## Definition **Progress as empirically measurable** is Steven Pinker's methodological and normative claim, developed in *Enlightenment Now* (2018), that genuine improvements in human welfare can and must be assessed through systematic quantitative measurement across populations and time — rather than through anecdote, media coverage, or cultural intuition. The core move is replacing "how does the world feel?" with "how many people are sick / poor / illiterate / killed, and is that number going up or down?" ## The Quantitative Method Pinker articulates the approach directly: > "How can we assess the state of the world rigorously? The answer lies in counting. How many people are victims of violence in proportion to the number of people alive? How many are sick? How many are starving? How many are poor? How many oppressed? How many illiterate? How many unhappy? And are these numbers going up or down?" This quantitative mentality is, for Pinker, not cold or technocratic but **morally required**: it treats every human life as equally valuable, rather than privileging the lives of those nearest to us or most photogenic. It is the only method that can identify causes of suffering and assess which interventions reduce it. ## The Empirical Record (Selected Indicators) Pinker reviews roughly fifteen dimensions of progress over the past two centuries. A representative sample: | Dimension | ~1800 | ~2018 | |---|---|---| | Extreme poverty (% world population) | ~90% | ~10% | | Life expectancy at birth | ~30 years | ~72 years | | Literacy rate | ~12% | ~85% | | Child mortality (under 5) | ~50% (hunter-gatherer societies) | dramatically lower | | Hours of work per week (W. Europe) | ~66 h | ~38 h | | Cost of one hour of artificial light | hours of labour | fractions of a second of labour | These trends are not the result of any single event but of the sustained application of scientific knowledge, institutional development (rule of law, property rights, international cooperation), and the humanist value that reducing suffering is worth doing. ## Progressophobia Pinker coins the term **progressophobia** to describe the culturally widespread inability to perceive progress despite its occurrence. Three mechanisms drive it: 1. **Negativity bias**: humans evolved to attend to threats and losses more than gains; bad news is processed faster and more durably than good news. 2. **Media incentives**: catastrophes are immediate and dramatic; improvements are slow and diffuse. A death is a news event; the ten thousand children who did not die of measles today are invisible. 3. **Expanding moral circle**: as humanist values spread, more beings and more distant populations enter our circle of concern, surfacing injustices that were previously invisible. The result is an apparent increase in perceived suffering even as absolute suffering declines. The solution is not optimism as a disposition but **calibrated quantitative assessment**: looking at the data, tracking trends, and refusing to equate "problems exist" with "things are getting worse." ## Progress Is Not Automatic Progress is real but not inevitable. Pinker insists that it is the result of identifiable causes — reason, science, humanist institutions — and can be reversed if those causes are undermined. The entropy backdrop ([[The Second Law as Backdrop to Human Progress]]) explains why: order and wellbeing are low-probability states that require continuous energy and effort to maintain. The current regime of progress is a hard-won achievement, not a natural baseline. ## Related - [[The Four Enlightenment Ideals (Pinker)]] - [[The Second Law as Backdrop to Human Progress]] - [[Humanism (Pinker)]] - [[Critiques of the Enlightenment (Pinker)]] ## Sources - [[Enlightenment Now (Pinker 2018)]]