Rating: 
Summary: Most Thought Provoking Book
Review: This book doesn't answer all the questions of the universe, but it's a good start. Combining evolutionary theory & history, NonZero provides an interesting philosophical perspective. I read the book almost one year ago, and it has been central to my sense of being ever since. I've just been revisiting the reviews here, along with several others that I found elsewhere. The very strength of the reviews is testament to the power of the ideas presented in this book. The book has a decidedly liberal bias, though definitely not in a libertarian sense. To hard core evolutionary scientists, the book may seem fluffy or superficial, but my view is that "scientists" who feel that way are missing some significant points with regard to issues such as terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. There are certainly a huge number of loose ends. But, to me, many of the loose ends are promising threads for further exploration...
Rating: 
Summary: Fun, interesting, but overreaching
Review: I thorougly enjoyed this book. It is packed with interesting discussions about anthropology, history, and modern trends. It is written in a breezy conversational style, while at the same time containing for the most part (at least as to matters that I am imitately familiar with) accurate information. I have a hard time taking the thesis seriously, for quite a number of reasons. First, there is an implied premise that cultural evolution and biological evolution are closely connected, and subject to similar laws. Wright refers repeatedly to the interconnected brain of cultures or societies, which is presumed to act in a way similar to the individual brain. This isn't necessarily wrong, but clearly is an anology that is impossible to prove, and carries a high burden of proof on the proponent. Second, Wright "explains" history as moved by "non-zero-summness," which, to simplify, means cooperative behavior. This is so broad as to be meaningless: of course cultures develop largely through cooperation. Moreover, given the huge scope of the topic and the fact that one can only approach the topic by selecting isolated examples, one could select examples of "zero-sumness" and argue they, rather than nonzerosumness, propel history. The most difficult area here, of course, is war - zero-sumness to the max - and Wright argues that war's role is to increase cooperative behavior within each warring society: in other words, the result of war is nonzerosum. But why view the result (assuming he's right) rather than the impetus as the most important factor? (Answer: he wants to). Also, it is clearly a thesis of our times: it seems natural in the age of the internet to talk a global interconnected brain. It is strained to suggest that feudalism was really just a nascent global brain. But of course the final and most obvious objection is that the enterprise is doomed from the start because of the unmanageable scope. That being said, this book is far from a waste of time. There's plenty of information and many intriguing ideas. Synthesis of grand themes can be interesting; what's more, regardless of whether such grand interpretations of human behavior and destiny are valid, they seem to be inevitable fixtures of society, whether they be conservative interpretations, liberal interpretations, religious interpretations, etc. These interpretations are a necessary part of public debate and an important part of forming policy, and at least on a more modest scale, can be useful and valid. That Wright significantly overreaches the realm of what is probably possible to synthesize does not invalidate his more modest conclusions. It is a worthwhile book and interesting book, even if it fails its grand ambitions.
Rating:
Summary: This book tells how society works
Review: If there is anything about society that you don't understand, this book answers it. Why people think the way they do and how it is all coming together to form a modern society. All right here. I bought 5 copies and sent to family and friends. Needs to be on your book shelf (after a complete read and highlighting). Know this book and you will know everything about society that is important. Now whether you can do what needs to be done is still a skill level thing.
Rating:
Summary: A remarkably useful way to look at history and pre-history.
Review: A non-zero sum game is one in which the total "reward" to all players is variable, and will be maximized if the players adapt behavior which to an outsider would look like cooperation. Wright shows that both biological and human cultural evolution evolve toward greater "cooperation" because it promotes the survival of the specie and culture in the constant competition to survive. For cultures, the cooperation is based on in-bred human psychological traits such as reciprocal altruism, and societal structures which promote organization, communication and trust. Wright considers morality only at the end of this book, as more of a by-product than a driver. Wright has a brilliant mind, and writes in an entertaining, very understandable style. The book provides all kinds of fascinating facts, concepts and ideas. It leaves the reader with a remarkably useful way to look at history, and pre-history. While Wright looks at the implications for the future, I believe you could get to the same place he does without the non-zero concept. I had the right kind of background for this book, having read Wright's Moral Animal, and books on evolution and cellular biology, but I believe readers without this background will still find the book clear, if a little more challenging.
Rating:
Summary: a great book - don't believe the negative reviews!
Review: Some of the very negative reviews given here prevented me from getting to this book earlier. I am so glad i finally read it - it is the best book on the social sciences since Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel". This is the type of book that you need to get out a highlighter to mark thought provoking passages and really think about them. I averaged only 30 pages a sitting because I had to think about many very brilliant observations that Wright makes. Looking at the negative reviews now, I see that the readers were very careless in reading and drawing conclusions from the book. There are so many excellent ideas in the book, I can't begin to do justice. Having said that, keep in mind that the author is a journalist. Almost none of his ideas are anything new. Instead, he draws great ideas from great thinkers during the last 25 years. For that, however, Wright deserves high praise - he has managed to incorporate those ideas into a coherent history of the world. If you are interested in anthropology, economics, history, and political science, then this book is for you. It nicely encapsulates the great ideas that you may have been exposed to since college. And the author builds on those ideas to make a bold (but ultimately justified) assertion that nature and human history trends towards greater complexity. Like I said, there are many ideas in the book, and I can see how careless readers may draw the conclusion that the book is not coherent. I am not going to respond to the many criticisms that readers have made. But I would like to touch on two ideas. First, the book addresses an issue that has been on my mind since my college days: is it economics or socio-politics that is the prime driving force of human history? The book provides well-reasoned evidence that it is economic principles that matter - that even socio-political phenomena can be explained by economic dictates. Second is the intriguing question: does evolution (of human society, nature) have a direction (i.e., towards greater complexity). Scientists of no less stature than Stephen Jay Gould have argued that there is no direction, i.e., evolution is a "random walk". Wright briefly touches on this issue but it is enough to show that Gould is wrong. Wright provides an excellent example of a drunk stumbling along the street. To his right is the traffic (symbolizing greater complexity), and to his left is a brick wall (you can't go below zero complexity). The drunk may engage in a random walk, but over time he will migrate to the right (greater complexity). Wright goes on to note that complexity begets greater complexity - it may have been the challenging natural environment that makes us smart and develop flexible behavior; but then the very success we enjoy engenders greater flexibility to better cope with the environment and, more importantly, to better cope with our competing peers. To repeat, this is an excellent book that I believe will eventually be seen as a classic. Don't believe the negative reviews. Read the book - carefully - and decide for yourself.
Rating: 
Summary: Rational approach to irrational subject
Review: What a pity! Robert Wright aspires to be able to prove Popper and Berlin double wrong. Not an easy job. This book is just another attempt to apply "scientific" method to the notoriously irrational subjects of history, anthropology, and sociology. Unfortunately, the open system of human society usually defies "scientific" approach, and the anecdotal evidence presented by the author, being interesting and entertaining to read about, does not amount to any proof. As Karl Popper so brilliantly indicated, the true scientific and rational method implies the ability to conduct experiments under the controlled conditions, verify the results by multiple cross-checks, and keep the results open to further doubts. Having said all this, the history of human cultures, as well as anthropolgy and sociology do not come nowhere close to being subjects for rational studies. This book remains just another example of well-written pop-science, somewhat sensational and driven by wishful thinking. What a shame! Robert Write should stick to his writing in the Slate - he does good job there!
Rating:
Summary: Was there a point to the book?
Review: Before reading, I had heard many great things about the book and seen a briliant PBS interview with Wright. Robert Wright is a great pop-science writer but after giving this book a good read, that's about all I can say about him. This book is not cohesive in any way. 100 pages in, I was already scratching my head as to where he stated his thesis. After reading through some damn interesting (to his credit) anecdotal examples of 'cultural evolution,' I understood what he was trying to do. It's just a shame that he never got around to tying the examples together and relating them to the 'non-zero sum' thesis. As much as I believe in the probability that evolutionary theory works and is still working, his explanation of the 'destiny' of cultural evolution is nothing short of a huge oversight. By showing us that cultures get bigger by improving non-zero sumness and extracting that this must constitute the 'direction' of human history past and future, is like saying that since the giraffe's neck has gotten bigger through the years, that the giraffe was destined to have long necks and that those necks will continue to grow in the future. Wright ignores two things. First, all evolution is contingent on environment. We can never say that something was destined to occur unless we are POSITIVE that no other environment was possible. In other words, written language, say, was never inevitable, but one of many possible ways to deal with many possible environemts. Second misunderstanding, the law of diminishing returns. To say that the giraffe must be destined to an ever longer neck simply because that's how it's evolutionary history points, ignores the fact that at some point that neck becomes too long for the body. Same with the enlargement of non-zero sum games. At some point, non-zero sum (in any of its forms) may be abandoned for another idea that is found to work better. There IS such a thing as too much altruism. Simply because we've seen no such line yet, doesn't mean we won't find it in the future. For better books on non-zero and zero sum games, read Robert Nozicks "The Nature of Rationality" and Matt Ridleys "The Origins of Virtue." For books on the evolution of cooperation, read anything by Robert Axelrod, and lastly, for a great critiqe of 'purposeful evolution' (a position Wright indirectly defends), read Richard Dawkins "The Blind Watchmaker."
Rating:
Summary: Great Book, Badly In Need Of A Rewrite
Review: Bottom line: The book is brilliant, insightful, and well worth reading. But you'll have to read it a couple of times to make out just what the author is trying to say. He often never explicitly lays out his point, and I found myself actually taking notes. The concept of maximizing non-zero sumness pays off, but reading the book is like listening to a lecture given by an ingenius professor who didn't have time to redraft his notes or organize his ideas into a cohesive whole. Frankly, it drags, and requires an enormous investment from the reader -- but it's worth it.
Rating: 
Summary: What about competition?
Review: It's definitely a well-researched book, with lots of relevant examples and quotes. It gives a very good background of the historic debate about whether there is an arrow in our human evolution (in cultural sense). But it strikes me as kind of odd that Robert Wright uses "Nonzero" (referring to a kind of game where all the players can cooperate to achieve a better social outcome than otherwise) as the title. And time and again, Wright stresses that the nonzero-sumness of the game induces human beings to cooperate and construct, leading to complexity (in terms of inter-personal relationship) and progress (essentially in terms of material gain). In other words, Wright is basically saying human evolution is the cause/consequence of the evolution of games played among human beings: Instead of trying to gain at another's expense, individuals have been becoming more interested in games where all the parties can benefit. I do readily agree with Wright that playing cooperative games would really lead to progress in human living conditions. But I don't think it's THE arrow. No doubt, specializing and trading with each other facilitates the progress. But it's only one way through which human beings have been advancing their wants. Zero-sum games are still very commonly played. And even though these games might mean a non-increasing size of surplus, they could punish the losers and hence intensify the spirit of "survival of the fittest" among us, leading to "smarter" future generations. Why I said zero-sum games are still very commonly played around the world? Look at inequality. It has been rising not only within countries (in particular, in the US), but also among countries (the poor countries have been falling further behind), at least in the past 100 years. And there is not really any sign indicating the reversal of this trend of rising inequality in the near future. In fact, in the US, the poorest few percentiles of households are not going any better now than they were 20 years ago. The situation is similar for the poorest nations of the world. Apparently, a significant number of our fellow human beings are excluded from participating in the kind of nonzero games Wright so enthusiastically raves about. Even Wright himself acknowledges the importance of zero-sum games in our daily life. In Chapter 2 of the book, Wright has briefly mentioned the concept of bargaining (how we divide among ourselves the surplus generated by the games). But surprisingly, he does not pursue the significance of this "zero-sum bargaining game" any further, presumably because he has overlooked it in favor of his own theory of how nonzero sum games drive the human progress. Most of human tensions are generated by the zero-sum nature of the games. Why was there WWII? Why are the Israelis and the Palestinians having such huge religious and territorial conflicts? I'm not disagreeing with the observations that some of the major events that happened in the human history have nonzero-sum nature (e.g., notably the Industrial Revolution, discovery of Relativity, etc.). But I think we must recognize that probably even a larger number of major historic events have zero-sum nature. These zero-sum games are also very important in driving human progress. Unless one is as competitive as his opponents, it's unlikely that he can survive the zero-sum games. It's of course just a very basic concept of competition and natural selection. And "he" might not be an individual, it could well be a system or an institution. We have witnessed the rise and later inevitable collapse of the communist systems. Why communism fails to establish itself as the ideal society mode? It's simply not competitive enough when faced with the competition from alternative systems such as capitalism. It's not fit enough to survive and thus is ultimately reduced to nothing more than a vocabulary in the history books. And arguably, the renewed dedication to free market economy has drastically improved the living conditions for tens of millions of human lives and also, of course, the uncounted number of their offspring. I share Wright's conviction that there's an arrow in human evolution. However, I'm not so sure if nonzero sum games are the entire story behind this directionality. I believe that it's through both cooperation and competition that human beings can progress. Neglecting any one of these two elements might lead to an unbalanced and biased view of the world.
Rating:
Summary: "Why is this one book, instead of two?"
Review: Three-quarters of the way through his book Wright poses that question himself, and it's not because he's confused about his own book (although some critics have said just that, and worse). It's a two part question. "Aren't organic evolution and human history sufficiently different to demand seperate treatment?" How you answer that question will determine whether or not you'll enjoy this book. This question is asked on p243. I'd suggest you begin there, read a little and then decide. If your answer to Wright is an unqualified "yes", you definitely won't enjoy the book and you'll probably find yourself in the "one star review" category. You'll have plenty of good company though as there are a few historians and evolutionary biologists who have found much here to criticize. Since this is a "five star" review I obviously feel differently. Wright goes on. "Early on, I claimed that the answer is no - that the two processes naturally constitute a single story." This is because the two processes share the same mechanisms, energy, and direction. The energy is the "interplay between zero-sum and non-zero-sum forces." Here we have the crux of his argument. In contrast to zero-sum situations where one's gain is another's loss, the NONZERO sum situation isn't quite so binary. In fact "interests overlap entirely" and cooperation is the preferred mode of operation. This results in increasing complexity (not necessarily progress) for both cultural and biological evolution and implies that history has a direction and human life has a purpose. Wright traces this idea throughout history from stone age to our age and shows the concept at work in the development of agriculture, language, technology, even war, and in our use of information, money, and trade. There is direction and Wright sees "an arrow beginning tens of thousands years ago and continuing to the present. And looking ahead, you see where it is pointing." That's just man's history or cultural evolution. Remember this is one book not two so we should not expect Wright to shy away from seeking some pattern, direction, or purpose to human life. Most (but not all) biologists agree that natural selection occurs at the level of the individual and thus gives us a basic definition of what an organism is. Ecosytems, cultures, or societies are therefore not organisms. Wright accepts that but merely as the starting point for departure on some other journeys through the nature of awareness, sentience, designs and patterns in life, purpose and direction in evolution, information networks, global consciousness, superorganisms and God. This is a vastly ambitious book as is any that seeks the "big picture." Any author that is brave (some may say arrogant) enough to try for the answers, I think, deserves a read. So is any book that covers works by Popper, Berlin, Kant, Mill, Marx, Tielhard de Chardin, Toynbee, Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, Stephen Jay Gould and E.O.Wilson. Certainly there's a lot here that is contentious and I doubt there's anybody, including Wright, who would say he's right on everything. It nevertheless is a well researched, carefully reasoned, extemely well written and thoroughly enjoyable book. ....
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