[chriscool]

This great article debunks a lot, but also acknowledges some important underlying points:

"Pinker has no serious evidence for ..., even though his sources’ evidence for the decline in homicide rates in European countries over many centuries is solid."

And some points in the article are also highly questionable:

"Perhaps most important, the absolute numbers of people who die because of armed conflicts are a first-order measure of the true human cost of violence, and we should never permit the moral gravity of this loss and suffering to be relativized by the juggling of numbers until they all match the same global population in any given year."

This would mean that we can never compare the past with the present...

[gizmo]

Is murder only half as bad today compared to 100 years ago because now a murder only gets rid of 1/7billionth of the world population? In one sense, yes. In another sense, no, obviously not. Pointing out that this is dubious moral arithmetic is in my opinion completely fair, and the entire thesis of the decline of violence rests on the treatment of violence in this sense.

[a8da6b0c91d]

A lot of the murder decline over the last 60 years is fake. Improved trauma care means people don't die from wounds that were lethal not long ago. The violent assault rate has not actually gone down that much.

[baldfat]

If that is true WHY is there such a serious decline from 1980s and early 1990s to today in the States?

Also why is there tremendous amount of police killings in the 1920s-1930s is so far above from what they were in the 1950s, 2000s+?