While PM Abbott is busy drumming up fear for his own purposes, Zero Hedge has a fantastic graphic of why we should, in fact, be thanking out lucky stars:
Amazing chart. One of my favourite books is Eric Hobsbawn’s Age of Extremes and this chart offers hope that perhaps we may have kicked the 20th century habit of slaughtering each other in ever increasing numbers. From VOX:
A recent paper, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Pasquale Cirillo, argued that our current peaceful era was a statistical myth: that dips in war deaths should be expected, as Roser’s chart shows, and that there’s no reason to believe this time should be different.
Pinker and others argue, by contrast, that things really have changed: that the rise of democracy, capitalism, industrial civilization, and international institutions like the UN have radically transformed the way global politics operates.
It’s impossible to know who’s right for sure. But Roser’s chart makes clear that, whatever the reason, we should be counting our blessings today.
True dat.
