One of these countries is different
You will have heard about the terrible shootings in Colorado.
From a post by Kieran Healy, at Crooked Timber, responding to the tragedy: death rates from assault, per 100,000 population per year, for the US and 19 other OECD countries. New Zealand is roughly in the middle (his post gives separate plots for each country). Dots are the data for individual years, the curves are smoothed trends with margin of error.
The much higher rate in the US is obvious, but so is the decline.
Part of the decline is attributable to better medical treatment, so that assault victims are less likely to die, but far from all of it. The rate of reports of aggravated assault is also down over the same time period. Similarly, simple explanations like gun availability probably contribute but can’t explain the whole pattern.
The decline in violent deaths is so large that it shows up in life expectancy comparisons. New York, and especially Manhattan, used to have noticeably worse life expectancy than Boston, but the falling rate of violent deaths and the improvements in HIV treatment now put Manhattan, and the rest of New York City, at the top of US life expectancy
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
The theme of declining violence in general is greatly expounded upon in Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature (see a review or TED talk).
The story he tells there is convincing and quite inspiring. In particular, it is full of graphs like the ones you link to on Crooked Timber but over much longer time periods, showing that the decline in assaults, homicides, rapes, war deaths etc have all been substantial and sustained.
Pinker says he wrote the book when he realised that people generally believed the exact opposite to be true — they thought that we were living in an unusually violent period.
12 years ago