Are Steven Pinker's Numbers Cooked?

Steven Pinker is a favourite for bougie lefties looking for reassurance that everything's ok

Steven Pinker makes a pretty strong argument using statistics to demonstrate that mankind has been making steady progress on social ills like violence over time.

David Graeber questions the validity of these statistics and asked if there were any available statistics that "prove" a different narrative. Pinker accused David of simply ignoring the empirical data based on ideology (something David accuses Pinker of doing, or at least selecting statistics that fit his narrative).

I thought about this for awhile, and in the shower just now it hit me...there ARE statistics that paint a very different picture, they come from the emerging field of economic inequality. We are getting more data every year thanks to an explosion in research on the topic. So what does the research show so far? In Wilkinson and Pickett's 'The Inner Level' they track a range of social ills from violent crime to overall health and teenage delinquency, and on every single one, when comparing the available statistics from different countries, things are worse in more unequal countries. So things like violent crime track with the level of inequality, not overall wealth. It's not how rich or poor your country is that produces bad results, it's how unequal it is.

So if social ills track with inequality and inequality gets more severe over time, it follows that social ills get more severe over time, not less. Or to put it another way, if we are experiencing the highest levels of inequality in human history and inequality is linked to domestic violence, sexual assault, poor educational outcomes, increased status competition, poorer mental health, etc, then Pinker's figures must be wrong.

I thought all this then Googled "Wilkinson Pickett Pinker" and found out that I'm not the first person to think this.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/18/letters-inequality-poverty-steven-pinker

I still need some time to think this through.

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