To get a clearer sense of what’s really going on, the statistician Pasquale Cirillo, working alongside Nassim Taleb of “The Black Swan” fame, did an analysis using extreme value theory — a branch of mathematics specifically designed for such problems. Looking at war data over 2,000 years, they found that violent conflicts have fatter tails than earthquakes and markets, suggesting an even more profound tendency to extremes. “History as seen from tail analysis,” Cirillo and Taleb conclude, “is far more risky, and conflicts far more violent than acknowledged by naive observation.”

Source: Is the World Getting Safer? Maybe Not