Monday, December 7, 2015
On the Fact that (According to Harvard's Steven Pinker) War-Related Deaths Have Gone Down From 300 per 100,000 During the Peak of World War 2 to Under 1 per 100,000 Today
This is an astonishing fact and the reason for it is that warfare
between countries has become exceedingly rare (in large part due to
democratization, economic liberalization, trade, etc.). Yes, the world
is still filled to the brim with civil wars (and the occasional
international civil war - thank you, George Bush and Barack Obama) but
these tend to be less severe and, while the media loves to play up every
single conflict, the facts are significantly less dire than the
wall-to-wall coverage, thank God.............Recommended reading - "The
Better Angels of Our Nature" by Steven Pinker
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Pinker is quite prolific, I have his "How the Mind Works", "The Blank Slate" and
"The Language Instinct" and appreciate his injection of humor here and there in
the necessarily tedious prose of 'How the Mind Works'. He has had an ongoing feud
over the topics with Noam Chomsky for years which cuts both ways: either they are
being childish, or the arguments will synthesis progress in the details of human
nature.
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