Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

War and Conflict
I was born in 1948, three years after the end of the Second World War, in
which 65 million people died. No one pretended that another world war could
not come. And yet, it did not come. Instead came peace: the longest peace
between superpowers in human history.
Today, conflicts and fatalities from conflicts are at a record low. I have
lived through the most peaceful decades in human history. Watching the
news, with its never-ending flow of horrifying images, it is almost impossible
to believe that.
I do not seek to trivialize the horror that undoubtedly remains. I do not try
to understate the importance of ending current conflicts. Remember: things
can be bad, 
and
getting better. Getting better, but still bad. The world was
once mostly barbaric and it is now mostly not. But for the people of Syria,
these trends are of course not comforting. There it is barbaric right now.
The Syrian conflict will most likely prove to be the deadliest in the world
since the Ethiopian-Eritrean war of 1998 to 2000. We don’t know the total
fatalities yet and we don’t know if the conflict will spread. If fatalities end up
being in the tens of thousands, the conflict will have been less bloody than the
worst wars of the 1990s. If the death toll reaches 200,000, this will still fall

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short of the wars of the 1980s. This is no comfort whatsoever to those living
through this horror, but the fact that battle deaths are falling decade by decade
should be some comfort to the rest of us.
The general trend toward less violence is not just one more improvement. It
is the most beautiful trend there is. The spread of peace over the last decades
has enabled all the other improvements we have seen. We must take care of
this fragile gift if we hope to achieve our other noble goals, such as
collaboration toward a sustainable future. Without world peace, you can
forget about all other global progress.