This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Monday, January 5th, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The world is improving across most vital metrics and has been for a long time.

Psychologist and Harvard Professor Stephen Pinker has studied these trends extensively

for various books.

We spoke following a Cato Institute event for Human Progress.org.

In 2012 or 2013, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey told the Senate Armed Services Committee,

quote, I will personally attest to the fact

that the world is more dangerous than it has ever been.

And most people don't really question that.

What do you say to Martin Dempsey and the people who would be likely to

believe what he says? More dangerous than the Cuban missile crisis in 1962

more dangerous than 1941 when Hitler was overrun in Europe.

And this is an astonishing statement.

But it's not that surprising because in every era people say it's the most dangerous time

in the history of the human race.

Even in the 1990s where a lot of us fondly

remember that as a time after the fall of the Soviet Empire and a time of prosperity

and relative peace.

You had a cover story at the Atlantic saying that the world was going to fall apart,

that the southern regions of the United States were going to join Mexico,

that African Americans were going to revolt against white America in sympathy with their

...