Ok, thanks, I added the book into my to-read list, so I'll read it when I have enough time. My skepticism isn't unfounded: I remember watching some TED talk(I

Ok, thanks, I added the book into my to-read list, so I'll read it when I have enough time. My skepticism isn't unfounded: I remember watching some TED talk(I guess: by the author of this book -- I googled "Steven Pinker ted talk" but I didn't do any additional check). And this talk discussed rates of individual violence(IIRC, murder statistics or something like that), and I was wondering all the time why he excludes organized violence by governments/states in 20th century(and other too). 200 million is a serious number, and it can affect your stats significantly. If you "normalize" this number by year, you'll get 2 millions of people killed on average. 4x times more than individual murder rate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona... Well, I hope the book is better/clearer than his talk.