The main thesis of Nonzero is that social complexity of human culture has been increasing since the dawn of man and will continue to do so until forever. Wright argues that non-zero sum games are the culprit: societies get more complex (moving from tribes of hunter gatherers to mutli-trillion dollar global economy) because in order to play ever more lucrative non-zero sum games with an increasing number of people, that's the way it has to be. It makes a lot of sense.

Find out more info about this book or read some book posts on kottke.org. This entry was published on July 07, 2003 at 09:27 pm.

Tags for this entry:  nonzero  games  gametheory  science  economics  robertwright 

kottke.org is a weblog about the liberal arts 2.0 edited by Jason Kottke since March 1998. You can read about me and kottke.org here. If you've got questions, concerns, or an interesting link for me, send them along. Here's the kottke.org RSS feed .

Advertise on kottke.org via The Deck.

Many posts on kottke.org have been "tagged" with keywords, which activity results in collections of related posts like sports, infoviz, or bestof.

swimming   photography   olympics   trackandfield   video   sports   movies   lists   language   science   green   food   books   tv   design

movies   photography   books   nyc   science   food   lists   design   business   sports   video   weblogs   music   bestof   art

photography   economics   lists   bestof   infoviz   food   nyc   firstworldproblems   cities   restaurants   video   timelapse   interviews   language   maps   fashion   nsfw   remix  

sunshine   prison   cities   barcade   marypoppins   lifeafterpeople   realestate   cars   fundraising   hosseinderakhshan   fridakahlo   sony   pentagram   movies   im