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Master of Posting
Joined: Jan 2008 Posts: 3710 Location: Berryville, Virginia
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 Non-Zero Sumness I suggest Non-Zero Sumness by Robert Wright. I've been reading his later The Evolution of God, in which he often mentions non-zero sumness. Wright is above all a clear writer who writes informally and without jargon but also deeply. Here are excerpts from a few laudatory reviews:
A dazzling mix of history, theology, economics, game theory, and evolutionary biology that paints the world's increasing entwinement as a positive and possibly inevitable development." --Fortune Magazine, March 21, 2005 (Named one of the "Fortune 75": The 75 "smartest [business-related] books" of all time.)
"An original, accessible and thought-provoking view of history…full of rich detail, ingenious insight and bold argument… By examining history through the lens of non-zero-sumness, Mr Wright builds a good case for his arrow of history. He takes the reader on an original and wide-ranging tour of human cultural evolution--big-game hunting, agriculture, war, information technologies, feudalism, capital markets, environmental threats, supranational organizations--that explains and illustrates the 'logic of non-zero-sumness'." --The Economist, July 15-22, 2000
"Wright carries his learning lightly, and his bold attempt to uncover parallels between organic evolution and the development of human cultures makes for a compelling synthesis...Wright is right about so many things: evolution is
seeded with inevitabilities, cultures have common trajectories, and human
history has seen great hopes and terrible crimes but is capable of achieving
a final destiny." --Simon Conway Morris, New York Times Book Review
(lead review), Jan. 30, 2000.
"Robert Wright's previous book, The Moral Animal (1994), presented a highly readable overview of evolutionary psychology... In Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Wright attempts something far more ambitious: he extends the evolutionary story both backward and forward in time, arguing that human cultural evolution can be understood as an outgrowth of biological evolution, and that it should eventually lead humankind to higher levels of cooperation on a planetary scale. If this sounds like a tall order, it is--but Wright does an astonishingly effective job of finding directionality in history, not just over the past few thousand years but over the almost four billion years since the beginning of life on earth... Wright has written an extraordinarily insightful and thought-provoking book. The idea that there is directionality and purpose to history is one that has come and gone, and now may be coming again thanks to the elegant synthesis he has produced." --Francis Fukuyama, The Wilson Quarterly, Winter, 2000.
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