The world is becoming a more peaceful place…and despite the growing concerns of income inequality and economic insecurities … there is reason to believe the world will be a better place for our children than it was for us. That’s something that we don’t often hear in today’s day and age. Unfortunately – in America … we’re not learning the lesson that many other countries in the world are. It’s probably not surprising that America ranks so low considering we are the #1 arms manufacturer and distributor in the world. America #1!
You can see the fully interactive map HERE:
The Economist writes HERE:
The latest index, released on June 12th, is composed of 23 indicators ranging from murder rates to weapons imports to conflicts being fought. The two maps below show how this index scored the world in 2007 and in 2012. It throws up some surprising results, such as that China was more peaceful than America in 2007. If some of the overall findings might seem odd, then part of the appeal of the index is that readers can examine each of the variables in turn and think about how much weight to add to each.
Fareed Zakaria makes the case that the world is in an unprecedented time of peace – the full transcript of his commencement speech at Harvard HERE:
The world we live in is, first of all, at peace — profoundly at peace. The richest countries of the world are not in geopolitical competition with one another, fighting wars, proxy wars, or even engaging in arms races or “cold wars.” This is a historical rarity. You would have to go back hundreds of years to find a similar period of great power peace. I know that you watch a bomb going off in Afghanistan or hear of a terror plot in this country and think we live in dangerous times. But here is the data.
The number of people who have died as a result of war, civil war, and, yes, terrorism, is down 50 percent this decade from the 1990s. It is down 75 percent from the preceding five decades, the decades of the Cold War, and it is, of course, down 99 percent from the decade before that, which is World War II. Steven Pinker says that we are living in the most peaceful times in human history, and he must be right because he is a Harvard professor.
