Sapiens 8 -- The Direction of History

See also these transcripts, posted by someone else who took Dr. Harari's Coursera course.

Lesson 08 - part 1 -- History is headed in a general direction of global unity.

• Sapien societies can be very different from each other (unlike chimps or ants), but the overall pattern of interaction at the macro level is towards bigger and more complex civilizations. 
• 1492, the number of separate human worlds on the planet had already declined drastically: Afro-Eurasia was 90% of human population, and the other 10% was concentrated mostly in 4 groups:  (1) Mesoamerica (2) Andean (3) Australia (4) Oceanic
• Things we all (mostly) accept:  political model of nation-states, the idea of democracy, capitalism, medical science.
• There are no remaining "authentic cultures" or ancient local traditions free of external influences.
• Globalization of the modern era was only the final step, the climax of much older processes that began working thousands of years previously.
• Like other animal species, Sapiens evolved to think of people as being divided in to ‘us versus them’; we don't care about the interests of members of the same species outside their own group.  But this began to change with the Cognitive Revolution, and in the first millennium BC when the vision of the unification of the whole of humankind began to grow.
• New universal vision:  Everyone can be 'us'!  
• 3 unifying orders:  money, religion, empire.  
• "Merchants, conquerors and prophets were the first people in history who managed to transcend the binary evolutionary division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and to foresee the potential unity of the whole of humankind."

Lesson 08 - part 2 -- The history of money, and what it allows humans to do

• For most of human history, economy = mutual favors and barter 
• With the rise of cities/kingdoms 5k years ago = specialization
• A barter economy can't work with large numbers of specialists/strangers; problem of calculating exchange rates for a variety of goods, matching supply/demand
• Money = anything people are willing to use in order to represent the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods and services.
• The development of money required no technological breakthrough. It was a purely mental revolution, the creation of a new inter-subjective reality that exists only in the shared imagination of many people.
• Today, >90% 90% of all the money in the world that appears in our bank accounts exists only as electronic data
• "Everybody always wants money for the simple reason that everybody else also always wants money, which means that if you have money you can exchange it for anything you like."
• Money enables people to convert one thing into another thing, and to store/transport a large amount of wealth.
• Without money, commercial networks would have had to stay small

Lesson 08 - part 3 -- Money is based on (1) universal convertibility and (2) universal trust.

• "Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised by human beings."  We believe in it because others believe in it.
• 1st known money = Sumerian barley money; inherent value, but not easy to store or transport
• 1st coins = 640 BC by King Alyattes of the kingdom of Lydia (western Turkey); no inherent value
• Coins have 2 advantages over raw metal ingots: no need to weigh it to know how much precious metal; mark of some religious/political authority as guarantee.
• Reciprocal arrangement between rulers and money:  The power of money depends on the power of the ruler (counterfeiting = usurping the power of that religious/political authority, deserves harsh punishment); the power of the ruler depends on the power of money.
• "Trust in money could cross geographical, topographical, and even political borders, thereby enabling people from very different cultures and religions and even kingdoms to trade with one another and to cooperate at least in the economic sphere."
• Roman coins were called "Denarius" - "Dinars" = Arabized form (shows how the use of coins was a transmitted idea)
• "People continued to speak many different languages, to obey different rulers and to worship distinct and very different gods. But more and more people all over the world believe in the same money, in gold and silver and later, sterling and dollars, and to use the same money." 
• Why/how did everyone come to believe in gold/silver as money?  Once trade begins to connect to separate areas, the forces of supply and demand tend to equalize the value of money (and all other goods/services being traded as well)
• This is how people who disagree about religious belief could agree on monetary beliefs:  Whereas religion asks us to believe in something like a god or some scripture, money asks us to believe only that other people believe in something.
• Money is not "evil"!  Money is "the apogee of human tolerance. There is nothing more tolerant it the world than money. Money is far more open-minded than any religion, than any state, than any cultural code, than any social habits. Money is the only trust system that humans created in history that can bridge almost all cultural gaps and it does not discriminate."