has the decline of violence reversed since the better angels of
TRANSCRIPT
Has the Decline of Violence Reversed since The Better Angels of Our Nature was Written?
Steven Pinker
Many journalists, citing recent violence in Syria, Iraq, Gaza, and Ukraine, have asked me whether the decline of violence has gone into reverse since The Better Angels of Our Nature was written. The question betrays the same statistical misconceptions that led me to write Better Angels in the first place. People always think that violence has increased because they reason from memorable examples rather than from global data. If at any time you cherry-pick the most violent place in the world, then you’ll discover that yes, it’s violent. That has nothing to do with overall rates or trends in violence. The basic problem is that journalism is a systematically misleading way to understand the world. News is about things that happen, not about things that don’t happen. You never see a reporter standing on the streets of Angola, Sri Lanka, or Vietnam saying “I’m here reporting that a war has not broken out today.” It’s only by looking at data on the world as a whole that you get an accurate picture of the trends. Objectively, there has indeed been an uptick in war deaths in 2013 compared to 2012 (it’s too early to have data for 2014), mostly due to the war in Syria. But the overall level of deaths is still far below those of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, when the world was a far more dangerous place. Even putting aside the obvious examples (such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 3-million-death war in Vietnam), one sees that the conflicts of today are far less damaging than those of past decades. For instance, the 1980s saw an eight-year war between Iran and Iraq that killed more than half a million people and threatened to block the flow of oil from the Persian gulf, which would have brought the world economy to a standstill. A decade before, the Yom Kippur War killed 12,000 people (six time as many as died in Gaza in 2014), threatened the existence of nuclear-armed Israel, and led Richard Nixon to put American nuclear forces on a higher level of alert. Here are some graphs (constructed with the help of Brian Atwood) which show the most recent available data on several categories of violence covered in Better Angels. The data analyses in the book were closed in September 2010, and thus included statistics no later than the preceding year, 2009. In all the graphs below I show that cutoff with a vertical red line.
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Violence Against Children An equally virulent panic surrounds violence against children, such as bullying, cyberbullying, and sexual victimization. But according to a 2014 literature review by David Finkelhor and his colleagues, “Of 50 trends in exposure examined, there were 27 significant declines and no significant increases between 2003 and 2011. Declines were particularly large for assault victimization, bullying, and sexual victimization. There were also significant declines in the perpetration of violence and property crime. For the recession period between 2008 and 2011, there were 11 significant declines and no increases for 50 specific trends examined. Dating violence declined, as did one form of sexual victimization and some forms of indirect exposure.” The highly publicized 2012 Sandy Hook massacre has convinced many people that schools are becoming increasingly unsafe. Not true. According to a recent summary of a 2013 joint survey by the Departments of Justice and Education: “•Since 1992, the rate of "victimization," which includes violent crimes such as assault and rape as well as non-violent crimes such as robbery, pursesnatching and pickpocketing, has plummeted, from 181.5 incidents per 1,000 students to 49.2 per 1,000 in 2011, the latest complete year for which statistics are available. •Overall, the number of reported "non-fatal victimizations" has dropped by 71%, from 4.3 million in 1992 to 1.2 million in 2011. •During the 2009-2010 school year, researchers found 1,396 homicides with victims ages 5 to 18. Of those, only 19 took place at school. During the 2010 calendar year, only three of the reported 1,456 youth suicides took place at school. •Though rare, homicides, suicides and deaths involving intervention by police at school or on the way to or from school dropped 46%, from 57 in the 1992-1993 school year to 31 in the 2010-2011 school year. Over 19 years, researchers counted 863 deaths, or about 45 per year.”
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Concluding Remarks If you base your beliefs about the state of the world on what you read in the news, your beliefs will be incorrect. This is not because of a conspiracy among journalists to hide or distort the truth. It’s because of an interaction between the nature of news—it’s about things that happen, particularly bad things—and the nature of human cognition. Forty years ago Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that people base their estimates of risk on how easily they can recall examples from memory. As long as rates of violence have not fallen to zero, the news media will always have examples of violence to serve us. It’s only by (1) counting the violent incidents, (2) scaling them by the number of opportunities for violence to occur, and (3) seeing how this ratio changes over time that one can get an objective sense of trends in violence. When one does this, one sees that global trends since the completion of The Better Angels of Our Nature show no reversal of the historical decline of violence, and in every case except the effects of the war in Syria, a continuation of the decline.