The world is not falling apart: The trend lines | Hacker News Reader

The world is not falling apart: The trend lines

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205 pointscrgt111 comments

Great! We're better overall than we were! No reason to rest on our laurels, though. How can we be better than we are now?

Here's some areas that aren't doing too well:

1. Climate Change - We're in store for a lot of trouble over the next few decades[1]. How will we manage?

2. Wealth Inequality - The gap is widening[2]. How do we reverse the trend?

3. Gerrymandering/voter suppression - The ones in power are the ones who draw the district boundaries[3]. How do we stop the feedback loop?

[1]: http://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/

[2]: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/12/racial-wealt...

[3]: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/the-pern...

> Wealth Inequality - The gap is widening

In the US, yes. Globally, no.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/upshot/income-inequality-i...

That just makes us even more embarrassing.

"Globally" includes the billion or so people lifted out of poverty in the last twenty years.

If globalization is what's driving down wages for lower-wage Americans that's not embarrassing, that's just math.

the us had a higher standard of living than the rest of the world for years. now the rest of the world is catching up to us; that means things will seem to suck for us by comparison for a while.

Simpson's Paradox: within almost every country it's widening, but between countries it's shrinking.

To clarify (since Simpson's paradox really only applies when tracking the average of a single variable, not its "inequality", or standard devation):

The local increases in income inequality don't contradict global decreases because populations are mixing between countries. If an average American moves to Zambia and an average Zambian moves to America, the result is that the income gap of both nations increases, while the worldwide income gap remains the same.

the article said we should rest on our laurels?

No, but you don't need to disagree with the article in order to make a useful comment. This is just a natural continuation of the discussion.

> 1. Climate Change

Unless the group think around nuclear power changes climate change doesnt stand a chance in hell.

EDIT: I would be interested hearing from peoples points of view for those who are downvoting.

There are other CO2 free options apart from nuclear.

If you believe solar installation is increasing exponentially a la Kurzweil then we'll soon have enough solar

http://bigthink.com/think-tank/ray-kurzweil-solar-will-power...

You can argue solar / wind is already cheaper and the differential is only going to grow

http://cleantechnica.com/2014/04/26/wind-solar-can-generate-...

Fair enough at the moment wind/solar don't work all the time but they are working on that. The cleantechnia article for example looks at natural gas powered generation for backup and we may get better at storage tech, who knows?

Doesnt use of natural gas have an adverse impact on climate change?

Not if it's replacing coal.

According to two very smart PhD engineers who work for Google and were assigned to look into this problem, there is no way to get there with wind and solar.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-rea...

It appears the people against nuclear power use a lot of "ifs" and "whens", nuclear is here now its cheap and its very clean.

We could easily ditch nuclear altogether if we could find an efficient way to store power.

Focusing solely on wealth inequality leads to strange conclusions:

  The richest people should destroy productive resources

But destroying productive resources (efficient water purifiers, better solar panels, computers that do more computations using less energy) would have been wrong in almost all of history - so why would we adopt beliefs now which make it right?

I think it makes more sense to focus on getting everyone to a basic level of freedom & choice; i.e. good health, good education, and freedom of information.

A successful world is one where everyone has at least these basics. In that world, we don't have to worry if the richest person's swiss bank account balance doubles, or they build a few more mansions. The problem of wealth is the people who don't have enough!

> The richest people should destroy productive resources

No. Focusing on inequality would lead to the conclusion that the richest should hand over some of their capital resources to the middle classes and the poor, ie: to the working class.

Say there's someone who wants to reduce inequality, and we ask them whether they approve of various scenarios:

Situation: "People living on a certain well-off island discover a way to farm more efficiently, which means they produce 10% more food, but that technology only works on their island. Is this good or bad?"

Inequality reducer: "This is bad, because that island's average income will go up while the rest of the world stays the same"

Situation: "We discover a free, simple cure for Alzheimer's"

Inequality reducer: "That's horrible, because Alzheimer's does the most damage to highly educated countries - those countries will now have way more mentally together, experienced 70-year-olds making them even richer, which will increase economic inequality with poorer countries where fewer people suffer from alzheimer's"

You have got to see this is a bit weird, right? It's a focus on minimizing local distortions sometimes can have a bad effect. In fact, imagine we really did have "equality" - the anti-inequality advocate would object to any change in that world, since it would lead to a temporary bit of inequality as information about the change propagated through it. Even simple things like the first invention of mechanized agriculture, or machines to make clothing, introduced tons of inequality at first, since there was only one copy of them at first! But we're better off now that our civilization doesn't have to devote 50% of everyone's life to growing food & making clothes by hand!

The other way to think about it is that that we just have to make sure everyone has at least a basic level of food, health, education, and freedom. That lets us focus on the main problems (people who don't have enough), and never could lead us into condemning gains in human quality of life.

That's an absolute straw man - someone wanting to reduce inequality doesn't want to do it at the expense of all other considerations, which is the assumption you've made.

Complaining about an increasing wealth gap does not mean that the only other option is perfect equality of wealth. Have you seen the breakdown of wealth in America? The gap between, say, the top 1% and the rest of society is staggering. The top 0.1% have more wealth than the bottom 90%!

It's a broken system that results in some people having wealth so wildly out of proportion with the rest of society, and its hard to argue its proportional to the value of their contributions.

What if it is not broken, but inevitable?

Then you need to speak to a philosopher…

There's nothing economically inevitable about spending public subsidy on the rich instead of the poor.

How did you get public subsidy into discussion anyway?

I have posted a simple question. What if large asset control inequality is inevitable? Is bringing down the wealthy, so that a new class of wealthy takes over and possibly destroying large means of the assets in process benefit society?

Thus far that is the biggest outcome generated by previous attempts at decreasing inequality.

>How did you get public subsidy into discussion

See sd8f9iu's comment below. For instance:

"If congress passes a tax cut for the top 1%, that increases inequality, not because some group has suddenly "found a way to farm more efficiently"

That is, public subsidy is naturally a part of the discussion.

>What if large asset control inequality is inevitable?

There is nothing "inevitable" about asset control because there is nothing "inevitable" about our economic system. It is all a function of the choices that we make, so you are begging the question to some degree.

Some of the choices are related to, say, tax-policy, as noted. But, the system itself is one that we have constructed from the ground up to allocate resources (from property rights to market function to fiat currency). We've created ALL of the rules from whole cloth, so how can we turn around and say, "well, that's inevitable", as if nature has decided?

>Is bringing down the wealthy, so that a new class of wealthy takes over...

This is a strawman similar to monkeypiza's comment above. "Bringing down the wealthy", creating a new class of wealthy that "takes over", etc. are not the stated desire or inevitable result of making the system more equitable. It's not a binary proposition.

When we have, say, tax code that favors capital over labor, while we simultaneously assault unionization, the outcome is clearly skewed in one direction. Surely, you see that these factors are out of balance in disfavor of one group. And, if so (and your interest is in fairness), then you would have to flip your original argument in the other direction.

First off, I have seen no evidence that that is the "biggest outcome." Also, how do you know such things are inevitable? I see no evidence that is true either.

>How did you get public subsidy into discussion anyway?

Consider all the wealth that comes from natural resources, often extracted from state-owned lands. Consider the intellectual property policies that create wealth out of ideas by state fiat. Consider fiscal and monetary policies deliberately aimed at ensuring the health of the financial, insurance, and real-estate sector.

That is how.

What precisely is the proper level of inequality? i.e. what is the Gini coefficient of an equal society? I've never seen it calculated. (It's not 1.0 since there are age effects, plus it's expected that immigrants will be poorer than well-established people, etc.)

You make inequality out as the result of purely economic factors, when it is as much the result of political decisions. If congress passes a tax cut for the top 1%, that increases inequality, not because some group has suddenly "found a way to farm more efficiently" or discovered a cure to Alzheimer's, but because we decided it that way.

And as matthewmacleod has stated, you have constructed a complete straw man for someone against inequality. The inequality movement doesn't believe in destroying productive resources. The idea behind redistribution (e.g. taxing the rich and giving it – possibly through increased social spending – to the poor) is to make up for what is seen as an unfair rewarding of wealth and inequality of opportunity. And before you say that this results in the same thing as destroying resources because it drags the economy, I invite you to look into the research being done on the negative economic effects of inequality, not to mention its effect on society as a whole.

At the margin, I think we both mainly want to help poor people, right? I'm just pointing out that using measures like the Gini coefficient can inadvertently reward bad behavior. Of course neither side directly wants to destroy resources, but if we're comparing national Gini numbers & policies, there's no good way to distinguish between good vs bad ways to lower it. i.e. China's Gini has been going up, but they also are pulling tons of people out of poverty - is it bad or not? I'm not in favor of inequality, but just pointing out that historically the things that have moved people out of poverty have been market based innovation (the world since 1800), not direct assaults on inequality (USSR, Chinese revolutions, cuba etc.)

> I'm just pointing out that using measures like the Gini coefficient can inadvertently reward bad behavior

Great, duly noted. When you make grand assertions about the inequality movement in the future, I suggest you do some background research and actually understand their claims first.

> just pointing out that historically the things that have moved people out of poverty have been market based innovation (the world since 1800), not direct assaults on inequality (USSR, Chinese revolutions, cuba etc.)

You need a history lesson. First of all, reducing inequality is not the same as moving a nation out of poverty (remember, technically, the US is the richest nation in the world). And secondly, look at the US in the 1930s-40s, when JFK's New Deal and WWII – not "market based innovation" – led to the largest expansion of the middle class yet. See http://spot.colorado.edu/~kaplan/econ3080/Krugman-middle.htm...

Inequality in the US is a result of decisions we have made, not because the rich have suddenly become more innovative.

Could you at least try to get the basics right about what wealth inequality even means? Piketty popularized the subject last year, it is a great place to start.

What if that capital disappeared as soon as you went to grab it?

What kind of communist propaganda is this? What world do you live in?

>Focusing solely on wealth inequality leads to strange conclusions: > > The richest people should destroy productive resources

Where does that come from ? I can't find that quote in the linked articles.

If you judge countries externally by their Gini coefficient, countries which blow up the richest people's resources (or just stifle innovation (The USSR, 60s China)) will have a "better" number. So it's a really bad number to use, since there are evil ways to maximize it.

I'm suggesting we should use numbers like the absolute # of people in poverty, or national health, or access to education - those numbers aren't gameable and allow better solutions to rise to the top naturally (and we don't care how they go up, as long as they go up)

In the US, wealth inequality correlates strongly with median age over time. In a regression, raising median age can explain 89% of the raise in wealth inequality of the top 10% (my own calculation, using Picketty data, not online yet). The hypothesis behind this is that inequality tends to grow with age. Among 20 year olds, there is much less inequality than among 60 year olds. In fact, the richest even grow in wealth after retirement thanks to capital gains, widening the gap even more.

Maybe the system did not get less fair over the years, just the people older? I would guess that inequality within age groups did not change much over the past 50 years. But those age groups with lots of inequality grew larger.

Are you suggesting that the bottom 90% of households are predominately headed by under-40 year-olds?

According to payscale.com, among those with college degrees or higher, pay for men stops growing about age 48; for women, about 39. (See http://www.payscale.com/gender-lifetime-earnings-gap )

In your defence, there is this: http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/20... ; in which Joseph Mason, Moyse/LBA Chair of Banking at the Ourso School of Business at Louisiana State University and a senior fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that the demographics of income and wealth inequality will go away with the Baby Boomers. However, that article doesn't go into or cite any real analysis.

A contrary opinion by Phillip Longman in 2008 (at http://newamerica.net/files/Longman-Remarks.pdf) actually goes into more detail on baby boomers and money: Could it really be that a typical household headed by a person in their 50s has disposable income of over $85,000 dollars? ... [Sure] enough, [the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey] shows average household income numbers for that cohort in the range of $85,000. ... The medium income numbers were much, much lower. For example, in 2006, according the Census Bureau, households headed by a person 45-54 had an average income $85,812. But the medium income of such households was some $20,000 less. The difference between average and medium works out to about 25 percent. ... Income inequality, let alone wealth inequality, in this generation is extremely high. Its average income includes the earnings of Bill Gates and countless other baby boom billionaires, plus a very large new class of McMansion-owning minor millionaires. Because of very high income inequality within the baby boom generation, medium income statistics tell us a much more accurate story than do average income stats about how the “typical” baby boomer lives.

Age could easily explain the apparent "wealth inequality", but not so much in regards to "income inequality". Yet "income inequality" can easily be shown to be a factor towards "wealth inequality". According to Pew Research (see http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/17/wealth-gap-u...): The wealth gap between America’s high income group and everyone else has reached record high levels since the economic recovery from the Great Recession of 2007-09, with a clear trajectory of increasing wealth for the upper-income families and no wealth growth for the middle- and lower-income families. In 2013, the median wealth of the nation’s upper-income families ($639,400) was nearly seven times the median wealth of middle-income families ($96,500) - the widest wealth gap seen in 30 years when the Federal Reserve began collecting these data.

My suggestion: Let's stop conflating the issues of "wealth inequality" and "income inequality". The real crux of the matter is in the "income inequality". There's been wage stagnation for decades despite productivity gains. In America anyway, the tax code is rigged against earned income in favor of unearned income. Overall, it is better to be "wealthy" than to be "gainfully employed".

You seem to know your stuff so I'm reluctant to challenge you on any of this but what is "medium income"? You use the term multiple times above so it doesn't seem like a typo...

It could be a typo or other mistake. To be clear, "medium income" was the phrase used by Philip Longman in the cited PDF. I also wonder if he actually meant "median income." I googled on "define medium income", and it seems P.L. isn't alone in using that term, but it's not clear to me if it's taken the same as median, or if it's a unique term all its own.

In the book, "Children in America: National Indicator of Well-being", edited by Ryan H. Nobbins, in Appendix A (page 121), "medium income" is given a definition (see https://books.google.com/books?id=ALccZ2yFq9UC&pg=PA121&lpg=...), although I don't know if P.L. means it this way: Medium Income is between 200 and 399 percent of the poverty threshold (e.g. from $37620 thru $75239 for a family of 4 in 2003).

Are you suggesting that the bottom 90% of households are predominately headed by under-40 year-olds?

Where did that come from? Clearly, Hermel was instead suggesting that the inequality in any particular age range hasn't changed over time, and that older ranges have greater inequality than younger ranges. (This could come both from some older people being wealthier than they were when young, and from other older people being poorer than they were when young.) It is a well-known demographic fact that there are more old people now than there used to be, which fact coupled with Hermel's claims would be enough to explain increasing wealth inequality.

I don't have the knowledge to agree or disagree with Hermel, but I oppose avoidable misunderstandings.

Exactly, thanks!

Thanks for your research. You are right in pointing to the difference between wealth and income inequality. My data online seems to explain the former, but not the latter. While I find my mentioned correlation between age and wealth inequality very interesting and plausible, one should should be aware of the following weaknesses of my argument:

- It explains wealth of the top 10%. It does not explain income inequality or wealth inequality regarding the top 1%.

- The correlation is much weaker in other countries.

- Inequality can corrode the fabric of society, regardless of its cause. Being able to explain raising inequality does not make it better. Or, as the Fins say: Weighing s--- does not make it better s---.

Another interesting consideration is that the working poor are often single parents. Having children outside marriage is one of the biggest risks of poverty. Thus, one of the biggest leftist achievements, namely the abandoning of traditional family values in favor of a more flexible and individualistic model, is one of the primary causes of poverty. There are many benefits of this development, but it also came at the price of new forms of poverty and thereby also increasing inequality.

> Wealth Inequality - The gap is widening

The US currency and most other currencies are working against the people and in favor of the bankers.

Probably one of the best solutions that have presented themselves for this problem is bit-coin but since it is extremely volatile and still underused at the moment it is not ready yet.

Here's [1] a simple youtube animation that explains it better than anything i have seen.

[1]: http://youtu.be/mII9NZ8MMVM

Why should I care about the relative wealth of the rich instead of absolute wealth of the poor?

This is the key question for me too.

Nowadays a blue collar worker (at least here in EU) has better living conditions than the wealthiest and more powerful mere hundred years ago.

Nowadays nobody has to die because of bad teeth and everybody has access to cheap and effective education and through that to other means of production.

The poor generally have none of:

* dental insurance * effective inexpensive dental care * effective education * access to effective education * a pathway to 'other means of production' * better living conditions than the wealthiest of a mere 100 years ago (the second industrial revolution and the gilded age, where the rich were incredibly rich, and the poor were utterly wretched)

In many countries exerting influence in the democratic process is heavily tied to the monetary resources of the person doing the influencing. Given that mechanism it might be easier to remove the wealth inequality than to dismantle the inequality in the democratic process directly.

Because human happiness and value are not measured in absolute terms.

Because they buy laws that favour them and increase that inequality.

This. I'd also add:

4. World is more armed than ever. Ability to destroy life any times over.

5. Tech is in the hands of a few corporations, mass surveillance and political repression, censorship is a fact of life in many countries. As it grows more powerful, it'll give bad people more power to control, suppress and oppress.

6. Pollution, urbanisation, exploitation of nature - a lot of species face extinction within the next 50 years. Disconnect from nature grows worldwide, that leads to all sorts of physical and psychological ailments in people.

[4]: http://www.sipri.org/media/pressreleases/2014/nuclear_May_20...

[5]: ?

[6]: http://www.nature.com/news/biodiversity-life-a-status-report...

The biggest overall concerns is that these gains seem to be the benefits of systems that are unraveling.

1. The effective constraint of the short term self interests of nation states via various international norms against armed conflict, internal repression and crimes against humanity.

2. The fossil fuel economy.

The plausible replacements for these systems seem much less stable at the current moment.

"How can we be better than we are now?" By getting informed on what is REALLY happening, i.e. if you are participating in electoral democracy, you're part of the misinformed set.

Reasoning and the human brain doesn't work the way we thought it did:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

Manufacturing consent

http://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Econom...

Most have no clue what's really going on in the world... the elites are afraid of political awakening.

This (mass surveillance) by the NSA and abuse by law enforcement is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttv6n7PFniY

Brezinski at a press conference

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kmUS--QCYY

The real news:

http://therealnews.com/t2/

http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverte...

http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Government-Surveillance-Securit...

http://www.amazon.com/National-Security-Government-Michael-G...

Look at the following graphs:

IMGUR link - http://imgur.com/a/FShfb

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

And then...

WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap

http://www.businessinsider.com/wikileaks-haiti-minimum-wage-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnkNKipiiiM

Free markets?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349

Free trade?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju06F3Os64

http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Illusion-Literacy-Triumph-Spect...

"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.

In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture—attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies—to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion."

Important history:

http://williamblum.org/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcA1v2n7WW4#t=2551

Wealth inequality itself does no harm as long as you don't try to judge it through some ideological lense.

Surely you mean that the amount of poor people is rising. This isn't the case. Instead various political interest groups even had to fiddle a lot to produce few relative, always variable poverty definitions to keep the "poverty is rising" claim valid.

This point of an increasingly peaceful world has come up repeatedly over the years, but I think there is an inherent problem in the way it is viewed. The rise of the internet and social media has facilitated glimpses into the terrible acts which humans are capable of perpetrating against one another. That combined with a biased media who thrives on shock and outrage, it's no wonder we find this data difficult to digest. Most of the modern world influenced by this biased media reside in very sterile, largely safe environments. In effect, we've become ultra-sensitized to gore and violence, and as a result our impression and response to any sort of mayhem is skewed accordingly.

Perhaps this combination is positive. Horrible things have always happened. While they are happening less today, we have much greater visibility of the horrors that do happen. And they still horrify us – as they should. This gives us motivation to strive harder to eliminate them altogether. The jarring thing about looking at those charts is the labels on the y axis – murder, war, genocide, rape, child abuse. It's certainly good that they are trending down, but how much genocide is ok? How much rape is acceptable? Perhaps our natural fixation with the dark side of life is a good thing. True, there is much cause for optimism, but should we really be complacent when these numbers aren't zero?

I think it's interesting in how people are readjusting their views to stop thinking of violence and misery as "normal".

This makes cases where it happens more notable.

You'll notice in countries with extraordinarily low crime rates (South Korea, Japan, etc.) that the locals don't perceive their relative safety and point to various happenings in the news as evidence.

Yet while I'm here in America, supposedly surrounded by gun violence, mass murders and other crazy nonsense. I feel no issues at all with walking by myself to the local store at night.

I've even seen opinions here on HN by non-Americans who talk in frightened tones about the violence levels in the U.S., but may come from countries that we Americans are educated to perceive as scary places.

I wish this kind of data was frequently mentioned throughout the year in mainstream media. Continue to show the news the way they are but keep this kind of data around to jeep people "calibrated" I think would help people's perspective on the world more positive.

>I wish this kind of data was frequently mentioned throughout the year in mainstream media.

Except bad news is what people want to see and it's what makes money. If you try to shift your news reporting away from crime and gore it kills viewer/readership.

example: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-30318261

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey informed the Senate Armed Service Committee (in 2013), "I will personally attest to the fact that [the world is] more dangerous than it has ever been." Now that's surprising from the head of the JCS, and from a former commander of an armored division in combat. He's a trade-school guy (West Point), so he knows his military history.

Things have been much, much worse for the US. Early in WWII, it didn't look good. When the USSR got ICBMs and H-bombs, it really didn't look good. Worldwide, nobody is having a really big war right now. The USSR lost 20 million people in WWII. Nothing that bad has happened since.

There are some big worries ahead, mainly regarding proliferation of nuclear weapons and troubles involving existing nuclear powers - Russia, China, Pakistan, and North Korea. Those are the things that can kill us.

Domestically, the biggest threat is the Mississippi River, with major floods both at New Orleans and further upstream.

>Now that's surprising from the head of the JCS, and from a former commander of an armored division in combat. He's a trade-school guy (West Point), so he knows his military history.

Of course he says that, the budget for the department of defense is in part dictated by how dangerous the public and congress perceive the world to be.

Military leaders have been saying this exact same thing for centuries.

Of course he says that, the budget for the department of defense...

Yet who does Congress consult when they're considering how much to spend? It's almost as if they want to spend more money on the military...

I am increasingly worried about the state of the world each year.

However, I was discussing this with a friend recently and we were talking about how much of it was simple the result of more reports about the trouble in the world. I realized something: if there was, say, ten reports of really bad, violent crime in Denmark (where I am from -- population: 5 million people) per year, that would be very little. But even so, if I heard about each of them, it would be practically something really bad happening every month which would lead me to feel that things were going down the drain.

In other words, an unchanging constant violence rate would seem like a deterioration. And furthermore, if the type of violence was different every time, I would start to feel that all the different types of violence were on the rise.

So maybe my fear is not completely justified. But I still don't feel completely convinced.

It's easy to get the impression that things are going to hell from the news because that's what gets viewers. If you want evidence for the opposite I recommend Pinker's very good book:

http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence-eboo...

Or to save the cost and hassle of getting his book, watch Pinker talking about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5X2-i_poNU&feature=youtu.be...

"The World is Falling Apart!" gets way more clicks than "The World is Not Falling Apart," though.

Exactly. It is journalism what is falling apart, not the world.

The world can "fall apart" without people dying. For example, the ongoing currency wars.

You can also have violence without death. Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are examples. Because these people are only tortured, and not murdered, is that considered "peaceful"?

And it also would depend on how far back you draw the data from. Is the Stalin famine of the 30s modern, or ancient? If we cast the data back to the 1600s, it's new. If we cast the data back to the 1920s, its old.

Some data sets in this article go back to the 60s, some go back to the 30s, some only back to the 90s. Maybe we need more data. Lets cast all the data sets back a few hundred years and look again.

Consider me unconvinced.

I think the global decline in viable arable land and fresh water are the most likely factors to cause the world to 'fall apart', which I take to mean; the collapse of many industrialised societies and countries, and the collapse of much of international trade.

Indeed.

Death by war has been on the decline since after World War II - the most violent war in our history? That's not exactly exciting news.

The first half of the twentieth century revealed the contradiction of modernity: the terrible brutality of the industrial processes (including mechanized war) which underlay a system that on the surface had brought forth so much prosperity. The period since has been an attempt to resolve this contradiction through new tactics (specifically information and communication technologies) which allow the 'necessary' application of power's blunt end to be as precise as possible.

"Wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations. But this formidable power of death – and this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limits – now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital." - Michel Foucault

This is actually not entirely true. Although WWI and WWII were large spikes, death rates for many wars before the 20th century – both in terms of combatants and civilians – were significantly higher and have generally been on the decline throughout human history. See Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature" for a detailed analysis of this exact issue.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/149151...

Steven Pinker has done a fairly deep study of the long run decline in violence: it is real, it is over centuries, and it is dramatic. But it is not guaranteed to last. I highly recommend his book as it provides a lot of data on the topic (and is quite a good read too).

"The decline in violence, he argues, is enormous in magnitude, visible on both long and short time scales, and found in many domains, including military conflict, homicide, genocide, torture, criminal justice, treatment of children, homosexuals, animals and racial and ethnic minorities."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature

Seconded. Although, given the length/depth of the analysis, be prepared to commit more than one sitting to finish the book.

Is finishing a full-length non-fiction book in one sitting common?

> Pinker uses the phrase as a metaphor for four human motivations that, he writes, can "orient us away from violence and towards cooperation and altruism,"[2] namely: empathy, self-control, the "moral sense," and reason.

All of which are contrary to religious fundamentalism... which worries me as a US citizen.

Why? Fundamentalists are noisy, but they aren't a majority. Catholics are the largest group, probably followed by the various types of non practitioners (I'm including atheists and people that "aren't sure" together there, I think it's fair to say that "not sure" is a ways away from fundamentalist). It's harder to sort out the protestants, but the more moderate "mainline" groups certainly have more influence than the fundamentalist groups, even if they don't quite outnumber them (but they are at least similar in number).

The type of news that fundamentalists end up making also isn't all that discouraging, they are usually losing court cases where they tried to inject their beliefs into public life.

If you've been watching Pope Francis lately, it's providing a strong contrast against fundamentalism, which he has even decried as a disease in the church that needs to end.

I guess it depends on where you draw the line on fundamentalism. I live in the Bible Belt and I'd argue that, at least, the Southern Baptists should be seen as a Fundamentalist organization. That locks down the majority of the people in the SE-quadrant of the continental US.

Also depending on how you draw your lines, the Catholics aren't even remotely close to #1 status. About 24% of Americans are Catholic while about 51% are Protestants. I'll agree that it's a little iffy, but I'm willing to count the Protestants as a singular group.

Perhaps I'm just jaded because I live in the land of "lets turn the US into a Christian theocracy".

Yeah, the first step of the discussion is drawing some lines.

When I said the Catholics were the largest group, I was treating the protestants as separate groups. Mostly because if you are treating "fundamentalist" as an axis, the protestants don't really group together. They even tend to be somewhat polarized across that axis.

Self-control is contrary to religious fundamentalism? The "moral sense" is contrary to religious fundamentalism?

I mean, sure, there have been some pretty horrible things done in the name of religion, often by fundamentalists. There have been some even more horrible things done in the name of atheistic philosophies, too. But religious fundamentalism should give one an idea that certain things really are morally wrong, and that you're therefore not supposed to do them. That sounds like "self-control" and "moral sense" to me...

Please cite an "even more horrible thing done in the name of atheistic philosophies" (I'm actually curious about this, even though I'm going to argue with you in a sec...).

The premise that religiosity in any way influences morality (or "self control") is a joke. We live in a world where religious people are performing (or attempting to perform) genocides, who rape children (and adults), and who are subjugating the current out-group. We also live in a world where non-religious people are providing healthcare to the poor, counselling to the abused, and food to the needy. There are, of course, plenty of counterexamples where religious people are acting morally, and non-religious are acting amorally... all this just goes to show that there are moral people and those who are not moral, not that religion has any influence over that morality.

To further the point, the vast majority of religious people (at least in the "Western Religion" sense) go out of their way to cherry pick which of their holy book's rules to adhere to. This is because they have decided to act in a way that they, and their society, have deemed moral; despite what the book has told them was.

> Please cite an "even more horrible thing done in the name of atheistic philosophies" (I'm actually curious about this, even though I'm going to argue with you in a sec...).

Pol Pot killed one quarter of Cambodia's population in the name of communism, which was explicitly atheistic. So far as I know, that is the ruler that killed the single largest fraction of his own population. (Stalin killed more people, but he had a much larger population to work with. And, surprise, Stalin also did it in the name of communism.)

THIS IS TERRIBLE.

How can news agencies make any money if they can't scare people into hysterics that keep them glued to the TV screen?

How can gun companies and home security firms sell product if people aren't afraid of everything around them?

THIS KIND OF RESEARCH HARMS THE ECONOMY AND MUST BE STOPPED.

Sincerely, Tom being cynical

I think a lot of this has to do with perception.

The violence and suffering in the world, particularly overseas, feels more inescapable in the digital, high definition, always connected age.

This age has gifted us perception, but not perspective.

Saved that last line in Evernote to ponder later.

It's simple, yes we might have less violence and your stats seem to make sense. However, the reason you are right is because we are being more controlled by, I don't know world bank, countries, laws. Today in Turkey they want to give the president the power to turn off the internet at will for 24 hours. There is news like this every day, ways to get more control and power over people. There are 1 million camels in Australia, the government thinks that that is to much and they pay people to shoot them. So, one milion camels is too much for a whole continent but there is nothing wrong with having 8 billion people on earth, destroying just about everything, that is ok? We have no choice in what is happening around us, most people I know would want their country to stop importing oil and find a greener alternative. This day an age that wouldn't be too hard. So why aren't we? That is not in your equation! We are destroying our oceans, atmosphere, finally the republicans are willing to talk about climate change, but all is still weight around money and cost. The monetary system is broken and it is global. One little change effects one way or the other the entire globe. If you ask me it all is hanging in a balance that is controlled by a few wealthy. And it is hanging on very thin strings these days.

By the way, homicide rates chart should account for age distribution. As population ages, the 18-40 age group dwindles. And, statistically, that is who dominates homicide deaths.

If you account for that, your chart may switch polarity.

Same for rapes.

As for "Democracy and Autocracy" - this chart comes from people who still call Uzbekistan a "young democracy". Actually, many supposedly democratic countries actually aren't.

A better title would have been "Progress isn't uniform, and measuring it is hard." Each war brings progress in trauma medicine, which contributes to making war (and driving) less deadly. That's good, right? Right?

Higher education requirements and increasing relative status as policing becomes a relatively more desirable job for people with lower (and capped) aptitude means policing gets better by many metrics. Nonetheless, militarization is a bad thing, solution rates are shockingly low, the Drug War is a distraction, and cop culture is rotten: http://www.salon.com/2014/12/23/deader_than_a_roadkill_dog_d...

Some things are clear, however: Terrorism is a negligible threat. Nuclear weapons are still the #1 threat to civilization. But there is a lack of intentionality in both these areas.

Steven Pinker has built a writing career out of telling people who are doing really well that everything is fine and that they should keep on enjoying.

He has built a writing career out of writing books about cognitive science and language, and then more recently diversified into history and writing style.

Exactly one of his books, so far as I can tell, has anything to do with telling anyone "that everything is fine". But it doesn't claim that everything is fine (only that violence is on a long downward trajectory).

I'm guessing that your real objection is to The Blank Slate, which you see as justifying entrenched discrimination. I'm not at all convinced that it does any such thing, but in any case it's a long way from "Pinker wrote one book that some wealthy right-wingers might find comforting" to "Pinker's writing career is built on comforting wealthy right-wingers".

It`s the end of the world as we know it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzqiPvGrkTo

The world is not falling apart. Personally though things are wearing out. They should fix that!

This article is pure link bait. Both ends of the extreme are far removed from the truth. There is hardly anything in this article that isn't sensationalist fluff.

I've always heard that more people died in the 20th century than any other... Not sure if that is true or not. Never did the research.

More people were born in the 20th century than any other. Comparing the absolute number instead of ratio is misleading.

This is a proof that there are lies, damn lies and statistics :).

World is in terrible shape, from climate, to new conflicts emerging, richest people detachment from reality are some that come to mind.

Solid evidence you've given there. I'm even sympathetic to being convinced that things aren't as good as the datasets I've looked at personally seem to show, but I've not had much that shows me otherwise. Instant world-wide wide-band communication and mass media's adoption of it has had an interesting effect on society's perception of how "terrible" the shape the world is.

> England, Canada, and most other industrialized countries...

England isn't a country. Constantly referring to it as one, was a distraction from the contents for me.

Actually, it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England

Wrong:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_of_the_United_Kingdo...

“Wrong” is wrong. The linked article cites England as a country in the UK.

Not sure why you were downvoted. England certainly isn't a country in the sense that's important in the article, i.e. a self-governing entity with control over its own economic system.

Why is the fact that it's not self-governing relevant to the article? If the violence statistics cited apply to the (country/nation/administrative region/chunk of land) that is England, then surely that's all that matters.

"America" isn't, strictly speaking, "The United States of America" - but when people use the term, we all know of which is spoken. Likewise "England".

Can't resist...

Guildenstern: I don't believe in it anyway.

Rosencrantz: What?

Guildenstern: England.

Rosencrantz: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?

Tell that to the 7000 Yezidian women in ISIS captivity marked with a price tag, paraded through Raqqa then gang-raped, tortured and starved. Forced to strangle themselves to death using scarves to get out.

Or the Female PKK/YPG soldiers defending their families being captured alive by Swedish Arabs and Somalians islamic rapists.

For them the world is falling apart.

I guess since we can't blame Israel for this it's not front-page news. But lets worry about about the lack of feminine characters in a Donald Duck video from the 70s or the apparent sexism in games.

talk about missing the point. You can acknowledge that violence is on the decline while also wanting it to continue to decline. The danger in ignoring the decline is that resources will be disproportionately redirected to solving problems that aren't of any real concern (terrorism, war on drugs, etc) instead of the problems that are actually in need of solving.

I never acknowledged anything you mentioned, so I am not sure what you've been reading or smoking.

Please, tell me what resources have we spent on saving these 7000 women (probably more) used as sex-slaves by these islamists?

I guess they are not a real concern because they're not as bad as "sexism" in video games or the "racism" in using native American outfits for Halloween.

Short of supporting a full scale invasion and colonization of the countries in question how do you propose to change the situations that allowed this to happen?

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