Non Zero

I have read Robert Wrights' book NONZERO. It is a great book where the authors wonders and then tries to prove that history has a direction, that it is heading one way, and a good one. Wright even finds a sense to wars in uniting countries together. It is an amazing trip throughout human history and progress. Below a few notes I took as I have read it. I really advise you to read it if you have not.

-there is no better metaphor for a non-zero sum relationship than being "in the same boat". Wright claims that human history is a non zero sum game, a "win win" game, different from zero sum games, where there are parties that lose and other that win, such as tennis, or poker...

-the business partnership and one of the basic elements of capitalism coalesced in Europe during the late Middle Ages, notably the justly celebrated "contratto di commenda" used to pool capital for trade, as ships required too much capital for its owner to take the risk. But the idea of the commenda may well have come from the Islamic world. Before the commenda appeared in Italy in the tench century, the very same tool, under another name, was used by Muslims as they turned Baghdad and Basra into centers of world commerce, trading goods ranging from paper and ink to panther skins and ostrinches. At about the same time as the commenda was created, checks drafted in Baghdad could be cashed in Morocco, a convenience not offered by European banks until centuries later.

-China's technological base during the Middle Ages was a harbinger of modernity: printing, the magnetic compass and the first bombs were invented in China.

-In Mathematics, India gave Europe, among other things, the concept of zero and the decimal number system, including the numerals that are misleadingly called "Arabic".

-The invention of the printing press (1450), more than any other factor, rendered vast multilingual empires unwieldly to the point of being unworkable. The printing press also helped overhaul religious thought and ushered in both the scientific and industrial revolutions. "In 1450, most Europeans would have laughed at the notion of a single, intricately woven global civilization (and perhaps at the notion of a globe). Yet already they possessed the basic machinery for creating this world".

-[the printing press] The source of history's directionality is intellectual advance, scientific, technical, political, moral. Over time, people build better machines, better governements, better societies, better moral codes, they rationally discern the good and rationally achieve it.

-the press paradox: it helped break up arbitrary empires but also helped fuse small polities. A single Serb, vuk Karadzic, developed a Serb alphabet, published a Serbian grammar book, translated the New Testament, and compiled Popular Songs and Epics of the Serbs, paving the way for a Serbian nationalism that, for better or worse, would prove durable.

-Secular rulers, from the early modern era onward, tried to control the press. In the late sixteenth century, Britain's Star Chamber confined printing rights to two universities and twenty one London print shops, hoping to rein in the "great enormities and abuses" caused by "diverse, contentious and disorderly persons professing the art or mystery of printing or selling of books". In France, before the Bastille was stormed in 1789, more than eight hundred authors, printers, and book sellers had been imprisoned there.

-When the printing press showed up, and threatened the jobs of French copyists, the copyists mobilized to thwart it. This was good for the copyists -for a while at least- and bad for book buyers, papermakers, and would-be printers.

-printing press and other information technologies reinforced pluralism, dividing power among a larger array of groups that could now mobilize effectively.

-the locomotive, along with other rapid data carriers, accented the truth highlighted by the printing press: the more easily data can move, the larger and denser a social brain can be. The vast, fast collaboration allowed by information technologies slowly turned the multinational technical community into an almost unified consciousness.

-Historians differ over when it becomes fair to speak of a single world economy. [...] progress toward a global web of interdependence was so long and relentless that pinpointing a threshold is hard.

-New world order. In 1500 B.C. there were around 600 000 autonomous polities on the planet. Today, after many mergers and acquisitions, there are 193 autonomous polities. At this rate, the planet should have a single government any day now.

-The EU example. To be sure, European integration was, from the beginning, not a strictly economic project. it was conceived as a way of "waging peace" - reuniting a war-torn continent with economic bonds that would make war unthinkable.

-Even if murderous extraterrestrials aren't a strict prerequisite for global governance, they would be a big time saver. Even if sheerly economic forces could in theory get people to put aside their petty differences (a big if), nothing does the trick quite like the common threat of death.

-If ninety, sixty years ago, you had predicted that someday France and Germany would have the same currency, the reply would have been: "Oh, really? Which nation will have conquered which ?"

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