Pinker's Argument Essay

Even with violence occurring all over the world, Pinker argues that violence today is at an all time low. In order to support his position, Pinker first takes on the preconception that the hunter-gather society of the past lived peacefully compared to modern times. Utilizing a graphic on percentage of male deaths due to war, Pinker shows that the percentage of contemporary hunter gatherer deaths is by far higher than that of people living in the US and Europe in the 20th century. Also along the lines of warfare, Pinker provides the audience with a statistic that states the number of deaths from interstate wars has decreased from 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade. After providing warfare statistics, Pinker compares common examples of violence from the past to today. He mentions an example where in the past people would instantly die just for speaking out against a King where as today many people commit murder and other crimes and are still allowed to live.

Pinker provides many different reasons for the general decrease in violence. One major reason he states is the differences in reporting. The advancement of technology has allowed people to receive news with a lot more detail thanks to pictures and videos. Pinker argues that since people
In an article by Smithsonian titled, "Globally, Deaths From War And Murder Are in Decline" there is a figure that proves warfare violence has rapidly declined (see attached). Aside from warfare violence, personally I do not think that per capita violence is a useful way to talk about violence. For example, say there is a small tribe of 10 people and 1 person dies due to an act of violence. The death rate would be 10% which is equivalent to saying that 32 million Americans died. Due to the skewed nature of per capita violence, I believe it is an inaccurate way of measuring violence between