Meaning

Pinker is making two connected points at once. The first is empirical: by measurable standards such as life expectancy, literacy, poverty rates, and child mortality, humanity as a whole is doing far better than at almost any earlier point in history. The second point is almost more striking than the first: this good news is largely invisible to the general public, which tends to assume the world is getting worse, not better.

Context

These lines come from "Enlightenment Now," published in 2018, in which Pinker assembles a wide body of data to argue that the values of the Enlightenment, including reason, science, and liberal institutions, have produced measurable gains in human welfare over the centuries. The book builds on themes Pinker explored in his earlier work on violence and human nature. The passage is characteristic of his approach: stating a data-driven claim bluntly, then immediately noting the gap between that reality and popular perception. He attributes the gap partly to the negativity bias in human cognition and partly to the nature of news coverage, which tends to highlight disasters and crises over slow, steady improvement.

About the author

Steven Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist and linguist who has spent much of his career at Harvard University. He is widely known for making complex ideas in psychology, language, and human nature accessible to general readers. Beyond his academic research, he has become one of the most prominent public advocates for an evidence-based, optimistic view of human progress, a position he defends rigorously against both pessimists and utopians.