What you might get wrong about progress - Lessons for leaders: Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker, Author and Harvard Professor: It's only through history that we know that human progress has taken place. We might think that humanity came into existence with grocery stores full of food and smartphones and airline travel and for that matter, a democratic government as opposed to despotic tyrants. But it's good to appreciate that each one of these had to be clawed out of a world that didn't have them.

There are fantastic problems. There's enormous suffering still. But there used to be even more.

We need to know that things have gotten better as the result of human agency and human evaluation of other humans' lives and that those are the ideals that we need to embrace if we want to solve the problems, the very real problems that are facing us now.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Welcome to Meet the Leader. I'm Linda Lacina and I am excited to introduce you to Dr Steven Pinker. He is a Harvard professor, a cognitive psychologist and the author of the book, Enlightenment Now. He's here today to talk about progress. How are you doing?

Steven Pinker, Author and Harvard Professor Fine, thanks.

Linda Lacina Good. So why don't we get started? Can you just describe for our listeners and our viewers your area of study and the questions that you look to answer?

Steven Pinker I'm interested in all aspects of language, mind and human nature. How do we think, how do we speak, how do we understand? How do we get along with each other? What makes us fight? What makes us refrain from fighting? If it has to do with human nature, I'm interested in it.

Linda Lacina So why don't we talk about human progress? What is human progress in your definition?

Steven Pinker Human progress consists of increases in human flourishing, where human flourishing means all the things that we strive for, all the things that are necessary for us to be having this conversation in the first place, starting with being alive and being well enough fed that you can have a train of thought.

Being healthy, being educated, being safe, being connected. All of the things that go with being a well-functioning human being.

Linda Lacina And when it comes to human progress, how are we doing?

Steven Pinker Not bad. In many, many ways, better than ever. That is, life expectancy at birth is currently at an all-time high for most of human history. Life expectancy at birth was about 30. Now, globally, it's more than 70 and even higher in the developed world. But it's not only do we have extra life, we have an extra life. it's as if we've been given two lives.

We are more affluent. The share of the population living in extreme poverty is at an all time low, even though there are far more of us than there used to be.

We're safer. Rates of homicide have come down over the last couple of decades.

Happiness varies from country to country but globally, we're happier than we used to be. Suicide rates have come down over the last 30 years or so.

The world is not at its most democratic point in history – that was probably maybe 20 years ago. So the world has lost some progress in democracy but still, we're more democratic than we were in the 90s, the 80s and the 70s, let alone earlier decades.

So not everything is – to put it mildly, there are fantastic problems. There's enormous suffering still. But there used to be even more.

Linda Lacina Are there any statistics that you just found surprising – things that surprised even you?

Steven Pinker I was surprised that the hit that we took after the pandemic was reversed after a couple of years. So during the pandemic, life expectancy went down, poverty went up, GDP per capita went down. But they have all recovered and we are at global records.

Linda Lacina As we've talked about, things that have gone well, some things have declined. So we balance this out for people who are watching and listening, what are those that maybe might come to mind as well?

Steven Pinker Well, certainly the deaths in war, we've kind of in the wrong direction for the last three years because of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, because of wars in Ethiopia and Sudan and Gaza. So we have wiped out about 30 years of progress.

We're back to the level of where we were in the early 90s, still better than we were in the '50s, '60s, '70s and '80s, to say nothing of the two world wars. But war deaths are an area in which we have definitely gone backwards for the last few years.

Democracy is another area in which the world has given up some of its progress. The peak was probably in the first years of the 21st century. Then we got quite a bit of a democratic recession. Again, not as bad as it was in the 20th century but we have lost.

Women's rights again, very close to an all-time high. But I think there's been some backtracking in the last few years. And you certainly wouldn't expect all measures of human well-being just to keep going up and up and up. That would be magic. That would be a miracle. There's no reason to expect progress should occur at all.

The universe doesn't particularly like us, has no particular interest in our well-being. Things fall apart, new pathogens evolve, people get on each other's nerves. So it's amazing that we enjoyed progress at all and it is not surprising that there should be regressions.

Linda Lacina So and this has come up before. It might be hard for some people to register and accept that things are better than ever. Why is that?

Steven Pinker Well, because there's a systematic bias in journalism to make people believe that the world is worse off than it used to be. By that I don't mean a political bias or intentional bias, although there is something of a negativity bias in many journalists that and they have told me this, that basically bad news is serious journalism.

Good news is, you know, advertising or government PR.

I think this is a actually a rather destructive attitude but it's actually not the main problem with getting a picture of the world through journalism, which is just that if journalism is event driven, it's bound to be systematically more negative than the state of the world because anything that happens suddenly is far more likely to be bad than good because good things take time to be built up, whereas they can be destroyed in a second. All it takes is one rampant shooter, one terrorist to deliver a big jolt of bad news.

If there's a country that's been more or less successful in keeping safe, keeping crime down, the fact that there hasn't been a rampage shooting is not a headline. And so you never hear about it.

Likewise, things that do build up a few percentage points a year and then compound the fact that extreme poverty has been going down, that affluence has been going up, education's been going up. It doesn't happen all of a sudden on a Thursday morning in October and so it doesn't generate a headline.

The headlines then tend to be a non-random sample of pretty much the worst things happening in a world of 8 billion people. And there are always bad things that are happening.

And even though it is vital that we know about the bad things that are happening because of the event-driven nature of news, we're bound to get an inaccurate impression about the state of the world. And in fact, people generally are misinformed about the direction of things like extreme poverty, affluence, homicides and so on.

Linda Lacina In your opinion, are we also getting less good at appreciating progress?

Steven Pinker I think we are. That there is some randomness or at least variation in whether times are more or less optimistic, depending on the vision that leaders often want to promote. But I find that people do tend to be oblivious to how terrible things were in past decades.

There are terrible things happening now but people forget that, say, in the 1970s, the world only had 33 democracies. Half of Europe was behind the Iron Curtain and ruled by totalitarian communist dictatorships. Almost all of Latin America was under the control of military dictatorships.

Spain and Portugal were under the control of quasi fascist military dictatorships. South Korea, Taiwan – all of them democratic today. So, even with the Democratic recession, it hasn't taken us back to the '70s and people forget the '70s, let alone earlier decades.

Likewise, people look at the wars in Gaza and think the world is entering a new period of violence. It's a fraction of the number of people who were killed in the '70s and '80s, even in the Iran-Iraq war, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Civil wars in Angola and Mozambique killed hundreds of thousands of people. And people forget about it.

Even quality of life. People forget that -- when I grew up, only rich people had air conditioning, let alone private screenings of movies, affordable airline travel. Airline travel used to be a luxury. Long distance calls – that was an expensive indulgence. You would watch the seconds go by.

So we find that people tend not to appreciate how much progress there is. We do tend to adapt to it. So there's a sense in which things never do get better because people pocket the gains and don't appreciate how much effort and struggle went into attaining them for sure.

Linda Lacina When we think about progress, there's also a connection to freedom. Can you talk a little bit about that? What is that connection?

Steven Pinker Freedom, aside from just being inherently valuable, does tend to correlate with things like happiness. World Happiness Report countries that are well, countries that are richer on average are happier. But in addition to sheer wealth, a sense of freedom is one of the main contributors to personal happiness.

I mean, it's valuable almost by definition but it's also the data tells us that freedom is something that makes people happier. And democratic societies in general show greater economic growth, holding constant the level that they start with, are the countries that people kind of vote for with their feet.

That's where the migrants want to come to. Democracies tend to have better education, better gender equality, more safety on the streets. So democracy really is a good thing.

Linda Lacina And resources like the Human Freedom Index also talk about how you can lead to more tolerance as well as income and well-being. What is also that relationship to freedom and things like tolerance? What's that connection?

Steven Pinker Yes, they're not identical. I mean, you could have and in fact, we used to live in a democracy where homosexual activity was criminalized. But they do tend to correlate. So, human rights, human rights index and democracy index are correlated but not the same thing.

Linda Lacina And so when we talk about progress and what ideas or concepts have been sort of most responsible for driving, how we look at progress in the past, what are those?

Steven Pinker Well, certainly an evaluation of science, of discovering how the world works, some degree of optimism, not in the sense of predicting that things will get better but rather being willing to take a chance on actions whose outcome is uncertain but could lead to improvement as opposed to doing nothing. In which case, the thesis is automatic.

Some kind of humanism that would first of all have confidence in humanity's ability to come up with new ideas, solve problems and improve the state of humanity together with the goal of improving humanity, that is making people live longer, healthier, safer, freer lives.

It's not automatic that people strive for that. You could also strive for national glory and preeminence or for rectifying historical injustices or bringing the kingdom of heaven to Earth and fulfilling God's Word.

So it does depend on the idea that, you know, kids not dying, mothers not dying in childbirth, people not starving. These are really good things that we should devote our efforts to. There has to be humanistic cause. There also has to be the confidence that humans, for all our flaws, are stupidities. And there are plenty of them.

But we are smart enough, especially if we work in groups where we can correct each other’s errors, that progress is possible. That history is not cyclical, that history is not constant. We are not kind of consigned to living the same way because that's just what God ordains or just our fate. That improvement is a realistic possibility.

Linda Lacina There's an understanding of the enlightenment of the 18th century. How are those ideas important to you in sort of understanding how progress has evolved?

Steven Pinker Yes. So I called my book on progress, humanism, reason and science, Enlightenment Now, in a kind of acknowledgment that many of these ideas seem to have to first burst out in the late 18th century in Scotland, in France, in the United States. The rejection of dogma and scripture and orthodoxy and oracles and prophets as sources of truth but rather scientific skepticism in the sense of wanting evidence for beliefs and being prepared to revise beliefs when evidence goes against them.

The reason why I think the invention and trust in institutions that try to bring out the best in people and minimize our various flaws and inner demons – institutions like democratic government, organizations of international cooperation, scholarly and scientific societies, practices like trade and commerce, that is trying to make everyone more affluent, as opposed to just redistributing the resources that we have. Trying to figure out where wealth comes from and how we can have more of it.

Commerce as a pacifying force. The idea that if countries trade with each other, they're less likely to invade each other because you don't kill your customers and it's cheaper to buy stuff than to steal it. You're more likely to buy it. And just the thinking, ethics and morality from the beginning, rather than accepting commandments, some of which might be good, like don't kill. Some of which, not so good, like kill homosexuals.

But thinking, what is the best moral system? Whether it's improving the happiness of the greatest number of people, or coming up with consistent rules that I demand of others, what I'm willing to accept for myself, just that putting morality on a rational basis to prune and jettison archaic practices and try to become better.

Linda Lacina How important is an understanding or at least an appreciation of history to understanding human progress?

Steven Pinker Yes. Well, for one thing, it's only through history that we know that human progress has taken place. We might think that humanity came into existence with grocery stores full of food and smartphones and airline travel and for that matter, a democratic government as opposed to despotic tyrants. But it's good to appreciate that each one of these had to be clawed out of a world that didn't have them.

It is human ingenuity pressed into service to making humans better off that is responsible for the progress that we had, we were born into it as a species. Also, an appreciation of history also allows us to try to avoid mistakes of the past, like utopian schemes where some government has absolute authority to dictate people's lives. That just doesn't work out so well.

Racial supremacy, national glory as the ultimate aspiration as opposed to human well-being. We can see the results of failed experiments of the past, leading to world wars, depressions, genocides, famines. And try not to do those again.

Linda Lacina That would be very helpful. When we're thinking about human progress. Also, when we think about the study of history, the study has been in decline as some universities are pulling these programmes. How can that serve as a barrier to the lack of a wider understanding of just maybe the basics even on an undergrad level? How can that even in high schools, in some cases, the most high schoolers don't even take a history class?

Steven Pinker No, that's terrifying. Yes, that's right.

Linda Lacina And how can that serve as a barrier to one of appreciating or understanding progress?

Steven Pinker Yeah. You know, being aware of the time course of human history just sort of guarantees to be stupid that you just won't understand how we got to where we are. What we ought to do, what we ought not to do. Part of the damage is self-inflicted.

The academic discipline of history has become more arcane, more specialized, tends to, in fact, hate the very idea of progress that's considered to be “Whig history.” And there's a kind of mindset in a lot of the humanities that progress is a kind of a dangerous myth.

Now, of course, progress is not a causal force of history. There's nothing that sweeps us ever upward. That kind of Victorian Whig history just is incorrect. Nonetheless, it's perverse to deny that we really do live longer than our ancestors. And there really were more wars in the past and lower literacy and less travel and all the rest. So it would be foolish to teach history in a way that just glorified the present. But it's also foolish to teach it in a way that denies what is just staring us in the face. Namely, that progress is a real thing and it happened and it had to have causes.

But the grand sweep of history, Australopithecus to 2025, the history departments tend not to introduce students to the deep history, to long-term forces.

You can have historians who study, you know, France between 1760 and 1765, often in impenetrable academic jargon and with a resistance to, in fact, sometimes a hatred of quantifying anything, testing hypotheses as to what caused what.

So partly the academic discipline of history in universities has gone down various rabbit holes, making it less accessible to people who really do have a thirst for history. There were historians, Barbara Tuchman being perhaps the prototype, who made history come alive in a way that often, occasionally academics would kind of sneer at because it didn't have every single footnote and exception and uncertainty but still kind of served the public well in expanding people's historical awareness.

Linda Lacina What is the risk of all these folks == well-placed folks, well-meaning folks -- not really have a real sense of where they are in time?

Steven Pinker Well, some of it is, the risks are kind of fatalism, that because we are bombarded with everything that goes wrong. And it's good that we know about the things that go wrong, that we know about the threats. And then some of them are quite severe, like climate change, like threat of nuclear war.

But if people's awareness is simply a horror show of everything that's going wrong and they're led to believe that the natural state of things is for everyone to be equal and rich and healthy and safe, that and that any deviation from that is some kind of crime for which we have to look for the perpetrators, as opposed to thinking that history tells us that in the past everyone was poor, everyone was illiterate, people were often fighting. We should appreciate the progress that we made, then the tendency of people to be fatalistic or to be cynical or just want to tear down institutions because they think that our institutions have made things worse.

I think to be pernicious that we need to know that things have gotten better as the result of human agency and human evaluation of other humans' lives and that those are the ideals that we need to embrace if we want to solve the problems, the very real problems that are facing us now.

Linda Lacina Leaders who are listening to this and want to make sure that they are aware of the blind spots that can come from this. What are maybe tangible things they can do, what questions they should ask themselves as a gut check to either guard against overhype or recency bias or any of this stuff? What can they do to make sure that they're understanding their moment in time?

Steven Pinker There's a natural inclination of politicians, especially people of power, to, of course, criticize the incumbents. But if that just leads to a general cynicism, a general hatred of our institutions, it could be fantastically destructive. That is, it could lead to catastrophes like Naziism or Maoism, where people died by the tens of millions. Or immiseration or impoverisation such as in Venezuela or North Korea.

There have been politicians who have successfully parlayed a kind of optimistic vision into a groundswell of support. Barack Obama famously did it. Ronald Reagan. John F Kennedy. A politician doesn't have to be cynical, negative and fatalistic in order to mobilize a voting population.

Linda Lacina You're a cognitive psychologist. Are there any other strategies or techniques that people can use to guard against faulty assumptions or phantom worries or things like that, that maybe business leaders could put into practice?

Steven Pinker Certainly, to try not to be impressed by vivid images, anecdotes and narratives. That's the way the mind works. It's called the availability bias. That is, we judge likelihood and risk by how easily can I think of an example.

And so therefore, if you're judging the world by your own memory or what you read in the news this morning, it's bound to be inaccurate because all the things that just didn't make the news that day are not going to enter into your intuitive statistics, which they should. So we have more data, more trends, fewer stories, images, anecdotes.

Also, contrary to, I think, a widespread myth. Trusting your gut is generally not a good idea. One of the most robust findings in psychology is that if you compare the intuitions of experts against even a simple statistical formula, I'm not even talking about an AI algorithm. I'm talking about like a regression equation of the kind that you can do it with a hand calculator in the 1960s.

The regression equation out-predicts the expert. Sometimes even the expert, given the equation, is worse than the equation alone. Because the equation alone doesn't factor in all the various biases, tendencies to try to override what the data are telling us.

So, generally, going by the data will result in fewer errors than trusting your gut.

People will, especially successful leaders, will say, well, I remember the time in which my gut told me to do this and it turned out to be a fantastic success. The problem is that is thinking with your gut because you're not thinking of all the times that you trusted your gut or things where other people trusted their gut and things got worse.

Linda Lacina As an academic and a writer, how do you counter assumptions that you might make or make sure that you're being skeptical so that you're finding the right answer? What are things you do?

Steven Pinker Well, it's a constant danger. As the famous scientist Richard Feynman said, the first thing in science is to not fool yourself because you are the easiest person to fool. And so, that's why we have things like peer review, empirical testing. Even then, people try to spin doctor their data to verify their own hypotheses.

So being aware of that in oneself is a first step but also not having absolute control to dictate the narrative. But having to pass muster with your peers or even people who aren't your peers. Having the burden of proof to show why what you're saying ought to be believed is the cardinal rule.

Linda Lacina We have a Future Jobs of Jobs report that talks about leadership, soft skills and how they're going to be important as AI comes up, because we're going to be needing to have more distributed leadership, not a command and control type of thing. And so with that, analysis is going to be really, really important. It's one of the soft skills that was sort of put up. To any leader listening to this, how can I shore up that skill, that analysis skill in your mind, what's the number one thing they can do?

Steven Pinker The reason that leadership is so hard is that there is no algorithm that covers all the cases. There is the wisdom of knowing how to canvass a region of opinion because you don't know everything. There's bound to be other people, especially closer to the ground and day-to-day realities whose input is going to be crucial.

At the end of the day, with all of the conflicting signals, someone's gotta be on the hook to make the decision. And you know that. And because the key to leadership is to, you know, accept the consequences of what are inevitably fallible judgment calls while taking in as much relevant information from the people who are in the best situation to know it are.

Linda Lacina What has inspired you to study this topic?

Steven Pinker In my own career had a pleasant surprise that even though I have documented human progress and what many people take to be an optimistic view of our our prospect as a species, I've often spent a lot of my career arguing that there is such a thing as human nature and that human nature encompasses some rather ugly motives like vengeance and dominance and sadism and greed.

These aren't going away. We're not blank slates. We can't be reprogrammed. And in one of my books, The Blank Slate, just to reinforce that this isn't necessarily a fatalistic, pessimistic view, the idea that there is such a thing as human nature. I noted a couple of obvious historical sequences in which we really did make things better.

We abolished slavery. The Soviet empire collapsed more or less peacefully. We have lower rates of homicide than our medieval ancestors did. And when I reiterated this in a blog post, experts in various subjects from across the world said, you know, you could have even added to your list of declines of violence. Did you know that the rate of death in war has come way down in the last 60 years?

Someone else said, did you know that rates of sexual assault have come down. Someone else said child abuse has come down. Someone else said, it's not just in England where homicide rates have come down but also Switzerland and Germany and Italy and Netherlands. And I was sitting on all of these data from people who didn't know each other, all of which seemed to be pointing in the same direction. Violence was going down. And at that point, I thought, no one knows about this. You wouldn't appreciate it reading the news. It's only the graphs that show you how much progress we've made.

I'm in a unique situation to put it all together and as a psychologist to deal with two challenges.

One of them is why were our ancestors so violent? Why is there in our societies homicide and rape and assault and child abuse? But on the other, how do we manage to bring the numbers down? What are the better angels of our nature? As Abraham Lincoln put it, that allowed us to make progress. And that immediately gave me the title for it.

The phrase from Abraham Lincoln, “the better angels of our nature” captured the idea that human nature is complex. We have demons. We have angels. Human history is determined by the outcome of the tension between our better angels and our inner demons.

Linda Lacina Is there a book you recommend?

Steven Pinker Is there a book I recommend? David Deutsch's, The Beginning of Infinity, for me was an inspiration. He's a physicist. He's an expert in quantum computing, among other things. But it's a rational grounding of the very idea of progress. How can it be possible? And I think perhaps more than anyone, he's thought through what it is about, just the nature of ideas, the nature of reality that make progress possible.

Linda Lacina Okay. What keeps you up at night?

Steven Pinker A resurgence of militant nationalism, an eroding of the norm of avoidance of war, absence of conquest, what we've seen threatened by Putin's invasion of Ukraine. I think the world was very well served by the taboo against trying to change borders by force. Likewise the nuclear taboo. The idea that this is with nuclear weapons are just an unthinkable Armageddon and we just don't go there.

The fact that Putin is loud about using tactical nuclear weapons, whether we will deal with climate change, I think it's quite possible that we will but it's also possible that we won't. There could be tipping points. I think those would be two of the big ones.

Linda Lacina And what gives you hope?

Steven Pinker The better angels of our nature. The fact that humans are a clever species.

We have cognitive processes that can recombine ideas in an unlimited number of combinations. We've got an instinct for language that allows us to pool the fruits of our ingenuity and are our strokes of genius and our trial and error experiences.

We're smart enough to put together institutions that allow us to make up for each other's biases and to bring out the ideals and aspirations that we have in common. And most of all, the fact that we have made progress in the past. That means it's certainly possible to make progress in the future.

Linda Lacina And your last question, sir, what should leaders prioritize in 2025?

Steven Pinker Human well-being, life, safety, freedom, happiness, knowledge.

Linda Lacina And it would seem obvious to us. But why should people be prioritizing those things?

Steven Pinker It's what we all claim for ourselves? And unless we think that each one of us is special, why should we deny to others what we claim for ourselves? It's also what is just a prerequisite to everything else to having this conversation.

We're alive. We're well enough fed and well enough educated and healthy enough to be thinking these thoughts as opposed to worrying about our next meal or our very existence.

Linda Lacina Thank you so much, Dr Pinker, for being on Meet the Leader. Very much appreciate it.

Steven Pinker Thank you.

Linda Lacina And for our listeners, check out more video podcasts on the World Economic Forum's YouTube page. And for more podcasts and transcripts at wef.ch/podcasts.