GIVE LIBERTARIANS CREDIT: Welcome to the Golden Age.  Steven Pinker’s new bestseller, Enlightenment Now, is a remarkably broad and deep — and readable — rebuttal to the pessimism that passes for profundity among progressive intellectuals. While the Cassandras keep predicting disaster, things keep getting better for everyone else. For all the concerns about capitalism and its discontents, like income inequality, people at all levels of society keep getting happier as they get richer. Pinker nicely sums up the data about wealth and happiness with a joke:

A dean is presiding over a faculty meeting when a genie appears and offers him one of three wishes—money, fame, or wisdom. The dean replies, “That’s easy. I’m a scholar. I’ve devoted my life to understanding. Of course I’ll take wisdom.” The genie waves his hand and vanishes in a puff of smoke. The smoke clears to reveal the dean with his head in his hands, lost in thought. A minute elapses. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Finally a professor calls out, “Well? Well?” The dean mutters, “I should have taken the money.”

I highly recommend it in my review in City Journal, but I do quibble with his treatment of libertarians. Although the book is a paean to the Enlightenment’s libertarian values — free minds and free markets — he takes a few digs at modern libertarians that seem to me at odds with the data (including his own). Otherwise, it’s a great book for us Cornucopians to enjoy, as is Gregg Easterbrook’s new one, It’s Better Than It Looks.