if i'm asked it's in response to the same number of russian diplomats being ordered to leave the u.k. britain has accused the kremlin of being behind the poisoning of a former russian spy and his daughter in law as of the previous behavior we aren't to subpoena to the response of this kind and we will consider our next steps in the coming days alongside our allies and partners but russia's response doesn't change the facts of the matter the attempted assassination of two people on british soil for which there is no alternative conclusion other than the russian state was culpable and social media giant facebook has banned a company linked to both donald trump's campaign and the probe to push the data analysis from cambridge on lyrica has been suspended for failing to delete information about two hundred seventy thousand users who downloaded an app called this is your digital life the company's accuse of harvesting the data without

authorisation to build software to influence the u.s. election your absolute headlines on al-jazeera up front is up next. we understand the differences. and the similarities of cultures across the world so no matter where you take it al-jazeera will bring you the news and current affairs that matter to you al-jazeera. forget all the bad news about war poverty disease famine things have never been better that's the view of the harvard professor and bestselling author steven pinker who is considered to be among the world's most influential intellectuals in his latest book he denounces those he says hate progress and calls for us to stop whining and start celebrating how humanity has become richer healthier and safer than ever before thanks to the european age of enlightenment but do the facts support him or has he got it wrong this week headliner steven pinker.

professor steven pinker thanks for joining me on up front we live in a world in which authoritarianism is on the rise a world filled with more displaced people that any time since the second world war a world on the brink of a nuclear conflict may be facing the threat of climate change and you come along with your new much discussed book and light moment now the case for reason science humanism and progress in which you argue that quote none of us are as happy as we ought to be given how amazing our world has become amazing how amazing why we're any aspect of human well being that you measure has shown an increase we live longer more of a school or school life is safer or fewer wars and the point of the book is not just to document the problem the progress that's the middle section of the book i

tried to do it in seventy five graphs knowing that people will be incredulous the greatest of all in the book they just won't believe it unless they see the graphs showing. poverty declining showing deaths in war going down but also to explain why it happened i attribute it to a certain set of ideas that were that were expressed in the second half of the eighteenth century that we call the enlightenment and identify them as reason we should try to analyze our situation logically and rationally instead of falling back on tradition dogma and authority if we apply reason and science to making people better off we can gradually succeed and then i argue that in fact we have succeeded so we'll talk about whether we've succeeded with some of your claims about poverty and violence but your critics say you haven't engaged with the fact that the enlightenment the age of enlightenment also coincided with the age of slavery genocide exploitation colonialism there's a lot of downsides that came out of the i mean as

a dark side to dealing with that you just don't take into account that with that that's false i do take it into account and it's anachronistic the chronology is wrong slavery has existed since civilization has existed genocide is existence and civilization give mr given the first even a justification when it came along and said well these people are lesser than i was when people like john locke and the manual count was outrageous racist things about savages natives when people going abroad to india africa from britain from france to civilise the savages a lot of up a lot of scholars say that was associated with a lot of values that first of all it preceded the enlightenment colonization did not begin in the second half of the eighteenth century and also it. figures for the first time in history that spoke out against imperialism and slavery and colonize ation all the great empires that we read about in history you look at those maps showing the extent of the empires they got there by conquest the idea that conquest and cloning was when slavery began in the. nineteenth century is historically wrong

and it was the during the enlightenment the first arguments against these practices started to carry the day but you also did have in london philosophers like emmanuel counts. black people could only be educated to the level of servants native americans can be educated at all john locke the english philosopher the supporter of african slavery david hume the scottish philosopher said the only civilized nation is the white nation voltaire the french for the new tories anti semite you are saying i was in a dark side to these people who were there absolutely dark side to these people and i make a point that there's not a book of. tree kind of whole thing about that as idols they were they were flawed they disagreed with each other some of them were slaveholders some of the anti semites and racism racists. what i'm holding up of the ideas that at least the ideas of reason science and when those ideas are also used as nazis will turn to terry and we're going to actually know the word a lot of scholars who say they were you don't agree with them but they're also called as you say the flat wrong i mean the the nazis were proponents of the

counter of light and they did not believe in universal human flourishing believed in the superiority of the tribe you're very prominent scientists very well credentialed scientists some critics say that your book is less of a reasoned scientific argument more of a polemic because it doesn't put forth a hypothesis tested against the evidence and then come to a dispassionate conclusion you start backwards you have your conclusion and then you spend around four hundred fifty pages trying to find data and graphs some say cherry picked data to justify that conclusion what do you say to them totally wrong it's dead rob i we all agree on what human wellbeing consists of like life expectancy death from disease like. death from violent crime i plot them and the graphs go to a particular direction there you will not try ignoring data that doesn't fit your absolutely false now let's go let's pose talking about it like there was to global poverty you have a chapter in the book on prosperity you want to make the case that the world is more prosperous and less paul than ever before and you point to data showing the

number of people living on the extreme poverty line as defined by the world bank today one dollar ninety cents a day is down from two billion in one nine hundred ninety to seven hundred million in. twenty fifteen the world is becoming middle class you say but surely you know i know you know because you're a very clever well qualified guy that there are numerous studies a number of scholars who dispute that poverty measure is arbitrary as inaccurate that in reality to quote from a recent academic paper by the by an anthropologist of the l.s.e. quote around four billion people remain in poverty today around two billion remain hungry more than ever before in history completely irrelevant to which way the numbers are gone of course the definition of absolute extreme poverty is going to be arbitrary if you make it higher than more people will be in poverty that low or fewer people but no matter what cut off you set the direction of sound. actually if you look at the work done by jason here at the l.s.e. if you take a poverty line of five dollars a billion people have been added to the number of people in the on the poverty

measure since one thousand eighty one the trend shows the exact opposite when you move it to five dollars a day the top of the proportion of people with absolute poverty by that criteria the sheer number of people not million people have been added to the poverty total yes because ninety ninety one yes but billions of people have been added to the world as a whole what's relevant is the proportion but you also use absolute numbers in your book you say it's gone down from two billion to seven hundred i note the by at least the most widely accepted definition of stream poverty is interesting that the absolute numbers have declined as well but the main point is the proportion because people have been added so anything is going to increase you say widely acceptable this is one point you don't acknowledge in the book there's no caviar where you say for example professor pritchett harvard colleague of yours a development economist who studies this stuff says the poverty line should be one dollar ninety should be twelve fifteen dollars a day and when you make that simple statistical change the entire picture of poverty changes and the argument of your book basically fall apart do they not i don't think so again changes the problem really on

a daily change the measurement and everything changes well no not everything changes because i mean. that's a rather extreme redefinition that's multiplying by a factor of sex. of the world's experts on the subject well your thoughts are with respect this is a field you could have included the caveats and said look there's a bunch of experts who don't agree that poverty is what you declare is fact the poverty is falling plenty of development experts disagree with you is what i'm asking yes some do but if it's a question of just absolute numbers it's irrelevant if it's a question of whether we should set the poverty level that two dollars or three dollars that's irrelevant over a wide range of estimates the picture is the same you say irrelevant but you do realize that if you're a middle class north american academic and you go to someone living on say one dollar ninety one cents a day and say well you're not in extreme poverty what are you complaining about we should be grateful about progress he would she would probably laugh in your face well but if you compare that person to. that situation twenty years ago if you look at how many people die of hunger if you look at how many people die of infectious

disease they all point in the same direction toward improvement and so. he's always going to be the case that if you cherry pick the people who are worse off they're not going to be very well off you also mention inequality which is a big discussion point right now in the world today the world bank the i.m.f. the world economy or even the will of these or gust institutions are saying inequality is a problem of growth you have books like the spirit level linking rising income inequality to high rates of homicide imprisonment infant mortality mental illness and yet you say in the book economic inequality is not in itself a dimension of human well being that's right because for one thing the claims of the spirit level have been evaluated and shown to be false. there's plenty of studies that agree with the spirit level it's not just the. plenty the have refuted the ones with the largest data sets have come to the opposite conclusion that actually affluence matters a lot more than any quality. in fact there are three hundred papers published in

journals since the mid one nine hundred seventy s. linking inequality to ill health mortality high levels of violence it's not just the spirit level and their cover some of them. one hundred twenty countries just for the record inequality is correlated with a lot of other things with overall level of economic development with education with women's rights so the question is not whether there's a first or a correlation but whether you can show it to be causal once you get to account of the other way that causation and correlation as you know is a real problem and some say that's a problem in your book because there's a similar issue within lightman is a causation of correlation but just on the inequality you make the sweeping statement in the book you said you said that today the gap between employees and employers isn't isn't the gap it was in the past they're both likely to be overweight both likely to wear the same shoes have similar phones same t.v.'s which sounds great but then you don't mention that in the us today men who are in the top one percent of income earners live fifteen years longer than men in the bottom one percent a fifteen year gap in life expectancy and you tell us but don't worry they have the

same shoes and jeans well i don't say don't worry i say the insinuation is not the insinuation it's let's appreciate the progress that has happened it doesn't mean that it will never mean that there are no more problems to be solved with the world as it is perfectly using inequalities in the problem to solve and i'm saying if there's a fifteen year life expectancy it is and it should be something that you should place on a much higher emphasis on well life expectancy for everyone is. the most obvious criterion for wellbeing so we should raise everyone's lifespan right now in the last twenty five years of most of the life expectancy gains according to stanford university is going to the top one percent yes but the goal should be should not be reducing inequality as if if we got the top one percent to die earlier that would be progress i'm saying that's the wrong criterion for a problem which is just something that's a straw man no one so there's no doubt that that's an implication of focusing on inequality as the problem as opposed to early death that can't be prevented those are two very different ways of stating the if you don't recognise the link with inequality which to be fair you don't although there are other studies it does let's talk about another big issue which you address in the book climate change

james hansen the former nasa scientist says it could threaten quote the fabric of civilization. big statement you say some would say in a rather flippant way in the book that quote despite a half century of panic humanity is not on an irrevocable path to ecological suicide how can you be so confident given all the overwhelming evidence on the other side there i agree completely with jim hansen he would he would say the exact same thing but it's not irrevocable it's irrevocable then it's pointless to try to do anything about it i'm saying it's not irrevocable that we should face the challenge and look for solutions as jim hansen is not on an irrevocable but that's exactly what i'm saying it's not irrevocable if we make certain decisions where is your solution to the climate change problem which seems to on face value undermine this kind of positive picture you play on the book given this existential threat we face from climate change too soon to say because there are pathways to solving the climate crisis one of them would be. carbon pricing which would. mean that every

decision that people make factors in the damage to the atmosphere and to the climate and the other is the development of carbon energy sources and eventually negative carbon energy sources because we've got to start sucking c o two out of the atmosphere as well as stopping adding to it but you believe those things could work even though all the people who are involved in the field right now tearing their hair out saying none of this is working the trend is in the wrong direction things aren't getting better the trend is in the wrong direction doesn't mean that doesn't mean that nothing could work. those are two different statements i agree but what is your basis for saying be optimistic is what i'm wondering i'm not saying i'm not this is a relentless lee optimistic book no it's a realistic book you say whatever you think will rise to the challenge we can be conditionally optimistic conditionally optimistic that is you are if we if we take these steps and if we don't think these steps then there could be disasters yeah ok so let me ask a balance of probabilities. on the subject of do you believe as of today given the

situation we find ourselves the warnings from scientists the political situation looks bad that we are and that we are going to be able to solve climate change. i think the probability is significantly greater than zero how much greater than zero i don't know if it's zero then let's just let's just drive our s.u.v.s. around your i read a lot of reviews of you i've read a lot of your reviews new york times boston globe guardian a lot of the reviewers who read your book said exactly that even though they like your style they praise a lot of the content of the book they do accuse you of setting up the straw man argument making sweeping claims hussein zero nobody's things era but what if you are if you're so i'm just saying if you're saying if you're challenging the idea that we're not on an irrevocable course to come to this add to the anyone you want to mistake about climate change right now given the political environmental economic situation well as i said it doesn't mean is zero evidence that means it's bad well it would be bad if we don't do anything about it but we're not doing anybody keep reading that if we're not doing all of that so we're not we're not

doing enough it's not true that we're not doing anything about it and we're doing enough and even some of the worst developments such as donald trump threatening to pull the u.s. out of the parasite accord the. other individual states plan to keep to the to the restrictions other countries it won't even go into effect until the last month of trump's presidency that could be reversed by a successor even paris people are complaining about paris not being enough well the old enough to know that that is true paris and i but it's and you're about who likes experts expertise. empiricism you are a famed brilliant cognitive psychologist but how does that make you qualified to make these kind of sweeping claims about climate change when you're not a climate scientist yourself and many of them don't like the fact that you've made these kind of sweeping claims well because the the idea that it's possible that we will solve the climate crisis is not a sweeping claim steven pinker thanks so much for joining me on that front thanks for having. according to journalists are for hershey

discussing race in contemporary britain is still a radical act in the latest book british hersh argues that the u.k. has failed to reckon with its colonial legacy and in turn important conversations around ethnicity and diversity have been silenced the end result she writes is that bigotry and prejudice remains quote woven into the fabric of everyday british life everywhere but just how accurate is her she's diagnosis and what are her solutions joining me in the arena to debate this are our four hersh and claire fox the director of the academy of ideas in london thank you both for joining me in the arena for a lot of liberals celebrate the fact that britain is no longer the openly racist society that it once was you disagree and you write in your book white supremacies ever present in british society how do you justify what is a pretty provocative i'm sure to a lot of white people startling claim about the u.k. well first of all i know that they i don't recognize that we have made progress in

them i think violent hostile aggressive racism has definitely diminished when i speak to people ten or fifteen years older than me who experienced being regularly chased down the street or beaten up because of their race that's not something i recognize from my own experience so i'm not saying that we haven't made progress but i think what's happened is that because racism has become less visible and it's become more subtle in coded we become very complacent and we start to recognizing that ray think this on multiple layers clear fox. structural racism still exists for called white supremacy what's your response to that well i've no doubt that racism still exists i think the subtle coded point is quite important because i think it's so subtle and so coded that very often people are frightened about discussing race in the u.k. because they're frightened that they'll be as the phrase goes called out for being racist when not being racist a tall i think the difficulty is and this is an aspect of identity politics that i

feel very uncomfortable with in indeed is that rather than kind of taking people for what they say and for the ideas that they hold we start to see people based on their ethnicity or indeed on their gender or any number of things i mean the thing about privilege. i for will be aware that recently in the u.k. there's been some controversy about. people saying that for example a white homeless person is that it's somebody who's got white privilege or that the suffragettes were white supremacists and so on and this actually does i think on healthfully which is people to the color of their skin and that's what i meant by racialized inciting and i've course i'm not addressing that to. my displacing about an object of point for the sake of our viewers let me just clarify then putting aside people your own personal views or friends or not of people's uncomfortable feelings just or not to the language with using here do you recognize that there is

such a thing as white privilege in the u.k. today that there is a bias across society financially educationally towards a white majority which really would recognize that we're not well i think it's more complicated than that and it's interesting that we only talk about white privilege recently we used to talk about until relatively recently racism something which i think many people. wanted to fight against and many people were racist and it's the kind of rejection of this to skin color that i find you know on helpful i mean we actually have a. complicated to look at picture in this country where for example white working class used to not doing very well white working class boys for example are not doing very well in educational where is there's been a credible increase improvements in how bangladeshi young people it's doing there's whole different cities within ethnicities and so on so it's just not black and white ok let's put that to africa it's not black and white there's an appropriate

phrase it's a complicated it's a complicated picture in the u.k. right now and you're simplifying it i'm glad claire has pointed to the complex think that's exactly what might because about i think we've become very simplistic in the way that we talk about identity in our narratives about race race and kathy intersect the idea of calling a white homeless person someone benefiting from white privilege to me is absurd you know that people who are homeless are more likely to the truman told to have parents that alcohol and drug abuse to be in the care system so they have suffered from multiple disadvantage based on cost and poverty at the same time black people who are homeless and roughly have even worse outcomes because they suffer from both class and race that probation it's true that white working class boys are doing very badly at school but young black men between the ages of eighteen and twenty six are twice as likely to be unemployed as young white working class men from similar backgrounds so we see in the data the way that race in perth intersects overlaps yet there are still so. after in fact i know people this is not

a conflict let me let me ask you this question a lot of people would would not they had to agree with you on the point to make about the dater and and the racism and i'm sure clare would agree with a lot of what you're saying about there are two racism in the british study but you go further in your book you say for example in the midst of frenzy debate the united states you say is in the midst of frenzied debate on what to do about all this historical racism white supremacy britain in our inertia arrogance an intellectual laziness is not some would say that's because britain just isn't as bad as the us when it comes to the legacy of slavery when it comes to race and using britain is as bad as the us. i think one of the reasons that we have been very complacent in being on is the buy history of empires because many people convinced themselves that the british empire was far more benevolent and humane than the french portuguese or belgian empire and therefore we should be proud of it the reality can be both you know we didn't have the same legislative segregation about racism as the united states which was a plantation economy but we didn't force that and i colonies in those colonies

built the modern industrial british economy so history is very complex and what i'm accusing britain of is failing to be interested in its complexity you know we talk about abolition but we don't talk about slavery we have a very much i have a victor's version of british history as a result of having one second ago having what they are he were on the right side of history. i just i honestly don't i don't recognize this because every institution in britain it seems to me is full of a kind of. exploration of the fact that my goodness you know we're a museum maybe we represent colonialism what are we going to do about our empires history this renaming discussions going on discussions about statues and so on if anything i think we're over preoccupied about a colonial past i don't mind a debate about history i feel as though however history is being plundered for the sufferings of people in the past very often ethnic minorities in the past almost as a way of talking about racism today which is

a very different thing and i would suggest that whilst i want an intelligent discussion about history that it's got nothing to the legacy of it's got nothing to do with the contemporary problems we face in relation. to have a reality and i really like i write i don't know where to start. i don't know where to start with i have fundamentally disagree you look at our political leaders good brown david cameron michael gove they talk about history as the celebrates we subject class is that we learn too much my riddled with shame how many people in britain can name. of the african abolitionists he was fundamental to ending slavery we talk about when india merchants and i literature and period dramas we never call them slave owners or plantation owners we found so many ways of coding meth partly that it's more palatable and to say of credit that this history is not relevant is absolutely absurd there are people alive whose grandparents worked on plantations owned by british families and in slave their ancestors there are whole nations who

are part of the commonwealth whose identity is a result as a result of the transatlantic slave trade propagated and profited from by britain so this is very much living part of history my mother was born in the empire in a colony the gold coast as it was where she was taught and culture and civilization was superior to her own i think what this does is it this reduces us to all our identity and or ethnicity and far too passive a way i could say now you know as somebody from an irish immigrant background every think about me today is because of all the suffering that my family had but to try and explain contemporary politics by actually accusing people of white supremacist them because they don't know enough history or even implying that white people in twenty eighteen are somehow in any way implicated in the slave trade or indeed that black people in this country because their ancestors were slaves or dominated by determined by is far too passive a way of seeing people and the racism from a was transcending our identities and our history and making history not actually

being victims of it would have a lot of good i think it's really frightening isn't easy very sort of to ask you this but given you're a member of the majority in the u.k. is the easier for a member of a majority to say let's transcend our identities is not by definition what privilege allows you to do well that's the whole point is now i'm with you to the fact that i happen to be white right identity is a very important part of everybody's lives what politics allows us to do it's transcend that in order to fight the contemporary problems that we all face. any seconds last last word last word this is not about you kyra this is not about individual white people this is about a system and i think what you're saying keeps reinforcing this misunderstanding the idea that i'm accusing individual people i'm accusing people of that they should feel guilty for what the empire did this is not about that this is about systems of race and class that are highly relevant in people's life experience in the outcomes in advantage and disadvantage and we don't talk about them and i'm trying to start

a conversation about them because they matter and because we want the same things i would love for us to be able to transcend race in this country that we call do so until we've acknowledged rights and we've as far as of yet failed to do so we'll have to leave it there claire fox for hersh thanks so much for joining me in the arena to debate this that's our show from will be back next week. period.

stories of life. and inspiration. a series of short documentaries from around the world. that celebrate the human spirit against the odds the man coming from a missile base ok. al-jazeera selects change makers at this time. a potential new problem for donald trump the fired f.b.i. deputy director reportedly hands over notes of his conversations with the president to the investigation into russian meddling in the twenty sixteen u.s. election.