Is the world getting worse? [Bryan]

I often hear that things are getting worse and that "the world" is sliding into moral decay. I don't really believe that is true. The world from 1900-1974 (the year I was born), with the mass slaughter in two world wars, genocide on an unprecedented scale, brutal apartheid racism in the United States, and so forth, seems like a place that had no where to go but up, morally speaking. I collected a bunch of graphs that try to explain why I believe that things are actually not getting worse with respect to morality. Of course, it is possible that certain things might be worse. I'm talking about the big picture here.

Let's start with violent crime rates, which seem to be consistently dropping over the past 30 years.

Below are the categories of violent crime broken down more precisely. Everything, from murder, to assault, to rape, is down since the 1980s.


Trends in domestic violence are particularly tricky, since what gets reported is always fluctuating. Below is a graph, though, indicating that domestic violence has dropped over the past decade.


Below is a chart attempting to capture the presence of armed conflict in the world. The trend seems to be down over the past 20 years meaning the world is, on the whole, a more peaceful place. This is hard for us to conceive, because we ourselves have been engaged in minor conflicts since 2002. Overall, though, the trend is down.
Abortion rates seem to have slowly declined since 1980.

Divorce seems to be declining fairly significantly since it reached its peak in 1980s. (There are many reasons for this, of course, not all good.)