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]

The Tareumiut, with their entrepreneurial boat owners and their intricate whale hunts, belie the standard image of the simple hunter-gatherer society. But not nearly so much as the natives of the Northwest Coast of North America—the Salish, the Haida, the Kwakiutl, the Nootka, the Chilkat, and others. These peoples, arrayed north and south of the present-day border betwen Canada and the United States, had taken yet another step up the ladder of complexity.

[SNIP]

The Northwest Coast Indians were blessed with mindboggling natural bounty. The salmon in their rivers may not have been so dense that, as one explorer claimed, "you could walk across their backs," but they were dense. There were also halibut, cod, and herring, and the sea was rich with shellfish, sea otters, seals, and whales. And then there was the incomparable candlefish--so oily that supposedly you can stick a wick in it and use it to light a room.

Diverse game called for diverse technology. The Nootka had an array of fishhooks ranging from a heat-treated spruce hook for halibut to a bone hook for cod. They made harpoons and tied them to inflated sealskin floats, to sap the energy of struggling whales. Boats ranged from one-man canoes to eight-man whalers to sixty-foot cargo boats. The Nootka had traps for bear, for deer, for elk. They had four kinds of salmon traps, ranging from cubic to cone-shaped, some as big as a small house. (The actual houses, suburban ranchstyles, were routinely larger than 2,000 square feet and sometimes as large as 4,000.) There were smokehouses for curing fish, cellars for storing cured fish, and watertight cedar boxes for storing berries.

Not all the technology was so utilitarian. Luxury goods ranged from ornate copper shields to decorative robes whose creation was an exercise in economic interdependence. Chilkat women spun the yarn from the wool of mountain goats and made twine out of cedar bark imported from Indians to the south. The yarn was dyed one of four colors, including a true blue (rare among hunter-gatherers) that was made by importing copper from the north and soaking it in urine. On a loom, the women wove intricate patterns-animals or abstractions. The finished product was exported to various Northwest Coast Indians whose aspiration was to someday be buried in an attractive robe.

Much of this technology involved that classic non-zero-sum game, division of labor--through which, as Adam Smith noted, a group of people can expand overall output. Though all Northwest Coast Indian families would hunt and gather, many also had a sideline craft--carpentry, say--that was handed down through the family.

These native Americans also played the non-zero-sum game played by the Tareumiut and the Shoshone: collective hunting, as reflected in their whaling fleets and the huge fish traps they affixed to the river floor with massive posts. These things were major capital investments. To build a salmon trap or a whaling boat took weeks. The workers had to be paid for their labor, if only in the sense of being fed. So before building began, resources had-to be saved and committed to the project.

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.

[SNIP]