This is a linkpost for http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/
That's not obvious to me. I understand that there is considerable debate over the secular trend of violence over timeline measured in centuries.
Steven Pinker has put forward the most comprehensive argument I'm aware of in The Better Angels of our Nature in favor of the position that violence is declining over time, no matter how you reasonably measure it. Among the people I know working on this (I've met a few), the uncertainty is over the causes, not the trend itself. But I suppose there could be biases at play still, given that they self-selected to work on these issues.
That all said, I don't think it contradicts the point you are making. There are many reasons that violence is subsiding, as Mr. PInker goes over. But ultimately we are moving over time towards stronger states, and the state's position is based on having a monopoly on violence. When the state has assured its own security, it no longer needs to exercise that power, just threaten it. And after a generation of conditioning, that threat need no longer be brandished -- people just know their roles and fulfill them, with only the deviants being labelled as 'criminals' and having state violence applied against them. So we can expect the amount of violence enacted over time to go down, even as the power asymmetry and implicit threat of violence goes up.
Steven Pinker
Yes, I think he is the primary proponent of the violence-is-declining argument and his book served as the focus for these discussions.
So we can expect the amount of violence enacted over time to go down, even as the power asymmetry and implicit threat of violence goes up.
That's a valid point, but it applies only to the violence between the state and its subjects. There is also inter-state violence which tends to account for most of the corpses plus raiding/predation by the state outside of its own borders (see the recent American advent...