One of my PhD advisors at Berkeley was Michael Watts, whose wonderful, massive, and dense work Silent Violence was a great inspiration…. but like Pinker remember thinking that while I understood the argument– social structure led to outcomes, like death through famine, as inexorably as a two-by-four– I wasn’t sure whether it was a helpful argument to be making in terms of clarifying concepts.  In particular, the “inexorable” part just doesn’t work.

From Pinker:

Isn’t economic inequality a form of violence? 

No; the fact that Bill Gates has a bigger house than I do may be deplorable, but to lump it together with rape and genocide is to confuse moralization with understanding. Ditto for underpaying workers, undermining cultural traditions, polluting the ecosystem, and other practices that moralists want to stigmatize by metaphorically extending the term violence to them. It’s not that these aren’t bad things, but you can’t write a coherent book on the topic of “bad things.”