Subtitled: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future
(UK: Oneworld, Oct 2016, 246pp, including 28pp notes, acknowledgements, and index)
Rather as I did with Rutger Bregman a few days, here’s an author who has a new book out recently, but before reading the new one I decided to back up and read two earlier books of his on my shelves. The author is Johan Norberg, a writer and filmmaker originally from Sweden and now stationed in DC working for the Cato Institute (which I did not realize until just now, the Cato Institute being a libertarian think tank and thus making him slightly suspect). His newest book, from 2025, is called Peak Human: What We Can Learn From History’s Greatest Civilizations (which sounds like it might align with Jared Diamond’s COLLAPSE), a big 500 page book; before that was Open: The Story of Human Progress, from 2020, a big 400 page book; and before that, the one I just read this past week, is Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, from 2016, a much slenderer book of only some 200 pages. He’s written lots of other books, mostly published only in Swedish, since 1994. And I’ll mention that the three books of his that I have, though ordered from Amazon.com, are British publications; the books apparently aren’t available from US publishers.
PROGRESS aligns neatly with books by Hans Rosling (et al) and Steven Pinker, documenting in great detail the ways progress has been made along various dimensions, mostly just in the past couple hundred years, despite common beliefs that the world is getting worse all the time. Continue reading →
