What problem could there possibly be with a data set choosing 1940 as its origin?
In an interview with Vox , Steven Pinker, the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature, argues that the world has been safer than it has ever been in the last hundred years, with the two main causes being capitalism and an Enlightenment morality. According to Mr. Pinker, capitalism has reduced the benefits of war since people can know get things from their neighbors without having to steal them. Rather than people generating their wealth through conflict, they now generate it through mutually beneficial specialization and trade. In turn, the Enlightenment morality, which has come hand-in-hand with capitalism, has helped to reduce violence by changing the way that people have calculated the costs and benefits of foreign policy. As Mr. Pinker explains:
In the 19th century, there was this cliché from [Carl] von Clausewitz that war was just the continuation of politics by other means: you consider whether to go to war [like any other policy option]. Now that's just not something decent leaders do.
Finally, cost-benefit calculations depend on what counts as a "cost." If you lose several tens or hundreds of thousands of your own citizens, is that a cost? And how big a cost is it? Now, increasingly, that counts as a cost: leaders are less likely to see their young men as cannon fodder, which means countries are willing to endure other costs to avoid that one. That's a result of the rise of humanistic sentiments, as opposed to nationalistic or ideological ones.
The problem with Mr. Pinker’s thesis, at least the most obvious problem, is that the data used to argue for a seventy-year long peace since the Second World War ended is horrifically biased and, as rigorously demonstrated by Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Mr. Pinker’s naïve statistics don’t exactly hold up. The graph for the interview, produced by Vox and reproduced above, is close to fraudulent in the way that it cherry picks a starting date that has little to do with capitalism.
I won’t go deeply into Mssrs. Cirillo and Taleb’s argument. Instead, I will exhort any reader to at least skim it themselves. In short, the article demonstrates how cautious we have to be in talking about the trend of violence across human history and how critical assumptions are made if we were to simply look at the sample mean, as the observed mean is not an estimator of the true mean. On Twitter, Taleb also did what Vox’s hacks didn’t do and that is to graph more than mere battlefield casualties, as the destruction of war isn’t constrained to where the battles happen:
Getting back to my main target: Vox’s biased graph skews our entire understanding of the 20th century by cutting out almost half of the pertinent data. Although the Second World War is generally the apocalyptic conflict that captures the imagination of contemporary commentators, its predecessor is the conflict that really set the stage for the 20th century’s hot and cold wars. Furthermore, in the beginning of 1914, people could freely trade and move between borders to a much higher degree than they could now, so any argument for the capitalistic peace hypothesis needs to be able to address why the argument doesn’t hold for 1914. The world was, after all, interconnected in trade. Even Krupp, the supplier of most of Germany’s arms, had a business relationship with the British government, whose subjects would soon enough bleed out due to weapons produced by Krupp.
Interconnectedness is, therefore, not a sure panacea to conflict, nor is the cosmopolitan attitude that comes along with interconnectedness. Indeed, the high degree interconnectedness of nations may very well have affected the statistical properties of war in the past century or so, since an interconnected world would probably have less small wars, yet there will always be a small chance of an apocalyptic war. Power laws are everywhere. Had Vox chosen, say, 1800 as the starting date for the graph, the graph would have told a story about how apocalyptic wars are very much possible in a capitalistic world. It would have been a story more compatible with a power-law world than a world made safe by the international division of labor.
As a bit of an aside, one way I like thinking about the capitalistic peace hypothesis is with a basic thought experiment: Would a liberal Englishman reading a newspaper article about the ascent of Kaiser Frederick III, the liberal emperor, to the German throne, drinking his tea from China, his clothing made from Egyptian cotton spun in a Manchester mill, and with a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations upon his bookshelf have imagined the slaughter that would define the political lives of his successors? I doubt it.
Depending on his naïveté, he would have probably thought that the worst atrocities of human history were behind the population. If he were a child of the Enlightenment like Pinker, I really doubt that he could have foreseen the purposeful starvation of the Ukrainian population, by the government to follow the Tsarist régime to boot, and he would have never imagined the industrial slaughter of the central and eastern European Jewish population.
Of course, as a thought experiment, this thought needs to be taken with a massive grain of salt. Nevertheless, I think it gets to a fundamental truth: The expounders of progress in the 19th century would have been very disappointed with the fruits of the 20th century. That, in turn, means that we should treat the notion of ‘progress’ with some caution. The broad pronouncements of the capitalistic peace hypothesis should ring a bit utopian to our ears.
Whatever philosophical problems I may have with Pinker’s narrative about Enlightenment morality, the most pressing problem with his view of history is statistical. Without a doubt, Vox’s data is biased. It cherry picks a starting date to create a graph that seemingly perfectly corroborates his hypothesis. Despite the seeming corroboration, starting a graph to illustrate capitalistic peace at 1940 is fraudulent and should be called out for being so. The commercial society didn’t emerge in the forge of the Second World War—indeed, the war did more to make a world safe for socialism than liberalism. Instead, the war broke out in a world where the international division of labor, innovation, and the pursuit of honest income was already apart of the daily lives of most belligerents.
When we correct for the biased starting date and use more sophisticated statistical tools than a journalistic average, what we see is that the 20th violent has been just as violent as many other periods of human history and even more violent than others. That’s certainly no argument for a fundamental change in the way that violence is treated in human society.