“The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species.”
Steven Pinker · The Better Angels of Our Nature, 2011
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Poverty has a thousand causes, but wealth has only one.
About this quote
Meaning
At first glance this line sounds paradoxical, since poverty clearly has many contributing causes: geography, conflict, disease, poor institutions, and more. Pinker's point is that these are obstacles and absences rather than active engines of production. Wealth, by contrast, has essentially one engine: the application of knowledge to solve problems and create value. The asymmetry he is drawing is between the many ways things can go wrong and the single, reproducible method by which sustained material improvement actually happens.
Context
This compact formulation appears in Enlightenment Now, published in 2018, where Pinker argues that science, reason, and humanist values have driven the dramatic reductions in poverty seen across the world over the past two centuries. He is building a case that prosperity is not the natural state of human affairs but an achievement, one made possible by the systematic generation and use of knowledge. By reducing the causes of wealth to one thing, he is making a point about policy and priorities: the route out of poverty is not mysterious, even if clearing the obstacles on that route is genuinely hard.
About the author
Steven Pinker is a cognitive psychologist and linguist based in the United States who has written influential books on language acquisition, human nature, violence, and progress. His work is characterized by a commitment to empirical evidence and a willingness to defend conclusions that run against the grain of much mainstream intellectual culture. He is associated with the view that Enlightenment values, particularly the growth and application of knowledge, are the most reliable path to improving human welfare.
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