Enlightenment Now

By Steven Pinker

This is one of my favorite books from this summers reading. Pinker sees the flow of history and writes about what has worked and what hasn’t. He ends up about where I am. To attain prosperity people need a civil society with enforceable contracts, rule of law, and open, free and fair markets. He points out that there has never been a successful libertarian or communist run society. He makes an argument that the ideas of the enlightenment made all of this possible and he worries that we are forgetting this in the age of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. But this is a mostly optimistic book about the progress we are making against our worst instincts as humans.

Highly recommended. A nine on my 1 to 10 scale.