• Why should I live? “you help continue that progress” [p. 4]
  • “The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, [etc.]…” [p. 5]
  • “Optimism … is the theory that all failures — all evils — are due to insufficient knowledge…. Problems are inevitable, because our knowledge will always be infinitely far from complete.” [p. 7]
  • Humanism privileges the individual over the glory of the tribe. [p. 10]
  • “‘progress’ unguided by humanism is not progress” [p. 12]
  • Without humans fighting to continually improve things, things would regress to disorder as the Law of Entropy states [p. 16].
    • “Information may be thought of as a reduction in entropy” [p. 19]
  • “…the desire to be right can collide with a second desire, to know the truth…” [p. 27]
  • “To take something on faith means to believe it without good reason…” [p 30]
  • “Whether or not the world really is getting worse, the nature of news will interact with the nature of cognition to make us think that it is. News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen.” [p. 41]
    • This is where the Availability bias comes in to play. “…people esitimate the probability of an event … by the ease with which instances come to mind” [p. 41]
  • “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.” [p. 48]
  • There is a wrong belief that wealth is a finite resource [p. 99]
  • “…the world’s poor have gotten richer in part at the expense of the American lower middle class…the tradeoff is worth it.” [p. 113]
  • “Education…is not keeping up with the demands of modern economies…” [p. 118]
  • “In some ways the world has become less equal, but in more ways the world’s people have become better off.” [p. 120]
  • “Humanistic Environmentalism” [p. 122]
    • “…there is an optimal amount of pollution in the environment, just as there is an optimal amount of dirt in your house. Cleaner is better, but not at the expense of everything else in life.” [p. 124]
  • “Progress in technology allows us to do more with less.” [p. 135]
  • Argues for nuclear power [p. 147]
  • “After a second [world war] and even more horrific one, the romance had finally been drained from war, and peace became the stated goal of every Western and international institution. Human life has become more precious, while glory, honor, preeminence, manliness, heroism, and other symptoms of excess testosterone have been downgraded.” [p. 166]
    • “Though conquest may be tempting over the short term, it’s ultimately better to figure out how to get what you want without the costs of destructive conflict…” [p. 166]
  • Shift from a manufacturing to a service economy [p. 185]
  • Terrorism is mostly a distraction and poses a minuscle danger compared with other risks. “Modern terrorism is a by-product of the vast reach of the media” [p. 195]. “Excluding 9/11 and Oklahoma, about twice as many Americans have been killed since 1990 by right-wing extremists as by Islamist terror groups.” [p. 194]
  • “…democracy is a major contributor to human flourishing.” [p. 200]
  • On page 262, the book switches from proving that things have improved to basically, “does it even matter?” by discussing happiness levels which have remained steady for decades.
    • People’s happiness is relative to their peers [p. 263]
    • “…the goal of progress cannot be to increase happiness indefinitely…” [p. 268]
    • “A bit of anxiety is not a bad thing if it motivates people to support policies that would help solve major problems” [p. 287]
    • “[anxiety] need not drive us to pathology or despair. One of the challenges of modernity is how to grapple with a growing portfolio of responsibilities without worrying ourselves to death.” [p. 287]
  • Regarding existential threats, “we can treat them not as apocolypses in waiting but as problems to be solved.” [p. 291]
  • “Each system is an idiot savant, with little ability to leap to problems it was not setup to solve…” [p. 298]
  • “…technology allows people to accomplish more and more with less and less, so given enough time, it will allow one individual to do anything — and given human nature, that means destroy everything.” [p.301] However, the social embededness of technology means the destructive power of a solitary individual has in fact not increased over time. [p. 302]
    • “The more sophisticated and powerful a technology, the more people are needed to weaponize it. And the more people needed to weaponize it, the more societal controls work to defuse, or soften, or prevent harm from happening.” [p. 302]
    • “Despite all the terror generated by terrorism, there must be very few individuals out there waiting for an opportunity to wreak wanton destruction.” [p. 303]
  • “…progress is not utopia” [p. 326]
  • “… populism looks backward to an age in which the nation was ethnically homogenous…” [p. 334]
    • Pinker goes on to describe why Trump’s populism is harmful for humanistic progress [p. 334]
    • “… certain beliefs become symbols of cultural allegiance. People affirm or deny these beliefs to express not what they know but who thay are.” [p. 357]
    • “The pressure to conform becomes all the greater as people live and work with others who are like them…” [p. 358]
    • “To make public discourse more rational, issues should be depoliticized as much as is feasible.” [p. 382]
    • “…political tribalism is the most insidious form of irrationality today.” [p. 383]
  • “…data are not a panacea” [p. 404]