Doing Violence to Statistical Comparisons

If you want an article length rebuttal to Steven Pinker’s “decline of violence” thesis, you can’t do better than David Bentley Hart’s recent takedown in the latest issue of First Things . But if you only want an paragraph length rebuttal, you can’t do better than this from Timothy Snyder in Foreign Affairs :

Yet even if Pinker is right that the ratio of violent to peaceful deaths has improved over time (and he probably is), his metric of progress deserves a bit more attention than he gives it. His argument about decreasing violence is a relative one: not that more people were killed annually in the past than are killed in a given year of recent history but that more people were killed relative to the size of the overall human population, which is of course vastly larger today than in earlier eras. But ask yourself: Is it preferable for ten people in a group of 1,000 to die violent deaths or for ten million in a group of one billion? For Pinker, the two scenarios are exactly the same, since in both, an individual person has a 99 percent chance of dying peacefully. Yet in making a moral estimate about the two outcomes, one might also consider the extinction of more individual lives, one after another, and the grief of more families of mourners, one after another.