From a strictly rational perspective, one should be willing to endure the same risk either to make a gain or to avoid a loss of the same amount. For instance, most of us have an unreasonably strong aversion to losses. The context that led to accurate shortcuts the past few hundred thousand years may distort our assessments in modernity.

First, our minds have not developed as unbiased calculators because bias helped us survive in past eras of our evolution. Pinker does nicely explain a number of inherent weaknesses in individual rationality, however. For society to flourish, it is necessary for citizens to be imbued with civic virtue beyond any rational calculus. As a result, rationality is likely not enough to sustain a good polity and generate social improvement. For instance, the book never mentions the disturbing political reality that it is rational to be ignorant of democratic policy, because one’s votes are so unlikely to make a difference. It is weaker in discussing reason’s frailties, particularly in group decision-making. The book is best when articulating the nature and importance of rationality. But human nature also restricts reason’s domain and effectiveness. Whether in a hunter-gatherer society or in the modern world, people make inferences from the evidence to achieve their goals. His overall thesis is that man is a pretty rational creature. In his latest, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce and Why It Matters, Pinker explores human rationality, this dynamo of improvement, in more detail. In his view, the limits to reason are what hold us back. All we need for more progress is better science and more peaceful collaboration. In both cases, he sees human reason as the engine of social amelioration, both in the technology it creates and the cooperation it commends. In Enlightenment Now, he argued that humankind has never been better off, despite persistent claims that things are getting worse.

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, he showed that violence-whether in the form of crime or wars-has been on the decline for thousands of years. In book after book, he argues that the world is improving through the continual application of our rational intelligence.

Steven Pinker is the greatest Whig theorist of our day.

Steven pinker rationality book