Money and Finance
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Related article: Jared Diamond: What’s Your Consumption Factor?
- Jared Diamond On The Bryan Callen Podcast
The discussion on religion from 33:10 to 46:52 was especially interesting. Link to podcast: Ep96 – Jared Diamond …………… Related books: The World Until Yesterday Guns, Germs, and Steel Collapse Related recent post: Jared Diamond, "The Third...
- Bill Gates Reviews Jared Diamond's Book "the World Until Yesterday"
Diamond starts with the premise that human beings were hunter-gatherers for millions of years, and only settled down when we began farming about 10,000 years ago. So most of our genetic selection has been done in a hunter-gatherer environment. He argues...
- Lunch With The Ft: Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond is the guru of collapse. Collapse is the title of one of the books that have made him a world-famous academic. It is a theme that captures the Zeitgeist: markets have collapsed, banks have collapsed and confidence, even in the capitalist...
- Jared Diamond: What’s Your Consumption Factor?
TO mathematicians, 32 is an interesting number: it’s 2 raised to the fifth power, 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2. To economists, 32 is even more special, because it measures the difference in lifestyles between the first world and the developing...
- How To Get Rich - A Talk By Jared Diamond
.....we can extract from human history a couple of principles. First, the principle that really isolated groups are at a disadvantage, because most groups get most of their ideas and innovations from the outside. Second, I also derive the principle of...
Money and Finance
"The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race" – 1987 article by Jared Diamond
Link to article: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our Earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.
At first, the evidence against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. We're better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Just count our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?
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Related books:
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Related article: Jared Diamond: What’s Your Consumption Factor?
- Jared Diamond On The Bryan Callen Podcast
The discussion on religion from 33:10 to 46:52 was especially interesting. Link to podcast: Ep96 – Jared Diamond …………… Related books: The World Until Yesterday Guns, Germs, and Steel Collapse Related recent post: Jared Diamond, "The Third...
- Bill Gates Reviews Jared Diamond's Book "the World Until Yesterday"
Diamond starts with the premise that human beings were hunter-gatherers for millions of years, and only settled down when we began farming about 10,000 years ago. So most of our genetic selection has been done in a hunter-gatherer environment. He argues...
- Lunch With The Ft: Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond is the guru of collapse. Collapse is the title of one of the books that have made him a world-famous academic. It is a theme that captures the Zeitgeist: markets have collapsed, banks have collapsed and confidence, even in the capitalist...
- Jared Diamond: What’s Your Consumption Factor?
TO mathematicians, 32 is an interesting number: it’s 2 raised to the fifth power, 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2. To economists, 32 is even more special, because it measures the difference in lifestyles between the first world and the developing...
- How To Get Rich - A Talk By Jared Diamond
.....we can extract from human history a couple of principles. First, the principle that really isolated groups are at a disadvantage, because most groups get most of their ideas and innovations from the outside. Second, I also derive the principle of...