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

Pinker is a Canadian American cognitive psychologist, linguist, author, and professor at Harvard University. He has written several books, including The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works. Pinker is known for his arguments against pessimism and declinism, and these arguments informed his previous book The Better Angels of Our Nature, which illustrated how violent conflict has been declining in recent decades. Pinker is a celebrated author and professor; he has won numerous writing and teaching awards as well as eight honorary doctorates. In the book Enlightenment Now, Pinker relies on his experience in psychology to analyze people’s perceptions of the world and illuminate how they can easily be misinformed. Pinker’s statistically informative work functions as a manifesto for rationalism and Enlightenment thinking.

Angus Deaton is a British economist and the author of The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality. In 2015 he won the Nobel Prize for economics. Pinker references Deaton’s work many times to demonstrate how people’s lives have dramatically improved in recent centuries, especially in terms of their health, lifespan, and wealth.