P(Violence) is a lot easier to calculate than P(Violence|Activity) for various activities. It also gets into definitional issues (is being born to a certain racial group an activity?).
But P(Violence) has definitely gone down. That’s a major part of Pinker’s point and is pretty uncontroversial. However, there have been specific spikes. For example, the introduction of efficient fire arms and longbows made casualty rates go up during the Hundred Years War. Similarly, right before World War I, there were about 1.8 billion people worldwide. About 17 million people died in the war so that’s about 1% of the world’s population. In contrast, the population around 1800 was around 1 billion. But in the various Napoleonic wars around 4 million people died. So if one compares specific wars one does get some jumps.
If however one looks at the overall number of violent deaths even from just 1700 to 2000 one sees a general decline. The last sixty years have been especially peaceful by this metric, but that’s partially just due to the population boom.
If one wants a real contrast, note that of early homo sapiens skeletons, about 5-10% show signs of violent death.(I’ve seen this statement before but don’t unfortunately have a source on hand for it.) That’s almost full order of magnitude more than the general violent death rate at the worst times in modern history.
P(Violence) is a lot easier to calculate than P(Violence|Activity) for various activities. It also gets into definitional issues (is being born to a certain racial group an activity?).
But P(Violence) has definitely gone down. That’s a major part of Pinker’s point and is pretty uncontroversial. However, there have been specific spikes. For example, the introduction of efficient fire arms and longbows made casualty rates go up during the Hundred Years War. Similarly, right before World War I, there were about 1.8 billion people worldwide. About 17 million people died in the war so that’s about 1% of the world’s population. In contrast, the population around 1800 was around 1 billion. But in the various Napoleonic wars around 4 million people died. So if one compares specific wars one does get some jumps.
If however one looks at the overall number of violent deaths even from just 1700 to 2000 one sees a general decline. The last sixty years have been especially peaceful by this metric, but that’s partially just due to the population boom.
If one wants a real contrast, note that of early homo sapiens skeletons, about 5-10% show signs of violent death.(I’ve seen this statement before but don’t unfortunately have a source on hand for it.) That’s almost full order of magnitude more than the general violent death rate at the worst times in modern history.