A public lecture organized by the Department of Economics
If you follow the news, you cannot help but get the impression that our world is an extremely violent place full of armed conflicts, terrorist bomb attacks, and mass shootings. Reading the headlines, you might think that most human violence against other humans in our world takes the form of civil war, perhaps other lower-level armed conflicts, or terrorist attacks. This lecture will take you behind the headlines and suggest that the impression you get from the news coverage is misleading. Every year, the amount of violence resulting from civil war and terrorism is dwarfed by interpersonal violence - chiefly, homicide, assault, especially assaults against women, and severe physical abuse of children. The resulting economic and social costs of interpersonal violence are substantially greater than those of civil war and terrorism. In contrast, aid spending on programs related to civil war violence and terrorism is vastly greater than spending on programs specifically focused on reducing interpersonal violence.
