"Replication files":
http://www.chrisblattman.com/documents/data/shocks-conflict/Bazzi-Blattman.zip?9d7bd4

I want to see the trees!!!

In a word: no. In more words, http://bactra.org/weblog/857.html

Very nice

"Steven Pinker has read the reports on civilian deaths in the Afghan war, mass rapes in the Congo, “going postal” shootings in the United States, and our youths’ seeming addiction to Call of Duty video games. Yet the Harvard cognitive scientist and wildly effective popularizer of evolutionary psychology brings you the Good News: humans are now far less violent than they have ever been. In roughly 700 pages of text and many dozens of graphs, Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature takes us on a long trip through millennia of brutality and sadism to arrive at a time, our time, when we ain’t going to study war—nor, for that matter, wife-beating, animal torture, or burning at the stake—no more.
Professional historians have known this news for decades; in their field, it is conventional wisdom that violence has declined over the centuries in both rate and savagery. Now Pinker brings his considerable analytical powers and rhetorical skills to tell this story to the wider public. He can be heard on NPR, seen on The Colbert Report, and read about in New York Times features. The Times’s Nicholas Kristof is ready to award The Better Angels of Our Nature a Pulitzer. Unlike the historians, many lay readers and listeners are surprised. “Really?!” Stephen Colbert asked in one of his less parodic moments. Really.
Pinker also means to deliver on the book’s subtitle, “Why Violence Has Declined.” But while his chronicle is powerfully and convincingly straightforward—rates of violence have indeed decreased—his explanations are less so. They may even undermine his campaign for a biological view of the human condition."

Not that it's not great, but WTF is this doing in _Esquire_?

Sometimes, good taste is inappropriate.

To be fair, without a similarly-constructed list for earlier times, this does make it hard to say whether the problem is actually getting _worse_.

Recommended in several pieces by the late Charles Tilly.

"Taking issue with the common sense view that 'human nature' is violent, Keane shows why mature democracies do not wage war upon each other, and why they are unusually sensitive to violence. He argues that we need to think more discriminatingly about the origins of violence, its consequences, its uses and remedies. He probes the disputed meanings of the term violence, and asks why violence is the greatest enemy of democracy, and why today's global 'triangle of violence' is tempting politicians to invoke undemocratic emergency powers. Throughout, Keane gives prominence to ethical questions, such as the circumstances in which violence can be justified, and argues that violent behaviour and means of violence can and should be 'democratised' - made publicly accountable to others, so encouraging efforts to erase surplus violence from the world."

Unquestionably the most depressing thing I have ever cited.

"sociological theories consider murder an outcome of the differential distribution of individual, neighborhood, or social characteristics ... explain variation in aggregate homicide rates [but not] the social order of murder [:] who kills whom, when, where, and for what reason. ... gang murder is best understood not by ... its individual determinants but by ... the social networks of action and reaction that create it. ... the social structure of gang murder is defined by the manner in which social networks are constructed and by people's placement in them. ... uses a network approach and incident‐level homicide records to recreate and analyze the structure of gang murders in Chicago. ... individual murders between gangs create an institutionalized network of group conflict, net of any individual's participation or motive. Within this network, murders spread through an epidemic‐like process of social contagion ...."

This is illuminating, compassionate, and profoundly depressing.

How utterly despicable.
(Short version: after the hurricane, white residents of a minimally-damaged neighborhood in New Orleans form a gang - excuse me, a militia - to conduct their own little race war.)

"It's time to separate manhood from violence. It insults men, and endangers us all."

_Something_ has to be the 2nd-leading cause of death; that doesn't mean it's important