So, because I hate myself, recently graduated, and am in a downward spiral of jobless mediocrity I decided to read Pinker's lauded Better Angels, both aware of the criticism and praise and not really knowing what to expect. Always, I'll also preface this with saying I'm not a quantitative guy, if my expertise is anything its in sociological theory and qualitative methods.

Buuuut I find the way violence is measured in the book to be fundamentally absurd. The use of violent death per capita as the deciding measure seems to be exactly the wrong measurement for the measurement of violence. One death is one death, no matter how relevant that singular death is to the rest of the population. I.E. One death in a hunter-gatherer group of a 100 represents 1% of the total population. 1% of the populations of the USA is something like 2,850,000 people. Equating this two things is insane right? A better measure for violence would surely be absolute numbers--its captures the actually unit of violence action (the death of a person, not a death of person relative to the population that person came from)--and looking at it like this would subvert his entire thesis up until the end of the Cold War--the 20th century would be the most violent century in absolute numbers, which in my mind, best captures actual violence, i.e. tha death of a human being.

Overall I think he is conflating two different phenomenon and for some reason, without saying it directly, saying they are related: population growth and violence. Just because we have the technology and infrastructure to support larger populations than the previous generations doesn't necessarily mean we are not suffer from higher rates of violence, it just means we have the technology and infrastructure to support larger populations. It might, at least for the first half of the 20th opposite: better infrastructure, and better technology means more people, why better weapons can get to the business of killing each other.

Am I insane? Is he? Why are their so many terrible pop social science compared to other fields?