Sapiens

Harari, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, compresses some 70,000 years of human history into four turning points: the Cognitive Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, the unification of humankind through money, empires and universal religions, and the Scientific Revolution. Its central idea is that large-scale cooperation depends on imagined orders, stories that many strangers believe at once. Harari puts money, limited liability companies, human rights and nations in the same category as myths and religions, which is provocative and memorable.

For a finance reader the most relevant chapters cover money as a universal system of mutual trust and capitalism as a creed built on confidence in future growth, which makes credit possible.

The book became a long-running New York Times best seller, and Bill Gates recommended it on his blog. Kirkus praised it as encyclopedic and eloquent. Scholars were harsher: the philosopher Galen Strawson wrote that its appeal was overwhelmed by carelessness and exaggeration, Charles C. Mann criticized its unsourced assertions, and anthropologist Christopher Hallpike found no serious contribution to knowledge in it.

Treat it as a stimulating synthesis rather than authoritative history, and read the money and capitalism chapters closely.

1. Money is a system of trust. Harari presents money as valuable only because people believe others will accept it, which helps explain how currencies, credit and confidence crises work.
2. Credit runs on belief in growth. Modern capitalism expanded when people began to trust that the future would be richer than the present, which made lending against it rational.
3. Companies are shared fictions. Corporations and limited liability exist because law and collective belief say they do, a reminder of how much markets depend on institutions.
4. Progress can make individuals worse off. Harari's argument about farming is a caution against equating aggregate growth with individual welfare.
5. Big narratives need checking. Critics found errors and overstatement, so use the book for perspective and test specific claims against specialist sources.

The book is divided into four parts and twenty chapters, followed by an afterword.

1. The Cognitive Revolution. Harari describes Homo sapiens as an unremarkable animal that, around 70,000 years ago, acquired the ability to create and believe shared fictions, then spread across the world and drove other human species and many large animals to extinction.
2. The Agricultural Revolution. He argues that farming, which he calls history's biggest fraud, produced more people but harder lives, and that writing, bureaucracy and hierarchies grew out of the need to manage surplus.
3. The Unification of Humankind. Money, empires and universal religions knit separate cultures into a single global system; the chapter on money presents it as the most universal and efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.
4. The Scientific Revolution. Science, empire and capitalism reinforce each other, credit grows on confidence in the future, industry turns energy into goods, and the state and market replace the family and community.
5. Happiness and the future. The final chapters ask whether all this progress made people happier and speculate that biotechnology and computing may end Homo sapiens as we know it.

New York Times Bestseller A Summer Reading Pick for President Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be human.” One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us? Most books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold with this highly original book that begins about 70,000 years ago with the appearance of modern cognition. From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens integrates history and science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific events within the context of larger ideas. Dr. Harari also compels us to look ahead, because over the last few decades humans have begun to bend laws of natural selection that have governed life for the past four billion years. We are acquiring the ability to design not only the world around us, but also ourselves. Where is this leading us, and what do we want to become? Featuring 27 photographs, 6 maps, and 25 illustrations/diagrams, this provocative and insightful work is sure to spark debate and is essential reading for aficionados of Jared Diamond, James Gleick, Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, and Sharon Moalem.