My new favorite book of all time

I watched the video of Pinker & Gates, and I confess my prejudice was 'two comfortably rich elitists pushing a centralized globalization agenda'. I'll read the book but with a large pinch of salt...

That's a false context setup. Show me Halliburton's chart where it collapsed down to $16 in 2008 after the commodity bubble burst.

All commodity companies and prices soared at the same time, it wasn't at all isolated to Halliburton or oil. That was due to a debased dollar, which also sent all dollar-based GDP numbers skyrocketing around the world simultaneously. Go to Google and type in: "Czech GDP" or "Colombia GDP" (or dozens of other nations) and witness the incredible spike from ~2003 to ~2008, that's the dollar in action (ie the dollar losing value). Gold similarly soared historically for the same reason. It all crashed simultaneously as well. Those GDP figures almost all have gone down since ~2013, that's the dollar in action again, this time the dollar gained immense strength which sent oil down to ~$26.

Iraq's oil production is at an all-time high, and that oil belongs to them. They're currently directly competing with the vast US domestic oil production.

If the US had started the Iraqi war over oil, it wouldn't have willingly left Iraq when asked to, and it would have used its military to lock up all the oil contracts and supply coming out of Iraq, for itself and its closest allies, effectively annexing the oil. That didn't happen.

His books are an expanded version of his TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_viole...

I (like other commenters) am cautious to attribute the lack of Post-WW2 global war to the UN. The development of nuclear weapons seems a far more likely culprit since we now live in the age of MAD (mutually assured destruction).

So I can of course get behind the idea that War is Bad [tm]. The problem is that in evolutionary and social terms it served a purpose. And that purpose was (and is) the ultimate resolution to resource allocation problems.

If you think about how wealth is being concentrated into the hands of very, very few, you can attribute at least some of this to globalisation. Look at historical figures [1] and you see that in inflation-adjusted terms some would be far more wealthy than the wealthiest people of today. What about the likes of Julius or Augustus Caesar? 2000 years of compound interest!

Now it's true that wealth doesn't tend to survive many generations but there are exceptions.

Then look at conflicts like the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution or any number of European conflicts. War really seems like it served the purpose of being the ultimate means of wealth redistribution.

Of course it's ghastly but my question is this: in a stable world without conflict, how is it that the wealthy don't end up owning everything?

And with an ever-rising population bordering on arguably more than the planet can support with ever-dwindling resources, how does this not end with catastrophic conflict since we've virtually eliminated every form of population pressure?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_...

The IQ rise of 3 points per decade has stopped and even reversed in many countries, like UK and Norway. That seems like a very big point to leave out, hopefully it's mentioned in the book.