To return to the case at hand: the decline of lynching (A) may be an improvement in one area, but you have to weigh it against the explosions in the imprisonment (B) and illegitimacy rates (C), the total societal collapse of a demographic that makes up over a tenth of the population (D), drug abuse (E), knockout games (???), and so on.

(parentheticals added).

You were originally arguing that some weighted sum of A, B, C... was increasing. NancyLebovitz was pointing out that A has clearly decreased, and so for the sum to increase on average, there has to be a correlation between A decreasing and B, C, ... increasing. Then she asked if you thought this correlation was causal.

In response, you punted and changed the argument to:

The absence of continuous general increase is enough to falsify the Whig-history hypothesis, given that the Whig-history hypothesis is nothing more than the hypothesis of continuous general increase

which was a really nice tautological argument.

So while showing causality is "more work than is necessary" for disproving the straw-Whiggery of your previous comment, it doesn't mean anything for the point NancyLebovitz was raising.