
The World Is Not Falling Apart (2014) - tdurden
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/12/the_world_is_not_falling_apart_the_trend_lines_reveal_an_increasingly_peaceful.single.html
======
krisdol
Title should have [2014] on it.

~~~
dang
Thanks—missed that one.

Edit: turns out it's a dupe, too:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8791117](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8791117).

------
denim_chicken
The article should be titled, "The World is Not Becoming More Violent".

Violence among humans is only one of many metrics to gauge the state of the
world. Other metrics show trends that are not as rosy. Let's not forget, for
example, that we are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction event,
exhibiting a rate of species extinction 10x greater than during any other
extinction event.

If we especially ignore our anthropocentric biases one can make a convincing
case that the world is falling apart.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
This is certainly not a popular view, and I might be wrong, but I don't think
the current state of technology allows you to increase democracy, standard of
living as we define it now, without the climate tradeoff, and I think that's
ok.

Industrialization and the internal combustion engine has been one of the
greatest drivers of prosperity in human history, and largely to drive
subsistence farmers into less manual work and into cities. These shifts
improve access to health services, networks etc... for all involved and has
been the biggest driver of for example Chinese productivity growth and PPP
improvement in the past 20 years. The downside is increasing carbon emissions.
The biggest impacts of these emissions, in the climate sense, dis-
proportionally affects groups like pacific islanders, current subsistence
farmers and other groups on the boundaries.

Very few people look at this issue in terms of what we gain from industrial
processes that _cannot_ be cheaply implemented to reduce carbon emissions, and
the gains in quality of life for the groups implementing them.

It's definitely preferable for emerging countries to generate power, do water
processing, transportation etc... in a clean way, but right now the cheapest
way to do that is through burning fossil fuels. If the alternative is to slow
progress in these nations to prevent a few million pacific islanders from
having to move, I think it would be more efficient for nations to assist those
who are impacted from the climate externalities.

~~~
littletimmy
What about the poor animals who suffer? Are they to go extinct so that a
couple billion more of this filthy chimp species can have a good life?

~~~
eclipxe
Yes. When forced to choose, humans win, everytime. Sorry.

~~~
littletimmy
I don't necessarily agree. The life of a lion is worth more than the life of a
Zimbabwean citizen. Harsh, but true. The lion is worth more monetarily, and
more morally.

------
IanDrake
>The World Is Not Falling Apart

Or, why I don't read anything but industry news.

Reading headline news will quickly erode your soul. You have nothing to gain
by reading it and just about everything to lose.

When I tell this to people, the typical response is: "But I don't want to be
uninformed". Information that you can't act on is not information; it's
distraction.

The only thing worse than distraction is thinking you CAN act on news from
around the world. If news from 100's of miles away is changing your behavior,
that's bad. We're not going to die in a terrorist attack, a shark attack, from
climate change, a new flu, etc...

These are the things people worry about incessantly. But we are going to die
of cancer, heart disease, in a car accident, of old age, etc... how mundane.

~~~
force_reboot
You do have some impact, as a voter. E.g. you might not be personally afraid
of ISIS but the threat they pose to the region and Europe might be enough for
you to think that the US should reverse its policy of trying to overthrow
Assad.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Which of the two US parties are promising a meaningful change in international
policy towards Syria?

~~~
force_reboot
Neither, I really should have said "as voter and a a citizen" since changing
this policy might require more than voting.

But I think that this is something an ordinary citizen can do something about.
The policy up until now was not created by arms manufacturers, or by neo-cons
alone, but primarily by moderate liberals. Noam Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein
would say that these moderate liberals had been tricked into acting as pawns
for the neo-cons. That doesn't have the ring of truth to me. I think they act
according to their own ideology, albeit a hypocritical one that is liberal at
home and right wing on the Middle East. This ideology can be argued and
lobbied against by people with different opinions.

~~~
mr_tyzic
Chomsky wouldn't say that at all. His critique has always been primarily of
liberals.

------
ashwinaj
The problem is the 24/7 news cycle. More often than not, everyday is a slow
news day, but you have to fill up 24 hours since "Our advertisers demand it".
So when there's worthwhile news the hyperbole increases exponentially. And
even worse is opinionated journalism; I personally do not care what your
opinion is, just report the damn news factually and without bias.

------
AnonNo15
Same could be said in 1913. It is probably true in the long term, but local
maximas of human suffering are no joke.

~~~
mcphage
The point isn't that things can't get worse—it's that there's a strong media
message that things are really bad _right now_ , and that isn't supported by
the evidence.

------
codeshaman
The world we live in now is good.. It's almost too good to be true, isn't
it... And when you have something _that_ good, you're bound to be afraid that
you're going to loose it.

We wake up to the smell of fresh coffee. We have access to the most incredible
food - from exotic fruit to deep-sea creatures.. We walk around with these
incredible magical devices in our pockets, connected to this worldwide ocean
of knowledge and we spend our days sharing and watching the shared stuff.

Then we go out on the weekends and we have lots of fun, we get drunk, we dance
to great music, we get high, then we have great sex .. Or unlimited porn, of
course.

It's like a good dream that we don't want to wake up from..

But guess what ?

You _are_ going to loose it all.

There's this rule of the game - things change. Old stuff disappears (falls
apart) and new stuff replaces it. It can be better or worse, but the rule is -
it's going to change.

The consequence of this rule is - you're going to loose it all.

All this beautiful music, green pastures, bacon, pussy and cocaine ?

Enjoy it while it lasts, because you're renting it...

So yeah, our world _is_ falling apart - either externally or internally, we're
all going to the same place - out of here ;). No worries, this is the game,
it's beautiful just the way it is, so don't forget to enjoy it :)

------
zxcvvcxz
I'm surprised no one has mentioned anything about "Black Swans" yet. There's
an alternative view point on why this optimism may be misplaced.

Basically, just because small effects (average levels of violence) are being
smoothed out and minimized, does not imply that tail-end effects -- such as
nuclear wars, large genocides, etc -- will not occur. Some people argue that
the former may even raise the odds of the latter through artificial
constriction until tensions reach a boiling point.

A big proponent of this type of thinking is Nassim Taleb, most notably in his
book Antifragile.

> Cirillo and Taleb also found no evidence that wars cluster together, as
> earthquakes and episodes of financial volatility are known to do. Rather,
> big wars follow no trend and simply occur with equal likelihood through
> time. Doing the statistics right, they argue, shows that the recent peaceful
> past is almost certainly causing us to seriously underestimate how much
> violent conflict we're likely see in the future. [1]

There's an interesting back-and-forth between Taleb and Pinker on this topic,
here are some links:

[http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf](http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf)
[http://stevenpinker.com/files/comments_on_taleb_by_s_pinker....](http://stevenpinker.com/files/comments_on_taleb_by_s_pinker.pdf)

[1] - [http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-05-18/is-the-
worl...](http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-05-18/is-the-world-
getting-safer-maybe-not)

------
MisterBastahrd
This article wouldn't have even needed to be written if it weren't for the
influence of politically-minded religious evangelicals in the US. Their entire
worldview is predicated around the idea that the world is destined to get
worse because it was preordained to be so.

I'm not nearly as concerned with ISIS as I am the white gun nut next door
who's off his meds... and I'm not nearly as concerned with THAT as I am the
lack of No Entry and No U-Turn signs on my local highway. Because if someone
near me is going to get killed, it will probably be when someone stops in the
middle of the highway to turn where there's no lane to do so.

------
cespare
It's nice to read an article with a bunch of charts that all have a y-axis
minimum of zero.

------
ilaksh
Realistically we have a long way to go as far as getting off of fossil fuel
dependence.

Those supposedly isolated wars are really an extended campaign that supports
the petrodollar.

[https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~paul20i/classweb/AFP2008/middleas...](https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~paul20i/classweb/AFP2008/middleastmap.jpg)

But actually these middle east conflicts are basically tribal and go back
hundreds of years including The Crusades and beyond.

We need a good alternative to clinging to the petrodollar's dominant position
until it is pried out of our hands by a world war. Bitcoin looks like a good
candidate.

------
Animats
That's a good article, especially when people are getting wound up about
terrorism again. Terrorism in the US just isn't a big deal. It's down in the
noise compared to routine mass shootings. See the Mass Shooting Tracker.[1]
351 mass shootings so far this year in the US. 447 deaths and 1292 injuries so
far. This is the price we pay for the right to keep and bear arms.

[1]
[http://shootingtracker.com/wiki/Mass_Shootings_in_2015](http://shootingtracker.com/wiki/Mass_Shootings_in_2015)

------
torusaurus
I have become a big fan of Pinkerton as of late. Not only for his views
described in this article, which are well-documented and refreshingly logical,
but for his views on religion. A lot of my extended family will lament about
the days news from time to time, reacting to the eye-catching headlines of
death and destruction. Forwarding Pinkerton's book and this article tends to
assuage these tendencies quite handedly. I definitely recommend this strategy
to those who may relate to my family as well.

~~~
taliesinb
Glad to hear I'm not the only one who calls him Pinkerton. It was Deadwood
that did it.

------
CM30
But that doesn't sell newspapers/bring website clicks, does it? Hence why the
media likes to say 'we're all doomed!' at the first possible opportunity.

It almost makes me wonder what the internet, online 'journalism' and social
media would have been like if it existed during the two world wars.

------
guard-of-terra
Meanwhile, the number of refugees and asylum seekers is all time high - 60
mln.

Why kill people when you can just uproot them?

------
codingdave
I cannot help but notice that many of the charts used to show how we are
getting so much less violent have a spike up over the last 5 years.

So if the argument that we are as safe as we have ever been is based on that
data, it looks more like we were as safe as ever in 2010. And now we are going
downhill.

------
z92
It's more about the trend and where things are going toward, rather than
what's happening right now.

Like stock market, the perceived future is what effects our emotion in the
present.

------
Synaesthesia
I'm afraid the world is falling apart. Global inequality and poverty are
growing. Wealth is increasingly concentrated in the top 1%. Areas of the
United States are even resembling the 3rd world now. The Middle East situation
is a quagmire from which is hard to see a way out of and getting worse. A
superpower confrontation seems possible either with Russia or China. Arms
trade is really massive and the threat of nuclear extinction still hangs over
us. Lastly we're destroying hope for decent survival with global warming.

~~~
nabla9
>global inequality and poverty are growing.

Global poverty has decreased dramatically (halved in 20 years).

"Global income inequality peaked approximately in the 1970s when world income
was distributed bimodally into "rich" and "poor" countries with little
overlap. Since then inequality have been rapidly decreasing, and this trend
seems to be accelerating. Income distribution is now unimodal, with most
people living in middle-income countries."

[http://www.voxeu.org/article/parametric-estimations-world-
di...](http://www.voxeu.org/article/parametric-estimations-world-distribution-
income)

[http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-
release/2013/04/17/re...](http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-
release/2013/04/17/remarkable-declines-in-global-poverty-but-major-challenges-
remain)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_inequality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_inequality)

~~~
Synaesthesia
Maybe because I live in South Africa, where poverty is really bad and has not
really improved. In fact Africa Has actually regressed in poverty lebels since
the 1970's. Yes there was massive improvement in poverty levels in Asia and
the rest of the world too. However huge problems remain. Inequality has grown
in the United States since the 1970's too and poverty has increased there
since 2000.

~~~
hodwik
>"Inequality has grown in the United States since the 1970's too and poverty
has increased there since 2000."

Inequality is not a good metric for whether or not things are getting better.

As Thomas Sowell said, “Now the history of the United States in the 20th
century shows an incredible increase in prosperity over that century, and it
was brought about not because [the poor]’s slice of the pie got bigger — the
whole pie got bigger. And so everybody had an increase in prosperity.”

And anyway, "income inequality" actually increases the more your government
has subsidies for the poor. The more the poor are subsidized, the less
incentive they have to work longer hours, the less they receive in income.
It's not a coincidence that income inequality was lowest when countries had no
government welfare programs at all.

~~~
Synaesthesia
But Europe has more subsidies for the poor and less inequality, whereas the
USA has more inequality. Cuba has much less than the rest of South America.

~~~
hodwik
Do you have data on inequality across the EU? I would wager it is much larger
than in the US, as you have very wealthy states like Norway and very poor
states like Bulgaria.

If you only look at inequality PER COUNTRY it will look lower than the US. Of
course, the same would be true if you broke up Connecticut and Mississippi in
your income statistics.

Cuba is a totally different story, they have a maximum income law that says
you cannot legally make more than $20 USD per month (except for doctors, who
are allowed to make $30 USD per month). Can't really compare incomes in a
country which artificially sets the legal income.

~~~
dragonwriter
Actually, EU-wide measures of inequality (e.g., Gini coefficient) are lower
than those for the US; the EU briefly reached US-like levels when some of the
Eastern European countries first joined, but had fallen back to levels much
lower than the US.

~~~
hodwik2
I would wager that if you're seeing data that makes the US look like we have
greater income inequality you're looking at one of two things.

Possibility one -- you have good data, but you're looking at post-tax income
data, which would be skewed because of our flatter tax structure, fewer
transfers, low long-term capital gains tax rate, and our relatively high
income tax as percentage of total tax burden.

Possibility two -- the Gini coefficient you're looking at took national rates
and then averaged them, rather than actually comparing incomes of specific
people across the EU.

I believe that if you compared pre-tax data across the EU (rather than
national data, averaged) you would see the EU having considerably more income
inequality.

Just speaking from first hand experience, I've seen the difference between the
lives of the wealthy and poor in the US (from Connecticut to Mississippi), and
the wealthy and poor in the EU (from Bulgaria to Norway). The difference is
much starker in the EU.

I'm sure it probably doesn't sound very scientific, but I'm inclined to trust
my own eyes over statistics. If the data shows otherwise, I have to imagine
the data is skewed in some way.

~~~
dragonwriter
The problem is your eyes are measuring something different than what Gini
coefficient measures: your eyes are measuring the visible difference between
the extremes that you have encountered, Gini measures the overall tightness of
the distribution. Unless you have the same "shape" of distribution, the two
aren't going to be equivalent.

------
hwstar
The US isn't a democracy and never will be until the rich and powerful are
prevented from nominating our candidates.

~~~
kiba
It's a democracy, alright, elected by the people for the people.

How big and fat a political campaign is irrelevant.

It's ultimately the voters' responsibility. They are the one who elect the
lizards, and listen to thrash news, and be terrified of serial killers and
terrorists.

~~~
cromulent
Sure, it's a representative democracy, but many of those around the world are
dysfunctional. Voters only get to influence their representative once every
few years, whereas large donors and lobbyists influence them every day. This
effectively makes it an oligarchy when these donors and lobbyists can
influence both major parties.

~~~
hwstar
Thank you. That influence goes by another name: "Corruption".

------
jacobdawson
Yet another article that glosses over the fact that the civil war in Syria is
also a Russian/US conflict and could spiral into a full on proxy war in the
same vein as Korea and Vietnam.

Russia is supplying military assistance to the government of Syria, while the
U.S. (and other NATO countries) are supplying assistance to moderate Syrian
rebel groups (but _not_ ISIS). This breaks it down clearly:

[http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/world/middleeast/the-
sy...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/world/middleeast/the-syria-
conflicts-overlapping-agendas-and-competing-visions.html)

This just happened recently:

[http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/11/25/world/europe/turkey-
syr...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/11/25/world/europe/turkey-syria-russia-
military-plane.html)

Russia has repeatedly warned the US to not interfere directly in Syria (you
might have seen this):

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-
cau...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-caution-from-
russia-on-syria.html)

This is all interesting considering the Republicans are already talking about
increasing the US presence in Syria (for the purposes of defeating ISIS).

[http://edition.cnn.com/2015/11/16/politics/republican-
isis-2...](http://edition.cnn.com/2015/11/16/politics/republican-
isis-2016-election/)

Statistics are nice but the model is too simple and doesn't account for the
complexities of geopolitics.

