In other words I do believe modern democracy+capitalism system is much less backed/stabilized by guard labor, violence.
Conversation
Replying to
It's all anchoring. It's fun to compare American cops shooting blacks to (say) Praetorian guard, but latter was way worse
2
Replying to
has any civilization incarcerated such a high % of its population in all of history?
1
Replying to
Depends on what you mean by incarceration, and whether you judge modern institutions by U.S. alone or all lib dem ones
1
Replying to
Maybe it's a bit of claim credit, assign blame, but I attribute incarceration to ghosts of slavery from non-lib-dem past
1
Replying to
I give you: the Opium Wars and how China got de facto colonized without the land wars that were needed for India :)
1
1
Replying to
Not trying to condone everything about status quo. Just calibrating tiny secular signal buried in big cyclic swings
1
1
Replying to
I guess you've read the many criticisms of pinker's thesis so you will understand why I am skeptical
4
Replying to
In many ways the noise-signal problem is more fundamental than whether the secular signal is "progress" or "decline"
1
Replying to
If we had a clean secular signal, two sides could just agree to disagree about which way is up and move on
Replying to
Most debate is around whether a particular contemporary trend is part of an < 1 lifetime cycle or not

