Is Violence Really on the Rise?

Many older people will rue the “good old days”. Some aspects are obviously individual preferences; which means they are subjective and hence there’s nothing to argue about on those points. How about something more objective, something that is not just an opinion?

Steven Pinker looked at the evidence of the amount of violence over the years in his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined: the book’s title makes obvious the conclusion he came to. But that seems so counter-intuitive when ISIS, Ukraine, Gaza, terrorism, violence against children and rapes are in the news/our minds all the time. Most people would agree with Michael Ignatieff’s description of today’s world:

“The tectonic plates of a world order that are being pushed apart by the volcanic upward pressure of violence and hatred.”

Pinker wrote an article summarizing his book’s points. So how does he explain all such news?

“News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a reporter saying to the camera, “Here we are, live from a country where a war has not broken out”—or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up.”

Bad news sells. And based on all the bad news follows what Daniel Kahneman called the “availability bias”:

“Since the human mind estimates probability by the ease with which it can recall examples, newsreaders will always perceive that they live in dangerous times. All the more so when billions of smartphones turn a fifth of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.”

And then there’s the media tendency to sensationalize things to sell more copies, as Seth Godin points out:

“By connecting us, by integrating cultures and by focusing attention on injustice, the media has dramatically improved the quality of life for everyone on the planet. At the same time, by amplifying the perception of danger and disaster, the media has persuaded us that things are actually getting worse. It creates a reason for optimism and then makes a profit by selling pessimism.”

So Pinker suggests looking at numbers instead: how many people died violent deaths in the past v/s today? He looks at different headings under violence: homicides, violence against children, genocides and of course, wars. The numbers indicate a decline over the decades. And so he wonders:

“Why is the world always “more dangerous than it has ever been”—even as a greater and greater majority of humanity lives in peace and dies of old age?”