Positive Publishers Weekly gave the book a glowing review, concluding that "In an era of increasingly 'dystopian rhetoric,' Pinker’s sober, lucid, and meticulously researched vision of human progress is heartening and important."
The Times also gave the book a positive review, stating that Pinker's arguments and evidence are "as entertaining as they are important", and expressing hope that Pinker's defense of the forces that have produced progress will be successful.
The New York Times described the book as "an excellent book, lucidly written, timely, rich in data and eloquent in its championing of a rational humanism that is — it turns out — really quite cool."
The Economist agreed with Pinker that "barring a cataclysmic asteroid strike or nuclear war, it is likely that (the world) will continue to get better". Timothy Sandefur, writing for
The Objective Standard, praised the book, noting, "Pinker's catalog of improvements is enjoyable, largely thanks to his witty style and skill at examining progress in unexpected ways." In
Skeptical Inquirer Kendrick Frazier concurs that Pinker "argues [his] case eloquently and... effectively, drawing on both the demographic data and our improved understanding of human biases that get in our way of seeing the truth." In
Nature,
Ian Goldin wrote that Pinker should have focused more on future risks, although Pinker did devote a chapter to existential threats, and concludes with "But for the many overwhelmed by gloom, it is a welcome antidote." A review in the
London Evening Standard agrees with Pinker's summary of how rationality has improved the world, and states "On Islamism, where his optimism falters, we have the interesting phenomenon of Muslim youth — not least in countries like Afghanistan — becoming less liberal than their parents" although they do not provide a source for this claim. John P. Tang, writing in
The Journal of Economic History, stated that Pinker demonstrates that "humanity has never had it so good, things until recently were much worse, and life will likely continue to improve." He stated the book provides an "empirical and quantitative approach to the topic, perhaps to the chagrin of
humanities scholars, but consistent with current scholarship in the
social sciences and economic history." He critiqued the book for its reliance on
utilitarianism due to its practical difficulties, and for not convincingly demonstrating that it was the Enlightenment that caused the trends Pinker identifies.
Negative Kirkus Reviews called it "overstuffed", and noted though Pinker is progressive, "the academically orthodox will find him an apostate". Some reviewers disagreed with Pinker's quantitative approach to assessing progress.
Booklist stated that "(Pinker's) seemingly casual dismissal of ethics concerns surrounding the
Tuskegee experiment is troubling to say the least." Pinker had written that the Tuskegee experiment "was patently unethical by today’s standards, though it’s often misreported to pile up the indictment," and when properly reported, "when the study began, it may even have been defensible by the standards of the day." Political scientist Nicolas Guilhot sharply criticizes the book for what he sees as "finessed statistics" marshaled in service of preconceived conclusions, and for being "one inch deep". He concludes: "Much of what Pinker writes about the humanities would be a comical caricature if it did not represent a coherent ideological offensive that is reshaping higher education and research." In the
Los Angeles Review of Books, Stanford University historian Jessica Riskin summarizes the book as "a knot of Orwellian contradictions". She states that Pinker believes that skepticism is a negative influence on society, and objects that the very Enlightenment heroes Pinker praises, such as
Immanuel Kant,
David Hume,
Denis Diderot and
Adam Smith, were all advocates of skepticism. She concludes, "What we need in this time of political, environmental, and cultural crisis is precisely the value Pinker rejects but that his Enlightenment heroes embraced, whatever their differences of opinion on other matters: skepticism, and an attendant spirit of informed criticism." Anthropologist and archeologist
David Graeber and
David Wengrow, respectively, criticized Pinker as a "modern psychologist making it up as he goes along," citing archeological evidence that falsify his claims, as well as criticizing his statistical analysis as wrongheaded. Enlightenment historian
David Bell claimed that Pinker's characterization of the Enlightenment was problematic and oversimplified. Bell criticized his monolithic characterization of the historical movement, as well as his lack of engagement with
Rousseau. Bell also notes Pinker's citation of sources he believes are unreliable, such as his extensive references to
The Idea of Decline in Western History by
Arthur Herman, whom he describes as a far-right author.
Susan D. Healy criticizes Steven Pinker's assertion that enlightenment have made humans today much more intelligent than our ancestors with the same biological hardwiring on evolutionary grounds, arguing that it would have been a waste of nutrients which evolution would have selected against for our ancestors to have capacity for vastly more intelligence than they could use in their environment. It is cited by Healy that the brain capacity of different animals is predicted by the food that was available to their ancestors when their biological hardwiring evolved, not by changes of living standards too recent to have shaped them through natural selection. The
apparent rise in IQ scores is explained by Healy as an artifact of forced rules that demand that IQ tests have
normally distributed outcomes and systematically leave out tests that give outcomes that are not normally distributed, a bias that is argued to be a purely negative influence on the scientific usefulness of the results comparable to introducing a noise generator and leaving out signal bands. Deborah Deliyannis, Hendrik Dey and Paolo Squatriti argue that Steven Pinker's claims that people today are better at inventing than people were in the past and that today's society is better at helping potential inventors ignore the increase in population, citing that there were so many inventions made in antiquity and medieval times despite the much lower population that invention rates per capita were actually at least as high as they are today, if not higher. This is cited as an argument not only against the claim that education have increased people's ability to invent, but also against the claim that creative people who would be diagnosed with various
neuropsychiatric diagnoses today get better help that helps them invent today and were mistreated so badly it prevented them from inventing in the past when they were not diagnosed. The claim that
free enterprise promoted invention that was suppressed by
feudal guilds, slavery and serfdom is criticized on the same grounds. ==References==