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RE: Is the world getting worse?

in #politics7 years ago (edited)

I buy into Steven Pinker's worldview, and would probably go a bit further than him to be honest.

The statistics are very clear that the world is getting less and less violent.

I am excited about the impact of decentralized technology, e.g . blockchain, but also things like 3-d printers, solar energy/batteries, electric cars, drones, etc, on this process. I imagine that as economic want decreases, violence between humans will continue to decrease.

One fly in the ointment is that as communication technology improves, people get the inverse impression. People I know are extremely upset about the ongoing wars in Syria and Yemen, and they are right to be upset, yet in perspective there were far greater wars and famines that killed orders of magnitude more people in living memory, e.g. WW2, the famine in the 1950s in China, and the Soviet Union. The difference is that the internet/24 hour rolling media puts a much a greater spotlight on the violence we see today, and so we get Trump-type moral panics. Those events in the 1950s were barely reported on here in the West, certainly when compared to today where every event gets livetweeted, etc.

In the long run I expect that that crease will iron out, but it's an interesting thread to follow.