As Steven Pinker pointed out in his recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature (previously reviewed here), violence worldwide has been trending down over the centuries, but not uniformly.
An interesting set of graphs from Kieran Healy shows that violence, as measured by assault deaths per 100,000 population, peaked in the U.S. in the mid-1970s, then fell again, though it’s still higher than the early 1960s. A vaguely similar rising-and-falling pattern holds for several other developed countries, though not for all of them and not peaking at the same time.
It’s also striking how much more higher the assault death rate is in the U.S. For no other country does the peak rate approach the lowest rates shown on the graph for the U.S.








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