But more than that, it's clear that economics and politics have become prime vectors for social violence in the 'developed' West: particularly economics, which has been used as an ideological excuse to destroy the possible future prospects and current living conditions of entire generations now.
Unemployment in - say - Spain for the under-25s is more than 50%. The rate in the US is around 12%, but that disguises the fact that many 'jobs' barely pay a living wage now, where fifty years ago even starter jobs offered comfortable salaries.
The destruction has been justified by a steady stream of clearly wrong 'economic theories' that don't stand up to even the most basic undergraduate-level scrutiny. See e.g.
Fifty years ago there was a dictatorship here, people weren't even able to speak their minds freely, without fear for their personal safety.
Castillan language and identity were forced upon Catalans, Galicians an Basques, that hold grudges for that even now.
No longer than ten years ago there were still regular terrorist attacks by ETA, with dozens of innocent victims.
Saying that things are worse now, regardless of the employment rate, it's just idiotic, sorry if I'm being blunt.
In general, the EU, which is seen by some (especially far right and far left parties) as the cause of all evil, has given Europe 70 years of peace, in a continent that has been at war for all of its history.
I'll gladly weather the occasional economic crisis for the privilege.
That's hardly a debunking of the thesis that violence has decreased. It cites no data, but simply declares in vague terms that some parts of the world are still violent and the sum of those parts is non-negligible, which is completely unrelated to the claim that violence has decreased.
The notion that fifty years ago "even starter jobs offered comfortable salaries" will come as a shock to people who lived then, barely getting by on piecework or similar marginal occupations. There were certainly classes of jobs where entry-level positions paid "comfortable salaries" but those jobs weren't much use to you if you were non-white, female, gay, or even from the wrong nominally-white ethnic group.
Things aren't as good as they could be, but they are still a lot better than they were by many, many measures. They are worse by a few measures, and we should be concerned about that, but in general the trend is in the right direction.
The original claim that we're less violent is easy to debunk, and has been debunked by many people. See e.g.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/john-gray-steven-...
But more than that, it's clear that economics and politics have become prime vectors for social violence in the 'developed' West: particularly economics, which has been used as an ideological excuse to destroy the possible future prospects and current living conditions of entire generations now.
Unemployment in - say - Spain for the under-25s is more than 50%. The rate in the US is around 12%, but that disguises the fact that many 'jobs' barely pay a living wage now, where fifty years ago even starter jobs offered comfortable salaries.
The destruction has been justified by a steady stream of clearly wrong 'economic theories' that don't stand up to even the most basic undergraduate-level scrutiny. See e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt
So yes - things are objectively worse for many people.
The fact that some people are doing okay and a tiny minority are doing really well doesn't change that.
Getting this stuff wrong has very real long-term social and political consequences. It's irrational to ignore that.