Hello, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Coming up, a bit of journalistic

introspection on this program, are news networks like ours making you unnecessarily miserable?

Many journalists feel that any positive development is like feel-good human interest stories.

The fact that global poverty is declining is not human interest

fluff, it's the state of humanity. Yesterday we hear reasons to be cheerful from a world-renowned

cognitive psychologist, plus reasons to be frankly terrified from someone else. What's the

probability of humanity going extinct this century? What was your

figure? Mine was somewhere around 10%. A 10% chance of global extinction. Prepare for that. Business

daily from the BBC. To follow the world's headlines these days from from fake news to murderous terror attacks,

from disease, pandemics to global warming, you might be forgiven for thinking the world

is becoming a pretty scary place. Is it really, though, more than before? In recent years,

one man has more than any other fought to make the point that actually, no, we are wrong.

It measurably isn't that bad.

The man in question is the Harvard University cognitive psychologist and author Stephen Pinker.

Fated by Time magazine as one of the world's 100 most influential thinkers, attacked in other quarters.

His two most recent books are better angels and

enlightenment now set out the case that in fact we are in a golden age of humanity.

We really never have had it quite so good.

And the improvements for mankind weren't inevitable either, he says, but the fruits of the

insights and methods popularized in the 18th century,

that period known as the Enlightenment. Yesterday, Stephen Pinker himself stepped into our

Bizdaily studio to enlighten me about it all. Over the past 250 years, the world has gotten

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