Negative 1nc

AT: Body counts are a bad metric

Body counts are the most moral way to assess impacts – it prevents devaluing distant impacts and centers the debate on problem solving

Mack and Pinker 14 - director of the Human Security Report Project at Simon Fraser University AND ** Johnstone Family professor of psychology at Harvard and the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. (Andrew and Steven, J “The World Is Not Falling Apart” Slate, 12/22, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/12/the_world_is_not_falling_apart_the_trend_lines_reveal_an_increasingly_peaceful.html)//CB
To be sure, adding up corpses and comparing the tallies across different times and places can seem callous, as if it minimized the tragedy of the victims in less violent decades and regions. But a quantitative mindset is in fact the morally enlightened one. It treats every human life as having equal value, rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of violence and thereby implement the measures that are most likely to reduce it. Let’s examine the major categories in turn.

AT: Taleb

Your author needs to rethink his criticism—Pinker is laying down the smack.

Pinker 12. (Steven, Steven, Johnstone Family professor of psychology at Harvard and the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. “Fooled by Belligerence: Comments on Nassim Taleb’s ‘The Long Peace is a Statistical Illusion.’” Nov 11 2012. http://stevenpinker.com/files/comments_on_taleb_by_s_pinker.pdf)//CB

Taleb shows no signs of having read Better Angels with the slightest attention to its content. Instead he has merged it in his mind with claims by various fools and knaves whom he believes he has bettered in the past. The confusion begins with his remarkable claim that the thesis in Better Angels is “identical” to Ben Bernanke’s theory of a moderation in the stock market. Identical! This alone should warn readers that for all of Taleb’s prescience about the financial crisis, accurate attribution and careful analysis of other people’s ideas are not his strong suits.

Taleb’s article implies that Better Angels consists of 700 pages of fancy statistical extrapolations which lead to the conclusion that violent catastrophes have become impossible. He mistakenly refers to this as “The Long Peace.” In fact “The Long Peace” (the term is John Gaddis’s) refers specifically to the well- documented post-1945 decline of wars among great powers and developed states. And the chapter with that title is one of six that describe historical reductions in rates of violence. Another chapter discusses the more tentative but still appreciable declines in civil war and terrorism since the end of the Cold War. The remaining four pertain to other kinds of violence: tribal raiding and feuding, violent personal crime, barbaric practices such as slavery and torture-executions, and violence on smaller scales such as lynching, rape, spousal abuse, spanking, hate crimes, and cruelty to animals. The book makes it clear that these developments obey very different statistical processes than those governing wars and terrorist attacks; not even Taleb, presumably, would expect a sudden, massive, unpredictable jump in human sacrifice, slave auctions, sodomy laws, or debtor’s prisons. So even if, as Taleb seems to believe, the danger from major war has not declined, we would have plenty of other declines of violence to explain. It’s an open question whether there are any common denominators behind these various declines. Better Angels considers some possibilities, while making it clear that these declines do not constitute a single phenomenon.

The book’s structure was lost on Taleb, who blends the different chapters and then criticizes his own confusion. He claims that the book “conflates nonscalable Mediocristan (death from encounters with simple weapons) with scalable Extremistan (death from heavy shells and nuclear weapons),” that it uses “statistics of one to make inferences about the other,” that it “does not realize the core difference

between scalable/nonscalable,” that it implies that a drop in crime has implications for “casualties from violent conflict,” that it “fails to deal with the notion of temporal homogeneity,” and that it “assumes that the statistics of the 14th century can apply to the 21st.” Every one of these attributions is wrong. The book spends many pages arguing the exact opposite.

Poverty/Economic Inequality Decreasing

Income inequality has never been lower—increased trade.

Cowen 14. (Tyler, professor of Economics at George Mason University. “Income Inequality Is Not Rising Globally. It's Falling,” NYT. JULY 19, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/upshot/income-inequality-is-not-rising-globally-its-falling-.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=1)//CB

Income inequality has surged as a political and economic issue, but the numbers don’t show that inequality is rising from a global perspective. Yes, the problem has become more acute within most individual nations, yet income inequality for the world as a whole has been falling for most of the last 20 years. It’s a fact that hasn’t been noted often enough.

The finding comes from a recent investigation by Christoph Lakner, a consultant at the World Bank, and Branko Milanovic, senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center. And while such a framing may sound startling at first, it should be intuitive upon reflection. The economic surges of China, India and some other nations have been among the most egalitarian developments in history.

Of course, no one should use this observation as an excuse to stop helping the less fortunate. But it can help us see that higher income inequality is not always the most relevant problem, even for strict egalitarians. Policies on immigration and free trade, for example, sometimes increase inequality within a nation, yet can make the world a better place and often decrease inequality on the planet as a whole.

International trade has drastically reduced poverty within developing nations, as evidenced by the export-led growth of China and other countries. Yet contrary to what many economists had promised, there is now good evidence that the rise of Chinese exports has held down the wages of some parts of the American middle class. This was demonstrated in a recent paper by the economists David H. Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, David Dorn of the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies in Madrid, and Gordon H. Hanson of the University of California, San Diego.

At the same time, Chinese economic growth has probably raised incomes of the top 1 percent in the United States, through exports that have increased the value of companies whose shares are often held by wealthy Americans. So while Chinese growth has added to income inequality in the United States, it has also increased prosperity and income equality globally.

The evidence also suggests that immigration of low-skilled workers to the United States has a modestly negative effect on the wages of American workers without a high school diploma, as shown, for instance, in research by George Borjas, a Harvard economics professor. Yet that same immigration greatly benefits those who move to wealthy countries like the United States. (It probably also helps top American earners, who can hire household and child-care workers at cheaper prices.) Again, income inequality within the nation may rise but global inequality probably declines, especially if the new arrivals send money back home.

From a narrowly nationalist point of view, these developments may not be auspicious for the United States. But that narrow viewpoint is the main problem. We have evolved a political debate where essentially nationalistic concerns have been hiding behind the gentler cloak of egalitarianism. To clear up this confusion, one recommendation would be to preface all discussions of inequality with a reminder that global inequality has been falling and that, in this regard, the world is headed in a fundamentally better direction.

The message from groups like Occupy Wall Street has been that inequality is up and that capitalism is failing us. A more correct and nuanced message is this: Although significant economic problems remain, we have been living in equalizing times for the world — a change that has been largely for the good. That may not make for convincing sloganeering, but it’s the truth.

A common view is that high and rising inequality within nations brings political trouble, maybe through violence or even revolution. So one might argue that a nationalistic perspective is important. But it’s hardly obvious that such predictions of political turmoil are true, especially for aging societies like the United States that are showing falling rates of crime.

Furthermore, public policy can adjust to accommodate some egalitarian concerns. We can improve our educational system, for example.

Still, to the extent that political worry about rising domestic inequality is justified, it suggests yet another reframing. If our domestic politics can’t handle changes in income distribution, maybe the problem isn’t that capitalism is fundamentally flawed but rather that our political institutions are inflexible. Our politics need not collapse under the pressure of a world that, over all, is becoming wealthier and fairer.

Global poverty is at an all-time low—globalization.

Tupy 15. (Marian, senior policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. Internally quoting the World Bank’s Branko Milanovic and Geoffrey Gertz of the Brookings Institution. “Stop obsessing about inequality. It’s actually decreasing around the world,” The Washington Post. 1/8/2015. http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/01/08/stop-obsessing-about-inequality-its-actually-decreasing-around-the-world/)//CB

In America, the income gap between the top 1 percent and the rest has grown. But if we look not at America, but the world, inequality is shrinking. We are witnessing, in the words of the World Bank’s Branko Milanovic, “the first decline in global inequality between world citizens since the Industrial Revolution.”

For most of human history, incomes were more equal, but terribly low. Two thousand years ago, GDP per person in the most advanced parts of the world hovered around $3.50 per day. That was the global average 1,800 years later.

But by the early 19th century, a pronounced income gap emerged between the West and the rest. Take the United States. In 1820, the U.S. was 1.9 times richer than the global average. The income gap grew to 4.1 in 1960 and reached its maximum level of 4.8 in 1999. By 2010, it had shrunk by 19 percent to 3.9.

That narrowing is not a function of declining Western incomes. During the Great Recession, for example, U.S. GDP per capita decreased by 4.8 percent between 2007 and 2009. It rebounded by 5.7 percent over the next 4 years and stands at an all-time high today. Rather, the narrowing of the income gap is a result of growing incomes in the rest of the world.

Consider the spectacular rise of Asia. In 1960, the U.S. was 11 times richer than Asia. Today, America is only 4.8 times richer than Asia.

To understand why, let’s look at China.

Between 1958 and 1961, Mao Zedong attempted to transform China’s largely agricultural economy into an industrial one through the “Great Leap Forward.” His stated goal was to overtake UK’s industrial production in 15 years. Industrialization, which included building of factories at home as well as large-scale purchases of machinery abroad, was to be paid for by food produced on collective farms.

But the collectivization of agriculture resulted in famine that killed between 18 and 45 million people. Industrial initiatives, such as Mao’s attempt to massively increase production of steel, were equally disastrous. People burned their houses to stoke the fires of the steel mills and melted cooking wares to fulfil the steel production quotas. The result was destruction, rather than creation of wealth.

Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s successor, partially privatized the farmland and allowed farmers to sell their produce. Trade liberalization ensured that Chinese industrial output would no longer be dictated by production quotas, but by the demands of the international economy. But Following liberalization in 1978, China’s GDP per capita has increased 12.5 fold, rising from $545 in 1980 to $6,807 in 2013. Over the same time period, the Chinese poverty rate fell from 84 percent to 10 percent.

What is true of China is also true in much of the developing world. As Laurence Chandy and Geoffrey Gertz of the Brookings Institution wrote in 2011, “poverty reduction of this magnitude is unparalleled in history: never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty over such a brief period of time.”

Developing countries have made strides in other areas too. Take life expectancy. Between 1960 and 2010, global life expectancy increased from 53 years to 70. In the U.S. over the same period it rose from 70 to 78. Similar stories can be told about child and maternal mortality, treatment of communicable diseases, and the spread of technology.

Many Americans point to globalization as a bogeyman, robbing our country of good jobs and resources. But really, the phenomenon has ushered a period of unprecedented prosperity in many poor countries. Even as we struggle with economic problems at home let us remember the global – and largely positive – perspective on the state of the world.