Children are far likelier to go to school than they were in 1900, while “outside the schoolhouse, analytic thinking is encouraged by a culture that trades in visual symbols (subway maps, digital displays), analytic tools (spreadsheets, stock reports) and academic concepts that trickle down into common parlance ( supply and demand, on average, human rights).”

How can this be, given that intelligence is highly heritable, and clever folk breed no more prolifically than less gifted ones? The answer is better nutrition (“brains are greedy organs”) and more stimulation. In every part of the world IQ scores have been rising, by a whopping 30 points in 100 years, meaning that the average person today scores better than 98% of people a century ago. People are also growing more intelligent, and more humane. It is not just that better medicine and sanitation allow people to live longer, healthier lives, or that labour-saving devices have given people more free time, or that Amazon and Apple offer a dazzling variety of entertainment to fill it. Street hawkers in South Sudan have better mobile phones than the brick that Gordon Gekko, a fictional tycoon, flaunted in “Wall Street” in 1987.

The vast majority of poor Americans enjoy luxuries unavailable to the Vanderbilts and Astors of 150 years ago, such as electricity, air-conditioning and colour televisions. Progress has often been stunningly rapid. Trade and technology spread good ideas, allowing rich countries to grow richer and poor ones to catch up. For this he credits the values of the 18th-century Enlightenment, summarised by Immanuel Kant as “Dare to understand!” By applying reason to problems, people can solve them-and move on to the next. His new one demonstrates that steady, cumulative progress is occurring on many fronts. Mr Pinker’s best-known previous book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature”, showed that humankind has grown less violent. During the 20th century Americans became 96% less likely to die in a car crash, 92% less likely to perish in a fire and 95% less likely to expire on the job. The share of people killed annually in wars is less than a quarter of that in the 1980s and half a percent of the toll in the second world war. The world is about 100 times wealthier than 200 years ago and, contrary to popular belief, its wealth is more evenly distributed. The result is magnificent, uplifting and makes you want to rush to your laptop and close your Twitter account. In “Enlightenment Now”, he does just that. To discern the true state of the world, he says, we should use numbers.

Negative news is one reason why people consistently underestimate the progress humanity is making, complains Steven Pinker.

Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker