Excerpt from the article:

If the world today is far safer than it was only a few decades ago, and generally more peaceful than it has ever been in human history, then why don’t we feel safer than we do? Partly it is because of the continuing genuine threat of terrorist incidents like the Boston bombing, which are unnerving because they can happen in places like our own neighborhoods, far from the few remaining war-torn regions of the earth. Partly it is the intrinsic sensationalism of the media, which prefers headlines about “the Long War against super-empowered terrorists” to “global political violence in historic decline.”

And partly it is what I think of as the Law of the Conservation of Anxiety: As big worries recede, we blow up lesser worries to compensate. So we stopped worrying about global nuclear war in the 1990s, only to panic about the Y2K computer glitch, and turned Osama bin Laden and his allies from criminals who failed most of the time but got spectacularly lucky once into world-historic figures on the scale of Hitler and Stalin waging “World War IV.”

We have less war than ever before in history, less violent crime than we've had at any point since 1963, less child labor, less poverty, better working conditions throughout the western world, less communism. There are very few statistics that would lead one to believe this is a bad time in history. It's actually a great time in history.

• ( http link ) The World is Actually Safer than Ever
[Anonymouse]