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

Pinker states that poverty needs no explanation because the forces of entropy and evolution guarantee that it will exist but that, in contrast, wealth is never a given. The author notes that nostalgically romanticizing past eras as “golden ages of pastoral simplicity” (79) is easy but that they should be remembered more for the devastating poverty most people endured. Pinker again quotes historians Norberg and Cipolla, who reflected on how in previous centuries poor Europeans were often consigned to workhouses, where they performed slave labor or even sold themselves into slavery for a chance of survival. Happily, Pinker explains, the world’s wealth has vastly increased since the 1800s; he refers to a graph that combines all the world’s currencies as a kind of hypothetical international dollar. Pinker credits the Enlightenment for debunking the fallacy that the world has a stagnant amount of wealth, instead revealing that “wealth is created […] primarily by knowledge and cooperation” (80).

The author investigates the causes behind this explosion in wealth. He accepts Adam Smith’s argument that a society’s institutions are an essential aspect of generating wealth and recalls Britain’s 1700s transition to an open economy:

[A]nyone could sell anything to anyone, and their transactions were protected by the rule of law, property rights, enforceable contracts, and institutions like banks, corporations and government agencies that run by fiduciary duties rather than personal connections (83).