I like Pinker, but his utility function is egregiously broken here. This sort of Panglossian thing is typical of the smug upper middle classes in the West who l

I like Pinker, but his utility function is egregiously broken here. This sort of Panglossian thing is typical of the smug upper middle classes in the West who look at the lower orders in their own societies as being morally defective somehow; downstream fallout of the ideology of "meritocracy." It's a tale of the hero-bureaucrat; a very questionable story indeed -most of the actual progress we've experienced in recent years is made possible a handful of individuals, just as it has always been. Aka no fracking, no green revolution: things would look a lot different. If you're a descendant of an American factory worker, or one of the Gilets Jaunes who can't afford to have a normal life like your parents did, you really don't give a shit that many people in Asia have much better lives now, or that childhood immunizations are so much better. Worse, one ought to be suspicious of shrinking metrics collected by bureaucracies whose definition of success is shrinking metrics.