Is War on the Way Out? - Institute of Politics at Harvard

[limpyhobbler]

5. Hi. Pinker does not really claim that total violence has declined, but rather only that

it has declined on a per capita basis. He doesn't dispute that more people died violently in the 20th century than in any other century. He says that as a percentage of global population it was less violent.

He thinks that is a step in the right direction and then bases the whole book around that premise. It's not clear to me that per capita violence is the best way to judge whether violence is declining. By that standard, if population keeps increasing and total violence keeps increasing in this century, Pinker would still judge it as a decline in violence as long as it declined on a per capita basis.

He also ignores other types of violence. For example if a village is burned down and all the peasants are forced out of their homes to go work 12-hour days in a Nike factory, he does not consider this a form of violence, as long as no blood is shed.

I could be wrong but that's how I understood Better Angels.