You fool - don't you realise that arms sales help the UK's balance of payments?

You think that without arms sales there would be no war? In theory selling to a responsible government can bring stability by giving them concentrated power - they just have to be seen to have the power...

And historical levels of violence have been decreasing (including rape and domestic violence) for hyndreds of years...

orathaic: Ha ha, are you really using 'stability' as a euphemism for 'suppression' here? You firstly don't negate your initial question (unless you are referring to civil war) and you secondly are providing an alternative (state oppression) that may be preferable to war, but one that certainly doesn't sound worthy of much support.

And then you follow that with a fragment that makes a claim which is simply false.

JECE, it is not false, just unprovable. In fact, it's more likely to be the truth. Encyclopaedia Britannica says: "In the early 1800s most legal systems implicitly accepted wife-beating as a husband’s right, part of his entitlement to control over the resources and services of his wife." I'd say there has been some progress in that area.

On the other hand, violence has increased in absolute terms simply because there are more people on Earth than ever before.

@Zmaj
'In the early 2000s most legal systems implicitly accepted husband-nagging as a wife's right, part of her entitlement to control over the resources and services of her spouse.'

unproven, but the evidence does indicate the result i suggested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ramBFRt1Uzk

And yes, oppression is a step in development toward democracy. you may think you can go in to a country and do some 'nation building' but i am skeptical that it can happen without internal cultural shifts which take generations.

There may be an alternative route toward development - at which point income and life expectancy can grow to levels which we see in China, Europe and the US, but i'm fairly sure we have no working theory of development.

orathaic: No working theory of development? Try looking up 'human development'.

And I'm not arguing for nation-building, but to simply state that opression is a "step" towards democracy is a gross idiocy, though many established political science theories are equally proposterous. Opression is, I would say, merely a state of being.

Zmaj and orathaic: I don't have time to watch that talk now, but seriously, think about what you're saying! It's one thing to say that violence has been on the decline since Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, which is still debateable, but to say that violence has been on the decline for centuries seems to me like a teleological statement with little basis in fact; of course, you both admit that the stamement lacks fact. What if you take into account the massive slaughters provoked by the advents of total war and nationalism, neither of which make it to two centuries of age.

@JECE: 'preposterous' and 'oppression'. Just saying.

Yeah, I didn't run those last two posts through spellcheck.

Yeah, if you take into account all the data available there is a downward trend. It's one thing you making they arguement that there isn't enough data, but when i offer the data in a concise (<20 min) video and you ignore it your position lacks credibility.

You can look it up yourself if you like to see the trend!

I already did:
http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=vc_btl_deth&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=region&ifdim=region&tdim=true&tstart=-302734800000&tend=1306638000000&ind=false

you mention living standards in china, europe and the us. However, i don't think you can put China in the same bucket as Europe and the US. Although their overall GDP is high, due to the sheer number of people, if you look at the income per person, then China is very poor. The richest economies in the world are the US, Europe and Japan. (plus smaller economies like Australia etc).

yeah, your public data doesn't divide by head of population, nor does it aggregrate over the average time between wars (so you can get a smooth predictive curve of the changes in number and scale of war related deaths...)

not surprising that a guy who wrote a book on the topic has better data analysis than we're going to do in the course of this thread...

meanwhile china may look different from the US today, but if you look at the progress it is several decades behind... and on a different curve.

see: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
(life expectancy in china is about US 1980, while income is US 1930/40)

when we're talking about deaths/violence i think the life expectancy is more important...

orathaic: I'm not entirely ignorant of this man's arguments, you know. I saw him come on either The Colbert Report or Jon Stewart, and was not at all impressed by his rationale. Well, I'm not quite sure it's the same person, but I can't imagine that there are two people famous for writing similar books within a few years of each other; of course I guess that's possible.

Sad to remember that Willy Brandt wrote, long enough ago to almost seem like another life, that ending the arms trade could end world hunger (over-simplification on my part or what!). Have we moved on since? No need to ask really!