There is much to admire in the Stephen Pinker’s recently published Enlightenment Now. Building on his success demonstrating in The Better Angels of our Nature that mankind is becoming progressively less violent, he sets out to challenge much of the pessimism that surrounds us. It is a fashionable thesis, Pinker’s volume beat Hans Rosling’s Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think to the bookstalls by less than two months. It would appear that, whatever it may feel like, the world is not going to hell in a handcart.
Much of the thesis is backed up by solid data and robust argument. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of lapses, but this the risk when a writer strays too far from their home turf and are ambitious in drawing on a wide range of sources from outside their own discipline.
One area where Pincker’s panglossian (or pollyannaish?) view of the world falls down is his discussion of inequality. It is hardly original, but no less untrue, to observe that material inequality does not imply necessarily that some people are less happy than others. But there is extensive evidence at a linking health outcomes and many other proxies for happiness and wellbeing to prosperity. He also slips into the trap of seeing a “lump” fallacy (as in “lump of labour fallacy” as first described by David Frederick Schloss in 1891, referring the idea that there is only a finite amount of work to spread among a population) in relation to material wealth. At one level, he is absolutely correct – there is nothing to stop us all becoming wealthier together, even if unevenly. But at another level, he is the subject of another fallacy, to the extent that inequality is measured solely in terms of the distribution of material wealth. Material inequality is also a measure of inequality in the distribution of the potential power that people have over their own lives and over each other.
There is plenty of evidence around at present of the impact of increasing inequality in income on the distribution of wealth, particularly in relation to relatively scarce resources – witness the decline in home ownership in the UK and the increasing proportion of the population renting, on health outcomes – witness the correlation between life expectancy as you head out on the Central Line from inner-London Tower Hamlets towards leafy suburban Essex, and on the impact on health of people working at lower income levels of inequality in job autonomy as documented, for example, in Jeffrey Pfeffer’s recent Dying for a Paycheck.