A criticism by way of criticism of an article pushing it - <a href="https://fair.org/home/the-radical-dishonesty-of-david-brooks/" rel="nofollow">https://fair.org/home/the-radical-dishonesty-of-david-brooks...</a> - from a "co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC" FWIW.<p>The overall thrust seems pretty damning (given how much technology improved recently, why hasn't that turned into more income and leisure time improvements for many?), enough to seriously dampen my interest in the book itself:<p>> The problem with the Brooks/Pinker story is that we expect the economy/people to get richer through time. After all, technology and education improve. In the ’50s, we didn’t have the Internet, cell phones and all sorts of other goodies. In fact, at the start of the ’50s, we didn’t even have the polio vaccine.<p>> The question is not whether we are better off today than we were 60 years ago. It would be incredible if we were not better off. The question is by how much.<p>> In the ’50s, wages and incomes for ordinary families were rising at a rate of close to 2 percent annually. In the last 45 years, they have barely risen at all.<p>-- from a bit later:<p>> Should we celebrate this reduction in poverty rates over the last 33 years? Well, the [child] poverty rate had fallen from 27.3 percent in 1959 (the first year for this data series) to 14.0 percent in 1969. That’s a drop of 13.3 percentage points in just ten years. The net direction in the last 47 years has been upward.