Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

In the case of the 1960s crime explosion, even the facts at hand refuted the root-cause theory. That was the decade of civil rights, with racism in steep decline (chapter 15), and of an economic boom, with levels of inequality and unemployment for which we are nostalgic.¹⁰ The 1930s, in contrast, was the decade of the Great Depression, Jim Crow laws, and monthly lynchings, yet the overall rate of violent crime plummeted. The root-cause theory was truly deracinated by a development that took everyone by surprise. Starting in 1992, the American homicide rate went into free fall during an era of steeply rising inequality, and then took another dive during the Great Recession beginning in 2007 (figure 12-2).¹¹ England, Canada, and most other industrialized countries also saw their homicide rates fall in the past two decades. (Conversely, in Venezuela during the Chávez-Maduro regime, inequality fell while homicide soared.)¹² Though numbers for the entire world exist only for this millennium and include heroic guesstimates for countries that are data deserts, the trend appears to be downward as well, from 8.8 homicides per 100,000 people in 2000 to 6.2 in 2012. That means there are 180,000 people walking around today who would have been murdered just in the last year if the global homicide rate had remained at its level of a dozen years before.¹³

Figure 12-2: Homicide deaths, 1967–2015

Sources: United States:FBI Uniform Crime Reports, https://ucr.fbi.gov/, and Federal Bureau of Investigation 2016. England (data include Wales): Office for National Statistics 2017. World, 2000: Krug et al. 2002. World, 2003–2011: United Nations Economic and Social Council 2014, fig. 1; the percentages were converted to homicide rates by setting the 2012 rate at 6.2, the estimate reported in United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2014, p. 12. The arrows point to the most recent years plotted in Pinker 2011 for the world (2004, fig. 3–9), US (2009, fig. 3–18), and England (2009, fig. 3–19).

Violent crime is a solvable problem. We may never get the homicide rate for the world down to the levels of Kuwait (0.4 per 100,000 per year), Iceland (0.3), or Singapore (0.2), let alone all the way to 0.¹⁴ But in 2014, Eisner, in consultation with the World Health Organization, proposed a goal of reducing the rate of global homicide by 50 percent within thirty years.¹⁵ The aspiration is not utopian but practical, based on two facts about the statistics of homicide.

The first is that the distribution of homicide is highly skewed at every level of granularity. The homicide rates of the most dangerous countries are several hundred times those of the safest, including Honduras (90.4 homicides per 100,000 per year), Venezuela (53.7), El Salvador (41.2), Jamaica (39.3), Lesotho (38), and South Africa (31).¹⁶ Half of the world’s homicides are committed in just twenty-three countries containing about a tenth of humanity, and a quarter are committed in just four: Brazil (25.2), Colombia (25.9), Mexico (12.9), and Venezuela. (The world’s two murder zones—northern Latin America and southern sub-Saharan Africa—are distinct from its war zones, which stretch from Nigeria through the Middle East into Pakistan.) The lopsidedness continues down the fractal scale. Within a country, most of the homicides cluster in a few cities, such as Caracas (120 per 100,000) and San Pedro Sula (in Honduras, 187). Within cities, the homicides cluster in a few neighborhoods; within neighborhoods, they cluster in a few blocks; and within blocks, many are carried out by a few individuals.¹⁷ In my hometown of Boston, 70 percent of the shootings take place in 5 percent of the city, and half the shootings were perpetrated by one percent of the youths.¹⁸