Enlightenment Now was easily Pinker's worst book. It took the counter-intuitive theme ("hey, things are not so bad when you look at the data") of Better Angels of Our Nature – which is a great book – and ran with it. Enlightenment Now is really two books: the first part deals with (chapter by chapter) a successive list of indicators of human progress. It's second part deals with the philosophical reasons behind human progress, what collectively are called enlightenment ideals.

Let's put to one side the second part of the book which is some of the worst material Pinker has put down on paper – not in terms of style of course, he writes like an angel, but in terms of philosophical content.

What struck me about the first part was where he deals with inequality. It is demonstrably true using Pinker's own metrics and datasets that economic progress is not distributed evenly. To put it very simply the data shows that the middle class is becoming hollowed out in the developed world. Where is that wealth flowing to? The rich in the developed world and the poor in the developing world. The argument goes like this: because the number of very poor and poor that are being lifted out of poverty in the developing world outnumbers the middle class that are losing their wealth in the developed world, then the current system is great because smaller overall numbers are better. QED.

You can attack this position from two angles. First, as Jason Hickel does by saying that the way poverty has been and is being measured is broken in some way. Second, in a way that is more compelling which is this: that the global and regional and national growth in wealth ought to be more evenly distributed. The current distribution is fundamentally and deliberately skewed. That would be the tack I would take. I would say, why do there have to be losers?

And isn't this what Brexit in the UK, the Yellow Vests in France, and the election of Trump in the US demonstrate? It shows that many feel squeezed and left behind. This was the first time I felt like saying to Pinker, "Well, look at you, a successful author in a developed country – do you not care about how your average countryman is doing?" Extreme and rising inequality is bad in and of itself. We know this because historically and in the present day when societies are more equal the knock on effects are felt in every sector of society. There's a reason people point to the Nordic model, they're not pulling this stuff out of their butts you know.

To Hickel's argument I would say this. Pinker is correct that where one draws the line of absolute poverty is irrelevant because the data shows that no matter where one draws the line (at that level of things) the numbers show poverty (at the global level, for the poorest of the poor) is decreasing. I think Hickel is correct in pointing out that all rich countries have protected their economies and continue to protect their domestic economies, Hickel lists a number of authors who pointed this out to which I would add How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor by Erik S Reinert. But that doesn't refute the data, it just refutes Pinker's ideology.

People like Hickel are basically anti-capitalist which for me is a non-starter. I'm opened to being proved otherwise. Don't get me wrong: crony capitalism can be critiqued, as can the excesses of capitalism – but I think people like Hickel would criticise capitalism itself which as I say for me doesn't fly. On the other hand people like Pinker either don't see or choose to downplay the ills of neoliberal globalist unfettered capitalism.

What bugs me about Hickel's take is that it feels like he's suggesting we can either have capitalism or public education, that we can have capitalism or public health programs. And so on. I don't think Pinker would be against such systems. All the most successful nations show that capitalism and some socialist policy can work hand-in-hand very well indeed. This is the debate we need to have I think, and urgently before skyrocketing inequality leads to violent social unrest and God knows who'll get into power then and God knows what cuckoo ideology they'll have. The wealthy have rigged the system in their favour. By the wealthy I mean, wealthy individual humans and wealthy corporations. We've allowed it to happen and now it must be addressed.

People like Hickel are awful. They rail against everything, scream that we're destroying the Earth (hint: we're not), and their proposed solutions are either socialist programs mostly _everybody_ agrees with and are implemented in _most_ nations or anti-growth solutions which are in a word 'bonkers'. Be very suspicious of people who say we're doing nothing right and who have a fundamentally pessimist view about humanity's growth.