Enlightenment Now

  12. Between 2000 and 2013, the Gini index in Venezuela fell from .47 to .41 (UN’s World Income Inequality Database, https://www.wider.unu.edu/), while the homicide rate rose from 32.9 to 53.0 per 100,000 (Igarapé Institute’s Homicide Monitor, https://homicide.igarape.org.br).

  13. Sources of UN estimates are listed in the caption to figure 12-2. Using very different methods, the Global Burden of Disease project (Murray et al. 2012) has estimated that the global homicide rate fell from 7.4 per 100,000 people in 1995 to 6.1 in 2015.

  14. International homicide rates: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2014; https://www.unodc.org/gsh/en/data.html.

  15. Reducing global homicide by 50 percent in thirty years: Eisner 2014b, 2015; Krisch et al. 2015. The 2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals include the vaguer aspiration “Significantly reduce all forms of violence and related death rates everywhere” (Target 16.1.1, https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg16).

  16. International homicide rates: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2014, https://www.unodc.org/gsh/en/data.html; see also Homicide Monitor, https://homicide.igarape.org.br/.

  17. Lopsided distribution of homicides at every scale: Eisner 2015; Muggah & Szabo de Carvalho 2016.

  18. Homicide in Boston: Abt & Winship 2016.

  19. New York crime decline: Zimring 2007.

  20. Homicide declines in Colombia, South Africa, and other countries: Eisner 2014b, p. 23. Russia: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2014, p. 28.

  21. Homicide declined in most nations: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2013, 2014, https://www.unodc.org/gsh/en/data.html.

  22. Successful crime-fighting in Latin America: Guerrero Velasco 2015; Muggah & Szabo de Carvalho 2016.

  23. Rise in Mexican homicide 2007–11 due to organized crime: Botello 2016. Drop in Juárez: P. Corcoran, “Declining Violence in Juárez a Major Win for Calderon: Report,” Insight Crime, March 26, 2013, http://www.insightcrime.org/news-analysis/declining-violence-in-juarez-a-major-win-for-calderon-report.

  24. Homicide declines: Bogotá and Medellín: T. Rosenberg, “Colombia’s Data-Driven Fight Against Crime,” New York Times, Nov. 20, 2014. São Paulo: Risso 2014. Rio: R. Muggah & I. Szabó de Carvalho, “Fear and Backsliding in Rio,” New York Times, April 15, 2014.

  25. San Pedro Sula homicide decline: S. Nazario, “How the Most Dangerous Place on Earth Got a Little Bit Safer,” New York Times, Aug. 11, 2016.

  26. For an effort to halve homicide in Latin America within a decade, see Muggah & Szabo de Carvalho 2016, and https://www.instintodevida.org/.

  27. How to bring homicide rates down quickly: Eisner 2014b, 2015; Krisch et al. 2015; Muggah & Szabo de Carvalho 2016. See also Abt & Winship 2016; Gash 2016; Kennedy 2011; Latzer 2016.

  28. Hobbes, violence, and anarchy: Pinker 2011, pp. 31–36, 680–82.

  29. Police strikes: Gash 2016, pp. 184–86.

  30. Impunity from justice increases crime: Latzer 2016; Eisner 2015, p. 14.

  31. Causes of the Great American Crime Decline: Kennedy 2011; Latzer 2016; Levitt 2004; Pinker 2011, pp. 116–27; Zimring 2007.

  32. One-sentence summary: Eisner 2015.

  33. State legitimacy and crime: Eisner 2003, 2015; Roth 2009.

  34. What works in crime prevention: Abt & Winship 2016. See also Eisner 2014b, 2015; Gash 2016; Kennedy 2011; Krisch et al. 2015; Latzer 2016; Muggah 2015, 2016.

  35. Crime and self-control: Pinker 2011, pp. 72–73, 105, 110–11, 126–27, 501–6, 592–611.

  36. Crime, narcissism, and sociopathy (or psychopathy): Pinker 2011, pp. 510–11, 519–21.

  37. Target hardening and crime reduction: Gash 2016.

  38. Effectiveness of drug courts and treatment: Abt & Winship 2016, p. 26.

  39. Equivocal effects of firearm legislation: Abt & Winship 2016, p. 26; Hahn et al. 2005; N. Kristof, “Some Inconvenient Gun Facts for Liberals,” New York Times, Jan. 16, 2016.

  40. Traffic death graph: K. Barry, “Safety in Numbers,” Car and Driver, May 2011, p. 17.

  41. Based on deaths per capita, not per vehicle mile traveled.

  42. Bruce Springsteen, “Pink Cadillac.”

  43. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety 2016. The rate rose slightly, to 10.9, in 2015.

  44. The annual rate of death in car crashes per 100,000 people is 57 in rich countries, 88 in poor countries (World Health Organization 2014, p. 10).

  45. Bettmann 1974, pp. 22–23.

  46. Scott 2010, pp. 18–19.

  47. Rawcliffe 1998, p. 4, quoted in Scott 2010, pp. 18–19.

  48. Tebeau 2016.

  49. Tudor Darwin Awards: http://tudoraccidents.history.ox.ac.uk/.

  50. The complete dataset for figure 12-6 shows a puzzling rise in deaths from falls starting in 1992, which is inconsistent with the fact that emergency treatments and hospital admissions for falls during this period showed no such rise (Hu & Baker 2012). Though falls tend to kill older people, the rise cannot be explained by the aging of the American population, because it persists in age-adjusted data (Sehu, Chen, & Hedegaard 2015). The rise turns out to be an artifact of changes in reporting practices (Hu & Mamady 2014; Kharrazi, Nash, & Mielenz 2015; Stevens & Rudd 2014). Many elderly people fall down, fracture their hip, ribs, or skull, and die several weeks or months later from pneumonia or other complications. Coroners and medical examiners in the past tended to list the cause of death in these cases as the immediate terminal illness. More recently, they have listed it as the precipitating accident. The same number of people fell and died, but increasingly the death was attributed to the fall.

  51. Presidential reports: “National Conference on Fire Prevention” (press release), Jan. 3, 1947, http://foundation.sfpe.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/presidentsconference1947.pdf; America Burning (report of the National Commission on Fire Prevention and Control), 1973; American Burning Revisited, U.S. Fire Administration/FEMA, 1987.

  52. Firefighters as EMTs: P. Keisling, “Why We Need to Take the ‘Fire’ out of ‘Fire Department,’” Governing, July 1, 2015.

  53. Most poisonings are from drugs or alcohol: National Safety Council 2016, pp. 160–61.

  54. Opioid epidemic: National Safety Council, “Prescription Drug Abuse Epidemic; Painkillers Driving Addiction,” 2016, http://www.nsc.org/learn/NSC-Initiatives/Pages/prescription-painkiller-epidemic.aspx.

  55. Opioid epidemic and its treatment: Satel 2017.

  56. Opioid overdoses perhaps peaking: Hedegaard, Chen, & Warner 2015.

  57. Age and cohort effects in drug overdoses: National Safety Council 2016; see Kolosh 2014 for graphs.

  58. Drug use down in teenagers: National Institute on Drug Abuse 2016. The declines continued through the second half of 2016: National Institute on Drug Abuse, “Teen Substance Use Shows Promising Decline,” Dec. 13, 2016, https://www.drugabuse.gov/news-events/news-releases/2016/12/teen-substance-use-shows-promising-decline.

  59. Bettmann 1974, pp. 69–71.

  60. Quoted in Bettmann 1974, p. 71.

  61. History of workplace safety: Alrich 2001.

  62. Progressive movement and worker safety: Alrich 2001.

  63. The steepening of the drop from 1970 to 1980 in figure 12-7 is probably an artifact from aggregating different sources; it is not visible in the continuous data series from National Safety Council 2016, pp. 46–47. The overall trend in the NSC dataset is similar to that in the figure; I chose not to show it because the rates are calculated as a proportion of the population rather than the number of workers, and because they contain an artifactual drop in 1992, when the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries was introduced.

  64. United Nations Development Programme 2011, table 2.3, p. 37.

  65. The example is from “War, Death, and the Automobile,” an appendix to Mueller 1989, originally publi
shed in the Wall Street Journal in 1984.

  CHAPTER 13: TERRORISM

  1. Fear of terrorism: Jones et al. 2016a; see also chapter 4, note 14.

  2. Western Europe as war zone: J. Gray, “Steven Pinker Is Wrong About Violence and War,” The Guardian, March 13, 2015; see also S. Pinker, “Guess What? More People Are Living in Peace Now. Just Look at the Numbers,” The Guardian, March 20, 2015.

  3. More dangerous than terrorism: National Safety Council 2011.

  4. Homicide in Western Europe versus the United States: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2013. The average homicide rate of the 24 countries classified as Western Europe in the Global Terrorism Database was 1.1 per 100,000 people per year; the figure for the United States in 2014 was 4.5. Road traffic deaths: The average of the Western European countries’ road traffic death rates for 2013 was 4.8 fatalities per 100,000 people per year; the US rate was 10.7.

  5. Deaths in insurgencies and guerrilla warfare now counted as “terrorism”: Human Security Report Project 2007; Mueller & Stewart 2016b; Muggah 2016.

  6. John Mueller, personal communication, 2016.

  7. Contagion of mass killings: B. Cary, “Mass Killings May Have Created Contagion, Feeding on Itself,” New York Times, July 27, 2016; Lankford & Madfis 2018.

  8. Active shooter incidents: Blair & Schweit 2014; Combs 1979. Mass murders: Analysis of FBI Uniform Crime Report Data (http://www.ucrdatatool.gov/) from 1976 to 2011 by James Alan Fox, graphed in Latzer 2016, p. 263.

  9. For a graph that expands the trends using a logarithmic scale, see Pinker 2011, fig. 6-9, p. 350.

  10. K. Eichenwald, “Right-Wing Extremists Are a Bigger Threat to America Than ISIS,” Newsweek, Feb. 4, 2016. Using the United States Extremis Crime Database (Freilich et al. 2014), which tracks right-wing extremist violence, the security analyst Robert Muggah (personal communication) estimates that from 1990 through May 2017, and excluding 9/11 and Oklahoma, there have been 272 deaths from right-wing extremism and 136 from Islamist terrorist attacks.

  11. Terrorism as a by-product of global media: Payne 2004.

  12. Greater impact of homicide: Slovic 1987; Slovic, Fischof, & Lichtenstein 1982.

  13. Rational fear of murderers: Duntley & Buss 2011.

  14. Motives of suicide terrorists and rampage killers: Lankford 2013.

  15. Delusion that ISIS is an “existential threat” to America: See chapter 4, note 14; also J. Mueller & M. Stewart, “ISIS Isn’t an Existential Threat to America,” Reason, May 27, 2016.

  16. Y. N. Harari, “The Theatre of Terror,” The Guardian, Jan. 31, 2015.

  17. Terrorism doesn’t work: Abrahms 2006; Brandwen 2016; Cronin 2009; Fortna 2015.

  18. Jervis 2011.

  19. Y. N. Harari, “The Theatre of Terror,” The Guardian, Jan. 31, 2015.

  20. Don’t Name Them, Don’t Show Them: Lankford & Madfis 2018; see also the projects called No Notoriety (https://nonotoriety.com/) and Don’t Name Them (http://www.dontnamethem.org/).

  21. How terrorism ends: Abrahms 2006; Cronin 2009; Fortna 2015.

  CHAPTER 14: DEMOCRACY

  1. High rates of violence in nonstate societies: Pinker 2011, chap. 2. For more recent estimates confirming this difference, see Gat 2015; Gómez et al. 2016; Wrangham & Glowacki 2012.

  2. Despotic early governments: Betzig 1986; Otterbein 2004. Biblical tyranny: Pinker 2011, chap. 1.

  3. White 2011, p. xvii.

  4. Democracies have faster-growing economies: Radelet 2015, pp. 125–29. Note that this can be obscured by the fact that poor countries can grow at faster rates than rich countries, and poor countries tend to be less democratic. Democracies are less likely to go to war: Hegre 2014; Russett 2010; Russett & Oneal 2001. Democracies have less severe (though not necessarily fewer) civil wars: Gleditsch 2008; Lacina 2006. Democracies have fewer genocides: Rummel 1994, pp. 2, 15; Rummel 1997, pp. 6–10, 367; Harff 2003, 2005. Democracies never have famines: Sen 1984; see also Devereux 2000, for a slight qualification. Citizens in democracies are healthier: Besley 2006. Citizens in democracies are better educated: Roser 2016b.

  5. Three waves of democratization: Huntington 1991.

  6. Democracy in retreat: Mueller 1999, p. 214.

  7. Democracy is obsolete: quotes from Mueller 1999, p. 214.

  8. “The end of history”: Fukuyama 1989.

  9. For quotations, see Levitsky & Way 2015.

  10. Not getting the concept of democracy: Welzel 2013, p. 66, n. 11.

  11. This is a problem for the annual counts by the democracy-tracking organization Freedom House; see Levitsky & Way 2015; Munck & Verkuilen 2002; Roser 2016b.

  12. This is another problem with the Freedom House data.

  13. Polity IV Project: Center for Systemic Peace 2015; Marshall & Gurr 2014; Marshall, Gurr, & Jaggers 2016.

  14. Color revolutions: Bunce 2017.

  15. Democracies: Marshall, Gurr, & Jaggers 2016; Roser 2016b. “Democracies” are countries rated by the Polity IV Project as having a democracy score of 6 or greater, “Autocracies” as those having an autocracy score of 6 or greater. Countries that are neither democratic nor autocratic are called anocracies, defined as an “incoherent mix of democratic and autocratic traits and practices.” In an “open anocracy,” leaders are not restricted to an elite. For 2015, Roser divides the world’s population up as follows: 55.8 percent in democracies, 10.8 percent in open anocracies, 6.0 percent in closed anocracies, 23.2 percent in autocracies, and 4 percent in transition or with no data.

  16. For a recent defense of the Fukuyama thesis, see Mueller 2014. Refuting the “democratic recession”: Levitsky & Way 2015.

  17. Prosperity and democracy: Norberg 2016; Roser 2016b; Porter, Stern, & Green 2016, p. 19. Prosperity and human rights: Fariss 2014; Land, Michalos, & Sirgy 2012. Education and democracy: Rindermann 2008; see also Roser 2016i.

  18. Diversity of democracy: Mueller 1999; Norberg 2016; Radelet 2015; for data, see the Polity IV Annual Time-Series, http://www.systemicpeace.org/polityproject.html; Center for Systemic Peace 2015; Marshall, Gurr, & Jaggers 2016.

  19. Prospects for democracy in Russia: Bunce 2017.

  20. Norberg 2016, p. 158.

  21. Democratic dimwits: Achens & Bartels 2016; Caplan 2007; Somin 2016.

  22. Latest fashion in dictatorship: Bunce 2017.

  23. Popper 1945/2013.

  24. Democracy = the right to complain: Mueller 1999, 2014. Quotation from Mueller 1999, p. 247.

  25. Mueller 1999, p. 140.

  26. Mueller 1999, p. 171.

  27. Levitsky & Way 2015, p. 50.

  28. Democracy and education: Rindermann 2008; Roser 2016b; Thyne 2006. Democracy, Western influence, and violent revolution: Levitsky & Way 2015, p. 54.

  29. Democracy and human rights: Mulligan, Gil, & Sala-i-Martin 2004; Roser 2016b, section II.3.

  30. Quotes from Sikkink 2017.

  31. Human rights information paradox: Clark & Sikkink 2013; Sikkink 2017.

  32. History of capital punishment: Hunt 2007; Payne 2004; Pinker 2011, pp. 149–53.

  33. Death penalty on death row: C. Ireland, “Death Penalty in Decline,” Harvard Gazette, June 28, 2012; C. Walsh, “Death Penalty, in Retreat,” Harvard Gazette, Feb. 3, 2015. For current updates, see “International Death Penalty,” Amnesty International, http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/death-penalty/international-death-penalty, and “Capital Punishment by Country,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_country.

  34. C. Ireland, “Death Penalty in Decline,” Harvard Gazette, June 28, 2012.

  35. History of the abolition of capital punishment: Hammel 2010.

  36. Enlightenment arguments against the death penalty: Hammel 2010; Hunt 2007; Pinker 2011, pp. 146–53.

  37. Sout
hern culture of honor: Pinker 2011, pp. 99–102. Executions concentrated in a few Southern counties: Interview with the legal scholar Carol Steiker, C. Walsh, “Death Penalty, in Retreat,” Harvard Gazette, Feb. 3, 2015.

  38. Gallup poll on the death penalty: Gallup 2016. For current data, see the Death Penalty Information Center, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/.

  39. Pew Research poll reported in M. Berman, “For the First Time in Almost 50 Years, Less Than Half of Americans Support the Death Penalty,” Washington Post, Sept. 30, 2016.

  40. Death of the death penalty in the United States: D. von Drehle, “The Death of the Death Penalty,” Time, June 8, 2015; Death Penalty Information Center, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/.

  CHAPTER 15: EQUAL RIGHTS

  1. Evolutionary basis of racism and sexism: Pinker 2011; Pratto, Sidanius, & Levin 2006; Wilson & Daly 1992.

  2. Evolutionary basis of homophobia: Pinker 2011, chap. 7, pp. 448–49.

  3. History of equal rights: Pinker 2011, chap. 7; Shermer 2015. Seneca Falls and the history of women’s rights: Stansell 2010. Selma and the history of African American rights: Branch 1988. Stonewall and the history of gay rights: Faderman 2015.

  4. Ranking for 2016 by US News and World Report, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/the-10-most-influential-countries-in-the-world-have-been-revealed-a6834956.html. These three nations are also the most affluent.

  5. Amos 5:24.

  6. No increase in police shootings: Though direct data are scarce, the number of police shootings tracks the rate of violent crime (Fyfe 1988), which, as we saw in chapter 12, has plummeted. No racial disparity: Fryer 2016; Miller et al. 2016; S. Mullainathan, “Police Killings of Blacks: Here Is What the Data Say,” New York Times, Oct. 16, 2015.

  7. Pew Research Center 2012b, p. 17.

  8. Other surveys of American values: Pew Research Center 2010; Teixeira et al. 2013; see reviews in Pinker 2011, chap. 7, and Roser 2016s. Another example: The General Social Survey (http://gss.norc.org/) annually asks white Americans about their feelings toward black Americans. Between 1996 and 2016 the proportion feeling “close” rose from 35 to 51 percent; the proportion feeling “not close” fell from 18 to 12 percent.