Lower childhood mortality, less poverty, longer life expectancy, less violent crime, less disease, more equality, less war. Things are getting better, along almost every metric we can think of. It's not just "different". It's also not just Pinker's work confirming that, OurWorldInData is good on this topic too.
The only sensible argument I've heard to the contrary is that our systemic tail risks have gotten bigger. Which is accurate but doesn't change the fact that things are much better for almost everyone presuming that such risks can be mitigated.
Jason Hinkel's are especially good: https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1334072469091708929?l...
(1) Hinkel falsely concludes that "The poverty rate has worsened dramatically since 1981", using a graph of the number of people in poverty (which increases by ~31% between 1981 to 2013) as justification. The rate did not increase. The rate decreased according to his own graph! The population increased by 59% over that same time period, so the correct conclusion from his own data is that the poverty rate actually reduced over that same time period.
(2) Not only is poverty better, but almost every other meaningful metric (disease/mortality/war deaths/crime deaths) is also better, which he hand-waves away in a single paragraph after falsely asserting that the poverty rate has gone up!
It is borderline dishonest, or perhaps at best he is innumerate. If this is the best rebuttal then I am even more confident in the conclusion that things are getting better - MUCH better - aside from a number of existential tail risks that we need to mitigate.
Also,
> only 5% of new income from global growth goes to the poorest 60% of humanity – people living on less than $7.40/day.
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-...
It's also ridiculous for him to say that China doesn't use policies that Pinker advocates for. That's absolutist and binary thinking. Pinker would advocate for the open market liberalising policies of Deng Xiaoping relative to Maoist economic authoritarianism, which helped to lift millions out of poverty in China, even though there's still a lot that he doesn't agree with China's system.
If Pinker doesn't like Putin's strongman behavior in the region should he exclude Russia from his statistics on improving world peace? If Pinker doesn't like the US healthcare system should he exclude the US from his statistics on childhood mortality?
This is a dishonest rhetorical strategy that Hinkel is employing. It's clear to me now that Hinkel is a bad faith salesman who has set out to demonstrate his hypothesis at all costs.
Hinkel's argument is that Pinker uses "is the world getting better?" as a proxy for "are my preferred policies making the world better?". If policy evaluation is their goal, the ad-hoc exclusion of China is overly simplistic, but so is drawing policy conclusions from overall trends without examining what's driving the trends. Both Pinker and Hinkel should be measuring the degree to which various policies were applied and evaluate poverty-reduction against that quantity.
Here are other links that concern another one of his books (Enlightenment …): https://historyforatheists.com/2016/11/the-dark-ages-popery-... (I haven't read any of these reviews though).
Specifically I used the word "changing" rather than "improving" because within the tech world (and to a degree the larger world of product) there is a long history of new and novel equating to better, hence the tired ad slogan "new and improved!" That emphasis on newness as desirable is a result of the many measurable improvements that did result from the rapid pace of innovation that occurred in the 19th and 20th century, improvements that were obviously perceptible in that they resulted in large leaps forward vs incrementally over long time periods.
Also, to claim that there has been improvements for large-scale populations via some new thing is nowhere close to being sufficient to explain how that new thing is an improvement for the individual customer.