Fewer, Richer, Greener

13Conflict, Safety, and Freedom

In his landmark book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, the Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker argues that we are living in the most peaceful and safest time in human history. The claim is contrary to intuition but he’s right, and I’ll summarize the data that he and others have used to demonstrate that fact.¹

We also live in a time of unprecedented economic freedom, a proposition that may be easier to accept than the decline in violence. Most of human history has been characterized by tyranny, widespread desperate poverty, and slavery. Thankfully, we now think of these evils as aberrations, not the normal state of things, although a slim majority of the world’s people still live in countries that are politically unfree or only partly free.

This chapter links these concepts, wrapping them into a package that I’ll call autonomy. The word connotes the uniqueness and dignity of the individual and the notion of self-ownership. It is what we strive for when trying to ensure the absence of conflict, the safety of the person, and the ability to live and transact freely.

Necessarily, our treatment of each major subtopic has to be brief. To make the effort manageable, I’ll separate the issues (although they are interconnected) as follows:

• Conflict: both war (state-sponsored conflict) and enmity between individuals (best revealed by crime statistics);
• Safety: Avoiding natural disasters and preventable injury and death, such as by fire, workplace ...