When we watch the news on television tonight, we are likely to think that the world is sliding into oblivion, that the future is certainly dark, and that things not only are getting worse, but have always been getting worse.

We’d be wrong to think this, however, despite all the news to the contrary.

How can that be?

The evidence we collect from what we watch on television or read in the newspaper is merely anecdotal. And there is a problem with anecdotal evidence. It’s insufficient for drawing accurate conclusions.

Let me give you an example of misinterpreting evidence. While my wife was in college she worked with autistic adults in a residential care facility. One day, one of the residents came out of the bathroom holding an empty bottle of saline tablets. He had a fetish for small bottles. When my wife asked him about the bottle, he at first told her that he had eaten the tablets. Then he changed his story and announced that he had dumped them down the toilet.

Not wanting to take a chance, she transported him to the emergency room, where the doctor gave him syrup of ipecac, to induce vomiting. He had to drink a glass of water after taking the syrup. After drinking the water, he vomited.

After the second time of taking the syrup of ipecac, my wife gave him another glass of water. He told her, “No, I don’t want more water. That’s making me throw up.”
The technical term for this is false causa, pro causa: imagining that something is responsible for a result merely because it preceded the other. It was the syrup of ipecac that caused the vomiting, not the water, but my wife’s client didn’t know better. He was drawing the wrong conclusion from insufficient evidence.

Just because you were robbed, doesn’t mean that there are more robberies than there used to be. Just because you read about an insane person shooting up a school this morning, doesn’t mean that such violence is on the rise. One has to look at the population and world as a whole to be able to tell whether such violence is trending up or down.

And when one looks at the actual statistics, the actual data of crime, war, and overall violence—reality is radically different from the perception that the news gives us. The water is not making us throw up. Oddly enough, the world today is a much more peaceful and a much more orderly and crime free place than it used to be. In fact, peace is more widespread than it has ever been before in the history of the world.

Steven Pinker recently published a book called The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes. Whether Pinker is correct in his estimation regarding the causes of declining violence, he nevertheless demonstrates the statistical reality which seems at odds with what “everybody knows.”

The percentages of those suffering from crime, war and general violence has consistently declined since the time of the Middle-Ages. Even with two world wars in the twentieth century, with million slaughtered, percentage-wise, the twentieth century was actually less violent than the Middle-Ages. Our major cities today suffer less from crime than they did even a hundred years ago. There are fewer wars, less bloodshed, less overall suffering in the world today than ever before, at least based on the percentages.

The world is not getting worse and worse. It is getting better and better.

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