Violence down, claims Pinker the thinker

by Chris Bertram on October 16, 2011

The Guardian has “an interview with Steven Pinker about his new book”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/oct/15/steven-pinker-better-angels-violence-interview _The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes_ . It presents me with a problem. In order to evaluate its claims properly, I’d actually have to read the book, but everything tells me that doing so would be an immense waste of valuable time, so I probably won’t. I can, however, comment snippily on the material that surfaces in interviews and reviews … so here goes.
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