Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and without calling names, regardless of who is a moron or you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In "Better Angels" he chooses "healthy, wealthy and wise" as his three benchmarks. We live longer (and suffer less violence). We have more wealth. We are smarter. That's what "better off" means. You can argue that's not what "better off" means, but you'd be arguing that we should strive for shorter lives, more poverty, and increased stupidity.

To simply dismiss Pinker as a moron either means you haven't at all read any of his books, or you yourself have a rather moronic definition of stupidity. You can disagree about many details in "Better angels of our nature" and debate future trends in interesting ways, but it's definitely not the work of a stupid individual. All the contrary, it's well thought out and highly robust in its arguments.

Also, "everything is relative" is an idiot's way of saying something something meaningless while trying to make it seem incisive. Yes, many things are relative to others, but there are also objective measurements and visible differences between material aspects of the world, past and present especially. Feel free to live with the violence and material resources of a 16th century peasant, with no access to modern amenities for a few months and see how you rethink "better off" when considering most of mdoern life (even for a majority of poor people)

Probably he is indeed a moron, or perhaps the shrewd academic.

The peasant who used to get one square meal in 3 days now gets one square meal a day. So objectively we are better off. ( And the HN idiot will gloss over the stats to point out how fortunate we are to have software jobs)