Do I get it right that the concept of violence is reduced to the concept of “official” war between nations? Why? How about murder and violent crime? One is selling death in wholesale, the other in retail, but it can add up. For example Albania was not involved in many official wars but the death rate from clan feuds was so high that it was affecting gender roles.
Pinker argues that all types of violence are going down. Cirillo and Taleb deliberately chose to ignore homicides:
We avoided discussions of homicide since we limited L to values > 10, 000, but its rate doesn’t appear to have a particular bearing on the tails. It could be a drop in the bucket. It obeys different dynamics. We may have observed lower rate of homicide in societies but most deaths risks come from violent conflict.
I’d note that they chose to ignore homicides, and it seems that homicides undermine their general point.
Pretty sure I remember reading Taleb on this, stating that homicides follow a normal distribution and he accepts Pinker’s argument there. He de-couples this from the other kinds of violence, saying that the narrative stretches too wide—specifically warfare should be analyzed separately, since that follows Pareto distributions.
I’d note that they chose to ignore homicides, and it seems that homicides undermine their general point.
I’m not sure about that. The whole concept that inner cities are dangerous no-go zones is recent. In Victorian London one mugging every couple months was considered a crime wave.
I’m not sure about that. The whole concept that inner cities are dangerous no-go zones is recent. In Victorian London one mugging every couple months was considered a crime wave.
I believe that is incorrect—London used to be a fantastically violent city.
But the reason I suspected it undermined their case is that they said “We may have observed lower rate of homicide in societies but most deaths risks come from violent conflict.” in the paper.
Interesting. But there’s a couple of features in there that make me leery of relying on this.
First, the table there is tracking convictions at jury. Clearance rates, especially for property crime, have never to my knowledge been high; if we assume similar figures they’d be undercounting reported crimes (most comparable to the crime statistics we’re familiar with) by a factor of three to five, and undercount committed crimes by more. That isn’t necessarily a good assumption, though, and there’s the rub: we can’t use conviction rates to estimate crime rates unless we know something about how likely cases were to make it through the system.
Second, buried in the bottom of that page there’s a sentence saying that about 17,000 summary convictions (excluding some minor fines) were imposed independently by police magistrates. No information on type, which means the table would further undercount crimes by some unknown proportion depending on how likely summary punishment was. But 17,000 is roughly four times the total jury convictions cited, so it’d probably be large.
I haven’t been able to find another source going back to the 1830s yet, but this data suggests that as many murders were recorded in London in the late Victorian era as in the mid-Sixties, when population was about 20% higher. (Population in 1838 was much lower—the city grew hugely over the 19th century.)
Well, I don’t have an intimate relationship with this data, this was only a Google quickie :-D But I think NRx made a big deal out of the safety (as they claimed) of Victorian London and it’s something they bring up regularly. It might have started with Mencius Moldbug, but I’m too lazy to go looking for the original write-up which, IIRC, included some data analysis.
Even at high homicide rates (e.g. Russia) it would take many many years to add up to even a small war’s casualties.
False, unless one sets an unusually high bar for an armed conflict to qualify as a “war”.
Russia had “over 12,300 homicides” in 2013.* For comparison, about 900 people died in the Falklands War; about 1,400 in the 2006 Lebanon War; and the 1999 Kargil War between India & Pakistan killed 900–5,600 people, depending on whose counts you trust.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimehas data for 2008–2012 as well, which allows some more interesting comparisons. In 2008 Russian police counted 16,617 murders, or about 60× as many deaths as in the war between Russia (& South Ossetia & Abkhazia) and Georgia in the same year.
The numbers add up quickly over multiple years. Lumping together the 2008–2013 counts gives about 86,400 recorded murders. This matches International Crisis Group’s estimate of deaths in the Eritrean-Ethiopian War (one of the few unambiguous examples of a recent interstate war arising from a territorial dispute), and beats (for example) the Croatian and Kosovan wars of Yugoslav succession put together (16,000 & 17,000 deaths respectively). Wait another year and the running murder total’ll match the war in Bosnia & Herzegovina.
* Edit to add: the link says “homicides and attempted murders reported” but I’m pretty sure it only counts successful homicides, since the “12,300″ number’s similar to the UNODC numbers for preceding years, and the UNODC counts are of intentional homicide, “defined as unlawful death purposely inflicted on a person by another person”.
Do I get it right that the concept of violence is reduced to the concept of “official” war between nations? Why? How about murder and violent crime? One is selling death in wholesale, the other in retail, but it can add up. For example Albania was not involved in many official wars but the death rate from clan feuds was so high that it was affecting gender roles.
Pinker argues that all types of violence are going down. Cirillo and Taleb deliberately chose to ignore homicides:
I’d note that they chose to ignore homicides, and it seems that homicides undermine their general point.
Pretty sure I remember reading Taleb on this, stating that homicides follow a normal distribution and he accepts Pinker’s argument there. He de-couples this from the other kinds of violence, saying that the narrative stretches too wide—specifically warfare should be analyzed separately, since that follows Pareto distributions.
That’s fine.
I’m not sure about that. The whole concept that inner cities are dangerous no-go zones is recent. In Victorian London one mugging every couple months was considered a crime wave.
I believe that is incorrect—London used to be a fantastically violent city.
But the reason I suspected it undermined their case is that they said “We may have observed lower rate of homicide in societies but most deaths risks come from violent conflict.” in the paper.
Hey, look—data :-)
Interesting. But there’s a couple of features in there that make me leery of relying on this.
First, the table there is tracking convictions at jury. Clearance rates, especially for property crime, have never to my knowledge been high; if we assume similar figures they’d be undercounting reported crimes (most comparable to the crime statistics we’re familiar with) by a factor of three to five, and undercount committed crimes by more. That isn’t necessarily a good assumption, though, and there’s the rub: we can’t use conviction rates to estimate crime rates unless we know something about how likely cases were to make it through the system.
Second, buried in the bottom of that page there’s a sentence saying that about 17,000 summary convictions (excluding some minor fines) were imposed independently by police magistrates. No information on type, which means the table would further undercount crimes by some unknown proportion depending on how likely summary punishment was. But 17,000 is roughly four times the total jury convictions cited, so it’d probably be large.
I haven’t been able to find another source going back to the 1830s yet, but this data suggests that as many murders were recorded in London in the late Victorian era as in the mid-Sixties, when population was about 20% higher. (Population in 1838 was much lower—the city grew hugely over the 19th century.)
Well, I don’t have an intimate relationship with this data, this was only a Google quickie :-D But I think NRx made a big deal out of the safety (as they claimed) of Victorian London and it’s something they bring up regularly. It might have started with Mencius Moldbug, but I’m too lazy to go looking for the original write-up which, IIRC, included some data analysis.
Even at high homicide rates (e.g. Russia) it would take many many years to add up to even a small war’s casualties.
False, unless one sets an unusually high bar for an armed conflict to qualify as a “war”.
Russia had “over 12,300 homicides” in 2013.* For comparison, about 900 people died in the Falklands War; about 1,400 in the 2006 Lebanon War; and the 1999 Kargil War between India & Pakistan killed 900–5,600 people, depending on whose counts you trust.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has data for 2008–2012 as well, which allows some more interesting comparisons. In 2008 Russian police counted 16,617 murders, or about 60× as many deaths as in the war between Russia (& South Ossetia & Abkhazia) and Georgia in the same year.
The numbers add up quickly over multiple years. Lumping together the 2008–2013 counts gives about 86,400 recorded murders. This matches International Crisis Group’s estimate of deaths in the Eritrean-Ethiopian War (one of the few unambiguous examples of a recent interstate war arising from a territorial dispute), and beats (for example) the Croatian and Kosovan wars of Yugoslav succession put together (16,000 & 17,000 deaths respectively). Wait another year and the running murder total’ll match the war in Bosnia & Herzegovina.
* Edit to add: the link says “homicides and attempted murders reported” but I’m pretty sure it only counts successful homicides, since the “12,300″ number’s similar to the UNODC numbers for preceding years, and the UNODC counts are of intentional homicide, “defined as unlawful death purposely inflicted on a person by another person”.
Try Mexico. Now that arguably qualifies as a war, but most of the sides involved aren’t official states.
Or how about the threat of violence to keep people under control?
That does not seem to change much throughout history.