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 b

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.pdf http://stevenpinker.com/files/comments_on_taleb_by_s_pinker.... [1] - http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-05-18/is-the-world-getting-safer-maybe-not http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-05-18/is-the-worl...