The great decline of Western society: What are the facts?

[This is a repost of an article that appeared on 21 Dec 2011 at Science Meets Religion.]

One of the most common refrains in news and commentaries, from both the religious right and the secular left, is that modern society is in sharp decline: skyrocketing rates of crime, divorce, teenage sex, teenage births, drug abuse and war (especially in the 20th century). There is also concern that modern society’s focus on science and technology is leading to a widening of the gap in living conditions and educational opportunities between prosperous first-world nations and impoverished third-world nations.

The religious right blames

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December 23rd, 2011 | Category: Essays | Comments are closed

Chiropractic: crackers now, and crackers way back when

[This is a repost of an article that appeared on 23 Dec 2011 in The Conversation].

Recently there was an excellent, and much read, article on The Conversation entitled There’s no place for pseudo-scientific chiropractic in Australian universities which made the case against chiropractic “medicine” all too well.

Dodgy doctors are dodgy wherever they live and are trained. Despite the value of a good and not-too-vigorous back massage (or perhaps some mild acupuncture), neither alternative medicine nor chiropractic make the grade as health sciences.

The article, by John Dwyer of the University of New South Wales, made me reflect

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December 23rd, 2011 | Category: Essays | Comments are closed

The remarkable decline of violence

Many will greet the title of this piece with considerable skepticism — in this day and age how could one possibly talk about a decline in violence? Yet it is true. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker begins his new book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined as follows:

This book is about what may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history. Believe it or not – and I know that most people do not – violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most

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December 15th, 2011 | Category: Essays | Comments are closed

Innumeracy and public risk

[Note: A condensed and revised version of this article was published here in The Conversation, an online forum of academic research headquartered in Melbourne, Australia.]

Assessing risk is something everyone must do every day. Yet few are very good at it, and there are significant consequences to the public’s collective inability to accurately assess risk.

As a first and very important example, most people presume, as an indisputable fact, that the past century has been the most violent in all history — two devastating world wars, the Holocaust, the Rawanda massacre, the September 11 attacks and more — and that

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December 4th, 2011 | Category: Essays | Comments are closed