The Speculist

For my first post that asserted that amped up bad news actually creates a better world over time, I decided to err on this side of brevity and omitted the inclusion of examples. To repair that omission, I herewith present some illustrative thoughts. First, the Violence Shaving phenomenon exhibits itself over time scales on the order of dozens of years, kind of like the media<->society equivalent of the slow movements of tectonic plates. For instance, in the 1970 - 80's it was a dead on certainty that we were all going to die by eating, drinking and breathing our own effluent. In the US, this dystopic vision driven by the media and entertainment industry was presented as a rock solid future. Instead, the result was that laws were written that forced major reductions in pollution.

If you were an adult in the 60's you will remember many days when you could almost scoop junk out of the air with a spoon. Did these laws/mods cause perfection today? No. The point is that the constant drumbeat by the then and current media had and continue to have a statistical process control "catastrophe shaving" effect - wherein the demonstrably less aggregious pollution of today relative to the 70's is vastly amped up in the media in order to drive profits from advertising driven business models that makes the now reduced pollution induce at least as much concern/upset/terrrrror in media consumers as there was during the "Silent Spring" post hippy era.

Another example is the orders of magnitude reduction of so called "acceptable casualties" that or OECD governments can expect that their citizens will allow in battle casualties without huge backlash.

From WWII 1941-1945 (4 years)
ARMY: 223,215 KILLED IN ACTION (includes US Army Air Corps);
NAVY DEATHS 63,278;
MARINE DEATHS 24,486;
US COAST GUARD 1,917 DEATHS
FROM "THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF WWII" ARMED SERVICES MEMORIAL EDITION......CO.1945 1948
American soldiers killed in the Korean War 1950-1953 (~ 3 years) = 54,246

Vietnam War 1963-1970 (10 years)= ~56,000 killed

Iraq "Desert Storm": (6 months) - 146 killed

Iraq 2: 2003 - 2007 (less than 4 years) 3,051

So, normalized for time elapsed during a given war, soldiers killed during these wars have dropped by two orders of magnitude since WWII. Where's the market pressure coming from to drive the investments in lifesaving capital intensive capabilities? Why are the casualties going down when the lethality of weapons has risen so greatly? Certainly there are technological explanations, but again - What is (are) ultimately driving the investments?

What about non-combatants? It's vastly more difficult to calculate the reduction in casualties driven via media pressure, but keep in mind that the fire bombings of Dresden, Tokyo, London and dozens of other cities where many times, some hundreds of thousands of civilians would perish in a single night would be totally totally unthinkable today. As a final point, think about the research that continues to go into non-lethal weapons research and ask what pressure has caused this research to be undertaken?

All this is NOT to say ANYTHING about the HORROR of it all. It is purely to try to point out that there is an emergent - even natural phenomenon at work behind the scenes working to scare us to death over less and less actual horror that drives further reductions in bad, dangerous, evil things.

Ok - I can't resist - one more. It used to be that most US male babies were circumcised. Now, the numbers are going down rapidly - especially on the US coasts. What might account for this? Perhaps some new media outlets? Do a search on YouTube for "circumcision"...then decide if horror amped media might reduce violence over time.

Ben