What is driving global disparities in wealth?

In their recent books, Steven Pinker and Jason Hickel offer strikingly different diagnoses and solutions.

Two contradictory narratives are currently playing out about how the West gained its enormous wealth, and how the Rest might hope to follow suit.

In his book Enlightenment Now (2018), psychologist Steven Pinker presents what we might call the creation story. On this view, Europe was historically unique in undergoing the Renaissance and Enlightenment, followed by the scientific and industrial revolutions. The subsequent radical improvements in political institutions and technologies dramatically enhanced living standards. For the first time, Pinker notes, there was a growing societal commitment to ‘the application of science to the improvement of material life’.

Such advances also made Europeans vastly more powerful. This enabled them to excel at the more traditional endeavour of conquering less powerful polities, until belated (largely Western) progress in ethics and political philosophy eventually caught up, finally putting the doctrines of empire and slavery to rest.

It follows that today’s developing countries are those where such enlightened ideas have yet to become adequately entrenched. Westerners should therefore seek to peacefully export ideas of liberalism, humanism, reason and…