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“The Lessons of History” by Will Durant and Ariel Durant talks about the cyclical nature of history. They talk specifically about the cycles of control and chaos. How our liberties are only possible after a period of control.

Will and Ariel Durant - The Lessons of History is a good short read. Probably flawed as well, but gives you food for thought.

> What book or books have had the biggest impact on your life and world view and why?

> RayTDalio:
> Three great books were:

> Lessons from History by Will and Ariel Durant, which is a 104-page distillation of the themes of history by great historians who covered 500 years of history in all countries.

> A River From Eden by Richard Dawkins, which in a little over 100 pages covers all evolution of all life through time.

> Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces, which looks at the archetypical life evolutions of all heroes through different civilizations through time.

What would you make of “The Lessons of History” by Will Durant? To me, all models are wrong but some, like his, are useful.

Very much agree. I prefer"The Lessons of History" by Durant [1], more focused and less "fluffy" IMHO.

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

The Lessons of History written in 1968 by historians Will Durant and Ariel Durant. They distill a lifetime of research into a small 100 page book. The result is a survey of human history, full of dazzling insights into the nature of human experience, the evolution of civilization, the culture of man.

I'm not saying we shouldn't try. Each individual person willing to help should do so.

I'm saying more broadly that we're all probably at the mercy of an inescapable cycle that may not end until humanity is willing to cooperate perfectly at the global/species level of abstraction.

'The Lessons of History' also comments that competition is also inherent to our biological nature. There's a passage about how we usually only cooperate in order to compete at plural granularities (e.g. families, corporations, nations, religions). This has obvious implications for the tradeoff between freedom and equality.

There's a fascinating argument in 'The Lessons of History' that suggests we simply haven't accepted, as a species, that inequality is an inherent characteristic. We are quite purposely endowed with varying capabilities.

One of the essential patterns of history is the vacillation between freedom and equality as societal ideals. A freer society is a more unequal society, and vice versa. It's a fairly paradoxical and nuanced idea because we (particularly Americans) don't tend to think of those principles as existing in tension with one another.

Furthermore, once a civilization reaches a certain threshold, it follows that a great majority of people become unproductive deadweight. Technology accelerates that deterioration.

These aren't terribly inspiring human truths, but I find they do hint at the futility of bemoaning the condition or hoping for emergent and sweeping policy solutions.

Better to empathize where possible, feel eminently thankful for our good fortune, and donate whatever surplus of time and capital we might have to a helpful cause.

The Lessons of History, by W. & A. Durant changed my view on several "big topics" of history and society, such as biology, religion, economics, and war.

Food Rules by Michael Pollan - for understanding food and nutrition

Sapiens - for understanding what it means to be human

The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant - for understanding groups of humans (civilization)

The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor by Howard Marks - for understanding investing

Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin To Munger by Peter Bevelin - for understanding mental models in general

Most people have the basics covered. Here is one I haven't seen and is worth a huge amount -- not business, but it will definitely help you in life.

Will and Ariel Durant: The Lessons of History
A great synthesis by two lifelong historians on what can be learned from a study of history. Covers human nature, society, culture/morals and many other important topics and takes as objective a view as possible.

You can listen to it over and over and get some great insights. Dense, but easy to listen to. There is one small section that is slightly dated and shows that they were writers in their own time but most of it is timeless.

I highly recommend this. It will really give you insight into our world.

I’ve read more this year than I have in the past few years.

A few I especially enjoyed:
- The Effectivd Executive
- How to Win Friends and Influence People
- Never Split the Difference
- Code Simplicity
- Atomic Habits
- The Lessons of History
- Superhuman by Habit
- The Coaching Habit
- On the Shortness of Life
- Deep Survival
- Desiring the Kingdom
- Masters of Doom

You can check out the full list at my Goodreads:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/50310109-paul-cook?ord...

Planning on diving more into history and biography in 2019 if anyone has any recommendations on that front.

If your only real exposure to history was through primary and secondary school, you really owe it to yourself to explore the space yourself.

It's not just late 20th century history that's elided, I'm finding (despite some exposre) that my knowledge of Greek and Roman history, of the post-Enlightenment era in Europe, much of English history, the late 19th century, 20th century issues of labour, race, drugs, culture, immigration, women's rights, and more, was tremendously elided.

* James Loewen, Lies my Teacher Told Me: Everything your American History textbook got wrong is a good start. http://www.worldcat.org/title/lies-my-teacher-told-me-everyt...

* Howard Zinn's A People's History has its own biases, but they're a strong antidote to the traditional view. http://www.worldcat.org/title/peoples-history-of-the-united-...

* Will and Ariel Durant's Lessons from History is a short (115 pages) overview of major themes from history. It's a wonderful introduction to the Durants' broader works. http://www.worldcat.org/title/lessons-of-history/oclc/336824...

* James Burke's Connections and The Day the Universe Changed are good introductions to histories of technology and philosophy. From these, continuing the PBS series mode, I'd recommend Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man. These are truly excellent productions.

* Daniel Yergin, The Prize, whacked me over the head with just how tremndously momentous the discovery of petroleum in Western Pennsylvia was, and the impacts across the last quarter of the 19th century and all of the 20th. Follow this with a more technical exploration in Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History and Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power.

And that's only the barest start.

Are you willing to vote against your own interests in the short-term (ex. your wait times for your non-emergency doctor visits due to Medicare for All may increase, but in exchange everyone has healthcare) to help those that are less fortunate than you in the long-term? I don't blame anyone for playing the hand they're dealt, minimizing their taxes, not donating money to charity. Those are the laws and norms we've agreed on - maximize your quality of life from there.

Related note I've been thinking about it a lot recently:
Will & Ariel Durant wrote an 11 volume history of the rise and fall of Western Civilizations (after touching on China and the Middle East) called The Story of Civilization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Civilization

It was written in the 1930s-70s so it has some fascist, racist and pro-eugenics overtones. Different time, pretty expected - you'd have to be pretty high on Western Civilization to spend your entire life, all the way to your deathbed, writing about it. Conveniently, he wrote a summary of what his takeaways were after all of his research The Lessons of History https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008GUIEYU/ref=dbs_a_def_r...

After studying the rise and fall of hundreds of states and civilizations, he credited excessive wealth inequality as one of the most consistent causes of a failed state - Romans, Greeks, Chinese, etc. Once you hit a certain level of inequality - norms fail, and it gets redistributed anyways. Since capitalism inherently concentrates wealth upward (returns on capital are higher than returns on labor), controlled income redistribution (e.g. The New Deal) is necessary to maintain stability.

Blog post with a few examples from the book https://fs.blog/2016/03/history-concentration-of-wealth/

It feels like a lesson that humans have repeated thousands of times, and we've managed to forget again.

Well now you're getting historical/philosophical.

I subscribe to what the Durants argued in 'The Lessons of History'. There is an apparently irresolvable trade-off between freedom and equality and, historically speaking, the world has tended to vacillate between the two extremes, with inflection points typically demarcated by violent revolution.

In order to get closer to a stable equilibrium, we would need to achieve a more progressive wealth redistribution paradigm than we have at present.

A tremendous amount of wealth is being locked up by the global 0.1% in S&I. Yes it flows through the economy as capital, but we now know enough to appreciate that it mostly doesn't furthermore trickle down into increased wellbeing for probably anyone at or below the 90th percentile, at best. In other words, this system is highly inefficient when you measure it against one of the most meaningful criteria that we should (but do not) evaluate: statistical distribution of human wellbeing.

I have a lot more thoughts on this. But, in short, an unqualified belief in the virtues of capitalism is certainly misguided.

"The issue is that violence is a poor metric for progress." Just to echo the commenter, I don't think Pinker is stating that humans are progressing in general - he is just stating that violence is decreasing. I also agree this is a measurable metric, that Pinker does well to argue for.

If he claims things "are getting better", I think he says that "violence is decreasing", where "violence" is a measure of worseness.

If we want to talk about progress, though, we would have to define what progress really means. Will Durant (from "The Lessons of History") says progress is more like the increasing ability of mankind to control his environment. If so, I would think there is some evidence for that.

In terms of social injustice, Will Durant also makes an argument that there will always be this. Power is always concentrated to the few (that's just how it works in order to have organization), and those not in power will always have some level of injustice. The amount of people in power and their motives can change depending on the era/civilization/society.