this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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The Amazon reviews are really bad. If anyone is looking for a book with this same idea, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker is really great.
The other comments are quite sarcastic and I want to give you a bit of a less antagonizing response why Steven Pinker is kind of a hack.
He more or less "cooked the books" when it comes to explaining how much good capitalism helped the people around the world by doing very selective data analysis. In the end he really advocates for being complacent with the status quo and basically argues for the argument of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (which has been disproven a lot by anthropologists.
These videos are quite long but go into more detail:
And if you prefer to read: I'd recommend The Dawn of everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
Thanks for the information, I had no idea that Pinker had such an anti-following. I've not read or even thought about him in years. I just vaguely remembered that that book did a lot to make me more thankful for the current state of things compared to how they used to be. I appreciate you letting me know that he is such a questionable fellow.
Cool that you weren't scared away by all the Toxicity in he other comments.