Ask a random sample of people whether the world is getting more or less violent, and the majority will say more violent. They are wrong. The data is not ambiguous on this point. It is overwhelming.
War deaths, homicide rates, genocide deaths, deaths from political violence, deaths from terrorism, deaths from domestic violence — every major category of lethal human aggression has declined significantly over the past 50 to 75 years, and most have declined to levels that would have seemed utopian to any prior generation.
This is not cherry-picked optimism. This is what the data shows. The disagreement between what people believe and what the data shows is itself one of the most important stories about how human beings perceive risk.
War: From Mass Casualties to Historical Lows
World War II killed an estimated 70 to 85 million people — military and civilian combined. That represented roughly 3% of the entire global population at the time. At the rate of killing in 1944, scaled to today's world population, we would be losing 250 million people per year to war.
Annual battle deaths from interstate conflicts have averaged under 50,000 per year since 2000 (Uppsala Conflict Data Program / Our World in Data). Even accounting for conflicts like Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine — each of which represents a genuine tragedy — the per-capita rate of death from organized war is lower than at any measurable point in the past century.
The post-WWII era saw the construction of international institutions — the United Nations, NATO, the EU, the World Trade Organization — explicitly designed to make war between major powers prohibitively costly. They have worked. No two nuclear powers have fought a direct conventional war. No Western European countries have fought each other since 1945. The longest peace between European great powers in recorded history is the one we are living in.
The conflicts that do exist — civil wars, proxy conflicts, terrorism — are horrific for the people in them. But they kill at a fraction of the rate of 20th-century interstate wars. The trend, on the right time scale, is unmistakably downward.
Homicide: Down in Every Region With Reliable Data
The global homicide rate was approximately 8.8 per 100,000 people in 2000. By 2021, it had fallen to 5.8 per 100,000 — a 34% reduction in 20 years (UNODC World Crime Trends). This decline held across Latin America, Asia, Europe, and North America — the four regions with the most reliable long-term homicide data.
The United States tells a particularly striking story. US violent crime peaked in 1991, at 758 violent crimes per 100,000 people — a number that fueled enormous political and cultural anxiety. By 2022, that rate had fallen to approximately 399 per 100,000 — a 47% decline. The average American in 2022 faced roughly half the risk of violent victimization as the average American in 1991.
This happened while the US prison population expanded significantly in the 1990s and then began a slow decline. It happened through demographic shifts, policing changes, the waning of the crack cocaine epidemic, lead paint remediation, and dozens of other factors that researchers still debate in their relative weight. What is not debated: the crime rate fell sharply, and the average American is substantially safer than their parents were.
Western Europe's rates are even lower and have declined even more sharply. The UK, Germany, France, and the Scandinavian countries all record homicide rates between 0.5 and 1.5 per 100,000 — numbers that represent historical lows and would have been unimaginable for most of European history.
Genocide and Mass Atrocity: A Century of Learning
The 20th century's record on organized mass killing is genuinely horrific: the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Stalin's purges, Mao's famine-purge combination, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia. Estimates of deaths from 20th-century genocides and political mass murders range from 100 to 200 million people across the century.
The 21st century's record, while not clean — Darfur, Myanmar's Rohingya crisis, ongoing atrocities in Sudan — shows a dramatically lower casualty rate. Deaths from genocide and mass political violence fell to under 100,000 in the 2010s on most estimates — a reduction of more than 99% relative to the worst 20th-century decades, even accounting for population growth.
The mechanisms of improvement include: international criminal accountability (the ICC, UN tribunals), satellite surveillance that makes mass atrocities harder to hide, faster humanitarian response, and the simple fact that the political ideologies — totalitarian communism, European fascism, imperial colonialism — that drove the worst 20th-century mass killings have been largely discredited and dismantled.
