Wednesday 19 November 2014

Death By War is Decreasing

Your granny might be nostalgic for the old days when she felt secure, not like today with all these wars going on everywhere.

But despite what you read about the current situation in Ukraine, Syria, Israel and various conflicts in central and northern Africa, we live in relatively peaceful times compared to the 50 - 80 million people killed in WWII for example:


Life before the 20th century was largely miserable, violent, brutish and short. Even taking into account that the 20th Century contained both WWI (37 million deaths) and WWII (50 - 80 million deaths) the 20th Century was relatively tame by comparison to older civilisations. The following graph shows the percentage of male deaths in various societies caused by war:
But what about the rise in the number of recent conflicts in different regions going on simultaneously? That's a new thing, right? Wrong:


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