That paper provides an alternate explanation for the long peace thesis.
However, it rejects “per capita deaths” as a good measure of rate of conflict, which makes it pretty dubious (people are fully aware that per capita is ideal for comparing homicide rates; why suddenly reject it for war deaths?) They write nonsense like:
Moreover, population growth is exponential [...] We should hardly be surprised that deaths from war cannot keep up.
More people means more soldiers, larger economies (hence more manufacturing of weapons), more and larger groups with reasons to rebel/fight/steal each other’s stuff.
They do have an interesting point with “war as information gathering/negotiations”. But a lot of the rest seems to be a conflation of “the reasons things are getting more peaceful are not nice reasons” with “things are not genuinely getting more peaceful”.
Violence might not be the exact opposite of peace. Intuitively, peace seem to mean a state where people are intentionally not committing violence and not just accidentally. A prison might have lower violence than an certain neighbourhood but it might still not be considered a more peaceful place exactly because the individual proclivity to violence is higher despite the fact violence itself isn’t. Proclivity matters.
I am generally sceptic of Pinker. I have read a ton of papers and Handbooks of Evolutionary Psychology, and it is clear that while he was one of the top researchers in this area in the 90′s this has dramatically changed. The area has shifted towards more empirical precision and fined-grained theories while some of his theories seems to warrant the “just-so story” criticism.
That paper provides an alternate explanation for the long peace thesis.
However, it rejects “per capita deaths” as a good measure of rate of conflict, which makes it pretty dubious (people are fully aware that per capita is ideal for comparing homicide rates; why suddenly reject it for war deaths?) They write nonsense like:
More people means more soldiers, larger economies (hence more manufacturing of weapons), more and larger groups with reasons to rebel/fight/steal each other’s stuff.
They do have an interesting point with “war as information gathering/negotiations”. But a lot of the rest seems to be a conflation of “the reasons things are getting more peaceful are not nice reasons” with “things are not genuinely getting more peaceful”.
Violence might not be the exact opposite of peace. Intuitively, peace seem to mean a state where people are intentionally not committing violence and not just accidentally. A prison might have lower violence than an certain neighbourhood but it might still not be considered a more peaceful place exactly because the individual proclivity to violence is higher despite the fact violence itself isn’t. Proclivity matters.
I am generally sceptic of Pinker. I have read a ton of papers and Handbooks of Evolutionary Psychology, and it is clear that while he was one of the top researchers in this area in the 90′s this has dramatically changed. The area has shifted towards more empirical precision and fined-grained theories while some of his theories seems to warrant the “just-so story” criticism.
Pinker seems to prevent good evidence for the long peace, but not for his explanations as to why it happened.