it’s true that the world’s poor have gotten richer in part at the expense of the American lower middle class, and if I were an American politician I would not publicly say that the tradeoff was worth it. But as citizens of the world considering humanity as a whole, we have to say that the tradeoff was worth it.

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress, New York, 2018, p. 113