“Scarily Peaceful Times” #
A surprisingly apt follow-on to the last post… In a discussion of his new book, Fareed Zakaria makes an interesting point:
We have done a great job of scaring the hell out of people, telling them that they are living in frightening times. You know the list: terrorism, rogue states, Iran, North Korea, a revanchist Russian, an expansionist China. Throw into this mix suspicions of Indian outsourcing and Mexican immigration and it seems as if the world is ganging up on the United States. In fact, the data overwhelmingly shows that we’re living in more peaceful times than at any point since the early 1950s, and perhaps in several centuries. (Harvard’s Steven Pinker says, “the most peaceful times in the species’ existence.”) Wars, civil wars, deaths are all down, down, down over the last twenty years. And economic growth is up across the globe.
(via Matt Yglesias)
EDIT (5/05/2008): Mr. Zakaria also got the cover of this weeks Newsweek. Had I seen it a few hours earlier, this story would be the title link.