Bill Gates recently called Steven Pinker's new book, "Enlightenment Now," his "favorite book of all time."
Pinker — a professor of psychology at Harvard and the author of countless popular science titles — takes a sweeping look at human history, and comes to the optimistic conclusion that we are living in the most peaceful era humans have ever enjoyed.
He analyzes 15 different indicators, like literacy, quality of life, and safety, and compares data to show how these have changed over time.
Despite the doom and gloom we often see within the news, Pinker's findings are astounding. By all the measures he looks at, humans are much safer than ever before.
On his blog, Gates highlights what he thinks are the five most interesting facts from Pinker's book, and how they illustrate the ways in which the world is improving for the better.
Time spent doing laundry fell from 11.5 hours a week in 1920 to an hour and a half in 2014.
Technological innovations in the home have freed up people — especially women — to pursue "higher callings," like entering the workforce, pursuing advanced degrees, and creating art, Pinker writes.
The average amount of time Americans spent washing their clothes has fallen from 11.5 hours per week in 1920, to only around 1.5 in 2014, according to Pinker. He quotes Hans Rosling, a renowned physician and public health scholar, who says that the washing machine is the "greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution," for effectively giving people one day per week of their lives back.
But it's not just laundry where we're saving time. The average amount of time Americans spent on housework has fallen fourfold since 1900, from 58 hours per week — more time than a full-time job — to 15.5 hours in 2011, according to Pinker.
"But in most times and places housework is gendered, so the liberation of humankind from household labor is in practice the liberation of women from household labor," Pinker writes.
We have modern appliances, like refrigerators, microwaves, vacuum cleaners, and yes, washing machines, to thank for that.
You’re much less likely to die on the job than in the past.
Thanks to a push from engineers, lawmakers, unions, and journalists exposing how fraught the manufacturing-based workplaces of the early 20th century were, Americans are far less likely to die on the job than ever before.
In 1910, almost 70 American workers per 100,000 died on the job. That number has fallen to less than 5, according to Pinker's research.
This figure belies the recent nostalgia in political circles for a return to the US's manufacturing-based economy.
"With the shift from a manufacturing to a service economy, many social critics have expressed nostalgia for the era of factories, mines, and mills, probably because they never worked in one," Pinker writes.
According to Pinker, early reforms like employer's liability and worker's compensation were instrumental in incentivizing the creation of safer workplaces.
You’re 37 times less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning than someone at the turn of the century.
"Humanity's conquest of everyday danger is a peculiarly underappreciated form of progress," Pinker writes, and that's most evident in how much less likely we are to die from lightning strikes.
Because of advances in weather prediction, education, medical treatment, and safety systems (including lighting strike mitigation on houses and buildings), Americans are 37 times less likely to be killed by a lightning strike than they were just over a hundred years ago.
Lightning strikes are just one example of how much less likely humans are to die from any sort of natural disaster.
The annual death rate for natural disasters in higher-income countries in the 1970s was 0.09 per 100,000 people, and that's almost been cut in half, to 0.05, owing to greater safety standards, disaster response, and predictive tools. For poorer countries, that number is much higher, at 0.02 per 100,000, though it's been cut from 0.7 in the past five decades, according to Pinker's research.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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