Steven Pinker

On this episode Debbie talks to Steven Pinker about measuring human happiness. “It’s better to be healthy than to be sick. It’s better to be literate than illiterate. Okay, let’s measure those things over time. Have they increased since the enlightenment? And the answer is, in every case, they have.”

These days it’s easy to feel a sense of doom. Various nuclear buttons, climate change, creeping authoritarianism here and abroad. You name it. It’s scary. But there is someone who sees hope for the future. In his new book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, author Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the headlines and see the bigger picture. Health, prosperity, safety, and happiness are actually on the rise. Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist with a broad range of interests: visual cognition, psycho linguistics, and social relations. In an era of religious and political polarization Pinker argues we need science, reason, and humanism now more than ever.

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