A useful takedown of Steven Pinker's politically conservative brand of optimism

"Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better."

That is a classic self-improvement mantra promoted by Émile Coué (1857-1926), a pharmacist who in the 1920s promoted this saying as a sort of self-hynoisis method to increase self-confidence. Since self-improvement fads never seem to actually die out, adovocates for "Couéism"can still be found today. It became a saying that embodied the optimistic spirit of the "Roaring Twenties" in the US.

Psychology Steven Pinker, currently a favorite of conservatives, isn't an advocate of the therapy brand of Couéism. But he promotes the kind of chipper optimism that is called Panglossian, after a fictional character in Voltaire's Candide, a spoof of the German philosopher Leibniz.

Pinker also attacks "political correctness," which is kind of a baseline requirement for respectability among more literate conservatives who would actually read a book of Pinker's. Jeremey Lent did a good piece looking at the major flaws in Pinker's advocacy for smug conservative orthodoxy. (Steven Pinker’s ideas are fatally flawed. These eight graphs show why. Open Democracy Transformation 05/32/2018)

I particularly like his analysis of Pinker's Panglossian interpretation of GDP growth and economic inequality. For instance, he writes:

There is no doubt that the world has experienced a transformation in material wellbeing in the past two hundred years, and Pinker documents this in detail, from the increased availability of clothing, food, and transportation, to the seemingly mundane yet enormously important decrease in the cost of artificial light. However, there is a point where the rise in economic activity begins to decouple from wellbeing. In fact, GDP merely measures the rate at which a society is transforming nature and human activities into the monetary economy, regardless of the ensuing quality of life. Anything that causes economic activity of any kind, whether good or bad, adds to GDP. An oil spill, for example, increases GDP because of the cost of cleaning it up: the bigger the spill, the better it is for GDP. [my emphasis]

Lent also makes this important point:

By failing to analyze his top-level numbers with discernment, he unquestioningly propagates one of the great neoliberal myths of the past several decades: that “a rising tide lifts all the boats” — a phrase he unashamedly appropriates for himself as he extols the benefits of inequality. This was the argument used by the original instigators of neoliberal laissez-faire economics, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, to cut taxes, privatize industries, and slash public services with the goal of increasing economic growth.

He underestimates the age of that argument, though. It preceded the Reagan-Thatcher era. For instance, the Kennedy Admistration used it to promote their economic policies. That analogy may be valid in some cases, even when a set of policies may increase concentration of wealth in the short term. But an economy isn't a single physical entity like a boat. And, as fans of the Titanic movie know, even on a boat concentration of wealth can make a huge difference in outcomes!