It’s Official — Steven Pinker Is Full of Shit
When Steven Pinker insists that the world is getting better and better, much of his case is based on claims about declining global poverty. But a new report from the UN’s top poverty expert dismantles that argument, showing that global poverty has gone nearly unchanged over the last forty years.
Steven Pinker giving a lecture for Humanists UK in February 2018. Bhaawest / Wikimedia Commons
The world isn’t getting better.
This might be surprising to hear, given the army of writers and thinkers telling us otherwise, pointing to various metrics and insisting pessimism about the world is the result of, for instance, addled elder nostalgia. First among them is Harvard psychology professor and Jeffrey Epstein buddy Steven Pinker, who insists such gloom is “flat-earth wrong,” a product of “the sin of ingratitude,” and points in part to the world’s “tremendous progress against extreme poverty” to make the case that people these days simply “bitch, moan, whine, carp and kvetch” too much.
The only problem is, this isn’t true. Pinker and the optimism industry he represents are put in the crosshairs of Philip Alston’s latest and final report as UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty, who, in a statement that accompanied the report, condemns the “misplaced triumphalism blocking the very reforms that could have prevented the worst impacts of the [coronavirus] pandemic,” and assailing officials, pundits, and the UN itself for pushing “a self-congratulatory message of impending victory over poverty” not borne out by the data.
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