Join 📚 Hadar's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Hadar's read, .
The earth’s surface measures about 200 million square miles, of which 60 million is land. As late as AD 1400, the vast majority of farmers, along with their plants and animals, clustered together in an area of just 4.25 million square miles – 2 per cent of the planet’s surface.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
people agreed to represent imaginary goods – goods that do not exist in the present – with a special kind of money they called ‘credit’. Credit enables us to build the present at the expense of the future. It’s founded on the assumption that our future resources are sure to be far more abundant than our present resources. A host of new and wonderful opportunities open up if we can build things in the present using future income.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
don’t words such as “civilization,” and phrases such as “rise of civilization,” convey the false impression that civilization is good, tribal hunter-gatherers are miserable, and history for the past 13,000 years has involved progress toward greater human happiness? In fact, I do not assume that industrialized states are “better” than hunter-gatherer tribes, or that the abandonment of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle for iron-based statehood represents “progress,” or that it has led to an increase in human happiness. My own impression, from having divided my life between United States cities and New Guinea villages, is that the so-called blessings of civilization are mixed. For example, compared with hunter-gatherers, citizens of modern industrialized states enjoy better medical care, lower risk of death by homicide, and a longer life span, but receive much less social support from friendships and extended families.
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jared Diamond
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise