About this title: Wright's thesis, a game-theory-based reevaluation of the history of the world, secures supporting evidence from a number of places and events across time and geography, challenging the idea of an aimless drift of human progress. A New York Times Notable Book for 2000.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Description: Good. Spine creased. Some light handling wear to page edges and a couple of the notes pages at the back have small tears. Good clean reading copy. read more
Edition: First British Edition
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Little Brown & Company, England
Date Published: 2000
ISBN-13:9780316644853ISBN:0316644854
Description: Very Good in Very Good jacket. Used book. Both text and jaclet very clean with few marks. Hard cover clean. In a book sure to stir argument for years to come, Robert Wright challenges the conventional view that biological evolution and human history are aimless...435 pages. A clean copy. read more
Edition: 1st
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Vintage Books, N. Y.
Date Published: 2000
ISBN-13:9780679758945ISBN:0679758941
Description: Cover Art. Good. No Jacket. Trade Paperback. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. The cover has a crease down the front....Owners name on the outer edges of the pages........We are very careful when we list our books, but sometimes something minor may get by.. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Vintage Books, New York U. S. A.
Date Published: 2001
ISBN-13:9780679758945ISBN:0679758941
Description: Very Good+ 978-0679758945. Marfree later prtg, like new, just a tad aged; no names, not marked-in, underscored, clearance or discard. Mails from NYC usually within 12 hours.; 1 x 7.9 x 5.1 Inches; 435 pages. read more
Description: Very Good. 0679442529 Binding is HARDCOVER. Very Good in Very Good Jacket. First Printing. bottom rear of jacket spot of dampstaining crinkle. read more
"A totally different way of thinking about the world and the linkage of various events. It's a persuasive and entertaining read. Wright's conceptions have their spirited adversaries, but his thinking process is unique and thought-provoking."
"Wright says that civilization progresses inevitably towards more positive sum games.
Quotes:
"The more possible inventors - that is, the larger the group - the higher its collective rate of innovation. All told, then, the Northwest Coast Indians outproduced and outinvented the Shoshone not because they had better brains but because they were a better brain."
"And, by virtue of thus satisfying people, the idea of farming was "good" in another, very fundamental, sense: it was good at getting itself spread; in cultural evolution's war of all against all, the concept of farming was a survivor."
"All told, if the key to the "European Miracle" lies in geography, it is not so much Europe's and China's relative proximity to America as it is Europe's and China's political geographies. Europe compromised lots of independent laboratories for testing memes, while China possessed political unity - an asset, to be sure, in matters of everyday commerce, but a handicap in any long-run race for technological preeminence."
"The middle class was willing to pay taxes in return for peace. By waging war against the reactionary nobility, the monarchs were waging peace - one of their obligations under their implied contract with taxpaying urban merchants.""
"A....review in progress of a reading in progress...please ignore for a while....
Wright uses game theory as a way of explaining the trajectory of human history. Wright argues that there is a tendency towards cooperation, towards complex models of working together, and it neither "conspiracy or accident", that is, just because there wasn't a plan deoesn't mean it is random, either.
Wright does a good job of negotiating the land mines involved in talking about "progress" of human history and civilization-
So, far, I find his use of the game theory idea of "zero-sumness" and "non-zero-sumness" something of a problem. "non-zero-sumness" isn't a difficult concept to understand, but it isn't a very evocative phrase , and Wright uses it often.
It would be interesting to contrast the style and power of this book with Malcom Gladwell's Outliers. Both books present ideas that are against the grain, partly because of their misuse in the past. Both titles rely on metaphors as key organizing concepts, Wright's from game theory and Gladwell's from statistics. But "Outliers" has a more visual capture, it is less an abstraction.
Wright's project is also much more ambitious-Gladwell merely uses examples to show how we tend to underestimate the role of social forces. Wright is actually giving the history of the development of human cooperation-his example is nothing less than the whole of human history.
This has just been a question of style so far, I will say more about the thesis itself when I have finished."
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