{"id":2914,"date":"2023-07-15T06:30:22","date_gmt":"2023-07-15T05:30:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=2914"},"modified":"2023-07-15T06:30:22","modified_gmt":"2023-07-15T05:30:22","slug":"review-do-humankinds-best-days-lie-ahead-by-steven-pinker-matt-ridley-alain-de-botton-and-malcolm-gladwell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/review-do-humankinds-best-days-lie-ahead-by-steven-pinker-matt-ridley-alain-de-botton-and-malcolm-gladwell\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Do Humankind&#8217;s Best Days Lie Ahead? by Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Alain de Botton and Malcolm Gladwell"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>With those four men listed as the authors, how could this have been such an uninteresting book?  It&#8217;s the transcript of a debate which took place in Toronto several years ago.  Pinker and Ridley made the optimistic case, de Botton and Gladwell responded as pessimists.  Pinker was the strongest, laying out a powerful case for steady improvement in the human condition, though he seemed (more than) a bit smug about climate change, among other challenges.  Reading what he said now that we&#8217;ve had COVID and the invasion of Ukraine, I still think he&#8217;s essentially right.  But to understand the argument better, one should read their books, not this one, which may have worked well as a debate on stage, but not as a text to read.  Disappointed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With those four men listed as the authors, how could this have been such an uninteresting book? It&#8217;s the transcript of a debate which took place in Toronto several years ago. Pinker and Ridley made&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2915,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2914"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2916,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2914\/revisions\/2916"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}