Humankind by Rutger Bregman

This book has given me loads of solid evidence to back up my long-held hunch that most people are good and that we could build a better society if we accepted that goodness. What’s more, Bregman’s writing is compelling and interesting; it kept me up past my bedtime more than a few times.

I also picked up another interesting lesson from this book: We should be careful not to trust science too quickly, especially the popular science that us normal folks usually hear about. Bregman argues for the inherent goodness of humanity largely by discussing well-known, influential studies that present a pessimistic view of our nature and then showing that the studies were poorly designed, misrepresented by the media, or have since been refuted numerous times.