I think you're not being charitable to Pinker here - he's not in my view "nefarious," and he's arguing his points in good faith. That said, I agree with you. I

I think you're not being charitable to Pinker here - he's not in my view "nefarious," and he's arguing his points in good faith. That said, I agree with you. I read Better Angels in its entirety and thought parts of it were very convincing. Others were deeply, provably wrong to anyone who is a professional historian (for instance, he let a bunch of Harvard RA's loose on some non-peer reviewed books purporting to statistically describe fatalities in wars that are very poorly documented, then used this faulty data to draw huge, misguided conclusions, like WW1/WW2 being less damaging in aggregate than the An Lushan rebellion). I actually really enjoy Pinker's writing style and he is clearly brilliant (as I learned when I tried to spar with him a bit in a Q&A and he casually parried what I thought was a devastating counter-example!) But IMO his intelligence is actually his downfall when it comes to this particular argument. He's convinced himself that everything is getting better, and he is indeed very convincing on certain aspects of this point. The problem, as you say, is with the scale of his conclusions. Certain things like the use of the death penalty and rates of infant mortality really are going down, demonstrably. Other things, like the risk of massive destruction due to a stolen nuclear weapon or EMP or a Nick Bostrom-style evil AI, or even just a generalized societal decline due to economic inequality and environmental degradation, are almost certainly getting worse. Pinker is so self-assured as a writer and thinker that he runs the risk of giving us all a false sense of complacency and a license to ignore these very real problems.