Anyone who grows up on a normal media diet assumes that our world is crippled by constant violence—wars, murders, assaults, terrorism—and that it seems to be getting worse. Pinker, in just 18 minutes, persuaded the TED audience that this assumption was dead wrong. That actually, when you pulled the camera back and looked at the real data, the world is becoming less violent, and that this trend has extended across years, decades, centuries, and millennia.
