not been steady, has not brought a silent -- finance down a owe and is not guaranteed to continue but nonetheless it is a historical development, a visible on the scale from millennia two years from moors in genocide to this banking of children and the treatment of animals. this evening i will discuss six major historical declines of violence, the immediate cause in particular historical defense of the era that historians would to single out but also the ultimate cost in terms of general historical forces interacting with human nature. the first major decline called de-ba'athification process. until 5,000 years ago cubans

every airlift in anarchy without central government. what was life like in this state of nature? it is a question on which people have opinions for many centuries. thomas jabba famously said in his state of nature the life of man is solitary, up four, nasty and short. 100 years later, rousseau countered the state of nature nothing can be more gentle than man in his primitives day. both of these men were pontificating from the armchair in none of them you about what life was like in today they can do better there are methods to measure in nine states societies in 1 inches archaeology like "c.s.i." but proportion of three historic skeletons have signs of violent traumas such as bashing's

goals, decapitate dated skeletons come arrowheads imbedded in the beemer and fractures on the bone that you hold up your arm to ward off a blow and also ropes tied around their necks. unfortunately this space is not a comedy visuals but i do have a graph 23 historic archaeological sites that they try to estimate the proportion of skeletons with signs of violent trauma ranging o% up through 60% and the average is 15%. taking that figure, for example, the united states and europe through the 20th century have been parable rate of death was 1% in if we tried to get the

worst possible figure from the war death from genocide in man-made famine of driving the world 20th century from 3% click 22005 for the most recent decade it is far left and from megapixel is by examining statistics what percentage of people living in recent nine states societies under quarter cultural and other societies diet and of their fellow humans.

it shows 27 societies for which figures are available in your eye plot than using the criminologists scale of violent deaths per 100,000 people per year the death rate ranging from zero through 1500 but the average is 500 deaths per 100,000 people per year, when half of 1%. compare that figure with the corresponding new figure for states and stack the deck by choosing the most violent states in the most violent era in history such as germany and the 20th century with two world wars 150 is a similar figure to a we have for russia in the 20th century that went through two world wars and revolutions in a civil war. japan and the 20th century

close at 60 and united states was less than three and the world in the 20th century is about one-third of a death per 100,000 per year. that is in the first decade of the 21st century but in the 20th century throwing and all of the world wars common man-made famine in genocide is about 600 which is far less than the nine states people but what is the immediate cause of this change of rate of violent death? the rise of expansion of states. students of history are familiar with the pieces boast of an empire or hegemon pax britannica, a pack civic and so on and

when it has control over a territory it tries to stamp out the reigning futile society not because this comes from a benevolent interest in the welfare of the subject people but rather all of this is a news -- new sense because it helps to settle scores ended is said net loss to those who would just as soon keep the people live to provide them with taxes and slaves. just as a farmer has an interest to prevent his cattle from killing each other the emperor or the war or will try to keep his subject people from killing each other at a loss to himself. the second historical transition is called the civilizing process referring to the transition between life and then it'll ages and i have the lovely would cut

of the stabbing putting daggers through presence-- peasants in the early modern period. it turns out homicide statistics go back hundreds of years to the 14th and 13 saturate over time they plummet to the contemporary rate of one of 100,000 per year a decline of a factor of 35. one of many graphs i ask you to imagine a bid jagged line meandering from the top left down to the bottom right

which represents the era of which we're now living and that is true for homicide in europe. the immediate cause of the european homicide was identified by the german sociologists in a book called the civil raising process from the middle ages to maternity a consolidation essential state kingdoms out of the european patchwork lowlife of feuding warlords was replaced by the king's justice and said of the family of a victim collecting blood money if it was a state that collected the money it would be a

constant revenue stream. and in fact, with the king sent a representative to every town wants a year to tally the number of homicides to collect compensation from the family of the perpetrator and his agent of the crown was called the corner which is why we still call the official who assesses the cause of death a corner. but the transition from middle ages from maternity sought a growing infrastructure of in the structure of money and financing contracts to be enforced and recognized within the boundaries of the states in technology that lubricated trade such as transportation better roads, horses, instruments of time keeping and other technology. the result was zero some or

the plundered gain was the victim's loss increasingly replaced by positive where both had an involuntary exchange to benefit. the third major transition is cemented by a their early stage used to impose peace punishment such as breaking on the wheel where the victim was tied to a wagon wheel in the executioner would break their bones with a sledgehammer then the victim would be hoisted on a wagon wheel and left to die of exposure in shock and sawing in half in ailments through the rectum and in play all the flesh with iron hooks in a remarkably narrow slice of time in the 18th

century torture as a form of punishment was abolished by every major country including the united states and its famous prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment and the eighth amendment of to the constitution part of of global movement to abolish judicial torture. the 18th century saw the abolishment of forms of violence that we consider barbaric such as the frivolous application of the death penalty. england 18th century had 222 capital fences on the books including poaching poaching, robbing a rabbit warden and being in the company of gypsies and strong evidence of malice with the child ages seven to 14 years of age not only a possibility but carried out with relish and johnson in his diary speaks of a seven

year-old girl who was hanged for stealing a petticoat. in 1961 capital crimes is down at four with high treason and murder in variation. in the united states and enormous list of capital crimes and the colonial and early independent period perhaps a graph showing percentage of american executions for crimes other than murder it is close at 100% down pretty much as o% and nowadays the only crimes against people that are punishable by death or execution other than murder our conspiracy to commit murder. the death penalty itself was put on death row starting in the 18th century and began a gradual and precipitous wave of capital punishment

now united states is the only western democracy that even has the death penalty and even then only two-thirds of the state's but even than to say it has a death penalty scott looking at the executions as a portion of the population nowadays 50 people executed every year in a country that has close to 17,000 homicides and even here, the backwater of death penalty is a shadow of its former self. it included witch hunts, religious persecution doing, debtor prison in slavery where the end of the 18th century saw the beginning of a tidal wave of abolition slavery.

the united states behind the curve not until the 1860's but today for the first time in history, no slavery is legal anywhere in the world used to be it was legal every where and endorsed as part of the natural order by the ancient greeks the bible in everyone else. what is the immediate cause of the revolution? looking at candidates in the most plausible in terms of something that happened and if the floor was advances of printing in literacy. of the only industry that shows the increase of productivity prior to the industrial revolution and the cost of printing a book plunged in the 16th in 17th centuries it was the

exponential books that were published as well as those who could be done in the 18th century for the first time as they were illiterate. why should literacy matter? we abbreviate with the term enlightenment those who can make you believe absurdities to me to believe atrocities. as society becomes smart enough to dupont hogwash such as her six go to hell, the jews poison the wells in children are possessed, africans are british, kings rule by divine right it is easy to undermine violence but literacy also

also technologies such as ships to allow the easy movement of people and it is plausible as people spend more of their life reading fiction in history in journalism start to inhabit other people's minds in see the world from their point* o have more empathy and less cruelty but if you try to imagine if what is like to be another person may be worth less likely to enjoy seeing them disembowelled. [laughter] but the fourth transition has to wait another 150 years and it is a development that bordering from a political scientist i call the long piece and it speaks to the chronic exception it was the most violent in history. people to repeat the claim

never back it up other than the 20th century and it is highly likely that is salacious but it is true the second world war was the deadliest event in human history in terms of the absolute number of people who were killed but they have all whole lot more people than had in past centuries and we record and care about more in the 20th century than people did in previous centuries. if you tried to estimate retrospectively land-use kao by the world's population at the time it is not so clear the 20th century was the worst i have taken figures from several people from one

book called a great big book affordable things which is the 100 worst things that people have done too each other that we know was. i divided them by population at the time in would have been since world war ii comes ninth place in world war i does not even make the top 10 other atrocities such as the mongol invasions and african slave trade the annihilation of native americans basically everytime a dynasty fell there to be tens of millions of people killed and looked at the worst atrocity for a cloud but if you assume been on the last 500 years the political scientist has the

matt for a particular category the 800-pound gorilla of the day those that do far more damage than all the wars combined. a few plot the years between 1500 and 2000 in which the great powers of the day find each other it is a curve of the early centuries many points of the curve hitting with a germ points the last great to was the one that ended in 1953 but with the duration at least on one side we used to have things like the third year war, the

80 year war, 100 year war the 20th century we had the six-day war. if you have 70 new war started every year you have occurred if working its way downward 1500 from the present in however there is one curve going in the opposite direction. if you look for most history not have any wars are started but how many more are killed once it begins in that those in the other direction they should got better and better larger numbers of soldiers until 1945 that does the abrupt u-turn and since then for the first seven history have been less numerous and less deadly per year of four and

if you combine the figures in multiplied the number of wars by the deadly this you get a zigzag curve but the last point* represents the last 25 years but the last 50 years hit the all-time low over the last 500 years. of phenomenon called the long piece of elastic 2/3 of a century is the unprecedented declined the wars between countries and here is some statistics they don't need a graph because it starts at the numbers zero. no wars between the united states in the soviet union

put every expert predicted world or three was inevitable many people grew up with experts assuring us that to it is okayed a matter time before the united states did u.s.s.r. do canal, the weapons used since nagasaki saki and no more sense western european countries in your first reaction may be to say but of course. nobody expects nobody expects france and germany to go to war. what a concept or sweden and russia that any student of european history knows this was the rules. not the exception until the precipitous decline of interstate war after 1945.

no wars between developed countries with the highest gdp per capita. what about the rest of the world? there is a fifth major decline that i called the new piece that refers to the rest of the world. if we set aside the great powers the rich countries, there was a worldwide declined 11 country declares war against another but a huge increase of the civil war that made the exploding starting in the 1960's when newly independent states or a challenge by the insurgent movements in those that were egged on by the superpowers

however since 1991 even the number of civil wars have declined if those interstate wars went down which one kills more people? the interstate waters killed far more people but there is nothing like a pair of great powers jouquin artillery shells sending massive number of tanks into battle to rack up the high by the count in a hurry but some teenagers are the ak-47 could make life matt -- miserable in those local areas but they don't do the same amount of nationwide damage. i have a graph showing civil war is over the last 55 years in has plummeted

forcible were with a slight increase if you add up the depth -- deaths interstate and civil wars, you will find a bumpy decline with peeks 40 currie anwr, be it numb and iran-iraq but they have hugged to the floor now us drake i will describe in numbers during the worst years of world war ii and terrain the late forties and early fifties and it had fallen to about 22 and 200,000 but then the past decade this 1/3 of deaths

per 100 people using akon's day yardstick this is the phenomenon and that is the bit of a saturation to say the dream of the 1960 fall seniors is almost coming true, the world almost putting an end to war. one of the immediate causes, one influential hypophysis in 1795 in his essay perpetual peace he proposes democracy democracy, interstate trade and an international community all would drive down the likelihood of war. recently a pair political scientists have tested the hypothesis to measure the factors to show first all of them have been increased to the second half of the

20th century and all of them are statistical predictors of peace and the number of democracies exceeded autocracies around 1990 and shows an increase of the fifth international trade skyrocket after the world war in membership of organizations has steadily increased o the 20th century and especially since 1990 a huge increase in the number of international peacekeepers soldiers with blue helmets and other neutral parties to get in the way between opposing forces, don't always prevent reigniting of hostilities into war but do far more often is the and when there is no peacekeepers. the sixth historical decline which refers to the targeting of violence in smaller scales against all

the ball minorities such as racial minorities, minorities, women, the children, homosexuals and animals. saw during the postwar period of the civil-rights movement put an end to lynchings which used to take place of 150 per year that went down by the 1950's at zero and hate crime murders of blacks have been in the single digits since first recorded and have since plunged at about one per year. eight crimes such as intimidation and assault have declined since first measured. the racist attitudes in the past license outburst of violence of genocide has been a steady decline. in the united states if you ask white people would you move if a black family moved in next door and you believe

they should go to separate schools in the in come gap is due to lower attitude and many have fallen so low there in the opinion and the pollsters have dropped them from the survey. 8% decline since the early '70s when the statistics were first kept. also a precipitous decline of domestic violence. a strong declaimed namely the killing of wives and husbands all lowercase who that decline is far deeper of what women in killing has been set of has been killings of that has been. the women's rights have been

beneficial to man. [laughter] and a decline in every western country in the degree of the approval of spain in day decline of physical abuse and sexual abuse of children and a decline of school violence such as fighting and a non fatal crimes. of the gay-rights movement has seen an increase in the number of states to decriminalized homosexuality and american states in a decline of the anti-gay attitudes of homosexuality is morally wrong and should be made illegal or of gay people should be denied equal opportunity and a decline of at least one category of the anti-gay hate crimes. the animal-rights movement seeing a decline in hunting in a rise of vegetarianism and a decline of the percentage of motion pictures where animals were harmed.

[laughter] this raises a question why have all of these graphs meandered downward over the course of history? why is there so many different declines of violence and scales of magnitude? one possibility is human nature has changed and have lost the inclination and it is an unlikely explanation in. for one thing toddlers continue to hit and kicked and bite and little boys continue to play fight but grown-up boys in boys enjoy greek tragedies in drama and ice hockey in movie stars including the ex-cfo governor of california. [laughter] and they have assessed of homicidal fantasies to be

ever fantasized of killing somebody don't like? fifty% of women and one-third of men do. [laughter] the three quarters of men at least occasional leave fantasize about killing people they don't like in the rest of them are lying. [laughter] a more likely possibility is human nature is extraordinarily complex and has inclinations that counteract them. with the "the better angels of our nature" which i took the title of my book and our inclinations and whether the sources of conflict to fight it out? not a single psychological

category than a distinct motive that can results sheer exploitation as a means to an end in in the path is something such as rape or plunder or conquest or the elimination of the rival which is different from that the quest for dominance of individuals to climb the pecking order with the all from vail and an adaptation know it is drive for those of ratio of national religious supremacy. dairy large category of revenge that had a vendetta, rough justice and cruel punishment and the biggest category is the

request of the ideologies such as religions fascism in communism that has the pernicious utility and cost-benefit analysis is the ideology has the prospect of a future world infinitely could forever, what are you entitled to do to attain that? you could commit to as much as you want and still make the world day better place by the cost benefit analysis and a match and that you are with the one true faith to which there is a utopia in some people who hereabouts this but they still run the reject it. how evo are they? you do the math. arbitrarily evil. that is why the details of

distribution of massive violence tend to be pushed out or by the utopian ideology is. what is on the other side to counteract the motives? self control, the consequences of our behavior and to feel others' pain in the moral sense the family of into a chance some of which like tribalism can actually increase by lance but at least one flavor of the moral sense the drive for fairness can counteract islands and then the cognitive fact to allow us to engage in the attached analysis. if we have the inclinations of violence toward one hand

and what has tipped the balance over the course of history or what has brought out our better angels? the first possibility proposed in the book called the leviathan. referring to the state and judicial system with a monopoly on the legitimate use it exploited by the attack in to reduce the need for deterrence in vengeance and for which sides to dispute that on one side is angels the other side is a wicked or stubborn or stupid or all three. people from social psychology research it exaggerates their innocence this is unless you have the third party to be out

penalties. it consists of the transitions of the effect of the state and watch the movies and reverse anselm's of anarchy where violence can reroute such as the american wild west with the cowboy movies to the nearest share of is 90 miles away and collapse of buyers in the mafia and the street gang to deal with contraband in cannot settle the disputes cannot dial 911 because of the nature of the work that they do to enforce the interest with their own rough justice resulting in "the sopranos" and those types of and does. other evidence that the national scale is the effectiveness of

international peacekeepers. the second to historical force to draw out our better angels is a gentle commerce, the idea that plunder is a zero sum game in which everybody can win over a longer distances more and more they are more of days viable live and dead not a lot of affection but that they make too much of our stuff and we owe them too much money. [laughter] it consists of statistical analysis to show the country's have greater amounts of international

trade to post a few were genocide in the third historical first -- force is called the expanding circle the concept named by the first charles r. one it chiquito us with a sense of empathy unfortunately by default only to a narrow circle of friends in family the you can see this to embrace not just the village or that client or the nation to both sexes to children and eventually too other species. it begs the question and which expanded the circle in as i hinted earlier, the technologies to increase

cosmopolitan has the growing appreciation of history in literature to journalism growing opportunities for travel and we know from social psychology laboratory began a person to adopt a real or fictitious person we're more sympathetic to the category of people that that individual represents historical evidence that the 17th in 18th century in expansion of literacy and travel that preceded the humanitarian revolution and it may not be a coincidence the second half of the century was also the era of the village and often speculated the rise of internet and social media assisted the arrow spring

but the final historical force i call the escalator of every seven the possibility of the growth of literacy education and public discourse has encouraged people to think more universally and they get into the habit of rising above their advantage point* which makes it harder to go in interest of others encouraging you to have a morality based on fairness and universal rules to recognize the futility of the cycle of violence and to see it as a problem to be solved rather than as a contest to be one. one intriguing piece is abstract reasoning abilities as measured by the iq test

given throughout the 20th century the iq increase to buy about three points a decade. how could this have affected by lance? other studies have shown that people and societies with higher levels of education and measured intelligence all else the quote commit fewer violent crimes on average and cooperate more with the experimental games and and with opposition to a more are open to democracy when i open to these forces is? the coming to the overarching theory this is what they call a social the lama. at the exploited by last

also run as to the victim in the long run all parties are better off if violence is avoided and our dilemma is how to get the other guy for the same time as i do in if you're the only one then you are a sitting duck for invasion by the bad guy everybody has to be there soared into the plowshare but the case in which human ingenuity gradually solves the problem just like other scourges of nature and all these forces have increased the material and emotional incentives of all parties to avoid violence simultaneously. regardless of the correct explanation, i think the implications for understanding the human

condition our profound. with the efforts of violence reduction from the moralistic mine said to the empirical mindset we may be better off asking why is there peace? instead of flattery doing wrong, what are we doing right? we have been. and it sure would be good to find out exactly what it is. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you steven pinker this was a fantastic presentation. already people are lining up for the questions. i will ask again, i am never successful but i would keep trying. please keep your questions really brief so everyone gets a chance.

and also please keep your answers brief. [laughter] it works both ways. if you are comfortable please say your name. >> my name is caroline and my question is germany. the most cosmopolitan and highly educated society arguably in europe and they did the most horrible crimes. >> is all little misleading to say it because there were sectors that are educated and cosmopolitan but also sectors that were tribal in their minds that and deeply anti-semitic even among the germany's leads there was a widespread rejection of the french business and rather

than the acceptance of universal right this and the emphasis of individuals but the primitive embrace of tribalism. you are right to there was say flourish chain cosmopolitan in sentiment but the problem is they were all murdered. said general answer is when it comes to man -- an entire society is important to see how it leads to competition among the various sectors only if you have the robust societies that the cosmopolitan old-- cosmopolitan people are numbered effect the society as of all. >> but the first spanish

filmmaker, and only after 10 years i could get up to keep in touch with what is going on. [laughter] but on the other hand, hand,, there is a containment in one sense of the proliferation of violent games starting with kids as young as two and three with april at -- tremendous occupation and all of the media and i would call it the next generalization but contained and freud spoke of

his aggressive drive and you can identify with people who were suffering to say they got it is not be. but even more important, i can fantasize i have done this murder but somebody else will be discovered and i can go conscience three. >> i agree pledge your take and is great for human experience but i don't believe them with a huge expansion of violent video games has been accompanied with the great american in crime decline and also not convinced by the hydraulic model if you did it out to buy entertainment you are much less likely but i think

it is day guilty pleasure and if you look at the old testament there is some gruesome stuff and people enjoy it for interesting reasons. >> but i would think very few people watch the execution in terms of the population but part of the population. >> people can amount to money stomach turn came public execution-- execution with disembowelled and in the past was possible to be overcome by a collective sadism. >> i notice there was laughter in twitter when you talked about the disinvolvement heche

disembowel meant. >> we have a long line i would like everybody to have their chance. >> you said if anybody wanted to give names i was there much impressed ious wanted to meet you. no bizarre fantasies. [laughter] no murder involved. do think some people are biological or have a tendency to be inherently evil as if there is a fear of clowns that could arouses evil? like little children

holdings is years behind their back? and you want to play and did you get very close watch out? no matter how you raise them even if adopted by the nicest people were intellectually brilliant something about them they like to see other supper. >> the answer is there is a substantial and heritable component to antisocial tendencies and extreme and violent antisocial tendencies. but within a population the troublemakers, and a more callous sort impulsive people get that way in part because thanks to their real life research to name the compare adoptive children to

their adoptive parents but the most extreme are the psychopaths a few percentage points of the population that seem to be without the ability to develop a conscience that takes into account the interests of others. among individuals there is destined to be inherited. >> we need to move on. is only for everybody get a chance. >> my name is no law. my question is about the backroom boys the phrase referred to the engineers at dupont to invented that napalm and the vietnam war. soap reviewing the records of quote -- known chomsky, the remark the

objectivity and distance of the fact of their actions of very technological expectations and you mentioned the institutionalized violence by rational people and technological means have its roots of those long genocidal complex that maybe 30% in then also the genocide no conflict they have declined precipitously but in a particular area the continent's and extreme violence white the backroom boys with those very effective killing agents. >> to be concerned when they were deployed it is interesting contrary to what

i hear as we've developed warfare wall that circumvent the end of vegetation and inhibitions of the bloodied gory violence does that cause it to go up? you mentioned the third year war with those terrific rates of violent death than those where carried out with weapons in bayonets and so on and people could very easily overcome their resistance to the hands on violence and often the most high-tech forms of violence that are deployed most gingerly nuclear weapons being an example was nagasaki so the correlation is much less than people think because it is so easy to commit hands on violence.

>> on the historical links with that particular pattern technological a very rich and devoted to the culture of violence. how clear is that connection? >> the highest technology of viniculture is applied to the weapons of four so those on horseback those second do vast amounts of damage very quickly. to bring a people's ingenuity. >> i am a psychiatrist here in town and i am wondering if you can comment of lemay be dismissing the change in human nature a little too quickly in this sense genes are always in a dance with the environment nine ase

said it is remarkable looking at what happened in the 13th century with the royals just been much more fertile than the lower class in the bush was the two in the street the amendment but it took the industrial revolution to happen so we have more people than england in the attention of surplus and those with attention deficit disorder with greater concentration in self control and run society moves in that direction moving in a critical mass that may change it certainly fuels a change in a culture. >> baidu discuss that possibility at length in the book not embracing it or rejected because of. [laughter]

-- lack of evidence but it does make a prediction that english men regardless of culture should be genetically less prone to violence and people from other cultures and races. moreover maybe unnecessary with those $0.3 biological evolution given those that occur far too rapidly to be a charitable to genetic evolution such as the plunging of the crime rate so i figure we don't have a need for the hypothesis. >> i am a huge fan of will try to keep it together.

>> and with the declining rates of violence that the same time the s.w.a.t. teams have gone way beyond the original intention from hostage situation even breaking into people's homes over college loans. if those rates of violence are really declining so why is law-enforcement flexing their muscles in a way that does not correlate with the decline of violence? >> we have to look at figures over time of government violence perpetrated and compared to earlier decades, to bringing in the leviathan to keep each other from people's

throats you have to keep that from people's throats and that first transition was a tough bargain because it did or their rates of violence but to debut the despot's to do with but the continuing battle for democracy and civil liberties is the attempt to find the sweet spot where the government could find over one psittacine over another but yet that is something i suspect we could muddle through. >> thank you. >> make sure everyone in mind gets to ask their questions in then that will be our limited tonight. . .

>> hunter-gatherer cultures, what you called, i think, non-state peoples is erroneous. they allege, for example, that the data at the time it was collected, these people had had contact with modern society for many decades, that they're not, in fact, nomadic, they're settled peoples. um, aye just been curious ever since reading that to hear your response to some of those allegations. >> i'm not familiar with those allegations, but the data that i present are, many of them are from people who definitely had no contact with any europeans such as samples of skeletons

from pre-columbian native americans. many of them are, also, from hunter-gathering and hunter-horticulturalist people who also had no contact, so i don't know a response to these allegations not knowing what they are. but certainly the sources i've consulted make it very clear when there has and hasn't been contact. and they've spent a range, there are some societies that don't have measured rates of homicide or deaths in war, but on average the rates are way up there, and they're from many, many societies of different kinds. what they have in common is not living under government. and that seems to uniformly give -- or i shouldn't say uniformly because there are some in this tale of distribution, but on average give to high rates of violence. and from what i can tell from the literature, that's a solid conclusion, and i cite many surveys that have the numbers that back up that claim.

>> thank you. >> hi, i'm rich, and thanks for your stimulating presentation. i guess when you're listing factors join the decline of violence in our society everything from, you know, paddling to death penalty to rape, i guess one exception that kind of stood out in my mind would be incarceration, very high level of incarceration. of course, there are violent people that deserve it but there are also nonviolent crimes that are huge sentences, people thrown into a situation where that, prison life, is not getting less violent. i was wondering how you factor into that the larger picture. >> well finish historical terms, modern american prisons, as horrible as they are, are much less violent than prisons several hundred years ago when you could have, say, prisoners shackled to the noor or wearing iron-spiked collars and their family would have to pay for the spiked collar to be taken off

when there was extremely high rates of deaths from disease and starvation in the prisons. this is not to defend current american prisons by any means, but historically it would be inaccurate to take the current situation as evidence that nothing has improved. now, the american impressment bulge in the last 20 years partly was a way of counteracting the enormous increase in street violence, violent crimes in all types that had overtaken the united states from the '60s through the 1980s. the homicide rate more than doubled in those decades, the rate of rape, the rate of assault. and so as a rather clumsy countermeasure, there was an increase in incarceration which in part was responsible for the fact that the violent crime rates have plunged back to earth since the 1990s. not entirely because there were a number of other causes of the violence decline, but most statisticians of crime attribute

at least part of the crime decline to the increase in imprisonment. now in the united states as with many other of the trends that i have been mentioning, it's a little misleading. it's the country we all know best, and we tend to think of it as representative of western democracies. but it's really, really an outlier. and a lot of the trends that i have mentioned are true for every western democracy but the united states which is kind of pulling up the rear. and it's true of homicide, it's true of capital punishment, it's true of willingness to engage in wars, and it's true of imprisonment where we throw a disproportionately large proportion of our population in prison compared to other western democracies. but certainly on the centuries scale, there's just no comparison between today's prisons and those of the 19th and 18th centuries. >> hi. my name is megan, and i was

wondering if you could share with us a bit about the methods you used to arrive to these numbers that you talked about tonight. um, did you do kind of independent testing with statistics to kind of look at this type of cause? like, did this factor cause x, you know, change these things? so could you share with us your numbers and how you arrived on that? >> well, it depends on the numbers because for different periods of history, different kinds of violence, the numbers have different sources. so for the state/nonstate contrast, it came from earth nothing mys of ethic tribal peoples and from forensic ark cog. for the history of homicide in europe, it came from historic krillnology such as the unearthing coroner's records for every year in a particular parish or town going back to the middle ages n. the case of war, it depends on the period. since 1946 there have been

meticulous statistics kept on deaths in armed conflicts by a couple of scandinavian organizations. before 1946 there was the war project which looked at death rates from the largest wars from 1816 to the present. prior to 1816 it becomes, as you can imagine the farther back you go, the fuzzier the statistics get. but there is a line of historians, quantitative historians that have tried to triangulate on estimates of the death tolls from various wars to come up with best-guess estimates. for homicide more recently, the fbi keeps reasonably good statistics which they have since the 1930s. for crimes other than homicide like rape and assault, the best data are victimization surveys which aren't contaminated by people's willingness to report a crime to the police. for still others like child abuse and domestic violence, there are victimization surveys

or other social science methodologies. so it all depends on the kind of violence. >> did you take a new approach with analyzing the results from these, or -- >> in general, what i did was i took the data sets in their entirety from other researchers and never second guessed the criteria. either the start date, the stop date, what gets included, what gets excluded. because i didn't want to do any cherry picking to try to favor this hypothesis. so the data sets that i use vary in their quality, for sure, but none of them were selected in order to show a decline or manipulate it in order to show a decline. i just dumped all the data -- even when i knew that some of the inclusions were dodgy for various reasons, but i didn't give myself the freedom of cherry picking them. >> thank you. >> hi. um, i was just wondering, um, putnam finds that social capital has been declining in the united

states, interconnection community. and i would have thought that that would lead to maybe more violence, more crime, but it seems like we've had a decline in crime despite, you know, those kinds of maybe troubling figures. and i was wondering if you could give any thought to that and had any ideas why, you know, putnam's results might be going a different direction from your results on crime in this country. >> yeah, it's a good question because there are other data sets that would seem to suggest that the rate of violent crime depends on the degree of social interconnectedness and trusted institutions. but of the -- when i refer to the civilizing process, that was a decline from about 100 per 100,000 per year to about 10 per 100,000 per year, and that is everywhere with government extends its tentacles. but the further decline we see in europe and parts of the

united states from about ten down to the single digits, the low single digits seems to depend not on the presence of government, but some more nebulous process of accepting the social order that, indeed, you'd expect to correlate with the health of communal institutions but, as you also point out, don't. the embarrassing, dirty little fact is that no statistical criminologist has been successful in accounting for either the increase in crime rate in the 1960s through the 1980s, nor the plunging from the 990s to the present -- 1990s to the present. everyone has been doing catch up. all the numbers you plug into the usual models, you turn them in, and they don't can predict why the curves go up and down. so that's the embarrassing -- but i do my best in the book to talk about changes in cultural attitudes that could filter down

to law enforcement and push these up or down. but we're all retelling stories post-talk. >> thank you. >> last question. >> my name's rich potter, thank you. can't wait to read book. it's fascinating subject. i'm interested in why is the perception that we live in such a dangerous and violent era, why is that so pervasive? >> yeah. >> it's just amazing how discordant that is. >> it is, indeed, an intriguing question. i think one reason is the, what the media report, what they're getting better and better at reporting. not only is there the programming policy -- if it bleeds, it leads -- media programmers know that just like people, just as people enjoy violent entertainment, they enjoy violent news, so that gets promoted, number one. we're better and better at finding violence.

now, anyone on the planet with a cell phone can beam video footage of violence all over the world. we -- and cognitive psychologists know that the human mind estimates risk and likelihood by the ease with which we can recall examples. if you can think of an example, you think it must be dangerous. we're not as good as calculating denominators. and the media, of course, don't report denominators. if you've got millions of people dying of alzheimer's and cancer and heart attacks, you know, if vladimir in lithuania keels over from a heart attack, there isn't a camera crew filming it. but if vladimir gets shot by a deranged postal worker, it'll be on the evening news. and the final reason is that we care more about violence now, so a lot of things that just didn't even count as violence now we consider to be heinous crimes. the most blatant example is genocide which before the 20th century, no one seemed to think there was anything particularly

wrong with genocide. there were many colonial ministers and politicians who thanked god for wiping out the indians. there was a change in sensibility that has gone further and further down the scale to isolate behaviors that before were okay. my favorite example being the recent targeting of bullying. no less than the president of the united states gave a policy address on what we're going to do about bullying in the playground. now, 25 years ago this would have been an episode of "the simpsons," it would have been absurd. boys will be boys, it's part of childhood. how are kids going to grow up tough if you're going to turn them into sissies. but now we think of life from the point of view of the bullied child. there are many, many accounts of the suffering of victims of bullying, and now there's a new category of violence that wasn't even counted as violence