My new favorite book of all time

Another factor is that there exists a massive advertising industry in developed nations whose goal is to convince everyone they can't be happy unless they are X or have Y.

I've read a lot of the discussions regarding Pinker's work in both books (but particularly his position in Better Angels), and I've always found his position to be slightly disconcerting.

Pinker attempts to make a specific argument, that violence has decreased over time.

Violence is not a first order phenomenon at a social scale - it's presence is predicated upon the existence of other key criteria, largely the existence of conflict within or between societies.

Better Angels indicates that violence has gone down, but does not sufficiently set out the basis to indicate that conflict is being better managed over time. If anything, it indicates that conflicts are being 'won' as the winners are increasingly able to ignore the plight of the losers.

On the micro-scale, in law we've been faced with a tremendous crisis - that of Access to Justice. In short, the courts are simply too expensive for normal people to avail themselves of, outside specialty practices like family or traffic issues. The result being that the majority of people do not actually have the ability to enforce their legal rights. The response of most legal institutions has been to decry the issue, then do nothing substantive to solve it.

We can pretend things are getting better but absent thinking about what 'better' means maybe the lid on the boiling pot is just getting heavier faster than the heat is being turned up.

Wow, apart from the book, this is something I am thinking about a lot. Does the book give any further thought on this?

The 1/7 GDP figure is misleading. It is absolutely true that everyone had an incentive back then to overstate the USSR's position: Communists and sympathizers for ego gratification, American liberals to use as an argument for government intervention in the economy and internal reform, and the American Right to ramp up militarism and domestic repression. That said, the revisionism that argues that it had no more power on the world stage than South Africa based on spurious GDP comparisons is just as off base.

GDP captures something meaningful, but in terms of ability to project power it's only somewhat correlated. In a Communist state, it captures even less, because pricing mechanisms are all off kilter.

For much of the USSR's post WW2 existence, it could likely have invaded and taken much of continental Europe using only conventional weapons. The USA had troops stationed in Germany not in hopes of stopping any invasion, but to buy a little bit of time and to make its defensive pledges plausible to allies: thousands of American dead would mean it would have to join in a total war, instead of calculating costs and benefits of total war (which would be unacceptable). Even then, other counties worried about America's commitment to an incredibly costly war with the USSR: that's part of why France developed its own nuclear deterrent and left NATO.

Discussion of whether the USA or USSR would "win" an all out war between them is almost besides the point: they both possessed enough military power that the only way to win would be to, um, not to play.

Pinker wants to establish metrics to evaluate the state of the world. Once he establishes the metrics, he wants to show that the state of the world is improving over time. Showing improvement by these metrics, he wants us to celebrate this. This is easy to appreciate. He is right. There really are large differences in living and these differences are commonly experienced as better. There is real cause for celebration and continued efforts at improvement. If this were all he was doing, his book might be universally praised.

But despite the truth of his cited facts, Pinker makes many common errors in reasoning when he attempts to claim sweeping philosophical conclusions from his series of empirical observations.

You can see Pinker's faulty thinking in his attempt to define progress: "What is progress? You might think that the question is so subjective and culturally relative as to be forever unanswerable… Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness… All these things can be measured. If they have increased over time, that is progress."

Progress may exist. It is not established by whether most people agree on something or not. That the majority believes something to be the case, does not make the thing the case. It does inform us, namely of how humans experience the something but it does not establish the something to be the case.

He repeats this error moments later: "Granted, not every one would agree on the exact list."

Whether every one did agree on the exact list wouldn't change the situation. That 100% of Earth believed X would not make X the case.

He follows this with a fallacy: "If you’re reading this, you are not dead, starving, destitute, moribund, terrified, enslaved, or illiterate, which means that you’re in no position to turn your nose up at these values."

This is a cute display of polemic but not a valid argument. The fact that I can read, does not establish that reading is good. Reading may be good but whether reading is good or not is not at all determined by whether I can read or not. His sentence here is something that seems that way but is not true (my freedom does not establish what I must value).

He continues with his previous rule-of-majority error: "As it happens, the world does agree on these values. In the year 2000, all 189 members of the United Nations, together with two dozen international organizations, agreed on eight Millennium Development Goals for the year 2015 that blend right into this list."

Again, even if all 7 billion people expressed that they believe "murder is wrong" this would not establish that murder is wrong.

This isn't to say that murder is not wrong. It's just to say that pointing out what humans do cannot establish what is wrong. Murder is wrong objectively (independent of human minds and their opinions and perceptions) or it is not wrong at all. Anything else is merely observation of what humans happen to hold or happen to practice. Pinker, Sam Harris, and others on the TED stage attempt to ignore this troublesome hindrance to the worldview they promote, dismissing it with a wave of their hand when it is raised and moving along with their presentation. The widely-held feelings and sentiments of humans everywhere do tell us something, just not what Pinker and Harris suggest: there is an intrinsic understanding of right and wrong in every human and we should pay attention that this is present. But this doesn't change the situation that values are objective realities or they are merely subjective whims/emotions/opinions (and may be treated like all other whims/emotions/opinions: ignored).

Pinker as a discussion of what is happening–fine, useful, needed. Pinker suggesting both that many values many humans happen to hold should be held and on this basis and that those who notice this is not philosophically sound are simply pessimists–laughable.