This books uses data to impress readers, as smokefront; but full of statistical errors. Aside from his central claim being wrong, there are flaws in the data analysis.

For instance:

1) Pinker accepts that violence follows a power law distribution with an exponent around 1, hence no stable average, but then makes statement about the drop in mean, not realizing the problem. An exponent around 1 means the mean is infinite, so how can it drop? (Under these conditions one cannot draw scientific conclusions from descriptive statistics. The closer the exponent is to 1, the lower the validity of claims of drop in violence.)



2) Pinker uses Richardson (1960) as back-up. The latter states that there is no sufficient evidence to reject the null hypothesis of a homogenous Poisson process, which denies the presence of any trend in the belligerence of humanity (Cirillo and I verified the claim). Nevertheless, Pinker interprets Richardson as saying the opposite, and is not responding to critiques.



3) Other metholodogical flaws such as the estimation of the An Lushan rebellion or the Mongolian invasions without an error rate for past biases.



4) Marketing (there is little, very little data, but a lot of graphs and words giving the illusion of thorough empiricism).