It is called The Evolution of Everything. He contrasts decentralized trial-and-error evolution with top-down control in many arenas, from biology to technology to culture. My first thoughts.
1. He offers full-frontal libertarianism. On money, he cites Selgin. On education, he cites Tooley. etc. Incidentally, on culture he cites Henrich, whose book I interrupted to read Ridley’s and who does not seem to grasp the libertarian implications of his own work.
2. He cites a legal scholar with whom I was not familiar: Oliver Goodenough. Actually, I met Oliver a couple of times through a mutual friend–more than 40 years ago.
3. On the evolution of marriage, he writes that hunter-gatherer societies are mainly monogamous.
But as soon as farming came along, 10,000 years ago, powerful men were able to accumulate the resources to buy off and intimidate other men, and to attract low-status women into harems. . .If only to try to satisfy the low-status men, societies that allowed widespread polygamy tended to be very violent toward their neighbors. This was especially true of pastoral societies reliant on sheep, goats or cattle, whose wealth was mobile and showed scale economies. . .herders from Asia and Arabia not only experienced chronic violence, but kept erupting into Europe, India, China and Africa to kill men and abduct women.
…The transition to monogamy is a big theme of Christianity. . .The winners from the re-emergence of monagamy in late antiquity would have been the high-born women, who got to monopolize their husbands, and the much more numerous low-born men, who got to have sex at all.
4. On the advantage of urbanization for specialization and trade,
In America as a whole, nearly twice as many people work in grocery stores as in restaurants. In Manhattan, nearly five times as many work in restaurants
5. On the inexorable rise of economic well-being,
Stagnationism has its fans in every generation.
6. On technology, he argues strongly for context as a causal factor (“the adjacent possible”) and against individual agency (the heroic inventor). One implication:
having argued for the incremental, inevitable and collective nature of innovation, I am not a fan of patents and copyright laws. They grant too much credit and reward to individuals
7. Speaking of technology’s evolution, when he writes
The internet revolution might have happened ten years earlier if academics had not been dependent on a government network antipathetic to commercial use.
he is blowing smoke. The arrival of the commercial Internet is instead an example of context. Telecommunications pre-internet used circuit-switching networks. The Internet uses packet switching. Until relatively recently, circuit switching was much less expensive (the cross-over point was roughly the year 2000). Packet switching became economical only after sufficient iterations of Moore’s Law had taken place. In 1985, the cost of building out a mass-market Internet would have been astronomical.
“The winners from the re-emergence of monagamy in late antiquity would have been the high-born women, who got to monopolize their husbands, and the much more numerous low-born men, who got to have sex at all.”
This is dubious bordering on ridiculous. Conceptually a bunch of high powered men got together and decided to pass power and privilege to women and low status men? In practice take Henry the 8th. 6 wives- divorce, execution, death in childbirth, annulment, execution, and the his own death. Along with some number of mistresses how is this functionally different from a harem? How are the outcomes for these high status women better under this system?
Monogamy is (probably) best understood as asserting lines of succession. By promising legal monogamy a king puts an impediment in his own way to ditching a wife and naming some illegitimate child a successor. The people that benefit from this arrangement are (generally) the father of the wife who is assuring (increasing the odds) that his daughter is the mother of a royal line and the first born son has a stronger claim to the throne. The attachment of status to the woman seems incidental in these cases.
For his theory to hold you would expect that Christian rulers would engage in few wars and not the many they did, and you would be perplexed by the creation of a celibate cast of young men.
One of the main mistakes that he makes is the assumption that women in a harem are monogamous. One man is sexually satisfying multiple women, while attending to all the pressures and demands of his position of power? That servants, merchants and other nobles that are in and out of his court daily aren’t taking advantage of a dozen high status women bound by tenuous legal ties?
” On the evolution of marriage, he writes that hunter-gatherer societies are mainly monogamous”
I’m pretty sure that claim won’t hold up to scrutiny, though it depends how you define ‘monogamy’ in the forager context. Is it one exclusive mate per child, or for life, or what?
Certainly there are loads of evidence that foragers do not at all behave sexually in a manner that is mandated by Christian Institutional Monogamy, that is, having one exclusive mate for life.
There are many arguments against this bizarre but dominant meme that the modern Internet is a successful government program. They can’t all be good.
I’m not sure about his internet assertion, but I do wonder about how things would have evolved today had the internet not been opened to the public.
I had the chance to use the private networks a bit in the late 80s such as Prodigy and Compuserv. It would be many many years before the web would begin to provide the rich UI experience that these services offered.
I’ve wondered if many of our headaches that we’ve had over the years with the web such as security, spam, and performance would have been minimal by comparison had our online history would have been more closed and privately run.
“The transition to monogamy is a big theme of Christianity”
This is lunacy. Monogamy was the rule in Classical Greece and Rome, and — with the exception of royalty — the Persian Empire. Are these examples of non-Christian nations so obscure we should overlook them? Should we ignore that for hundreds of years, polygamy-permitting Islam had a more advanced culture than monogamous Christianity?
This is the sort of history Republican presidential candidates tell to voters, not serious scholarship.