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I attempted to address that in my comment. Check out, Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" which shows that violent crime is down globally, not ju

I attempted to address that in my comment. Check out, Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" which shows that violent crime is down globally, not just in the US. Also, Levitt did say increased policing decreased crime, but only caused around 5% of the decline ( http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUnderstandingWhyCrime2004.pdf http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUndersta... p. 184)

bayesianhorse 13y ago
I found that talk riveting. I tried to tell that to people in real life, but stopped that after a couple of tries... Noone really believes that...
bstrand 13y ago
Pinker's thesis is not without serious detractors. Edward Herman and David Peterson's critique[1] in ZNet is worth considering before taking it as fact. [1] http://www.zcommunications.org/steven-pinker-on-the-alleged-decline-of-violence-by-edward-s-herman-and-david-peterson http://www.zcommunications.org/steven-pinker-on-the-alleged-...
- Tuna-Fish 13y ago
  That is atrociously bad. Among other things, it argues against the concept of normalizing death tolls of war by population (when the primary variable under consideration is the likelihood of one person to die violently across different times), it tries to cram as much contemporary political rhetoric as it can, and it uses highly pathetic analysis such as "the phenomenon of structural violence, or the kind of violence that is “built into the structure” of social relations" (yes, because past societies based aristocracy that brutally extracts what it can from the majority of the population is so much less structurally violent) and "the increasingly savage global class war of the 1 Percent against the other 99, and the “endemic undernutrition and deprivation”" (conveniently ignoring the fact that endemic undernutrition was the normal state of the world prior to recent times). It staggers me that someone can actually read that and take it at face value. His entire thesis seems to be "ignore statistics, look at these pretty individual cases" and "look at how bad the world is", completely missing the point that Pinker didn't actually say the world is peaceful, only that it is more peaceful than it has ever been before, and completely failing to make any case against this.

bayesianhorse 13y ago

I found that talk riveting. I tried to tell that to people in real life, but stopped that after a couple of tries... Noone really believes that...

bstrand 13y ago

Pinker's thesis is not without serious detractors. Edward Herman and David Peterson's critique[1] in ZNet is worth considering before taking it as fact. [1] http://www.zcommunications.org/steven-pinker-on-the-alleged-decline-of-violence-by-edward-s-herman-and-david-peterson http://www.zcommunications.org/steven-pinker-on-the-alleged-...

Tuna-Fish 13y ago
That is atrociously bad. Among other things, it argues against the concept of normalizing death tolls of war by population (when the primary variable under consideration is the likelihood of one person to die violently across different times), it tries to cram as much contemporary political rhetoric as it can, and it uses highly pathetic analysis such as "the phenomenon of structural violence, or the kind of violence that is “built into the structure” of social relations" (yes, because past societies based aristocracy that brutally extracts what it can from the majority of the population is so much less structurally violent) and "the increasingly savage global class war of the 1 Percent against the other 99, and the “endemic undernutrition and deprivation”" (conveniently ignoring the fact that endemic undernutrition was the normal state of the world prior to recent times). It staggers me that someone can actually read that and take it at face value. His entire thesis seems to be "ignore statistics, look at these pretty individual cases" and "look at how bad the world is", completely missing the point that Pinker didn't actually say the world is peaceful, only that it is more peaceful than it has ever been before, and completely failing to make any case against this.