Big wars may be in our future

It has been common to assume that man's lot in the world is getting better and better, and that one of the things contributing to this, is less and less death caused by war.

However if you note and measure that the distribution of deaths from war through history is seriously fat-tailed (which means that very rarely occuring wars do kill a whole lot of people), then almost all measurements you will take on the way will be below the true mean. And we may in fact be up for serious mayhem. This is presented in a paper (linked at the end of this post) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Pasquale Cirillo, and blogged about by Mark Buchanan here:

Violent warfare is on the wane, right? — Bull Market — Medium -

For example, it turns out that, for a process following this statistical pattern, one should expect fully 96% of all observations to fall below the true mean of the process. This brings home just how non-Gaussian and non-normal this process is. We’re used to thinking that, if we observe instances from some random process, we ought to (very crudely) see events about half above and half below the mean. Instead, in this process, one should expect that almost all observations will be below, and even far below, the actual mean. We almost always see fewer wars than we, in a sense, should.

Original paper: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/violence.pdf