May 28, 2015
The “long peace” hypothesis is never precisely defined; Pinker’s work appears only in some orphan footnotes; the clear meaning of the “long peace”—a break with the past in 1945—is never directly tested for.
Largely, the paper argues that the historical data do not appear improbable if we assume no trend over 2,000 years in war deaths.
Cirillo and Taleb check whether the average number of years between significant wars (those causing at least 50,000 deaths after rescaling to today’s population of 7.2 billion) exhibits serial correlation.
