It's pretty easy to conclude that the world is spinning down the toilet. Despite the gloomy mood, the historical backdrop is stunning progress in human decency over recent centuries. War is declining, and humanity is becoming less violent, less racist and less sexist - and this moral progress has accelerated in recent decades. To put it bluntly, we humans seem to be getting nicer. That's the central theme of an astonishingly good book just published by Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard. It's called The Better Angels of Our Nature. [Pinker] acknowledges, "In a century that began with 9/11, Iraq and Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene." Still, even in a 20th century notorious for world war and genocide, only around 3% of humans died from such manmade catastrophes. In the 17th century, the Thirty Years' War reduced Germany's population by as much as one-third. Wars make headlines, but there are fewer conflicts today, and they typically don't kill as many people. Many scholars have made that point, most notably Joshua S Goldstein in his recent book, Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide. Look also at homicide rates, which are now far lower than in previous centuries.