Canadian-American psychologist at Harvard University. Mr Pinker argues that there has been a dramatic decline in violence over the centuries: homicide rates in 14th-century Germany, Italy and Spain were roughly 70, 200 and 50 times higher than they are today, and in some pre-modern hunter-gatherer societies as many as a third of people died violently.
In 2025 he published "When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…" (Scribner), a book on the concept of common knowledge — knowing that others know something, and that they know we know — and its effects on public affairs and personal lives.
A statesman is a politician who's been dead 10 or 15 years.