Building on his earlier analysis, Wright foresees the continued expansion of nonzero-sum exchange to the global level, powered by the Internet. In Part III, Wright draws predictions about the future course of cultural and political evolution. If intelligent humans had not evolved to fill this environmental niche, Wright believes some other creature almost certainly would have.
As a result, there is a similar arrow of biological evolution, generating increasingly complex organic entities and culminating in the evolution of a species of high intelligence. Specialization of cells in living creatures provides similar benefits to the specialization of functions in a human economy. Part II, “A Brief History of Organic Life,” develops a similar model of biological evolution to that proposed for cultural evolution in Part I. Following on the heels of the revolutionary inventions of agriculture, money, and printing, the future will be powered by the Internet, an information-processing device that can instantaneously coordinate information from disparate parts of the globe. Wright plots the arrow of human cultural evolution as the spread of these new information technologies. Once discovered, information can be made freely available to all-indeed, many types of information technologies become increasingly valuable as more people use them. Information, after all, is the ideal nonzero-sum good unlike physical resources (such as coal or food) the stock of information does not decrease as more people use it. Wright places more emphasis on the latter. Here Wright has in mind two basic engines of such interactions: the division of labor and the division of knowledge. Invoking the concept of reciprocal altruism from evolutionary psychology, Wright argues that humans are naturally inclined to engage in nonzero-sum transactions. Employing a model of Darwinian selection among cultural groups, Wright argues that once invented, these useful technologies tended to spread rapidly. Part I, modestly titled “A Brief History of Humankind,” advances the thesis that human cultural evolution can be best understood as the creation of “technologies,” such as money, writing, and printing, designed to make possible the realization of gains from trade. Wright divides the book into three basic parts that elaborate the idea of the centrality of nonzero interactions to the trajectory of human history.
There is an “arrow” to history, one pointing toward ever-increasing social complexity designed to make nonzero interactions possible. In turn these species would construct social, legal, and cultural institutions whose primary purpose was to make possible ever-increasing gains from trade. Because of the advantages of engaging in nonzero-sum transactions, it was virtually inevitable that living organisms would evolve whose primary function would be to capitalize on the benefits of nonzero trading opportunities. In Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Robert Wright argues that gains from trade, or “nonzero” transactions, is the motivating force driving human history.
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