Nassim Taleb has a weak habit of ascribing every argument against him to an ad hominem attack. Taleb does have a point, war could very well become less frequent but more deadly. If the current nuclear stockpile stays where it's at, the next major war could kill all of humanity. However I think Pinker's argument is, barring that, life does seem to be getting better, and I think his argument there is valid. In his chapter "The Long Peace", he goes over how there has never been a period in history where the 500 lb gorillas of the world have been without war in a long time.
> life does seem to be getting better, and I think his argument there is valid.
I think anyone who's protested or supports the #BlackLivesMatter movement might quibble with that conclusion. Making conclusions like that based off crime data is specious if violence is in anyway systemic. Violence doesn't have to be murders, assaults and robberies...incarceration is its own form of violence and incarceration rates are as high as ever. Poverty is its own form of violence and income inequality is as high as ever. And civil asset forfeiture is basically legalized robbery, so if you included those statistics along with reported robbery statistics, you'd probably find that robberies have actually increased.
What I see happening is that some (rich) people have realized that nationalistic bonds no longer tie us together as strongly as they used to. They've been replaced by economic and religious bonds. So yes, the leaders of the largest countries in the world have largely avoided war against each other. But the top stratum of these countries has been very active in colluding against the bottom strata (G8, WTO, TPP, etc). They've largely waged war against the lower classes in all countries for many years now without most people realizing it. Just because the violence is perpetrated under the guise of law enforcement does not change the fact that it's still violence. And we still have "official" (not declared, but acknowledged) wars against religious extremist groups (Al Qaeda, Isis, etc), so there's that too.
In short, the nature of violence has changed, not the prevalence of it. That you don't realize it only reflects that you're not (yet) a target.
The nature of violence has not changed. The class warfare you speak of has existed since the dawn of man. It just has been brought to the forefront of our issues now because there are no longer evil tyrants skinning people alive (outside of North Korea). To say otherwise is incredibly ignorant of history. You could take Ancient Rome, for example, as a place where class warfare was entrenched and a major force of change. Marx, of course, thought of the same kind of struggle. People try to portray the Nazis as the cartoonishly evil to explain what they did to the Jewish people but they forget that the 1920s-30s was a ruinous time for everyone except the mostly Jewish banker class who were able to transfer their currency out of the German marks before the hyperinflation. You had a situation where Jewish families were traveling around in carriages while people on the streets were starving to death. Conspiracy theories sprouted up. The National Socialist party (Nazis) were supposed to remedy such differences of wealth, and they did it in the most destructive way possible. The atrocities during the WWII were largely due to class warfare taken to an extreme level. That's why I think you should be very weary when you refer to the situation that presents itself now as "war". Most of violence in history has been moralistic violence, don't fall for it. In any case, no, the nature of violence has not changed, though the costs have increased, which is for the better.
Pinker largely sticks to looking at the percentage of the population killed in war as all the arguments about which class is nasty to another are too subjective to get decent numbers on. On the deaths per capita measure things have been getting better. And if you think the powerful screwing over the poor is bad now things were way worse in fairly recent history - slavery, tens of millions staved by Mao & Stalin etc...
