NONZERO

Introduction

PART I: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND

1. The Ladder of Cultural Evolution
2. The Way We Were
3. Add Technology and Bake for Five Millennia
4. The Invisible Brain
5. War: What Is It Good For?
6. The Inevitability of Agriculture
7. The Age of Chiefdoms
8. The Second Information Revolution
9. Civilization and So On
10. Our Friends the Barbarians
11. Dark Ages
12. The Inscrutable Orient
13. Modern Times
14. And Here We Are
15. New World Order
16. Degrees of Freedom

PART II: A BRIEF HISTORY OF ORGANIC LIFE

17. The Cosmic Context
18. The Rise of Biological Non-zero-sumness
19. Why Life Is So Complex
20. The Last Adaptation

PART III: FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

21. Non-crazy Questions
22. You Call This a God?

Excerpt from

Chapter Three

ADD TECHNOLOGY AND

BAKE FOR FIVE MILLENNIA

[SNIP]

Capital investment and division of labor are things we take for granted. They happen naturally in an economy with a currency, a stock exchange, and a bond market. The Northwest Coast Indians didn't have a capitalist economy, or even a currency, yet they managed to play the same basic non-zero-sum games capitalists play. How? Through the great enemy of Adam Smith aficionados: centralized planning.

The chief planner was the political leader, the "Big Man." He held the allegiance of a clan, maybe a village. He orchestrated the building of salmon traps or fish cellars, and he made sure that some villagers specialized in, say, making canoes that other villagers could then use. To pay for all of this he would take one-fifth, or even half, of a hunter's kill. Some of this revenue would be returned to the people in the form of chief-sponsored feasts, but for the most part this was simple taxation, used for public goods. Only, in this case, many of the "public goods" were things that a modern capitalist society might deem private goods. (The U.S. government doesn't have a Bureau of Canoe-making.)

Needless to say, the Big Man skimmed a little off the top. He lived in a nicer-than-average house and owned a nicer-than-average wardrobe. Whether he skimmed off more than he "deserved" is a complex question that gets at an unresolved academic dispute about how exploitive ruling classes are. We'll get to this debate later. For now I'll just note that skimming a little off the top isn't exactly unheard of in a modern economy. Investment banking isn't charity work.

The Northwest Coast Indians' rudimentary "government" wasn't only a stand-in for the market. It did things that governments do even in capitalist societies. For example, if fishermen were allowed to compete without restraint, they could deplete the salmon stock, hurting everyone. This is an instance of what the biologist Garrett Hardin famously called the "tragedy of the commons"--a textbook non-zero-sum problem, in which overgrazing of public land by privately owned herds would be ruinous, so all herd owners can benefit by mutual restraint. The Northwest Coast Indians solved the problem by deciding when fishing would begin and end, much as governments today enforce a hunting season so that deer and ducks will live to die another day. There was even a specialist--a kind of "fishing warden"--who would go around from trap to trap, inspecting the haul to decide when the fishing must end.

Northwest government also blunted misfortune. Goods that Big Men gathered as tax--blankets, sea otter furs, hanimered copper--were in times of scarcity traded for food with another region's Big Man, and the food then divvied up among followers. Here Big Men were together tapping one of the most hallowed forms of socially integrating non-zero-sumness: the diffusion of risk, as practiced by the !Kung with their giraffe-meat dinner parties and by Eskimo boat owners with their inter-village feasts. The more widely this risk is spread, the better for all concerned. And the Northwest Coast Indians spread it as widely as any known hunter-gatherer people, "even across tribal and linguistic boundaries," as Johnson and Earle note.

The resulting safety net has been called by various anthropologists "social security," a "life insurance policy," and a "savings account." The diversity of labels illustrates that, even today, people argue over whether this function belongs in the public or private sector. The issue is partly a moral one, turning on judgments about whether the wealthy should help the poor. But to some extent the issue is technological. Modern information and transportation technology make it easier to do all kinds of exchanges without central coordination. Today a middle-class citizen of an industrialized nation can diffuse risk to the ends of the earth, buying mutual funds that invest east and west, north and south.

Two economists of differing ideologies could have a long argument about whether the Northwest Coast Indians, even with their primitive technology, couldn't have put some of the Big Man's functions in the private sector. But almost any economist would admit that, given the absence of money, these native Americans had a remarkable economy, with great specialization, large capital investment, and disaster insurance. All of this is a tribute to how steadfastly, even unconsciously, human nature pursues non-zero-sum gain, shaping social structure to that end.

In this case, the requisite social structure was elaborate: villages of up to 800 people, with dozens of families recognizing a single, central authority. To be sure, the Big Man's powers were hardly absolute, or even very formal; to keep the economy humming, he sometimes had to cajole or browbeat reluctant donors. Still, the Big Man system carries economic and political complexity to a level higher than any other society we've seen so far. The Northwest Coast Indians are testament to the arrow of cultural evolution, and to its guiding force.

[SNIP]

The Northwesterners may have been on the verge of a de facto currency--strings of dentalia shells, used as a sign of prestige and occasionally as compensation for public service. Certainly the idea of abstractly embodied wealth was familiar. One Big Man, in exchange for goods, issued tokens that.entitled the holders to blubber from the next whale that washed up on his people's beach. If he had been born a century later, he might have founded the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

[SNIP]

Social status, however ephemeral it sounds, has long brought tangible rewards. For example: Big Men, if Big enough, can attract multiple wives.

For that matter, a successful Big Man's stature can rub off on his lieutenants. At one feast in the Solomon Islands, observed in 1939,a Big Man named Soni parted with mounds of sago-almond pudding and thirty-two figs at a feast attended by 1,100 people. Soni's closest followers, who had toiled long and hard toward this day, watched proudly, but, like Soni, ate nothing. They consoled themselves with this refrain: "We shall eat Soni's renown."

[SNIP]

Though he lacks formal powers of office, and must rely on persuasion, the generic Big Man foreshadows the modern politician. He "is usually a good speaker, convincing to his listeners," writes Allen Johnson of the Melanesian Big Man. He "has an excellent memory for kinship relations and for past transactions in societies where there is no writing." The Big Man "is a peacemaker whenever possible, arranging compensatory payments and fines in order to avoid direct violent retribution from groups who feel they have been injured." But, if peacemaking fails, "he leads his followers into battle."

[SNIP]