Sublime

food production was indirectly a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel.

There are, however, on this planet phenomena that are hidden in plain sight. These are the phenomena that we study as complex systems: the convoluted exhibitions of the adaptive world—from cells to societies.

These data make a strong case that, as human social networks grow, they necessarily lead to systems that require fewer resources per person, and produce more per person. In other words, the benefits of scale for human groups have always been there.

With modern hydrocarbon fuels, Rai stones could be quarried easily, aggry beads could be made for very little cost, and seashells could be collected en masse by large boats. As soon as these monies lost their hardness, their holders suffered significant wealth expropriation and the entire fabric of their society fell apart as a result.

These are all highly contestable statements.

“Money has been the oil that has kept the wheels of society turning and allowed the complexity of our present civilization to develop, but credit, the centralized creation of money, interest, and particularly compound interest, have seriously destabilized the relationship between money and the goods and services, or wealth, it originally represente