THE UNWISE SAPIENS OF YUVAL NOAH HARARI

Harper, 2014, 443 pages

I was on a long waiting list despite the many copies at the Austin Public Library. When I was done, I could not renew the checkout because other people were waiting. Gratefully, I did not pay for the book. Despite (or perhaps indicative of) its runway popularity, it is shallow and facile, drawn from second-hand sources and not well integrated in its presentations.

Harari failed to correctly explain the origin of writing, the origin of counting, the origin of money, and the origin of coinage.  They are all tightly bound. In every case, his supporting citations point to other popularizers, rather than validated peer-reviewed academic publications. So, he gets a lot of the details wrong. From those he builds his attractive and erroneous narrative. Finally, like me and other bloggers, he is a synthesizer, collecting and republishing ideas that he likes without actually challenging any of those claims for their want of proof. 

One such assertion is that the agricultural revolution was not worth the price. Domestication of wheat brought longer working hours and slavery. It actually brought malnutrition, and set the stage for periodic starvation never known to hunter-gatherers. I reviewed Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization by Richard Manning (North Point Press,  2004 ISBN: 0865476225) for the Objectivist discussion site, Rebirth of Reason, here  in 2006 and later in 2010 here.  I wrote: "Among Manning's many points is that the "surplus" usually went to a handful of unproductive people, priests and nobles."  

Moreover, as I pointed out in my original review, the nobles themselves hunted -- which they denied to those who were bound to the cultivating fields.  Nobles did not suffer a steady diet of grain.  When times were good, they ate well, a variety -- another point Jacobs made about city life -- with lots of fresh meat." It is an interesting fact to consider. But Harari just stops there. He does not see strawberries in January. Cutting off our food supply is integral to his thesis, which includes disdain for liberal humanism. Harari advocates for the postmodern anti-industrial revolution. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Not Conned by Seghal’s “Coined” 

Debt: the Seed of Civilization 

Accounting for Civilization 

Art as Ordered Narrative

Money as Speech 

Not Conned by Sehgal’s Coined

A degreed economist (LSE) who works for J. P Morgan, Kabir Sehgal is the author of Coined: The Rich Life of Money and How Its History has Shaped Us. By its title, it is obviously a book with a great breadth of scope for its 257 pages of narrative. However, every story that I already knew was arguable. This is a scissors-and-paste effort, quickly assembled without deep reflection, insight, or questioning. In truth, throughout the book, the author does present the facts approximately. He gets almost all of it almost right. But as we say, “close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.” 

As this is a book about the history of money, the origins of money are important. His narrative is incomplete, coming from secondary sources. Sehgal apparently failed to grasp the central facts of the event. The same is true for the invention of coinage. Sehgal does correctly understand the fact that seems curious to us today, that promissory money, “soft” money, preceded precious metals as hard money by thousands of years. That said, the story of ancient Sumer and the creation of promissory notes (pg. 86) is wrong in so many details that it is wrong in substance. His deepest misunderstanding is the claim that clay balls containing tokens were a form of proto-currency (page 104). They may have been a harbinger or foreshadowing of that, but he completely misses the significance of the contemporaneous invention of writing. For the correct accounting see “Debt: the Seed of Civilization” on this blog, which points to the works of Denise Schmandt-Besserat.  

On the invention of coinage, he again relies on secondary popularizations, rather than the best academic research. And he fails to ask delving questions. He claims (as many do) that coins were invented in Lydia before 630 BCE. But he also identifies the famous hoard of the oldest known coins and coin-like objects, from the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Why were the oldest known coins and proto-coins not uncovered within the excavation of Sardis, the royal site of Lydia?  Ephesus, Miletos, and Kolophon have been suggested as possible candidates for the first cities to strike coins, not for commerce, but as bonus payments to mercenaries.

Sehgal never questions the economic motive for the origin of coinage. But if they were invented to facilitate commerce, they would have originated at a center of commerce. And they would have been commercially convenient. In fact, the first coins came from a cultural hinterland, the Turkish coastline of archaic Greece. And they were worth more than anything you could buy with them, as if today, the smallest bills were $1000 and relatively rare, while $10,000 bills were common. And Sehgal completely misunderstands electrum, the naturally occurring alloy, nuggets of which the first coins were struck. Lacking anything like an atomic theory, gold, electrum, and silver were three distinct metals, even though the ancients knew that electrum could be made by alloying gold and silver; and that electrum gold could be parted from electrum silver.  

Seghal never stops to ask why but just keeps going with a facile, though interesting, narrative.  He correctly identifies the fact that coinage is closely tied to the development of democracy, but he misplaces the origin of democracy at Athens.

It does not get any better with his stories about Nero, Diocletian, Lincoln’s greenbacks, or Bretton Woods. 

Kabir Sehgal lavishes praise on the deep knowledge base of the numismatic auction house, Stack’s (pgs 247-249) and rightfully so, but simply cites Q. David Bowers as “David Bowers, legendary numismatist and business partner of Harvey Stack.”  Harvey Stack gets all the credit. And he is worthy, indeed. But everyone in the know calls Q. David Bowers “the dean of American numismatics.”

So, as much as I would like to believe that a cash economy created niche employment for the beggars of Jakarta as extra riders to validate a taxi cab’s right to the high-occupancy high-speed traffic lanes, I have to remain doubtful that Sehgal actually understood what was happening.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Money as Living History  

Numismatics: History as Market   

Numismatics: The Standard of Proof inEconomics  

Scripophily 

A Partial Index of Ideas within this Blog

I write about whatever interests me.  Below is a representative sample from the 454 previous posts.

Language and Thought

• Art as Ordered Narrative
• Language and Thought: As You Think, So You Speak 
• Linguistics Debate: What Colors are Your Rainbow? 
• The Living Fish Swims Under Water 
• Indian English: Totally Legend Like Anything  
• Akkadian Roots of Modern Semitic Languages  
• Sandor Kőrösi Csoma 
• Readability is the Only Metric  
• Not Less Grammar Errors  

Philosophy

• Understanding Objectivism  
• The Influence of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism 
• Gregory M. Browne’s Necessary Factual Truths  
• More on Necessary Factual Truths  
• Harriman’s Logical Leap  
• Harriman’s Logical Leap AlmostMakes It  
• Browne on Kuhn 
• The Validity of the Senses  
• Imaginary Numbers are Real; Pegasus is Not  
• The Problem of Induction: Karl Popper and His Enemies  
• Knowledge Maps  
• George Boole’s Laws of Thought  
• Teaching Ethics to Student Engineers  
• Choose Your Virtues
• Morality and Ethics  
• Bringing Philosophy to Athens: Aspasia of Miletos  
• Hypatia of Alexandria  

Computers and Computer Security

• Documentation is Specification
• When Old Technologies Were New  
• Fortune Cookie in Hex Code 
• John Kemeny Knew: We Shall Have Computed 
• BASIC: Turing’s Truth 
• A Successful Imitation of AlanTuring  
• Turing’s Cathedral  
• Claude M. Watson (1922-2013) 
• Hackers Heart Small Talk 
• Passwords  
• Brian Krebs’s Spam Nation  
• The Code Book  
• BSides Austin 2016  
• BSides Austin 2015  
• LASCON 2014  
• Bleeding Data

Military 

• Your State Defense Force  
• State Guard Song: Texans ServingTexans 
• Leadership
• Primary Leadership Training 
• Texas State Guard BasicNon-Commissioned Officer Training 
• Hurricane Tejas  
• Away from the Keyboard 
• Challenge Coins  
• The Fourth Star  
• We Were Soldiers Once – and Young
• Love My Rifle More Than You
• Plenty of Time When We Get Home
• Atheists in Foxholes  
• Armies Without Weapons  
• Peace is More Powerful

Criminology and Protective Services

• The Fallibility of Fingerprinting  
• Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security  
• Laissez Faire Criminology 
• Integrating Criminologies  
• Criminalistics: Science or Folkway?  
• A Forensics Bibliography  
• Police in a Global Culture  
• Alternatives to Prison (Part 3)  
• Active Defense and Passive Aggression (Part 2) 

Scientific Fraud and Research Misconduct

• Misconduct in Scientific Research  
• 20% of Scientists are Crooks  
• Four Books about Bad Science  
• Science Fairs and Science Frauds  
• Another Case of Fraud in University Research
• Retraction Watch

Science and Mathematics

• The Unit Circle  
• Happy Pi Day of the Century  
• Visualizing Complex Data  
• The Man Who Loved Only Numbers   
• The Map that Changed the World  
• Epigenetics  
• Is Physics a Science?  
• BioBash Replicates Success  
• Biohackers  
• U.S. Patent Law Does Not Add Up  
• Teaching Ethics to Engineering Students    

Nerds

• Where All the Children are Above Average  
• She’s Such a Geek!   
• World Peace Through Massive Retaliation   
• Nerd Nation 
• Nerd Nation 4.5   
• Big Bang Theory vs. Modern Philosophy
• Genius by James Gleick  
• Feynman’sRainbow  

Science Fiction 

• Firefly: Fact and Value Aboard Serenity  
• Fantastic Voyages: Teaching Science with ScienceFiction  
• Monsters from the Id  
• From Texas to the Moon with John Leonard Riddell  
• The Girl Who Owned a City  
• Star Trek: Not Too Far Beyond  
• The Ferengi Rules of Commerce  

Industrial Design, Consumerism, Austin Culture

• The Genius of Design  
• Start the Presses  
• Objectified  
• Raymond Loewy  
• Creature Comforts Show No End to History
• Art & Copy
• Sunday at the Co-Op  
• Awesome Austin Foods  
• Brain Juice for Austin and the World 
• Hot Dang Vegie Burger Mix
• Sweet Deal: Epic Honey
• Epic Meat Bars
• Great Bean Chocolate
• Kalliope 
• Images from SXSW 2013 
• Formulas for Success  

Numismatics and Economics

• Numismatics informs Economics  
• Numismatics: the Standard of Proof in Economics 

• Money is Speech
• Money as Press and Speech
• Money as Living History
• The Art of Finance 
• Sacred Silver from the Roof of the World  

• Forgery and Fraud in Numismatics  
• William Sheldon: Psychologist, Numismatist, Thief

• The Remarkable Story of Risk
• To Make Money 
• Gresham’s Conjecture 
• Money as a Crusoe Concept 
• Debt: the Seed of Civilization  
• The Success of the WEIRD People  

MISCELLANEOUS

• Thank You Notes
• Before Email
• Reflections on the Passing of a Comrade
• The First Dagny

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Most Popular Page Views
Ten Most Popular Page Views
100,000 Pageviews
Most Popular Necessary Facts

AKKADIAN ROOTS OF MODERN SEMITIC LANGUAGES

Dated at 2360 BCE, Sargon of Akkad eclipsed the Sumerian kingdoms along the Tigris and Euphrates. In Akkadian SALIMUM ALLAKUM means “peace will come.” Today, even among Turkic peoples of central Asia, the common Arabic greeting has been adopted into the local culture as one word: SALOMALEIKUM–“peace be upon you.”  It is nearly the same in Kyrgyzstan, the first western neighbor of China: ASALAMU ALEYKUM (two words).  But those are not native to those Turkic people, either.  They inherited them when they adopted the Muslim religion of the Arabs, who were and are Semitic. 

 

A Grammar of Akkadian (Second Edition)
by John Huehnergard, Einsenbruns, 2005.

The word for “seven” in Akkadian is SEBE.  It has not changed much in over 4000 years. The Indo-Europeans found it convenient. The word “number” comes from “name-bearer” and these early peoples, Semitic and Indo-European, shared a margin where the Hittites met the Akkadians. The earlier Sumerians had their own merchant colonies within Hittite cities and it was the Sumerians who invented the naming of quantities.  Everyone else stopped with “one, two, many.” When the Akkadians conquered Sumeria, they adopted the cuneiform script and much else that went with it.  The Akkadians borrowed words from the Sumerians, also a common occurrence, among them those for Crown, Palace, and Scribe. 

Dog was KALBUM like the modern “Caleb” a man’s name in the Bible or “kalib” in modern Arabic. 

House was BITUM like the later root “beth” as in Bethlehem or Elizabeth. It is seen the second letter of our alphabet: Beta from the Phoenician letter which was a pictograph of a house.  Their letters were called Ox, House, Camel, Delta, … as in modern Hebrew:  Aleph, Beth, Gimel, Daleth.

The common Arabic man’s name HABIB (beloved) is found in the Akkadian word KABTUM.  Like the Indo-European languages, the Semitic have a tie from the aspirated Ha to the harsher (velar) Ka. We see it in Latin, Spanish and Italian CARA which are the English WHORE and German HURE with French in the middle with CHER.  K-H is also found in words common to Finnish and Hungarian. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Accounting for Civilization 

Language and Thought: As You Think,So You Speak  

Profits and Benefits in ForeignLanguages   

Sándor Kőrösi Csoma  

Isma'il Abu Taqiyya: Making Big Money in 1600  

Language and Thought: As You Think, So You Speak

The primary purpose of language is thought. Communication is secondary. It is true that language evolved out of animal calls. Ravens have 30 calls in three dialects. Our grunts, coos, and growls are necessarily more complex. The origins of modern language are unclear and the purpose of language is largely misunderstood.

One way to think about this is by analogy to geometry. Practical geometry goes back 3000 years, perhaps. We know of clay tablets with cuneiform tables of Pythagorean triples.  But formal geometry began only about 300 BCE.  So, too, did language originate with animal calls, but now serves a more abstract and sophisticated purpose.

We largely trace our modern speech back to about 10,000 years to 8000 BCE. Nostritic is a  construct that unites all Afro-Asian languages, but is highly putative. Nonetheless, it is suggestive. Proto-Indo-European is on firmer grounds but is only 6000 years old.

In the 18^th century, European intellectuals stumbled on the fact that the languages of India share deep roots with the languages of Europe. Words such as mother, father, and brother, the first ten numbers, and other basic vocabulary suggested a common origin. Words for “beech” and other clues indicated the ancestral home of the “Caucasians.”

These languages all evolved from a common ancestral tongue called Proto-Indo-European (PIE), spoken ca. 6,000 years ago by a people living (by "traditional" hypothesis) somewhere in the general vicinity of the Pontic Steppe north of the Black Sea and east to the Caspian -- an area that, perhaps not accidentally, seems to coincide with the land of the ancient Scythians, from the Ukraine across far southwestern Russia to western Kazakhstan – “Indo-European Languages Evolution and Locale Maps,” by Jonathan Slocum here. 

 It is easy to see that modern languages from Greek and Latin to German and English grew by differentiation.  We know the prefixes hyper and hypo, sub and super. They indicate some motion or distance away from you, or by extension some other reference, above or below.  Beer and wine were originally the same thing: fermented liquids, but we differentiated them, by their origins, grain or fruit.

http://www.ling.cam.ac.uk/li7/grimpie.gif

At the same time, long statements commonly understood were compressed by slang.  The word “nest” is a contraction for “nether sitten” because a nest sits down upon the branches. Today, we ask, "Wussup?"

Philologists could not ignore baby talk: we imitate our children, from “moo" for cow to “choo-choo" for train.

We all play with words. British slang calls a girl a “bird” but that is a transposition from “bride” just as the “butterfly” was originally the “flutter by.” 

No woman likes being called a whore. The rules of philology show that “whore” is the Germanic (die Hure) form of the Romance “cara” (dear).  In Italian, you can say “Cara mia” and get a kiss, but “meine Hure” does not work so well in German.  They are the same word at root.  The K in Latin becomes an H in German.  (centum = hundred; cortus = heart) That led some philologists to look for mountain ranges on the theory that those ancient ancestors aspirated their Ks while climbing uphill. The assertion did not stand up, but it does point to the kinds of ways that languages do change.

In our time, it is ROTFL and LOL, and the full range of emoticons from the simple smiley face to the inventory on your smart phone. 

The bottom line is that how you speak (or write) derives from how you think; and, conversely, how you think manifests itself in your speech (or writing). The two are different. I am often embarrassed, if not horrified, by my own vernacular speech. I take more care with my writing. OTOH YMMV.

The fact remains: what is in your head determines who and what you are. Language is the medium and means and mechanism of thought. Alone on an island, you would have no one to speak to, but the words in your head would predict your chances for survival, even as you imagine felled trees becoming a raft.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Visualizing Complex Data

The Problem of Induction

George Boole and the Laws of Thought

Fortune Cookie in Hex Code

Tokens of Capitalism

In the popular adventure Pirates of the Caribbean: at World's End, Jack Sparrow and his friends must battle an array of bad guys headed by the British East India Company.  Like the Hudson Bay Company, the BEI certainly had a complicated past that inevitably included the evils of raw colonialism. On the upside, it was a venture; and venture capitalists profit from risks that no one else wants to take. (See Venture Capital on this blog.) Johnny Depp and Keira Knightley are attractive as freebooters. We denigrate the drudgery of billing department commerce; but, as Deirdre McCloskey famously reminds us, we are all bourgeois now.

British East India Company Rupee. 1840 Calcutta).
28 berries W. W. variety Craig 4a.  30.5 mm silver.

We get so used to seeing dead politicians on government money that we have a hard time imagining anything else. Excavations of Ice Age tombs reveal amber, jade, and shells, other objects of no practical use, hundreds of miles from their places of origin. 

Northumberland & Durham 6-pence Token  20 mm 
Payable by John Robertson
Newcastle on Tyne. 1811. (silver)

The stone ages ended about 8000 BC when copper was discovered. From about 3500 BC other metals (including silver and gold) were also found and worked. Cuneiform records from Mesopotamia at about 2400 BC tell of silver being weighed out in payment. This was indirect trade in a material that, like amber and cowrie shells, had no immediate use. Silver and gold are pretty, but not suited for agricultural or hunting tools. By 700 600 BCE, merchants were die-punching nuggets of electrum to mark them so they would not have to be reweighed. It was not long before monarchies and democracies minted coins. 

Ireland Bank Token. 10d. 22 mm. 1813. Silver.
Craig 9. Seaby 6618. K&M Tn5
Series ran 1760 to 1820.

In the mid to late 1300s life in England had improved to the point where luxury items were over-priced in terms of the smallest silver coins. So, bronze tokens ("counters" or "jetons") from Europe filled a need for small change. Foreign coins were joined by private issues. By the 1600s, the privately issued copper, tin, and lead tokens completely dominated neighborhood trade. It is not surprising, then, that undervalued copper tokens were among first coins minted for American commerce. For nearly 200 years in America, small purchases were carried out in a wild array of private and foreign coinages. Federal government money was not established in household shopping until the 1840s. Through the 1830s, merchants in the East kept their books in pounds-shilling-pence; and Mexican silver was legal tender until 1857. Counterfeit British copper half pennies from the colonial era circulated as money in western Appalachia through the 1830s.

Norfolk Norweb. Dalton & Hamer 23b (no date)
"Prosperity to Old England / More Trade Fewer Taxes"
so-called Vitriol bottle
Copper half penny
Edge: "Richard Tinmore and Son"

If you look back at history, you will see a curious pattern. We can assume that government money is the norm and that tokens are an interesting exception. However, in every time, a variety of moneys carried the needs of daily commerce.  Stores today to pass out "good-fors," aluminum or wooden coins good for some amount of money toward a purchase whether coffee, ice cream, pop corn, or beer.

Canada Maritimes
Charlton Brett 963. 8.16 grams. copper.

The August/September 1993 issue of Mother Earth News featured a cover story about the
"time dollars" of Ithaca, New York, a local currency still in use today.  People there trade services in units of an hour. The idea of denominating money in labor was suggested by anarchists and syndicalists in previous decades. Community money can be found in many towns, including Traverse City, Michigan, where "Bay Bucks" have been circulating for ten years.  An interesting twist on "time dollars" comes from the policies of the conservative economic journal, The Freeman. Authors are paid 10 cents per word, plus a subscription. Authors can assign that subscription to anyone, thus commoditizing it.

Middlesex. Dalton & Hamer 1012E
from Erskine, Anderskine, and Gibbs
Law firm successfully defended accuseds on charges of treason.
"Erskine and Gibbs and Trial by Jury"
Two men with banners: "Magna Chart" / "Bill of Right"
"T. H. Hardy,  I. H. Hooke, T. Holcroft. I. A. Bonney, J. Joyce, 
S Rid, J. Thelwall, I. Richter. I Baxter
1794.
The shoemaker, Thomas Hardy, was the secretary to the London Corresponding Society. His outspoken support for the French Revolution – including his association with a play called "La Guillotine: or, George’s Head" brought him from his shop at 161 Fleet Street to Old Bailey Prison on charges of sedition.  He was acquitted by his peers and his lawyers struck a token to celebrate their skill and his good fortune.

This narrative was taken from "Money Without Banks and Governments" by Michael E. Marotta, published first by Practical Anarchy, 1994 and then archived at Lloyd Unlimited Numismatics.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Money is Speech

Venture Capital 

Money without Banks and Governments

Numismatics: the Standard of Proof in Economics