Thanks, New York Times

Nice mention of It’s Better Than It Looks leads this morning’s Books of the Times.

It’s Better Than It Looks (and the similar, also well-done Enlightenment Now and Factfulness) make a fundamentally counterintuitive claim. When books do this, it may take some time for readers to mull their contentions. Then momentum for the ideas may build. Maybe that’s starting to happen.

That three major books making the same counterintuitive claim came out nearly simultaneously is not just some publishing-industry quirk. This shows that the evidence of an improving world is beginning to accumulate, and to become persuasive – not of course that everything is fine, there are countless serious problems, but that the main current of history is positive for most people in most nations.