The global decline in murder, explained in one chart

One source of good news — favored both by me and, apparently, venture capitalists — is what’s known as a “narrative violation.” A narrative violation occurs when everyone thinks one thing, but the actual evidence suggests the opposite.

And few narratives are more persistently violated than one common belief: “Violent crime is always going up.”

A 2023 survey from IPSOS of people in 30 countries found that 70 percent of respondents thought the world was becoming more violent and dangerous. Here in the US, majorities have told pollsters almost every year since the early 1990s that violent crime is going up. And other surveys indicate that many people around the world insist that life was better and often safer 50 years ago than it is today.

So, that’s the narrative. Here’s the violation: When you actually look at data on murder, it shows that the world has largely been getting safer, both as compared to the more distant past and in this century. I wrote earlier this year about how the 1990s were actually an extraordinarily violent decade in the US and how violent crime in the US this year may be headed towards record lows, even as many Americans — including the President — insist it isn’t.

Now, recently updated data from the World Bank looks at the picture from a global perspective and finds something astonishing. Between 2000 and 2023, the international homicide rate fell from roughly 6.9 deaths per 100,000 people to around 5.2 per 100,000 people in 2023. That translates into around a one-quarter decline in the chances that any random person will be murdered.

Because the global population has increased since 2000, the total number of murders has gone up over these years. But, had the global homicide rate not experienced this decline and instead stayed steady, some 1.5 million additional people would have been murdered over these years. That’s equivalent to the population of Philadelphia still breathing because the world has gotten less violent.

It wasn’t always this way

We all have a vision of violent antiquity thanks to Hollywood, but how bad was it really? Thanks to the work of researchers like Steven Pinker, we’ve managed to piece together a picture of violence in the medieval and early modern eras — and wow, in a lot of places, it was very high.

A recent project by the criminologist Manuel Eisner used coroner records to map every known killing in the 14th-century English towns of London, York, and Oxford. Eisner found that the homicide rates in London and York clocked in at between 20 and 25 per 100,000 people, while in Oxford, home to the most venerable university in Europe, it was around 100 per 100,000 people. (Why? Apparently medieval Oxford students really liked to get drunk and fight each other to the death.)

Today, the most lethal thing an Oxford undergraduate might wield is a cutting remark; there were all of two homicides total in the city for the year ending in September 2023. For its part, London’s homicide rate was less than 1 per 100,000 through the first nine months of 2025 — the fewest murders since monthly records began in 2003.

What changed over those centuries is, in a word, civilization. More powerful states maintained a monopoly on force, courts replaced blood feuds, religious and philosophical movements de-normalized cruelty, and the rise of urban commerce made stable cooperation more valuable than lawless predation. Violence stopped being an acceptable everyday tool, and norms slowly caught up. Critics have quarreled with Pinker and his colleagues on just how far that optimism should stretch, especially for war and colonial violence, but it’s indisputable that ordinary homicide in the West is far less common than it once was.

What’s behind the drop?

It’s not just the West. For years, Brazil recorded more than 50,000 killings annually, with national murder rates in the high 20s per 100,000 people. Yet, a new report from the Brazilian Forum on Public Security finds that homicides fell to about 44,000 in 2024, the lowest level since 2012 and down roughly 25 percent from that earlier peak. The authors credit a mix of factors, including a renewed federal security push, tighter rules on civilian gun ownership, truces between rival gangs, and even demographic aging.

None of this means the work is finished. The burden of violence today is highly concentrated. In 2021, the Americas and Africa had homicide rates of roughly 150 and 127 per million people, respectively — many times higher than Europe or East Asia. Within those regions, a relatively small group of countries and cities bear an outsize share of the killings. Think of Port-au-Prince in Haiti or Colima in Mexico, where recent homicide rates in some parts of these cities have reached well into the triple digits per 100,000 people. The global average can improve even while particular neighborhoods remain terrifyingly dangerous.

The research behind the global murder decline is messy, and there is no single magic lever, but several patterns recur. Improvements in basic state capacity help; functioning courts, less corrupt police, and a predictable legal system make it harder to get away with murder. Targeted, data-driven policing that focuses on small hotspots and the tiny fraction of people responsible for most serious violence appears more effective than indiscriminate crackdowns. Policy choices around weapons matter, as do economic and social conditions. Studies of US counties, for instance, find strong links between measures of household and economic distress and death rates from homicide, suicide, and drugs. When those stresses ease, violence tends to do the same.

One last factor is out of everyone’s control, but it might be the most important: aging. The single most robust predictor of violent offending is age, and homicide is overwhelmingly committed by (and against) young men. One 2019 study found that, since the 1960s, most regions of the world have seen a decline in the share of their population aged 15-29, and that this aging accounts for a significant share of the recent decline in the homicide rate. When societies age, crime falls, all else equal. The global demographic transition — fewer kids, longer lives — seems to be quietly pacifying humanity.

If you, like me, enjoy seeing the world through narrative violations, this is a big one to hold on to. Some people would have you believe we are sliding toward chaos. The numbers say that, very slowly and unevenly, we have been making it harder to kill each other. Spotting a narrative violation is fun; building accurate narratives is even better.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!