steven pinker paints a picture of our history in which supposedly everything was worse, when we wereory, we were raging these tribal wars — that is sort of the pessimistic view. what i am trying to show in the book is that actually civilisation was, for most of our history, a big disaster. it started the age of warfare, of patriarchy, of hierarchy, of infection diseases like we are dealing with right now. and actually the lives of nomadic hunter gatherers were much healthier and happier and more relaxed than the lives of the city dwellers and the farmers who came after it... but how on earth... ..and why do we remember this because obviously we have made a lot of progress in the last couple of decades. how can you posit that the cave dwellers and the hunter gatherers were a happy people living in a state of sort of pure innocence? you have no idea! they had not left written record and you are just sort of imposing some sort of quasi—religious world view upon this sort of age of innocence, aren't you? no, i'm not. it is obviously hard to know how our ancestors lived 30,000 years ago.

steven pinker will have some thoughts.s is bloomberg. ♪ mberg. ♪ >> what you saw over four weeks from mid march to mid april, the fed added to balance sheet to trillion dollars. to $7lion to $4 trillion trillion. i think what comes out of tomorrow is they will slow down the pace to about $100 billion per month, coming down from $2 trillion per month. the markets have done their job by normalizing. fixedquidity of that has the liquidity in the system. tomorrow, we will get more violence. -- more guidance. of course, you conduct about the yield curve. the commentsost of will be around the fundamentals in addition to monetary policy. the fundamentals is really all about jobs and gdp. >> we have had a bunch of programs aiming to help companies and may be your job for you in some ways. the default right now is about 4%. what happens next? do we get another leg lower? do we get more fallen angels? >> that is a good question. when we spoke last comedy high-yield market was 12%, now 6%. $50 billion coming into markets like mutual

cognitive scientist steven pinker chartered this progress and it is staggering. human wealth barely advanced in the millennium after the year 1 a.d. and had only doubled a half millennium later. then the industrial revolution arrived. between 1820 and 1900, the world's income tripled. 50 years later it had tripled again. and again in 25 years and again 30 years after that. this represents a 100 fold expansion of the world's gross domestic product since the revolution. thanks to advancements in science and technology. and the technologies that ushered in this era were the result of curiosity, experimentation, failure, and ultimately discovery. this is the formula for innovation and it's something americans are particularly familiar with. we are a creative people with a pension for plunging ahead when we have an idea and searching for a solution when we see a problem. you know, it takes courage to be creative and in america, we encourage and honor that courage. we celebrate those who try and fail and courageously get up and dust off their trousers and try again. we