The Best of Times
Part II
This week in the Cosmopolitan Globalist, my father, David Berlinski, examines Steven Pinker’s claim that we live in the most peaceful time in history.
Yesterday, in Part I, he discussed the problem of reference-class ambiguities. Today, in Part II, he asks whether the historical record truly supports the claim that homicides have been on an 800-year decline since the Middle Ages.
Bludgeoned, stabbed, bopped on the head, knifed, run through with a pike, pushed out of high windows, trampled in a frenzy, strangled, stuffed into wells, poisoned—the dead, in short, and so the reference attribute in any homicide rate. How many of them were there in a given year? …