists, anti-Semites, slaveholders, or duelists.” Pinker says the ideas matter, not the personalities, and that modern science has since added three ideas the philosophes lacked.

Chapter 2, “Entro, Evo, Info.” This is the most original chapter, and the one I return to most. The three ideas are entropy, evolution, and information.

1. Entropy. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that in a closed system disorder never decreases. There are vastly more ways for things to be broken than whole. Pinker quotes Texas lawmaker Sam Rayburn: “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one.”
2. Evolution. Natural selection built organisms that fight entropy by capturing energy. It also left us with minds tuned for survival in small groups, not for statistics or global cooperation.
3. Information. Knowledge is a reduction in entropy. Brains, genes, and cultures store information that lets living things resist decay.

From these three he draws the chapter’s most useful lesson: “misfortune may be no one’s fault.” For most of history people blamed witches, minorities, or angry gods for disaster. But in a universe governed by entropy, bad outcomes are the default. His follow-up line reframed how I think about economics: “Poverty, too, needs no explanation.” As Adam Smith saw, “what needs to be explained is wealth.”

Pinker lists our cognitive bugs in one rapid paragraph. People think in “one, two, many,” generalize from their own experience, infer causation from correlation, and behave less like scientists than like “intuitive lawyers and politicians.” Yet our minds also have two escape ladders: abstraction and recursive, combinatorial thinking. Add rules for open debate, and “a community of less than fully rational thinkers can cultivate rational thoughts.”

He also borrows a phrase from Bertolt Brecht to explain why the great philosophies of the Axial Age (around 500 BCE) appeared when energy capture rose to about 20,000 calories per person per day: “Grub first, then ethics.”

Chapter 3, “Counter-Enlightenments.” Who could oppose reason, science, humanism, and progress? Many people, Pinker says, and not only populists. He lists the rivals:

• Religious faith, which he defines as belief “without good reason”;
• Nationalism and tribalism, where people become “expendable cells of a superorganism”;
• Romantic Green ideology, which treats human energy use as a crime against nature;
• Declinism, both the kind that fears technology will destroy us and the kind that sneers that modern life is too comfortable;
• The “Second Culture” of literary intellectuals, named after C. P. Snow’s 1959 lecture The Two Cultures.

He revisits the famous 1962 attack on Snow by critic F. R. Leavis, who scorned a world where “standard of living” is the ultimate aim. Pinker’s reply is one of the book’s sharpest passages: ask a mother in a poor country whose newborn survived because living standards rose, then multiply that by a few hundred million.

His summary of who the real enemy is appears at the chapter’s midpoint: “Our greatest enemies are ultimately not our political adversaries but entropy, evolution… and most of all ignorance.”

Part II: What Does the Data Show About Human Progress?

Chapter 4, “Progressophobia.” It opens with a line designed to provoke: “Intellectuals hate progress.” Pinker then explains why ordinary people misjudge the world too.

• The Optimism Gap. People think their own lives will improve but their country will decline. In almost every year from 1992 to 2015, while violent crime fell, most Americans told pollsters crime was rising.
• The nature of news. “News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen.” Nobody reports live from a country where war has not broken out.
• The Availability heuristic (Tversky and Kahneman). We judge frequency by how easily examples come to mind. People rank tornadoes (about fifty American deaths a year) above asthma (more than four thousand).
• The Negativity bias. “Bad is stronger than good.” Losses sting more than gains please.
• Sentiment data. Data scientist Kalev Leetaru measured the emotional tone of every New York Times article from 1945 to 2005. The paper grew steadily gloomier, and so did world news from the late 1970s onward.

A 2016 poll he cites found that 77 percent of Americans agreed that Islamic militants in Syria and Iraq posed “a serious threat to the existence or survival of the United States,” a belief Pinker calls “nothing short of delusional.”

His remedy is simple: “The answer is to count.” Then he delivers the book’s thesis in two sentences. The world has made “spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being,” and “Almost no one knows about it.”

He also spends several pages on the objections he hears, and his answers are useful for anyone arguing about this. A decline is not a disappearance (“x > y” is not “y = 0”). Progress does not mean violence will “take care of itself”; if a pile of laundry shrinks, someone washed the clothes. And calling poverty or Twitter insults “violence” confuses metaphor with measurement.

Chapter 5, “Life.” How long does the average person live? In 2015, 71.4 years worldwide. In the mid-18th century, life expectancy in Europe and the Americas was about 35, and 29 for the world. Hans Rosling found that fewer than one in four Swedes guessed the true modern figure.

• Child mortality: in 19th-century Sweden, a quarter to a third of children died before age five. The global rate fell from 18 percent to 4 percent, and in sub-Saharan Africa from about one in four in the 1960s to under one in ten in 2015.
• Maternal mortality in Europe fell “three hundredfold,” from 1.2 to 0.004 percent.
• A British one-year-old in 1845 would live to 47; in 2011, to 81.
• Economic historian Johan Norberg’s line stuck with me: in the 20th century, “the average person approached death by just seven months for every year they aged.”

Pinker rejects immortality hype (Ray Kurzweil’s forecast that those alive in 2045 will live forever). His view is “Stein’s Law,” that things that can’t go on forever don’t, softened by “Davies’s Corollary,” that they can go on much longer than you think.

Chapter 6, “Health.” Infectious disease was the biggest killer in history. Pinker lists how vaccination, germ theory, chlorinated water, and handwashing turned the tide, then names the forgotten heroes: Karl Landsteiner, whose discovery of blood groups he credits with saving about a billion lives; Abel Wolman and Linn Enslow (chlorination, 177 million lives); William Foege (smallpox strategy, 131 million).

His favorite sentence in English, he says, is Wikipedia’s “Smallpox was an infectious disease.” Smallpox killed more than 300 million people in the 20th century; the last case was diagnosed in Somalia in 1977. The eradication program cost about $312 million over ten years.

• Guinea worm cases fell from 3.5 million in 21 countries in 1986 to 25 cases in three countries in 2016.
• Malaria deaths fell by 60 percent between 2000 and 2015.
• Polio was down to 37 cases in three countries by 2016.

Angus Deaton’s line captures Pinker’s point: “It is knowledge that is the key.”

Chapter 7, “Sustenance.” Famine was once normal everywhere. Today the problem in rich countries is too many calories. China’s 1.3 billion people averaged 3,100 calories a day; India’s billion, 2,400; Africa, 2,600. Undernourishment in the developing world fell from 35 percent to 13 percent in about 45 years, even as the world added nearly five billion people.

Why was Thomas Malthus wrong? Because knowledge made food grow geometrically too. Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch’s nitrogen fertilizer process is credited with saving 2.7 billion lives. Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution means the world needs less than a third of the land it once did for the same food. Between 1961 and 2009, farmland grew 12 percent while food output grew 300 percent.

Pinker reminds us of Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb, which predicted that 65 million Americans and four billion others would starve by the 1980s. It did not happen.

The most sobering statistic in the chapter: of the seventy million people who died in major 20th-century famines, 80 percent were victims of Communist regimes’ collectivization and central planning, including Stalin’s Holodomor (1932 to 1933) and Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1961).

Chapter 8, “Wealth.” It opens with economist Peter Bauer: “Poverty has no causes. Wealth has causes.” For most of history, the graph of world income, in Pinker’s words, is “nothing” repeated for a few thousand years and then a “boom.” Gross World Product has grown almost a hundredfold since 1820.

Three things launched the “Great Escape,” Pinker argues: science applied to production, institutions that allowed trade among strangers, and a shift in values toward what historian Deirdre McCloskey calls “bourgeois virtue.”

For me, the most personal passage in this chapter was his list of the 30 developing countries whose incomes, since 1995, have been doubling roughly every eighteen years. Bangladesh is named first. He also uses a haircut in Dhaka versus London to explain purchasing-power parity. Reading that as a Bangladeshi reader, I felt the book suddenly talking about my own street, not an abstraction.

The key figure: extreme poverty (under $1.90 a day at the time) fell from about 90 percent of humanity to 10 percent in two centuries, “with almost half that decline occurring in the last thirty-five years.”

Chapter 9, “Inequality.” Is all the new wealth going to the rich? Pinker concedes US inequality rose. The Gini index for US market income rose from .44 in 1984 to .51 in 2012, and the top 1 percent’s share grew from 8 percent (1980) to 18 percent (2015).

But he argues inequality is not the same as poverty. He leans on philosopher Harry Frankfurt: “What is morally important is that each should have enough.” A Soviet joke makes the point: a peasant granted a wish asks that his neighbor’s goat should die. Both become equal; neither becomes better off.

He also notes, grimly, that history’s most effective levelers of inequality were “epidemics, massive wars, violent revolutions, and state collapse.” He ends open to a universal basic income, which he says has been championed across the political spectrum, from Milton Friedman to Richard Nixon.

Chapter 10, “The Environment.” Pinker rejects what he calls “greenism,” a “quasi-religious ideology” he finds in figures as different as Al Gore and Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’. He prefers ecomodernism: pollution is a problem to be solved with technology and growth, not repentance.

He takes climate change seriously. Fossil fuels supplied 86 percent of the world’s energy, and “Humanity has never faced a problem like it.” His solutions:

Carbon pricing, which he says economists across the spectrum endorse (“Tax what you burn, not what you earn,” as Al Gore put it).

Nuclear power, “the world’s most abundant and scalable carbon-free energy source.” Compared with nuclear, he reports, coal kills 387 times as many people per kilowatt-hour.

Conditional optimism, borrowed from economist Paul Romer. A child waiting for Christmas presents is complacent; a child who gathers wood and nails to build a treehouse is conditionally optimistic. “Problems are solvable,” Pinker writes, but they will not solve themselves.

Chapter 11, “Peace.” Great powers were at war almost constantly in 1500; they have not fought each other directly since the Korean War. World War II at its worst killed nearly 300 people per 100,000 per year in battle.

That fell to 22 during Korea, 9 during Vietnam, 5 during the Iran-Iraq war, and under 0.5 between 2001 and 2011, before creeping to 1.5 in 2014 with Syria. Pinker’s conclusion: war “may be just another obstacle an enlightened species learns to overcome.”

Chapter 12, “Safety.” Global homicide fell from 8.8 per 100,000 people in 2000 to 6.2 in 2012, which Pinker translates into 180,000 people alive who would otherwise have been murdered in a single year. American car deaths per capita peaked in 1937 at close to 30 per 100,000 and hit 10.2 in 2014. Walking American streets became six times as safe as in 1927. “Wealth buys life,” he writes.

Chapter 13, “Terrorism.” In 2015, terrorism killed 44 Americans (a generous count). The same year an American was 350 times as likely to be murdered in an ordinary homicide, 800 times as likely to die in a car crash, and 3,000 times as likely to die in any accident. His best line here: “terror about terrorism is a sign not of how dangerous our society has become, but of how safe.”

Chapter 14, “Democracy.” In 2015 there were 103 democracies holding 56 percent of the world’s people. Adding countries more democratic than autocratic, two-thirds of humanity lived in free or relatively free societies, compared with 1 percent in 1816.

Chapter 15, “Equal Rights.” Racism, sexism, and homophobia have declined, measured in both laws and attitudes, with the young leading. By chapter 20’s summary, women could vote in every country where men can vote save one.

Chapter 16, “Knowledge.” World literacy rose from about 12 percent in the early 19th century to 83 percent. The world reached parity in teaching girls and boys to read by 2014. IQ scores rose about three points per decade (the Flynn effect), which Pinker totals at roughly thirty points over a century.

Chapter 17, “Quality of Life.” American housework fell from 58 hours a week in 1900 to 15.5 in 2011. Laundry alone went from 11.5 hours a week in 1920 to 1.5 in 2014, which is why Hans Rosling nominated the washing machine as the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution. Americans work 22 fewer hours a week than they once did.

Chapter 18, “Happiness.” In 1973 economist Richard Easterlin argued that richer countries were no happier. Pinker says bigger data (from Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, Angus Deaton, and the World Happiness Report) shows “there is no Easterlin paradox”: richer people and richer countries are happier.

In the World Values Survey, 86 percent of people say they are “rather happy” or “very happy,” yet people underestimate how happy their compatriots are by an average of 42 percentage points.

He is candid that Americans have not grown happier as fast as expected, and he offers a mature reading: modern people have “an adult’s appreciation of life, with all its worry and all its excitement.”

Chapter 19, “Existential Threats.” Pinker is skeptical of AI apocalypse scenarios, arguing that intelligence and the desire to dominate are separate. His joke: we know of a highly advanced intelligence that evolved without the conquering instinct, and “They’re called women.” He calls the idea of an all-powerful Artificial General Intelligence “barely coherent.” On a malevolent doomsday computer, his advice is: “don’t build one.”

He treats nuclear war as the one real threat, with more than ten thousand weapons in nine countries, and backs a policy of No First Use. He also records a wager with astronomer Martin Rees, who bet that “by 2020, bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event.” Pinker took the other side and wrote: “By the time you read this you may know who has won.” (More on that below.)

Chapter 20, “The Future of Progress.” This chapter summarizes the whole data section and then confronts authoritarian populism. Populist parties won 13.2 percent of the vote in recent European parliamentary elections, up from 5.1 percent in the 1960s. Pinker ends with his favorite label for his own position, from Hans Rosling: “I am not an optimist. I’m a very serious possibilist.”

Part III: How Does Pinker Defend Reason, Science, and Humanism?

Chapter 21, “Reason.” Arguments against reason, Pinker says, “refute themselves,” because arguing already assumes reason. The real problem is not stupidity but politicization. Drawing on legal scholar Dan Kahan, he explains that people treat beliefs about climate change or evolution as badges of tribal loyalty. Kahan calls this a “Tragedy of the Belief Commons”: what earns you respect in your group can be disastrous for society.

He cites Philip Tetlock’s forecasting research, in which experts on average did about as well as chance, while a small group of “superforecasters” reasoned in probabilities, updated often, and rejected fate. He also shows American polarization: the share of consistently liberal or consistently conservative Americans doubled from 10 to 21 percent between 1994 and 2014.

Chapter 22, “Science.” Pinker calls science the one achievement we could boast about “before any tribunal of minds.” He defends scientific thinking against the charge of “scientism,” stressing that it is not a call to hand decisions to scientists or a belief that every current hypothesis is true. His main target is the “bunker mentality” he sees in writers such as Leon Wieseltier, whose 2013 article carried the tag line “Now science wants to invade the liberal arts.

Don’t let it happen.” He rebukes colleagues who treat the Tuskegee syphilis study as the balancing weight against smallpox eradication, calling that equation “morally obtuse.”

Chapter 23, “Humanism.” The book’s philosophical close grounds morality in impartiality. His second epigraph, from Spinoza, sets the tone: those governed by reason “desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind.” Pinker then attacks two rivals:

• Theistic morality, using Plato’s Euthyphro: if gods command things for good reasons, we can appeal to those reasons directly; if not, divine commands are arbitrary.
• Nietzsche’s heroic romanticism, which he paints as the philosophy of “a callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath,” and links to fascism and today’s authoritarian populism.

His final paragraphs recast progress as a heroic story that is also true. “Myths are fictions, but this one is true,” he writes, “true to the best of our knowledge.” It requires only the beliefs that life beats death, health beats sickness, and “knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance.”

Enlightenment Now Analysis: Is Steven Pinker Right?

Enlightenment Now is an important, bracing, and often maddening book: the most persuasive case for modern progress I have read, attached to the least persuasive account of its critics.

Does Pinker Support His Arguments With Evidence?

Mostly yes, in Part II. His sources are the standard ones: Our World in Data (Max Roser), the World Bank, the WHO, Gapminder, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, the FBI, and national statistics offices.

He shows his sources under each chart. When I checked his headline claims against newer data, the direction held. Our World in Data’s 2025 analysis of the World Bank’s updated poverty line (raised from $2.15 to $3 a day in June 2025) counted about 817 million people in extreme poverty in 2024.

That is more people than under the old line, but the same analysis says the change reflects a higher threshold and better surveys, and that the world has not become poorer.

Part III is weaker. Pinker’s philosophy is mostly assertion plus wit, and his history leans on secondary sources.

Does the Book Fulfill Its Purpose?

It fulfills half of it. As a defense of progress, it succeeds and it changed the public conversation. As a defense of the Enlightenment as a historical movement, it is shakier, because the “Enlightenment” in the title is closer to Pinker’s own liberal humanism than to the argumentative, contradictory 18th century that historians study.

Strengths: What I Found Compelling

Chapter 2’s entropy frame is the best idea in the book. Once you accept that disorder is the default, you stop asking “who caused poverty?” and start asking “what created wealth?” That shift is worth the cover price.

The unsung heroes. The list of scientists behind chlorination, vaccines, and oral rehydration therapy made me slightly ashamed that I knew more about generals than about Karl Landsteiner.

Media literacy. Chapter 4’s explanation of the Availability heuristic and news cycles is the most practical part. It changed how I read headlines.

Honest caveats in places. He does not claim progress is automatic. “Progress is an outcome not of magic but of problem-solving,” he writes in chapter 5, and he repeatedly lists setbacks: the African AIDS epidemic, the 1918 flu, rising deaths among middle-aged non-college-educated white Americans.

The prose. Pinker is funny. The line about AI and women, the goat joke, and “Grub first, then ethics” make 500 pages move.

Weaknesses: What Frustrated Me

A tidy Enlightenment. Philosopher John Gray, in the New Statesman (February 2018), wrote that “Pinker’s Enlightenment has little in common with” the actual historical movement, and called the book “embarrassingly feeble” as a contribution to thought. Historian Jessica Riskin called it “a knot of Orwellian contradictions,” according to Wikipedia’s summary of reviews.

I think Gray overstates it, but the complaint lands: Pinker admits some philosophes were racists and slaveholders, then moves on too quickly, and he barely engages Rousseau, whom Wikipedia’s reception section notes historian David Bell also raised.

Straw opponents. Placing Al Gore, Pope Francis, and the Unabomber in one sentence as prophets of “greenism” is rhetorically fun and intellectually unfair. Pinker demands proportionality from his critics but does not always show it to them.

Averages hide people. A falling global average can coexist with real suffering in specific places. Jeremy Lent’s essay in openDemocracy, “Steven Pinker’s ideas are fatally flawed. These eight graphs show why,” argues that measures such as biodiversity loss and ecological overshoot tell a darker story than Pinker’s selection. I do not accept “fatally,” but the point about which graphs get chosen is fair.

Tone toward the humanities. As someone who writes about literature, I found Part III’s jabs at the “Second Culture” too broad. Leavis deserved the rebuke. A whole culture of readers did not.

AI dismissal. Even Bill Gates, the book’s most famous fan, cautioned that Pinker dismissed AI extinction risk too readily, per Wikipedia’s account of his endorsement. Reading chapter 19 in 2026, after the arrival of general-purpose AI systems, his line “As far as I know, there are no projects to build an AGI” has aged the worst of anything in the book.

How Has Enlightenment Now Aged by 2026?

This is the question I care about most, because a data book lives or dies by its predictions. Two tests stand out.

The pandemic. Pinker listed Ebola, SARS, bird flu, and swine flu as “falsely predicted pandemics,” and he bet against Martin Rees on a million-casualty bio event by 2020. Then COVID-19 arrived.

The WHO estimated at least 3 million excess deaths in 2020 alone, and reported later that deaths associated with COVID-19 across 2020 and 2021 came to nearly 15 million.

According to The Spectator, the $400 wager hinges on whether COVID came from a lab (bioerror) or from nature, and the two men agreed to revised settlement terms in 2022 that tie the outcome to public health agencies’ judgments; the magazine reports Pinker himself put the lab-leak probability around 0.6. I cannot confirm that the bet has been formally settled. Either way, the pandemic proved the book’s warning about fragility more than its reassurance.

Poverty and progress. The long-run direction Pinker described mostly continued. Using the older $1.90 line he relied on, the fall from about 90 percent to 10 percent is not disputed by the sources I checked, and the World Bank’s own fall 2025 update headline states that one in ten people globally live in extreme poverty. What has changed is the benchmark, not the trend.

So my honest scorecard is this: on the long-run arc, Pinker was right. On short-run tail risks, the kind he tended to wave away, reality humbled him.

Books Like Enlightenment Now: How Does It Compare?

If Enlightenment Now grabbed you, these related books sharpen or challenge it.

The Better Angels of Our Nature (Steven Pinker, 2011). The prequel. Narrower (violence only) but deeper, with far more history. Pinker himself calls Enlightenment Now an extension of its method.

Factfulness (Hans Rosling, with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, 2018). Published the same year and full of the same Gapminder data, but warmer and more practical. Rosling explains why you are wrong about the world; Pinker explains why the Enlightenment deserves credit. I would read Factfulness first.

The Rational Optimist (Matt Ridley, 2010). Pinker lists it among the progress books in chapter 4. More economic, more pro-market, less philosophical.

The Great Escape (Angus Deaton, 2013). Deaton is quoted throughout chapters 5 and 6. It is more cautious about aid and inequality, which makes it a good counterweight.

Rationality (Steven Pinker, 2021). Pinker’s follow-up expands chapter 21 into a full guide to probability, logic, and bias.

Straw Dogs (John Gray, 2002). The sharpest opposing view. Gray argues moral progress is a myth; reading him after Pinker is like hearing the other lawyer’s closing statement.

On Liberty (John Stuart Mill, 1859). The classic liberal argument for free speech and open debate that Pinker’s chapter 21 assumes. See our explainer on On Liberty by John Stuart Mill and our plain guide to what liberalism is.

For more reading in this vein, our list of the 100 best nonfiction books that changed the world and the 100 best psychology books of all time include several of Pinker’s works.

FAQs About Enlightenment Now

Conclusion

Enlightenment Now is a flawed but necessary book. Its numbers corrected my own gloom, and its entropy argument changed how I think about poverty and blame. Its intellectual history is thin and its opponents are often cartoons, but the core evidence has survived eight years of scrutiny and a pandemic better than its critics predicted, even if the pandemic itself exposed Pinker’s blind spot on tail risks.

Who benefits most? General readers who feel overwhelmed by bad news, students of economics, public health, and public policy, journalists, and anyone who argues online about whether the world is getting better.

It is written for a general audience; you do not need any background in statistics or philosophy. Specialists in 18th-century history or environmental science will find it frustrating in places, and they should read it anyway, if only to argue with it properly.

My advice: read Part II slowly, read Part III skeptically, and keep Pinker’s own rule in mind. The answer to most arguments about progress is still to count.

References

• Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. New York: Viking,
• Enlightenment Now, Wikipedia (publication date, page count, Gates endorsement, critical reception)
• Bill Gates, “My new favorite book of all time,” GatesNotes
• CNBC, “Bill Gates’ new ‘favorite book of all time'” (January 29, 2018)
• John Gray, review of Enlightenment Now, New Statesman (February 2018)
• Jeremy Lent, “Steven Pinker’s ideas are fatally flawed. These eight graphs show why,” openDemocracy
• Steven Pinker, official biography
• The Spectator, “Wuhan wager: the $400 ‘bio bet’ that predicted the pandemic”
• WHO, “The true death toll of COVID-19: estimating global excess mortality”
• University of Washington Biostatistics, “WHO report finds nearly 15 million deaths associated with COVID-19 worldwide”
• Our World in Data, “$3 a day: A new poverty line has shifted the World Bank’s data on extreme poverty”
• World Bank, Poverty and Inequality Update, Fall 2025