Monday, December 9, 2013

Mining the Anti-Reactionary FAQ

I may edit this post.
Cited Source: Pinker, via hbdchick
The overall violence rate kinks up twice. First time, just before 1800. The second kink is the first time all the component curves move in unison. It looks like it starts in, what, the 60s? It's as if a long-term global decline in violence was overwhelmed by something, in every country, at the same time.

This may be just a coincidence. At some point the parade of coincidences must be taken seriously.

Does anyone know why Italy and Scandinavia responded to the revolutions? Or perhaps did they respond to the same causes the revolutions responded to?

Notably, because we have this kind of graph, we can use it to proxy propensity-for-violence. Using this factor, we can adjust historical war deaths downward, just like we adjust historical dollars upward to adjust for inflation. Given our lower propensity to kill each other, how many wars should we have had, or how big should they have been?