Cherry-Picked Data in Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now

Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now says that progress occurs because people continually solve problems, but Pinker himself gets in the way of progress by cherry-picking the data to deny that problems exist.

The two exceptions are nuclear war and global warming, which could both have such disastrous consequences that he suggests solutions to them. But on other issues, Enlightenment Now minimizes or denies one problem after another.

Pinker refers to one study that says we are not going through the sixth mass extinction in the history of the Earth, as if it were more important than the many studies that say we are experiencing this mass extinction.

Pinker repeats a standard conservative talking point by saying that poverty is not a big problem in America because most of the poor have color televisions, cell phones, and appliances. But he does not mention the standard liberal response: the price of these consumer goods has gone down, but the price of housing, education, and medical care has gone up.  People who are saddled with massive student debt or who cannot afford to go to college at all would undoubtedly prefer black-and-white televisions and free or very-low-tuition public colleges, which is what we had in the 1960s.

Pinker says that increasing inequality is not a problem, citing international comparisons showing that equality is not correlated with happiness, but this defense of inequality contradicts his defense of economic growth. To defend inequality, he says that people need enough to live full and satisfying lives, and it doesn’t hurt them if others are extremely wealthy.  But to defend economic growth, he says that international comparisons show that higher income continues to increase happiness regardless of how wealthy a nation is. 

Which one is it? If people just need enough to live full and satisfying lives to be happy, then growth beyond that point does not make people happier.  If growth beyond that point makes people happier, then reducing inequality by redistributing income from the top 10% to the lower 90% would make the great majority of people happier at the expense of a small minority. Pinker has obviously never thought this through: he cherry-picks the data that defends the status quo, inequality and economic growth, without realizing that he is contradicting himself.

Graph from Enlightenment Now, page 249

But Pinker's strangest abuse of data is what he says about work hours. He has a graph that shows very clearly that work time has been going down in Europe but that it has gone up since 1970 in the United State and is now about the same as it was in 1950 - something that anyone who studies work hours knows. He writes a lot about the benefits of shorter work hours, and one paragraph looks briefly at the historic benefits of shorter work hours in the United States and then says that shorter work hours, longer life expectancy and other factors mean that “the fraction of a person’s life that is taken up by work has fallen by a quarter just since 1960” (p. 251). How can he say this about shorter work hours in a paragraph about the United States, when his own graph just two pages earlier shows that work hours are rising in the United States?  It is enough to make one look at the footnote, which refers to a study and says, “Data for the UK.”

It seems that Pinker pulled in the graph and did not think much about it, because noticing that work hours in the United States have been going up for the last fifty years would contradict his preconceptions about progress. When he wrote the paragraph about the benefits of shorter work hours in the United States, which comes two pages later, rather than looking at his own graph and seeing that work hours in the United States are not falling, he looked for a reference that would confirm his idea about progress, could not find one for the United States, and cherry-picked one about the UK instead, pulling it into the book even though it is totally out of place in this paragraph about the United States.

It is enough to cast doubt on the entire book.  The book is very wide ranging, and it presents enough data about all the different subjects it covers to make Pinker look like an expert on everything, but when we see these examples of cherry-picked data, we have to wonder about how impartial Pinker is and about how honest the data is throughout the book.

Pinker says there is progress because we are always solving problems; if so, this book is an obstacle to progress because it is in denial about many of our problems. Extinction and poverty in America are not such big problems as people think. Rising inequality is not a problem at all. The fact that Americans’ work hours have gone up for the last fifty years is not a problem - because Pinker does not even notice that it is a fact.

Pinker also seems to know relatively little about the Enlightenment authors that he professes to admire. He does quote directly from Kant’s essays (without mentioning his philosophy, which is actually critical of reason), but all of the rest of his chapter about the Enlightenment is based on recent books about the Enlightenment, and Pinker shows no sign of having studied the authors themselves. He includes Rousseau in a list of Enlightenment authors on page 10 and in a list of anti-Enlightenment Romantic authors on page 30, presumably relying on two different secondary sources without thinking about which period Rousseau actually belongs to. He includes Hume in a list of authors who believed in “deliberate application of reason” (p. 11), but the first thing you learn when you start to study Hume is that he was an empiricist who criticized Enlightenment rationalism.

Pinker sprinkles this book with gratuitous insults directed at “literary intellectuals,” but literary intellectuals at least study the old authors whom they comment on. Some of us even take the ideas in old books seriously and believe they help us to think about what is a good society and what is a good life.

Apart from cherry-picking the data, in the section of the book about progress, Pinker refuses to look beyond the data and think about the good life.

Instead, in this section, he adopts the view that philosophers sometimes call “preference utilitarianism” - the idea that everyone’s preferences are equally valid, so a society is good if it satisfies as many of those personal preferences as possible. He gives this view a progressive veneer by referring to Amartya Sen’s book Development as Freedom (p. 248), but it is also the view underlying all market economics: consumers choose freely what they want to buy, and for this to lead to the optimum result, consumers’ preferences must all be valid.

Sen is talking about the developing nations, where people are badly in need of food and housing, so they do not have much room for choice.  But in the wealthier nations (and in the world as it becomes wealthier), most people already have the basics, so it is more problematic for them do decide what to do with their increasing wealth and  the shorter work hours that Europeans have and Americans would have if we dealt with our long work hours rather than ignoring them.

Of course, people should make this choice for themselves, but they should also think about what is the best choice to make.  It does not help when Pinker, as an expert on progress, tell them that all choices are valid, any more than it would help people to choose a good diet if an expert on nutrition told them that all choices of food are valid.

In classical times, there were four major schools of philosophy with different visions of the good life - the Platonists, the peripatetics, the stoics, and the Epicureans - and the small number of male aristocrats who were privileged enough to choose their own way of life looked to philosophies to help them make an informed decision.  If any philosopher told them that all choices are equally valid, they would not have been interested, since it would not have helped them to decide how to use their freedom.

Progress gives us more and more freedom, which we can use badly or well.  In a conceivable future, many people might choose to use their greatly increased amount of leisure time watching a high-tech virtual reality version of television, where the action movies are more thrilling and the porno movies are more erotic than they could possibly be in two-dimensional television.  Or, conceivably, there might a drug that has the same effect as heroin but with no harmful side effects, so many people might spend all their leisure time in an intensely pleasurable stupor.

Would Pinker say that these consumer choices are as valid as any others? If he lived in this future, would he write that even the poor are better off than ever before because most of them have virtual-reality televisions, which are even better than color televisions, and have all the heroin they want, which is even better than whiskey?

Progress means movement toward some goal. We cannot say we are progressing without thinking about the goal we are moving toward.

When Pinker defends progress by relying entirely on data and refusing to think about the good life, he is like a man driving down the road who is convinced he is making great progress because his car has elaborate instrumentation that shows its engine is working better every day - but who has never thought about where he intends to go.