When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . . Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life

Steven Pinker, Fred Sanders

eAudio - 2025

**Selected by Bill Gates as One of Five Books to Read This Winter** From one of the world's most celebrated intellectuals, a brilliantly insightful work that explains how we think about each other's thoughts about each other's thoughts, ad infinitum. It sounds impossible, but Steven Pinker shows that we do it all the time. This awareness, which we experience as something that is public or "out there," is called common knowledge, and it has a momentous impact on our social, political, and economic lives.Common knowledge is necessary for coordination, for making arbitrary but complementary choices like driving on the right, using paper currency, and coalescing behind a political leader or movement. It's also nec...essary for social coordination: everything from rendezvousing at a time and place to speaking the same language to forming enduring relationships of friendship, romance, or authority. Humans have a sixth sense for... more