Charter Cities Podcast Episode 72: Michael Muthukrishna on Cultural Evolution and the Human Advantage

In this episode of the Charter Cities Podcast, Mark speaks with Michael Muthukrishna, Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics, about how cultural evolution explains the rise of human civilization. They explore why Homo sapiens prevailed over Neanderthals, the role of self-domestication and social learning in societal development, and how religion and cooperation have shaped social complexity. The conversation covers major historical shifts—from agriculture to the Industrial Revolution—and examines how modern challenges like declining fertility, institutional stagnation, and academic conformity can be better understood through the lens of cultural evolution.

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Show Notes:

In Episode 72 of the Charter Cities Podcast, Mark speaks with Michael Muthukrishna, Associate Professor of Economic Psychology and expert on cultural evolution, about the deep forces that have shaped human civilization. Why did Homo sapiens outcompete Neanderthals? How do cultural traits evolve? What can AI and religion teach us about societal progress?

This wide-ranging conversation touches on Michael’s interdisciplinary research, including the Database of Religious History and its revelations about social complexity. They explore the evolution of human cooperation, the societal impact of agriculture and industrialization, and how modern institutions—from academia to global cities—are navigating demographic shifts, declining fertility, and the tension between conformity and innovation.

Whether you’re curious about history, human behavior, or the future of development, this episode offers a thought-provoking framework for understanding how culture makes us—and how it can help us build better societies.

Key Points From This Episode:

Why humans prevailed over Neanderthals
The role of self-domestication in social development
How cultural evolution connects disciplines
Religion’s influence on trust and complexity
Agriculture, inequality, and societal transformation
Cultural bottlenecks and civilizational shifts
The potential (and pitfalls) of AI in simulating evolution
Global fertility trends and cultural runaway selection
Innovation, conformity, and the future of academia
Why cooperation, meritocracy, and free speech still matter

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going

Charter Cities Institute

Charter Cities Institute on Facebook

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Charter Cities Institute on Instagram

Transcript

[INTRO]

Features highlights from the episode.

[INTRO ENDS]

Mark: Hi Michael, thanks for coming on the Charter Cities Podcast.

Michael: Thanks for having me, Mark. Good to reconnect.

Mark: Yeah, so I guess my first question is, why did humans outcompete Neanderthals? Or how?

Michael: That’s a really interesting question. So we don’t definitely know the answer. The best answer we suspect is that we got good at learning from each other, so we had higher sociality effectively. So it seems like Neanderthals also went down. Let me go back a little bit. So the big answer to why humans are different to other animals seems to be that we moved from a pure hardware-based system, where it’s just like genes and instincts and some individual learning, a little bit of fine tuning to a kind of software based system. So we do have genes, they give us big brains, but those big brains allow us to learn new capacities, download new apps if you like. It looks like Neanderthals probably had similar capacities just because they have indications of culture like making jewelry and stuff. But what we were, we had…

Mark: My understanding is that the Neanderthals actually had like bigger brains or at least bigger head sizes, right? I think there’s a question of like great brain folds matter and maybe their brains were smooth so that they weren’t smarter, but like they actually had higher cranial capacity than modern humans, which indicates like higher intelligence on some margin.

Michael: Yeah, entirely possible that as individuals they had, they were smarter than us individually. But the thing is once you move to software, it opens these two capacities and you don’t need the overblown hardware because brain tissue is really expensive, right? 20 times as expensive as muscle tissue. And so just because we had larger groups, we had larger kind of collective brains. And that might have been what enabled us to outcompete the Neanderthals. So you got to remember, it seems like there’s some indications that human brain size shrunk in the last 3000 to 10,000 years. And yet we also seem to be getting smarter at the same time, like our capacities as a collective and even as individuals went up despite our shrinking brains. So it seems like it’s not the hardware that’s doing the work here, it’s the software.

Mark: Yeah, there was kind of a, what’s his name? The Yale, he did Seeing Like a State. He died like a year ago. Do you know what I’m talking about? What’s his name? He had like two cheers for anarchy. James C. Scott, James C. Scott, there we go. So in one of his books, he actually kind of talks about when you domesticate animals, right, their brain size shrinks. Because if it’s a domesticated animal,

Mark: They, right, kind of, they, that point, humans are basically breeding them to produce either meat or milk or like horsepower or whatever. Right, so they’re getting optimized for that. And because humans defend them, they don’t have to optimize for like fighting predators, escape, predators or escaping them, like chasing prey or like, I don’t know, identifying which bushes are key to eating. In the book, James C. Scott hints that, he doesn’t go out and say it, but he suggests that humans also domesticate ourselves when we develop agriculture. That was always an interesting hypothesis. You mentioned that there is evidence that human brain size shrunk over the last 3,000, 10,000 years. I wasn’t, I guess, aware of that evidence. Are there other indications that we domesticated ourselves?

Michael: Yeah, for sure. So Brian Harris has some nice work on this where, if you look at us, just look at us, domestication also, you know, has led to these kind of neoteness features, right? Like dogs look like puppies, like they look like wolf puppies permanently. And we look like juvenile chimps. Like if you look at a child, it doesn’t have the protruding jaw, for example, is this more flat face? So just physically we look that way. But then we maintain these kinds of childlike properties for most of our lives, right? We’re man-children to some degree, we’re playful, we continue to learn, we’re less aggressive. So there’s all this kind of evidence that we self-domesticated. And we seem to do it by, you know, through kind of selecting out the super aggressive males in our group. Once you have things like projectile weapons and you start to cooperate with one another, if you have a male that’s too aggressive and not in your favor, you can start to control them. So yeah, lots of evidence.

Mark: Yeah, I mean, you occasionally see they dig up the, I don’t know, 5,000, 10,000 year old body from like Central Asia of the, I’m going to mispronounce it, but like the Yamanya group. And they look kind of, yeah, I mean, more barbarian, right? Like protruding forehead, protruding jaw. And it’s hard to know like, yeah, it is physiognomy real. Obviously there’s like some, something there, but like how to understand that. So your research kind of focuses on, I guess, like, cultural evolution. My understanding is your PhD was in psychology because there isn’t really, I guess, a PhD in cultural evolution. And you’ve got like an interesting background growing up spending a lot of a decent amount of time in Botswana. So can you I guess walk me through your story? Like, how did you end up where you are? Kind what excites you about about cultural evolution?

Michael: Yeah, right. My family was from Sri Lanka. I was born there. left when I was two years old. Grew up in Africa in Botswana primarily. And this was the time when South Africa was ending apartheid. So I remember when Mandela was voted in. It was very interesting time. And then we lived in Australia. We lived in Papua New Guinea. Since I lived in Canada, the States, and the UK. So my family was in Australia for quite some time. And that’s where I did undergrad.

And I did a degree in engineering, software and computer. And then I also did a second degree where I initially majored in psychology and then got just super frustrated because I was like, my God, this stuff is, it’s not good science. It’s a lot of advocacy. I’m really frustrated. So I ended up taking courses in like biology and philosophy and economics and political science and a bunch of other things. And eventually I just majored in cognitive psychology and started applying it to engineering design and was working on smart home technology.

and audio interfaces for anesthesiology. But then, you know, what actually happened was I watched Al Gore’s documentary, you know, An Inconvenient Truth, and I watched it. So it was like 2007 or something, right? So I watched this document. Was it that late? Yeah.

Mark: I think it came out like 2001, 2002, maybe we’ll watch it later. My understanding is it was like just after he lost the 2000 election, like he reinvented himself pretty quick.

Michael: It came out in 2006. I just Googled it.

Mark: Okay maybe before the documentary came out, he was like going around giving the PowerPoint. Yeah, and then the actual documentary came out a few years later, okay.

Michael: He was doing the circuit. Yeah, he was. So, you know, I did catch all that, but I watched the documentary and I watched this thing and I was like, holy crap, is this for real? Like, are we in trouble? So I start reading the IPCC reports and I’m like, OK, they’re talking about climate wars and stuff like that. And then I was like, OK, but let’s look at the Pentagon because they really have to think about national security. And they were also warning about, you know, mass migration and all these things. And so my sense was, look, everybody’s so focused on mitigation and maybe we’re going to slow the economy to save the planet.

I don’t think we are. And if we don’t, we should really be thinking about what that means, right? And so I started reading about future projections about where we were headed. And it seems to me like we don’t have a good science for how to govern ourselves or how to develop growth or how to do any of this stuff. Like there’s a push and pull, right? Like why are people streaming across the border in the Southern United States or into the UK or into Europe? Because the places they’re in suck and they’re gonna suck more under climate change, you know, when part of them are underwater or because of droughts and so on. So that’s one part of it.

And if we don’t have a good science for how to govern ourselves, that seemed an issue. And because I was working on smart home tech, there’s an area of engineering that some of your listeners might be familiar with called control theory, which is like the math of feedback loops. And I was like, this seems like a useful thing to build a science of culture.

Anyway, long story short, I run into Joe Henrick, who at the time he was cross appointed in psych and economics at UBC. And so I flew, rerouted on a business trip to Vancouver. So I actually flew to Ohio and back to Vancouver, back to Australia. And I caught up with Joe. And when I met Joe, I was like, I got to work with you because you know, he’s an aerospace engineer. don’t know if you knew that, but it’s an aerospace engineer by training. He also had a degree in anthropology and we were on the same wavelength. Cause I had an undergrad in psych. I majored in psych, but I ended up taking courses in graduate courses in economics and evolutionary biology and data science. I had no desire to be a professor. I was recently promoted to a full professor and I had no desire to enter down this path. I just wanted to figure out this stuff and then go apply it in like a think tank or World Bank or whatever. But this, you know, this seemed like a good venue. And so that’s what I’m interested in cultural evolution. What I’m really interested in is I have no desire to publish papers. That’s just a long way. I just want to figure stuff out and then go build it in the world because deep down I’m still an engineer.

Mark: Yeah, that’s interesting, because it sounds like part of it was a similar path, at least I took, or economists take, which is like, why are some countries rich, other countries poor? Right, try and understand why societies function the way they do. What are these kind of underlying inputs that lead to these outcomes? But I don’t know, as an economic imperialist, think economics has most of answers. But it’s interesting that you kind of had the same questions but moved in a kind of, like overlapping, but kind of like kind of different underlying idea of how to answer them.

Michael: Yeah. So I think so right now I’m an economic psychologist. I have affiliations in Developmental Economics. I certainly took courses, but in undergrad, it was actually Milton Friedman’s 1953 essay that irritated me, I think.

Mark: Was that his, the methodology essay?

Michael: Yeah, that’s the one where he says, look, it doesn’t matter that our assumptions don’t make sense as long as the predictions are good. And I read this and, you know, I’m coming out of engineering. I’m like, dude, you’re talking about like the Ptolemaic model, like, you know, our model of the solar system, it wasn’t even the solar system, right? With the earth in the center and the sun rotating around in circular orbits, really predictive, but it’s got these little epicycles. It’s nonsense. It’s not how the world works. And what we want is a kind of Kepler model. So it’s not even the Copernican model. You want the sun in the center and you want elliptical orbits. And having grown up in a lot of these places, the economic answer seemed insufficient.

like it i’d lived in places that had westminster parliamentary institutions and in places like bots wanna they worked really well and in places like south africa or or sri lanka they did not and happily get a you know i mean so i was about we need the pivotal moment in its history called the sandline affair where there’s a government coup and the prime minister’s overthrown and he’s replaced by a well-known gang leader

And New Guinea is one of the most linguistically, or if not the most linguistically diverse place on earth. It is truly tribal politics meets, you know, Western style institutions. And there’s just no way the thing works. There’s just no way. So underneath institutions were these cultural pillars. So I kind of felt like the economists had worked out a lot of the right answers from the institutional perspective. What they were missing was the kind of cultural, the things that co-evolved with those institutions that made the institutions work. And that’s what I wanted to figure out.

Mark: Yeah, I mean, that’s fair. I think the good economists focus a lot on cultural and cultural evolution. right, you’ve got kind of the one of the most influential essays in my intellectual development was Hayek was at Law, Legislation, Liberty, think Volume One, where he kind of traces the evolution of common law in the United Kingdom, where kind of it’s common for economists to look at market outcomes and being like, right, like how many shoes should be produced next year. It’s like, the market decides and right, similarly there is to a certain extent, like it’s not exactly analogous, but like there is a market in kind of culture and decision making and norms where these are not, these are the result of human action, but not human design.

And they co-evolve over kind of years, decades, centuries that lead to certain outcomes today. I mean, one of the, like going around Twitter last week or so, there’s been this map of European castles in Europe. All right, Germany has a lot of castles, France has a lot of castles. Do you know where there are not a lot of castles? The United Kingdom. Why? Because castles are like late medieval technology and the United Kingdom was a relatively centralized state in the late medieval era. So because it was relatively centralized, like castles are military technology you don’t need to build a military technology when you already have a mostly functional centralized state. And so there are these kind of good economists do try to pay attention to that, but most economists probably do not pay as much attention as they should.

Michael: Yeah, totally agree. And honestly, if I’d read Hayek a bit earlier in my career, I think maybe I would have tried to pursue that as a path. And actually, I think things have changed a lot. So much more recently, you’ve got real attempts to grapple with culture coming out of Derone Hachimoglu, Jim Robinson, like real attempts to grapple with this stuff. So I think it’s just, I think what we have here is a situation where economics has a very robust and excellent framework for let’s say institutions and maybe even individual decision-making. And cultural evolution has a really powerful and rigorous framework for cultural evolution. And so it is all like, it’s these old ideas of a marketplace is really an evolutionary system and firms are living and dying on the basis of this. And they’re a great example actually of cultural group selection. I think that it’s the marriage of these two fields where the future lies. And I think that is really the focus of a lot of both my academic and applied work.

Mark: Yeah, and so, you meet Joe Heinrich and kind of get really excited. How do I answer these questions? You do your PhD at UBC focusing on psychology and kind of like, I guess that’s the big question is kind of cultural evolution. Like, one of the things that I’ve kind of observed from afar is, right, one cultural evolution is like a mostly new field. And then two, especially like last culture evolution, but related is there are new measurement technologies that kind of, especially with our DNA sequencing that allow for a lot more information than was previously possible that allows for kind of much more rigorous science and conclusions. So like, how did your, your, your research agenda evolve?

Michael: yes so i mean the first is a slight i’m not i’m not kind of i’d be i’d joke that i’m an undisciplined scholar or non-disciplinary in the sense that I’ve got questions and I don’t care where they come from. If they come from genetics, that’s great. If they come from economics, that’s fine too. And my dissertation was actually, so the first chapter was on brain evolution. And so I had to have a biologist on the team, Christoph Howard. Another chapter was on corruption. So I had to have an economist there, Patrick Francois. And then I had a chapter on social learning, which was the psychology. So it was always this kind of interdisciplinary thing, just trying to fill the gaps. Yeah, so not only has economics moved on and cultural evolution kind of moved on, but the genetics have moved on. They’re all, when you, when you kind of arrive at the truth, everything starts to point in a similar direction, let’s say. And so I think we’re starting to, we’re starting to see that. So I, we just had a paper I wrote with, Abdul Abdullahi was the lead author on the way that genes and culture become intertwined in social status. And now because we have better methods of measuring genes, we’re fairly certain that that’s part of what’s going on. Like, yes, social status is a social thing by definition. But if you have a sortative mating where people who are very smart start marrying other people who are very smart, you can stretch the tails of those distributions.

I’m not sure where the question was going other than to say, we have new methods also in culture, right? So some of my work has been on how to quantify culture in a more rigorous way. Actually, borrowing methods from genetics. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah, I mean, not sure how relevant the question I’m trying to, guess, tease at is I do think science, right? Like what typically causes major advancements in paradigm shifts is often new technology. Sometimes it’s new theories, but it’s new technology that allows you, right? Like you don’t get the Galileo without the telescope. And similarly, right? Like I don’t know to what extent. Cultural evolution is being influenced by like the new technology that comes to mind is basically cheap genome sequencing. And I don’t know, there’s some over that there. I don’t know how much, but I don’t know. We can tease that out, but there’s also lots of other questions to get to.

Michael: Yeah, yeah, so mean, Mark, you the field was founded by Rob Boyd and Pete Richardson, ecologists and anthropologists respectively, and physicists originally, but also by Mark Feldman and Lucia Cavelli-Schwarzer, right, who were population geneticists. So those models have always been genetic models. And, know, the FST measure, for example, developed by cultural evolution people, really, but applied to genes and now applied to culture. But I do think, I mean, I do think like maybe this is what you’re getting at. On the one hand, some of these advances have been amazing. So ancient DNA is a good example of this, right? So the story, our understanding of human evolution. Which of course is the primary interest that dual inheritance theory and cultural evolution has, has shifted because of our understanding of the way that, you know, we thought we just beat out the Neanderthals. We actually, you know, we met them, we fought with them, but we also mated with them, right? So if you are, if you’re from Eurasia, have a non, you know, you have a reasonable amount of Neanderthal, Odinosovin, or other ancient DNA. If you’re from West Africa, there’s a ghost population, let’s call it, of another ancient hominin population.

There are these admixtures that are part of the story. But then another part of the story is like history, right? So from a cultural evolutionary perspective, history is the cultural fossil record. And so better measurements of history and better quantification and even just putting the data together. So one of my projects may be aware of is the database of religious history, which will expand into the database of cultural history. And it’s really just a, it’s a.

It’s a way to quantify history in a way that maps onto cultural evolution and that we’re measuring traits over time and that allows you to then look for what might lead to the emergence of large-scale civilization and what might lead to its collapse and which parts of these are ecological or economic or driven by these kind of path dependencies that the culture has just gone down. The other big, so you’re absolutely right, by the way, about technology. I think the big technology for cultural evolution specifically is AI.

So for the first time, cultural evolution and behavioral science and psychology have a simulator, a human simulator. And simulation is critical to every good science and its ability to move, to move and make advances, right?

Like one analogy I use is like everybody points to 1903 when the Wright brothers invented the airplane as the beginning of the aviation industry. Actually, the big bottleneck was training pilots. And it was 1930 when we invented a flight simulator that we removed that bottleneck and everything really took off. I mean, the cost of training pilots for bombers went from $600 an hour, I think, their money to a dollar an hour.

So now, know, so one of my big directions right now is building out technology to simulate given current costs, we can simulate it kind of everything we understand about cultural evolution, everything we understand about the software, we can simulate individuals and types of people and how they would react to certain stimuli. But the goal is that eventually as the prices drop, we’d be able to simulate populations and societies.

Mark: That’s interesting. I would also think that with AI, the other kind of advantage is just, it’s twofold. One, the ability to translate a lot more works, right? Like I think there is a, understanding there’s like a bottleneck. I don’t know, 90 % of like ancient Sumerian, like manuscripts haven’t been translated just because there’s like a limited number of translators. Not fully sure of that, but I heard that somewhere and it seems plausible.

Michael: Yeah.

Mark: And right, like with AI, can basically translate everything to is you can now uncover additional manuscripts. There was the well-publicized example of the scrolls in what’s the city Vesuvius, yeah, in the burned Roman scrolls that they can now uncover, which obviously AI had a part to do. And then two is right, like now the cost of

Michael: Yeah, the burn scrolls where they can kind read through yeah.

Mark: Basically analyzing textual change over long periods of time is a lot cheaper. Where previously, if it’s like we’ve got, I don’t know, 500 years of record from ancient society and we want to change, like look at how they refer to religious gods or how they refer to like pronouns or how they refer to priests. And you can basically run these like very large things with previously might’ve been like a multi-year, even like multi-decade with like dozens of people and like thousands of man-hour input now can kind of be done with one person with like talking to AI for a year and then you can get like really good textual analysis of like previously they would refer to all of these minor deities that had like direct relationship with the land.

And over a thousand years, right, they began to refer to these like broader and personal deities that would punish deviation from social norms. And we saw as that happened, right, the social structure we also know from archeological records got more complex. And now you’re kind of really tracing like, I don’t know what to call it, like ideology, like worldview with social composition in a way that people are like poking at, but you get like a much stronger sense of, or like actual outcomes.

Michael: Yeah, no, exactly. mean, so that’s actually the purpose of the database of religious history specifically. It was, I mean, we do other things with it, but it was to test this. Big gods or supernatural, like the role of religion in the rise of civilization is kind of transitioning us from a reputation based system to a proto institutional based system. And, you I don’t know if funders listen to this call, but we are trying to use AI to document history. And, know, if someone at, I don’t know, Google or open AI or Anthropic wanna throw some, throw some credits our way, we’d appreciate it. You know, basically to automate this whole filling process, because right now we have like 600 or so historians who are filling this thing in. We wanna use AI to just take everything. So that marriage, think.

Mark: And so what are the specific inputs that you’re doing? Are you just taking old documents and you’ve got a database? What are the columns of the database? What is the inputs that you’re doing?

Michael: So the data comes from the heads of historians, from actual texts, from ancient texts, from archaeological sites, so places as well. And we have different poles within this, because of what we focused on to begin with, we’re looking at what people believed about the supernatural monitor, what they were concerned about, how they interacted with other groups, what were their social structures, how strong was their state, what did their state concern itself with, how did they engage in warfare, what kind of weapons did they have? host of questions around polity, civics, religious politics.

Mark: Why are you calling this the religious database? This feels more like the… Okay, I was gonna say it feels more like, I don’t know, Polis database, right? Like it’s Polis in the Greek sense.

Michael: Because our original funding was from Temple. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s what I said, yeah.

So it started in 2012 and we registered the domain name Database of Religious History and Database of Cultural History at the same time because the idea was that yes, we’ve got this initial funding to start with. Religion is a little bit more circumscribed than all of culture, but we want to ultimately expand. Yeah. So the technology is not designed just for religion. It’s just that’s where we started.

Mark: Cheers and if you’ve been doing this for 12 years, like what novel outputs or perhaps confirming outputs have you seen from this so far?

Michael: Yeah, so we are able to show that there is this relationship, like we can confirm the relationship between social complexity and the scope and interests of gods go up, right? So the hypothesis, so the way this hypothesis works for listeners not familiar is if you look.

Since 2001, we often think about religion as this really divisive thing in the world. And it’s true, but before it was divisive, it brought people together, right? So Islam, the major world religions, were super ethnic groups that brought the tribes of Arabia together, the tribes of Europe together, and so on. But it’s not all religions that did that. There’s all kinds of little small religions that just don’t care. Like they care about, don’t desecrate the water, don’t cut down the trees. That’s the scope of these gods. But the gods go up because they’re kind of, in my view, like the source code.Like even though we’ve kind of kicked off.

Mark: What do mean gods go up?

Michael: So that the size, the belief about what God cares about and how much God knows increases over time. And it seems to be a way to stabilize things. So here’s an example, right? So you might have, in the same way that you have an ethnic identity. Let’s say you meet another woman wearing a hijab or something. You don’t know who she is. She doesn’t know you. So you can’t do reciprocal altruism. You can’t do reputation. But if you believe that she believes you should be good to co-ethnics and she believes that you and she also believes that this ethnic identifier, in this case, the hijab, it could be a cross or whatever, is monitored by the group, you can then infer with some higher non-zero probability that she might be slightly more trustworthy. So the absence of like a central this can help you transition to that more centralized state, which has these rules. And so we were able to detect.

Mark: It’s a meme to coordinate violence or maybe violence is a little bit too specific, but it’s a meme to coordinate like, know, trustworthiness action, right? Like over a large area in the absence of a centralizing state or sometimes with a centralizing state.

Michael: Yeah, exactly. And so when you get the centralized, there’s a couple of interesting things here. One is that the traits are under selection, right? So it’s not an accident that most major world religions say, you know, be there for your family and maybe have large families and be good to other people. Like those are the traits that help a group grow at the expense of religions that don’t have that. I mean, a good example of this is my favorite example, actually, is, people probably know some Quakers. They, you know, mate and reproduce at a rate similar to the rest of the population. You probably don’t know shakers.

Mark: Than the rest of the population.

Michael: Maybe slightly higher, but like you know what I’m saying is they’re not like Mormons or something, But there’s a group, there’s an offshoot of the Quakers called the Shakers. Do you know any Shakers, Mark? They all died out. Exactly, so it wasn’t celibacy for the Priestley class, it was celibacy for everyone. Not a good strategy for growing your group. So over time you get this filtering process, right? But what’s interesting is then

Mark No, they all died out because they had prohibitions against sex and reproduction.

Michael: Even after, so what I mean when I say it’s like the source code of the civilization, even after you get the centralized state and the need for a supernatural god starts to disappear, you still maintain a lot of those beliefs, right? Like monogamy spreads on the back of Christianity, really, and it has

Mark: Yeah, but isn’t this kind of implicitly, right? Like, doesn’t Christianity, is it like a little bit contrary? Because Christianity evolved in the Roman Empire in the era after most of the civil wars when it kind of early, early stages of the Republic, but it was a large centralized state that was fairly effective at controlling violence, especially for its time like Christianity basically emerged and grew. In that the shadow of that centralized state, which implies that like there wasn’t that like, I don’t know, that there wasn’t that need for coordination that might have been required if there was not a centralized state.

Michael: Yeah, so in general religion serves this purpose, but I think what made Christianity such a successful religion is so the first mutation with Judaism was the messianic proselytizing mutation, right? So, you know, so even if you go back, if you go back further, the first mutation is to say, normally, you know, different people believe in different gods and we’re going to find out whose God is better on the battlefield. Then you’ve got this mutation that says, objectively, there is but one God.

You know, you got the seven day story to show the Babylonians that their God, the moon and the sun and all that were created by the one actual God. And these were just like objects in the sky. So that’s the first mutation. The second mutation is like it becomes proselytizing and it becomes messianic and there’s a desire to go convert and change the world. I think that what ends up happening is that gets supercharged when it gets the levers of the state. So it’s able to kind of supercharge in that what’s left of the Roman Empire is, guess, the Roman Catholic Church.

And so it begins to spread, begins to out-compete on the back of this, these smaller tribes. So it’s kind of a supercharged version, I guess, of the broader story. And actually, one thing I’ve often wondered is if that’s the reason why there’s a kind of difference between the West and China in terms of geopolitics, right? Like in the West source code, there is this sense like you should all be like us you should be a you know liberal democracy this is the right way to be we want to spread our values was china that the story of china is one ethnic group really the hot taking over

It’s not like a centralizing religion that does this. It’s just one ethnicity with, you know, with its own kind of belief system. So China doesn’t have this over and over. They go out, they look at the world, they’re like, whatever, that works for everybody else, but it doesn’t work for us. Like we are Chinese, you’re everyone else, you do you, we do us. And there’s a different way of kind of doing geopolitics that isn’t so messianic, let’s say, or proselytizing. So there are these hidden things in the civilization, I think, that really emerged on the back of religion.

Mark: Yeah, I am sympathetic to that story, but how does it interact with China, for example, right, like China is frequently referred to as Confucian. And that’s not like a religion in the sense that we think of like Christianity, or like Islam as religions. You have a lot of other parts of Southeast Asia that are heavily Buddhist, again, which is perhaps more religious than Confucianism, but it’s not the same vector as like Christianity. how do you think about it? If the theory is right to effectively coordinate over large groups, especially in the absence of central states, right, we need a kind of distant, all knowing, all powerful gods that kind of bind us together, right? Like, how does that relate to kind of non Western religions that have become so influential?

Michael: Yeah, so I think you’re right about Confucianism. like I said, you know, I think they went down a different path. Like they went almost they jump started the state and they did it kind of through an ethno state. Whereas it’s not true of Hinduism and Buddhism. So the karmic religions do have a supernatural monitor, but it’s not their gods, it’s karma. So it’s that, you know, you do bad stuff, bad stuff happens to you. You do good stuff and it’s impersonal and it’s just it’s just going to happen. That is the key mutation that serves the same purpose as an all seeing God. You just have an all seeing force.

Mark: No, that makes sense. Maybe to switch gears a little bit. Why did humans take so long to develop civilization? Right? So a typical story is like you got modern humans 200,000 years ago or so, and you don’t, you really only get the first instances of civilization, like 8,000 years ago or so. Right. And so obviously there’s a lot of like inputs that need to happen, namely kind of domesticated grain, but it feels like even with like kind of randomness of early humans, like it shouldn’t take 200 or 190,000 years to domesticate grain. So like what is going on that caused that like, I don’t know, slow evolutionary development up, or like cultural evolution development up till then, or is that even the right framing?

Michael: Yeah, so what Joe Henrik and I have argued is that initially you get this kind of autocatalytic takeoff in brain size on, you know, on the back of a few things, including bipedalism, which frees up your hands and opens up a pathway to learn language, and fire, which allows us to digest food outside our body and, you know, and use this to kind of shrink our guts and grow our brains. But then because we’ve now moved over to kind of cultural software, the limit is a kind of collective brain rather than individual brains. So you need kind of large groups of individuals living together cooperating with one another. And this doesn’t really happen until we get agriculture. So agriculture is the prime mover here. Now you could say, why did it take us so long to get to agriculture? Different stories around that, maybe carbon dioxide was a little bit higher. It seems that the basic story seems to be that we were dropping stuff as we were going and we were there for long enough that we realized this was a way to start growing this. But it happened all around the world in different places. So I do think there might be kind of a broader ecological story behind it. But in any case, once you get out, this is my interest in cities, by the way, Mark, because once you get agriculture, you get the surplus of people. You start to get large amounts of people. And even though agriculturalists seem to be a little bit less healthy than the hunter gatherers around them. They push the hunter-gatherers to the margins which are not suitable for agriculture, so deep in the forest into the deserts where they still live actually.

And from agriculture, you can start to get cities. And cities are supercharged. Again, if we’re talking about cultural software, this is how it gets written. New ideas are flowing in and out with new people bringing things. People are learning things from one another. And there’s just sheer more experiments going on. If you think about like a wisdom of the crowd, there’s just more people doing more stuff. And as long as they’re learning from one another, you’re going to supercharge the whole thing. So that’s the first kind of supercharging that happens. we go along. until we, you know, in my book, I’d basically say at first, it’s like a positive-sum reality.

Like all of these ideas, it’s amazing until agriculturalists hit their carrying capacity. So the amount that agriculture can support and then the only choice is to start fighting with other agriculturalists. And so we’re back in this kind of Malthusian world right up until the Industrial Revolution. And that is the next major shift. Yeah.

Mark: Sure, let’s get into that. But I guess two kind of questions before jumping into that. One is, what about tepecobleque? Because the standard human story is human discover agriculture, then you actually get agglomerations, dense enough people, then you get basic civilization. But tepecobleque is dated pre-agriculture. So there at least appears to be some fairly strong evidence. That people were getting together in bands of like thousands, if not tens of thousands of people, do relatively complex works of putting big stones around. And that implies that there is maybe some like, I don’t know, civilizational impulse in humans that is like pre-agricultural, that is kind of a very interesting element to think about with like this broader kind of cultural evolution dynamic.

Michael: That’s right. Yeah, so we don’t know what’s going on with Gobekli Tepe, but it… I think, again, we’re speculating because we just don’t know what was going on there. There’s different ways people can come together. It could have been like bands of kin, right? So you just have like common groups of lineages like the 12 tribes of Israel type thing where people come together and do these things. In some of our experiments, what we show is that the problem is if you don’t have this reliable flow of information between large groups of people, things can pop up and then they disappear. So you can invent things, but they don’t spread anywhere, so they just kind of disappear.

You need the full network, need the full ecosystem for something to take place. So it could be like that. In our experiments, again, these are stylized, but in our games and things, people will invent or discover the right solution, but it doesn’t get spread unless sociality is high, unless the population size is high enough and the interconnectivity is high enough. You get these genius Einsteins, but they come up with something, it serves their purposes, and then it disappears. And likely to be could be a little bit like all of the kind of lost technologies over time. Like someone comes up with something by accident, by some crazy recombination just because they’re just brilliant, whatever, but it doesn’t lead to civilization, which is a collective process. So that’s why I think it took agriculture and cities to make that happen.

Mark: Yeah, I mean, I agree. like, yeah, but anyway, the other kind of point before getting into industrial revolution is just regards to like, it’s kind of going back to James C. Scott, right? His argument, you mentioned that, okay, kind of our pre-modern states, early modern states hit carrying capacity, it was like, okay. And then once they kind of hit their size, it became, or they kind of started fighting with each other. They were trapped in a Malthusian dynamic.

James C. Scott argues, my opinion, fairly convincingly, is that one, you already mentioned, individual lifestyles were probably inferior in agricultural river valleys to hunter gathering. It was just that there were a lot more of them. And then two, there appears to be at least decent evidence that a lot of the population would literally just be enslaved from hill tribes.

Right? would basically, the pre-modern states needed people to work in the rice fields or whatever. And they, I don’t know if they, right, like the birth rates were too low or just too many people escaped. They would go up to find populations of people in the nearby hills and enslave them, force them back and say, all right, you have to work in the kind of rice fields till you die. So it wasn’t like even kind of before they kind of hit carrying capacity and started fighting with other states, it wasn’t exactly pretty.

Michael: Yeah so within states, I mean with the advent of agriculture, we also see a lot more inequality, right? And we start to see inherited wealth classes. So once you get property rights and you get surplus and you’re able to store that surplus, then you start to see a very, very big shift. Like most hunter gatherer groups, unless they have a lot of resources, tend to be fairly egalitarian. And we think it’s just because they live in a zero sum environment where there isn’t strong property rights. There’s no ability to keep the stuff for yourself. So that’s just, in my view, that’s not really a puzzle. It’s just kind of an extension of that. That the lowest group that you can get is the person who’s not even in your group. And if you’re acquiring wealth and you’re doing it better than the groups around you, you may as well get them in to keep you acquiring wealth. The inequality begets the slavery.

Mark: So, okay, basically, I don’t know, 200,000 years ago, human start, or maybe longer than that, walking on two feet, 200,000 years ago, we get fire. Fire allows us to grow our brains and shrink our guts, two million years ago. I mean, there were some others, I don’t know what the, of, whatever. Right, then we get agriculture 10,000 years ago or so, right, we’re in…

Michael: Maybe a few million years ago, if I recall. So 6,000 years ago

Mark: Yeah, 6,000 years ago cities and then industrial revolution 200 ish years ago, right? Like what were the requirements to get there? How did that impact everything?

Michael: Yeah, so if you look, as I point out in my book, if you look at just about any measure of progress, you know, size of states, lifespan, infant mortality rates, whatever you want, energy capacity, war making capacity, it does go up, but it’s kind of just kind of bobbing along until the Industrial Revolution, where it just like hockey sticks up. So what I argue in my book is a lot of those are like efficiency gains. So we didn’t have the kind of new energy form. So actually, fire and agriculture were both.

They were energy technologies, right? They really enabled us to command and control far more energy. And that is what really powers all of civilization. So when you don’t have that, you’re just, or even when you do have that, what you’re really doing is just gaining efficiency in things. So when you’re fighting with one another, there’s all kinds of battles over better bows and arrows and better swords and better ways of aggregating and better ways of cooperating too, so that you can get armies and you get the armies to march and you get the armies to work together and you find ways to make sure that there are no defectors. Can decimate groups and whatever. that’s what’s bubbling along. And later on, before you get to the Industrial Revolution, we of course have things like the Enlightenment. We have things like the Scientific Revolution, which is all laying the foundations. So it’s laying the foundations, I think, in the technology that was going to be required. It’s laying the foundations with therefore the efficiency with which we can use power. But there’s also some interesting shifts in our ability to cooperate with one another.

A lot of my work has been on how we reach these higher scales of cooperation. And one part of that story is you need something to cooperate toward. So when you access a reward, the per unit payoff for that reward has to be higher than what you would get if you were in a smaller group. That’s the only reason you’d be working in a large So if the market isn’t large enough, there’s no reason to start a big company, you would make more money in a smaller company. If you can’t out-compete this other civilization with lots of gold in a large group, you just do this thing in a small group initially. But the other half of this is that you have to have like efficiencies by which you kind of get there.

So you have to develop these new technologies and you have to be able to work together. You have to be able to cooperate. So have something to fight toward, but also suppress lower scales of cooperation that tend to undermine higher scales. One example of this is, so Joe Henrik and Jonathan Schultz and a few others have argued that in Europe, one key shift was the destruction of European tribes.

So the Catholic Church ends up banning cousin marriage, which removes European tribes. Like, where do the European tribes grow? Like, I live in the UK right now. We have the Angles and the Saxons and the Picts and the Vikings. They’re all gone. And what happened was they married among one another.

Normally, groups don’t do that. Groups tend to marry their cousins. They tend to marry their relatives. so you get effectively tribes. You get ethno-tribes that undermine states. Your uncle isn’t just your uncle. He’s related by all these means. the traditional family is not traditional at all. Normally, we have a traditional family web, not a family tree.

By doing this, we kind of bring us back down to more individualism and we set the stage for a higher scale of cooperation, which we don’t see emerging in, let’s say, the Middle East or many parts of Africa. So that’s the second half of this. All of this is kind of laying the foundation so that when we discover the cheap and accessible coal in Britain, we have the technology to work it, we have the cooperative structures to do it. Guilds, right? Another example of this is guilds. There’s a famous paper about the McRaeby traders, do you know this work maybe? Yeah, so the McRaeby traders, right? So this is a major cooperative shift.

Like prior to that, you could only trust your relatives. And so the extent to which you could grow was the family corporation. You had to have any sons, you had to send them out. But the McRaeby traders found a way to access reputation and they share reputational information. And this allowed them to kind of scale upward.

Eventually, this leads to what we take for granted these days, but corporations that are not based on family, where you can bring your labor based on your own ability, which is incredibly empowering for both cultural evolution and cultural group selection, and is exactly what you need alongside the energy and alongside the efficiency to supercharge this whole thing. And then we have the era of colonialization, right? So have the great divergence where Europe takes off and everyone else is kind of stuck where they are. Colonialization leads to these highly cooperative, energy powered, technologically efficient groups going and taking this stuff from everyone else until a few of those other groups figure out ways to take that same technology, remix it and make it their own in the way that South Korea and Japan and Singapore and others did. And more recently, China. So that’s the kind of cultural evolutionary story of history, if you like.

Mark: Yeah, I think I’m quite sympathetic to it. I mean, one of the points on, I guess, like suppressing, sometimes suppressing smaller forms of coordination is like, often see this debate kind of about like decentralization versus centralization, which to me is kind of like missing the point. Like some things are better centralized, some things are better decentralized. The question is like, what is the optimal unit of governance for different decisions? And so kind of one of the classic examples in Europe, is like modern states, basically one of the key things they did was smash local principalities to allow for free trade. So if you travel down the Rhine pre-Germany, you’d have to pay a new tax every mile or two miles, and that tax incidence ended up being extremely high, basically making interior trade to Germany functionally impossible except for extremely high value goods creating internal free trade zones that created the ability, it was centralization, right? It was smashing local authorities, but those local authorities were net negative for cooperation, at least on certain margins. I one of the kind of questions, I guess, like, yeah.

Michael: Yeah, precisely. So if I might just kind of jump in there like real quick. So, what you’re describing is what I call the kind of law of cooperation because it just applies everywhere. So take corruption, right? Those like little princedom taxes that prevent any kind of growth are the same as the kind of corruption that goes on in, you know, let’s say many parts of Africa where each person in order to make a business has to pay this person, pay this person. By the time you get there, there’s not much the black tax. Right. Is sometimes what it’s or the kinship tax is what it’s sometimes called. But because, so if you look, a lot of places around the world, you see a lot of nepotism because you didn’t smash the tribes, you didn’t ban cousin marriage. In Europe, you don’t see nepotism, you see kind of more cronyism and you see these kind of higher state princedoms type stuff, which still needs to be smashed or at least aligned. So, you know, even going back to kind of evolutionary biology, and this is what I mean, it’s like such a, it’s a law that applies all the way even down to bacteria and cells. You yourself, are an ecosystem, And when you have misalignment, that’s a cancer. That’s like a disease. Because every cell is incentivized to make sure you’re okay, that’s why the system works. And the same thing is true of a state. Like it’s fine to devolve power as long as there’s alignment between the interests of those devolved units and the higher level state.

Mark: Yeah, I think that’s one of the kind of most interesting things. There’s, I forget his name, Banfield, right? His kind of classic study of Italy, where Northern Italy is kind of basically dramatic. Southern Italy is arguably like a little bit more Arab, kind of a hundred years ago, where he looked and in northern Italy, dramatic in the sense that they had this ideal, of a dramatic conception of good, public propriety, while in the southern area, I think the term he used was amoral familialism, which is basically like, morality only applies to your family. You can’t steal from your family. can’t… attack your family, but it does not apply outside of your family. right, like you’re kind of there is social sanction to go and steal to do violence upon to harm anyone outside the family. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the mafia, for example, came from southern Italy that had those norms, which have been kind of historic norms throughout most of history. And Somalia recently, for example, maybe not recently, but there’s my understanding of a kind of Somali saying is right.

Michael: Exactly.

Mark: Me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the world. Where, right, like if you get in a fight with your cousin, your brother is expected to come to your side. If you get in a fight with somebody like more distance than your cousin, then your cousin is to defend you. And this serves as the violence containment mechanism because you and your kind of clan have a credible threat of violence if you are wronged. So therefore, if you are wronged, stolen from, assaulted, whatever, right, you and your clan come to defend you and demand payment for that violence. And if not, there’s a credible threat that they can commit a kind of proportional violence against the initial aggressor. And that’s what maintains the equilibrium instead of a kind of third party state that serves as the enforcer of violence.

Michael: Yeah, exactly. And you see this in so many different places, right? So Latin America, descendants of Southern Europe, La Familia e Tutto, hiring nepotism, hiring corruption more generally. know, there’s this Franz Crapenau has this data where he asks people, you’re driving along, you know, with your brother, your relative, whatever, they crash into somebody and kill them. Does this relative have the… the expectation that you would lie to them in court. Or maybe it’s your friend, does this have the expectation that you would lie to them? Would you do it for them? Northern Europeans are absolutely not. Of course I wouldn’t do that, right? They’re worse friends, they’re worse family members. Whereas, you know, in Latin America, Africa, you know, even parts of Southern Europe, they’d be like, of course I would. Even in terms of jobs. So, you know, there’s data on how you found a job.

And in parts of just the data is from Europe, in Southern Europe, you’re more likely to find it through a contact. In Northern Europe, you’re more likely to find it through a job ad. Basically, all of these things are the same way that the princedoms were extracting taxes and making the system more inefficient. These same things are making these places less efficient, less growth-filled, and undermining meritocracies.

But it’s a much more general principle, and this is why I think I’m so interested in cultural evolution, because you’re able to extract these things and apply them elsewhere.

Mark: Yeah, you also have Fukuyama. He wrote a book, I think it was called Trust, where he looked at basically corporate organization. And I think he compared the US and China. Maybe there are other examples, but those are what kind of stuck out in my mind, where kind of China had very different, like in the US, for example, you would typically have like an executive and they’ll have, the CEO will have, I don’t know, between eight and 12 direct reports, but you usually don’t have above 12 direct reports. And then you’ve got kind of a hierarchy where each person has between eight and 12 people below them until the organization works, right?

And in China, the number of direct reports to the CEO would just be like an order of magnitude higher, like sometimes 150 people. And why in part because there was not that same degree of kind of interpersonal trust, where the CEO then felt that they needed to oversee everyone individually, to the greatest extent of their ability, because they were kind of that lack of social trust. Precluded them from being able to delegate some of their authority to third parties, which obviously has a big impact on economic efficiency and other elements.

Michael: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, so in my book, you know, Mark, I make fun of the kind of books that are the one thing that explains everything. You everybody’s got their like one piece of the puzzle and they’re like, this is this is the key mover. In reality, you needed a whole bunch of things to come together to lead to this great divergence and industrialization of this takeoff. And where just about any of those pieces are missing in these other places, we see exactly this kind of breakdown. Right. So it could be you didn’t smash the Kins or you didn’t, you know, these tribes, you didn’t…

You didn’t incentivize and so they get they get stuck in these these suboptimal political clutches where yes, actually the resources are there They could be a very wealthy country, but they’re unable to trust one another they’re unable to cooperate with one another And as a result of that human capital is low They haven’t you know received the education that they should a small group of elites is cooperating with a large multinational corporation with aid with a country directly and and Cooperating to the degree that they’re undermining like they’re selling off their resources making themselves wealthy at the expense of the rest of the population. Same thing.

Mark: And I guess so why did this happen? Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Europe and more specifically in the United Kingdom? Because right, like if you look at agriculture, agriculture developed independently in like seven different places. And the Industrial Revolution, right, I’ve seen cases made for like, why not the Roman Empire? Or why not China, I think particularly the kind of Ming dynasty that had decades, if not like 100 plus years of sustained economic growth and innovation in terms of gunpowder, in terms of printing. So what were those places missing? Was there some degree of randomness if we run, simulate all of human history again? Is it like, don’t know, Britain five times out of 10, France three times, like China two times out of 10? How do you think about the kind of arbitrariness and variance in these outputs, outcomes?

Michael: Yeah. So I don’t think about it deterministically. I do think about it as kind of probabilistically. And so a lot of the pieces were there. Like, so why not the Roman Empire? Unclear. But one answer might be you didn’t have all the prerequisite technology and slavery was pretty cheap. So even if you did get these, you know, these mechanized devices, they were not cheaper than having slaves. You didn’t yet have this kind of breakdown of the kin relation, so you had more individualism and more assortment of talent with the rise of the cities, with the rise of the guilds, with the rise of… which then didn’t allow for things like, in these other places I mean, didn’t allow for things like… these larger collective brains, people meeting in coffee shops and swapping ideas and debating the pamphlets of their age, right? In the same way that maybe we do that on social media. They didn’t have all those pieces. And so the technology wasn’t rapidly able to change and able to adapt to the changing circumstances in quite the same way. You’ve got all those pieces in place in a variety of places in Europe. And I think there were some candidate sites for industrialization. Parts of Germany where the cheap and available coal, think, was a big thing. So not only did you have all of these pieces, you had the guilds, you had the cooperative societies, you had the prerequisite technology, you had the enlightenment, but then you also had energy and you had energy that was easy to access. So that’s why I think you had a higher probability of this thing taking off in Britain. If you reran it, there might have been parts of Germany, there might have been parts of the Netherlands, for example, that it might have also happened.

Mark: So, I think this is similar to how I think about it, but one of the, guess, like sympathetic to the broad strokes of cultural evolution, kind of like, I guess, how granular do you think the explanatory power is? Because like, there is some degree of, like reasonable data supporting like some of the broad strokes, right, if you think about human history, like I don’t know if you’re familiar with progress studies.

But progress studies kind of the question is, right, like, why are some times and places far more innovative than others? And obviously, right, there’s the kind of ancient Greece, there’s the Renaissance, there’s right, like turn of the century Venice. And like, I mean, you could kind of, I guess, point to some of the inputs. But it feels to me that like, I don’t know if there’s like other factors going on that feel pretty difficult to explain that like might be cultural evolution related, but not like only kind of like vaguely related. And like, I guess, guess how much fitting do you see to some of these like kind of key turning points?

Michael: Yeah, I love the question. It’s great. First off, big fan of progress studies. In fact, funders, if you’re listening in, the other thing I’m trying to do right now is create a human progress institute at the LSE. because I think cultural evolution has something to offer progress studies. And what I think it has to offer is cultural evolution is to, let’s say, progress studies, what evolutionary biology is to ecology.

It’s the rules of the system. It shows you where the levers might be. ecology, so if you’re an ecologist, you actually have to go down and you have to measure the number of, you know, how much rainfall you had that year and the carbon pathways and how many foxes and how many squirrels and all of that stuff. But if you tried to do that and you didn’t understand, you know, Lotka Volterra predator prey systems, you didn’t understand like the concept of evolution even, you’d be running blind.

Now, Darwinian natural selection or modern synthesis, that math is not at a granular level, but it is the rules by which the whole thing is operating. And so it constrains the system in some way, tells you where the sense is and where the nonsense is. And so what needs to happen is the equivalent of the modern synthesis. in the, again, for listeners who don’t know, in the early 20th century, we had this problem where you had ecology and you had kind of the biologists who were measuring a whole bunch of stuff in disagreement with these kind of evolutionary models.

So evolutionary models, you’ve got apparently things are genetic and, know, you’ve got pea plant experiments that suggest that there are tall genes and short genes and yet the human height looks like a Gaussian distribution, a normal distribution. How does that work? So you have to marry, you have to figure out how this stuff and, you know, there’s a whole bunch of math, there’s a whole bunch of people who came together, Wright, Fisher, Hamilton and so on. They come to, well Hamilton was later, but they come together and they figure it out. They say, actually, it turns out the reason that we have a continuous distribution is because of the environment, but also because things are polygenic.

you have lots of additive individual effects that then… Replicate if you like a continuous distribution, even though in reality we have little genes. That’s what needs to happen for progress studies in my view. So cultural evolution provides the backdrop, the broad framing, the equivalent of evolution, and then now you’re on the ground and I think economics has a lot to say about that, history and historical contingencies and very specific path dependencies that take place have a lot to say about that. And I guess that’s why, you know, we started things like the database of religious history because we wanted to get into the weeds and marry the science together.

There’s a bit of ways to go. That’s also why I’m obsessed with charter cities, right? Because it’s the way the rubber meets the road. It’s like the tire meets the tarmac. We don’t have a lot of good models of development. Again, from a cultural evolutionary perspective, aid sucks. It’s not amazing from… So yes, it can increase education. It can provide that impetus that might move a system out.

But it often also does things like undermine farmers, right? Like how do you compete with free food that’s coming out of America that’s producing way more or the fact that it props up autocratic regimes who would, who can use this to keep themselves in power, even if a little bit trickles down to the population. Whereas again, from a cultural evolution perspective, it’s the competition that’s really going to drive this. And if we look around the world, we see some success stories that seem somewhat organic, like

Japan to some degree, at least they wanted to bring in, you they were spending tons of money on German engineers coming in to teach them how to do stuff. They were borrowing stuff from cars and, you know, whiskey and they run other things. South Korea is another example of that. But other than that, it’s like city states, like we seem okay at governing ourselves at the level of these states. So in my view, this ecosystem of startup cities It’s like Silicon Valley. It’s the equivalent of the Hayekian firm competition where they’re learning from one another in the same way that the coffee shops are swapping ideas and they represent another model that could undermine these kind of autocratic corrupt states. But again, you have to do it in this careful way that there’s some alignment, the money’s splashing around. It’s not this tax haven or this gated community that doesn’t transform the local region. But in my view, it’s like…

It’s the best shot we have at a developed world. And to go back to the beginning of this conversation, the reason that it matters for a lot of people when I talk to people, they’re like, I just don’t care about what’s going on in Africa, if they’re being honest with me. And there’s a good reason to care. And the reason is because other people’s problems, insofar as you can’t control your borders, are very quickly going to be your problems. Right? And so, yes, should we be, you know, enforcing things and, of course we should, right? But we should also be trying like the equivalent of projects that might actually develop these regions will reduce the push factor.

Mark:I think in addition to that, there’s also just like having a large market is good. Having more people innovate is good. Obviously, there’s geopolitical competition right now with China and the US. But if China can develop a drug that saves cancer, that helps the US. And if there’s a lot more demand for cars or for airplanes or whatever in Africa because they’re a lot wealthier.

Michael: Yeah, of course.

Mark: Right, like that means there is a lot more reward for developing innovations along that matter. One kind of question.

Michael: Yeah, can I just interject? So just to say the edge of one discipline and the beginning of another is what you consider signal and what you consider noise. And so, you know, everything you just said, I totally agree with. I just take it for granted. You know, it’s like, why is China trying to do this, you know, the Shen Zeng Guangzhou thing all around the world? Because they know that it works. And, you know, of course, innovation is going to be good and increasing people’s welfare is going to be good for everyone. More people developing drugs and developing new technologies is great for the whole world. It’s great for humanity.

Mark: So I guess several kind of related questions on cultural evolution. I there’s a few, you told the story kind of up to industrialization, but now to a certain extent, we have like a global culture. It’s not like fully global, but it’s like largely global. Like arguably there’s like two poles, like US and China. But if you look, so like Robin Hansen, for example, has written that like, we’ve basically stopped building nuclear.

And it wasn’t just the US, right? Like it was US and almost everyone else. You had some exceptions, like France did it for energy dependence largely in the 70s. But like his argument is basically that because we have a single global culture that is largely mimetic, it’s not even like formal regulatory prohibitions. It’s just like, right, kind of US is viewed as the highest status, most influential. So when South Koreans designed their

nuclear program, they’re like, okay, let’s just kind of copy some version of America is take our cues from them, which ends up making it prohibitive to build new nuclear energy. And right, like, there is this kind of risk now that we have a single global culture that if this global culture, right, isn’t facing competitive culture forces from other sides, it becomes stagnant, it drifts to the wrong path, and that leads to kind of very negative outcomes.

Michael: Yeah, so, you know, Robin and I actually had a podcast where we forgot to hit record. We spoke for us about two hours on this very topic. So let me, you know, so I’m very first of all, I’m very sympathetic. So I do think that that’s part of what’s going on. And you can see little indications of this, right? So under conditions of uncertainty, let’s say with the universities right now, people are like, well, what’s Harvard going to do? they’re doing a hiring freeze. We should do it. You don’t go wrong following Harvard, right? So similar kind of thing. It’s like the US goes down this direction. You don’t go wrong following the US. The only thing that I can see fighting against that is when things don’t go so well or you accidentally discover something else that works well for you or you try that thing and it doesn’t seem to work. So you recombine it into something that Singapore isn’t quite. Harry Lee Kuan Yew is a very British man, really. But, he decided this couldn’t just be a British state, it would be its own thing. So I think that’s part of it. But I don’t know if that’s the like, I’m big on. I think one of the biggest missteps that created many of the problems that we’re facing today was the stillborn nuclear revolution. And the fact that we’re restarting these on the back of AI is massive. I think that yeah. Is a big part of it. But I think there were other forces as well that, know, the oil industry, for example, there are other forces that would be incentivized to not lead to an era of cheap electricity and the electrification of just about everything. Yeah, so…

Mark: Yeah. I mean, the other kind of, I don’t know, global cultural issue that strikes me as a big problem is fertility, right? And now basically you’ve got Africa is above replacement. Yeah, go for it.

Michael: Yeah. Sorry, I just wanted to add one more thing. So another place you see this is in the contrast between China and the United States. I have a model that tries to explain why China has these long periods of stability punctuated by rapid change where everybody changes. And we show that you can recover this if the population is highly conformist and not as, know, and you have a different, a slightly different social structure. So in the United States, no one person is able to kind of dominate the scene. It’s a constant flow of different competing ideas. Not only is the federal state structure set up that way, but in general, know, people’s levels of skepticism and conformity, you do you, highly individualistic. Whereas in China, that leads to conformity and it leaves to stability for a long time, unless you’re in the right place, you’ve got the right connections, and then you puncture the whole thing. And for the very same reasons that they were stable, they then move to a different place. So you get these kind of eras. And I think that’s kind of what’s going on in the world as well today, where you get the more we centralize, the more we have like, everybody has to agree to this set of laws, you know,

European Human Rights Court, whatever, we’re all subject to this whole thing, the more that it squashes this, but there are always going to be places that want to do it and those end up being the skunkworks, the places that they’re trying new policies. And again, to go back to the whole, I’m talking to CCI, Or the Charter Cities podcast. This is why cities is so important because it allows for the kind of policy experimentation that is very difficult to do in a highly centralized structure. So the United States gets away from this a little bit. Like, so Justice Brandeis, you he refers to each state as a laboratory. And that really helps.

Here’s an example, many people probably know this one. 19th century law means that you can’t enforce non-compete agreements in California. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? You don’t know. You actually don’t know in advance because, you know, companies have to protect their patents, but it’s good for ideas to flow around. It turns out when the tech sector came out, they figured that out and it ended up being a really good thing because you can just grab talent and you get the patents alongside it and you get cross patents and ways of dealing with it. So other states start to copy it. And eventually, as of like in April last year, 2024, before, it becomes federal law. But if you don’t have that kind of experimentation, then I think the, you let’s call them Hansen effects, you know, start to start to happen and the whole population can drift toward bad things. And you’re about to talk about fertility, which is of course what Robin and I spent an hour talking about. So just ask me first and then I’ll say it.

Mark: Yeah. I mean just touching on your kind of experimentation. mean, to me, like a lot of the questions are just yeah, at what level? like, this is kind of an Ostromian question, which is like, what is the optimal level of decision making for what unit? This is sort of what we’re hoping to do with Zanzibar a little bit, right? Create a hub in East Africa, both with the African urban lab which is a partnership with the African School of Economics where you are a director of one of the programs, I want to say. Research lead.

Michael: Research leads, I don’t know what the title is. Person who does stuff in cities, technology and innovation.

Mark: Yeah, and then too, like Zanzalu, which is our one month festival. There is like, okay, right, like, and I think this is especially important as like the US kind of, let’s call it, I don’t know, the long arm of the US global policeman kind of begins to recede, right, we will see a lot more institutional experimentation and innovation regionally. And right, like I think the US wanted to basically pound every state into a somewhat recognizable counterparty where they would say like, okay, we need you to like, our government people need to be able to meet your government people and our corporations need to be able to get the right permits to invest to limit liability. And as we see the US withdraw, I expect we’ll see a lot more institutional diversity in these places with different institutional forms, different kinds of structures take the form.

I suspect most of them are going to be worse than their previous instantiation, but hopefully some of them will be better and we’ll be able to kind of push things, push things a little bit along.

Michael: Yeah, yeah, that’s right. I’m not sure if there’s a question, but I agree with all of that. You know, one of the nice things is if you’re not at the technological frontier, like China for a long time was not at the technological frontier, then you can just steal, right? Like we should be doing a lot more policy theft. You can’t just take something from one place and bring it to another. You have to make it your own. But that kind of learning, I think, is quite possible. I mean, one example of this was like Estonia. The tiger leap, their education revolution, 1991, Soviet occupation ends, 97, they’re like, we’re a small country, we’re not very rich, but what we do have is people who care about education, we should just be stealing the best practices from around the world and this technology thing seems important. So they go reading, writing, arithmetic and algorithms as a fourth pillar. They start to teach elementary school kids how to program. They’re programming little robots to do geography lessons. It’s like today we’re on China, what do we know about China and so on. And it leads to them being the Western countries in reading, in mathematics, in science, right? And they can do that because they’re not at the technological frontier. They can kind of steal and borrow, but then because in that adaptation they learn a bunch of stuff, they become an exemplar that other countries can then learn from.

So I think a similar story could happen in Zanzibar, that’s my hope, that’s why I’m involved in it, which is, you you got the Harvard and MIT thing going, you’ve got IIT’s very first international campus, you’ve got the African School of Economics, you’ve got Silicon Zanzibar and Zanzalu and all of the, you know, let’s bypass garments and go straight to technology. And the only piece that I see missing from this nice little pipeline is the lower education section. So elementary and high school is abysmal. You’ve got class sizes over 100. You have textbooks shared three to four kids. Poor teacher training. So at the moment, one of my projects is running a pilot study looking at how AI and teaching kids how to safely and effectively use AI for the purposes of learning might actually lead to a better place. This is my last call, funders. This is another one you might want to fund.

Yeah, so this would be this, think then that then the circle is complete and it would just, it has all the reasons to be like an engine of growth but like with all startups, most startups fail, but we’re doing our best here.

Mark: Yeah, and so, yeah, kind of going back to the previous question on global culture, one of the, guess, like obviously fertility is kind of crashing around the world. Like Africa is only part continent above replacement. And you’ve got like some in Central Asia, think Uzbekistan, Afghanistan still above replacement. But it’s obviously right, pretty abysmal globally. And this isn’t just a recent phenomenon, right? If you look at kind of my understanding is for the Roman upper class, right? They were basically at or below replacement fertility for a lot of part of the Roman Republic, much of the Roman Empire, right? And this kind of, what’s most surprising to me is, or it kind of is, the standard story is female education, whereas women get more educated and more empowered, fertility rates drop, which obviously has a degree of truth. But if you look at, right, like North Korea, North Korea, when I last checked their fertility rate,

Michael: It goes like that.

Mark: It was reported at about two. And again, it’s North Korea, so who knows how valid those statistics are, but it feels like it’s, like I would expect it on there, like five or six, just because it’s extremely poor. think like a thousand or 1500 per capita GDP, like largely agricultural. I mean, it’s communist, so I assume female education is probably better than most like 1500 per capita GDP places, but men are probably getting like, all right, you’re 12 years old, go work the farms, right? women are probably being treated similarly. And two, it’s also very culturally isolated, right? They intentionally throw up as many firewalls as they can to minimize foreign kinds of ideological influence. I guess like one, it’s kind of like crashing fertility is a problem. And two, it defies, like this kind of major demographic trend kind of defies a simple explanation. I don’t know if you agree, if you disagree, but like, it feels like, I don’t know, in some ways, like, counter to the standard evolution point, which is like, all right, we’re richer, we’re more successful, like, why aren’t we propagating our genes more? So I don’t know how you think about all those factors.

Michael: Yeah, I think a lot about this. So I don’t, you know, I don’t, have speculations about what might be going on. I don’t obviously know the answer. So what I actually think is this is an example of something that’s been called cultural runaway selection.

So it’s the equivalent of the peacock’s tail. So in genetic runaway, know, typically through sexual selection, the peacock, you know, wants to have a small tail actually, but the P hen loves the sexy tail. And so the peacock ends up with as large a tail as possible, even though it’s going to get captured by predators, it still has to have this in order to get laid really. And so you end up with this suboptimal tail.

I think there’s an equivalent in culture. So Boyden Richardson actually suggested this to explain like all body tattooing, where basically initially, know, tattoos are dangerous, you know, in a world before antibiotics and stuff. And so you have a few, but eventually you need to fill your whole body in order to have the same signal value. I think a similar story has happened here with what we consider to be prestigious. And that prestige can then lead to runaway. So we value very heavily economic success of both sexes.

And that has all kinds of implications. Elizabeth Warren has this book, I don’t know if you’ve read it, called The Two Income Trap. And she talks about the fact that same number of resources, having both. It used to be the one person, typically the man, would go to work and a woman would go in and out of the workforce as needed, as the family needed it. But when both people were working and they required both incomes to buy a house and to do all these things, they put them in a very precarious situation because if one of them lost their jobs, it threatened bankruptcy for the family. So not all these other effects but in order to compete on the marketplace and you know because we value so if it were the case, I’m rambling a little bit, but if it were the case that you said to people I have 10 kids and they treated that in the same way that you exited you know with with nine figures we’d see a lot more people with 10 kids.

But we don’t. So we’ve kind of gone this runaway where you get more and more value from your economic output. And so people double down on whatever it takes to do that. And typically that comes at the cost of fertility, particularly among women. And if you look in a lot of surveys suggest that women’s ideal number of children ends up being a lot higher than the number of children they actually have. You know, and you’re below two or if you go to South Korea.

Mark: And like the US is like 2.5, I think we’re at like 1.7, I think in the US.

Michael: Yeah, exactly. So basically, you’re pushing on this new selection pressure, which is the ability to give birth at an older age, but trading off against economic output. So how does that shift? I mean, first off, if you have prestigious figures who can drive cultural change. So the fact that for people who like Elon Musk, the fact that he’s got, I actually don’t know how many kids he has at the moment, but at least a dozen.

Mark: 12, 13.

Michael: That’s somewhere out there, right? That’s a pro-fertility thing. It used to be religion that had some of that. So in order to have your religious standing, know, pro-fertility was associated with that. With the die down of the few things that made that prestigious, people stopped investing in it when they had control over it. Would be my story.

Mark: So, changing gears a little bit, like, as in this conversation, my understanding is most kind of cultural evolution focuses on group selection. It’s kind of like assumed, right? Like you’ve got a set of groups that have some degree of random variation or innovation or whatever, and they compete and the good ones win and expand, right? But if you look at the modern world, what feels much more relevant than group selection is, I don’t know, might be described as group interaction. Like there’s probably a more technical term for it.

Right. Where if you look at it like this happens in several ways. One is just immigration. Right. Like the U.S. obviously has had waves of immigrants that are shaped by the U.S. but also helped shape the U.S. Like kind of the good old symbol of like Americana. Right. Like hot dogs, white picket fence, nice manicured lawn is much more like a German symbol than like an English symbol. Right. And like Germans are obviously not the founding ethnic group of America. They came in largely in the 19th and early 20th century.

And similarly, where America has a great deal of Hispanic innovation today, and that’s probably going to shape what America looks like in 50 years. You’ve got like the United Kingdom, I think 6 % of the United Kingdom’s population now is Muslim, which is probably like right, Central, South Asian, plus maybe Middle Eastern that’s beginning to shape Europe. And so like, I don’t know, like if this has like formally been modeled in some of your or your colleagues research, but how do you think about not just the like, I don’t know, right? Like, I don’t know, how does this kind of feature?

Michael: Yeah, so first off, cultural group selection doesn’t actually, so one of the common misconceptions is it’s actually not selection between groups, like it’s not a cultural form of group selection, it’s selection on cultural groups. And by cultural groups, they’re actually groups of traits, not groups of people.

So the thing is that people can switch traits and thereby change their group affiliation. And the four best studied ways that cultural groups compete with one another is, the first is kind of direct competition. So that’s the one I think you have in your head, which is firms are born, they have particular traits that help them grow in the market or not, and they go bankrupt or they get merged and acquired by other firms.

You rarely see this in the actual world. So one example of this is in New Guinea. You get tribes that are ethno-linguistic groups and they commit genocide with the neighboring tribe in the other valley completely replacing them. Most of the time you have one of the other three mechanisms. So one of them is migration. So on the back of the traits that the group has, they bring in new migrants and those new migrants will assimilate to some degree, but then of course also bring their own traits.

So, you two great books on this, maybe you them as Albion Seed, the four British folkways that formed America and American nations, which is, the various other groups like the Spanish, for example, Germans and so on, who also imprinted. And today, you know, the fault lines on voting and the fault lines, know, the South, Greater Appalachia, California and so on, still track those because people do assimilate to that.

So, yeah, so there’s direct competition, there is migration. The other one is demographic growth. So there are things that just allow the group to organically grow. This is most often the case with things like religion, right? So the religions that were pro-fertility, like the Mormons, they went from like obscure cult to, we have a presidential candidate who’s Mormon on the back of polygamy and large families and emphasis on family, right? So that’s an example of kind of demographic transition. And the final one is prestige bias cultural group selection.

which is where a group just acquires the traits of another group and thereby becoming part of that group, even though it’s not through migration, it’s not the people of change that have just taken on the traits. So the spread of democracy, for example, is a good example of that, where for a long time, autocrats would pretend to have elections. Why do they do that? Because we all agreed that democracy was the way we should be governing ourselves. When I teach this in class, I put up a photo from Japan where you’ve got Japanese hip hop artists, and they’re dressed like African Americans.

There’s no reason they need to dress like African Americans, but that’s part of the import of hip hop culture into Japan. was entirely this kind of prestige bias cultural group selection. So I think that, I mean, those are probably not the only mechanisms. There’s other things like overlapping groups, the fact that people long to multiple groups and thereby bridge, they form bridges for cultural transmission to occur. Leaders, for example, form groups of leaders and they can be quite influential in their separate groups. But I think for 80 % of the phenomena I’ve seen,

This does a decent job of explaining what’s going on at the level of Darwinian evolution. You then have to get into the weeds, as I said earlier, about ecology.

Mark: And I mean, you’re a professor at a university and universities are kind of going through a major kind of crisis, one of the bigger ones in the last few decades to the extent, right? Like one in the US, they’re under a lot of funding pressure because the Trump administration is kind of targeting them in part because of past, right? Like DEI requirements and statements, as well as kind of what the Trump administration would probably describe as hostility towards Israel, you have that combined with the fact that universities, college age populations in the US peaked like five, six years ago. So there’s kind of demographic decline that is threatening revenue combined with you’ve got this kind of prestige threat where right now, like from kind of the TO fellowship, right now in Silicon Valley, for example, it’s higher status to drop out of Stanford than it is to graduate from Stanford.

And then you’ve got the question of like, is all of this research funding being used effectively? Like if science is slowing down and it’s getting funded more than ever, right? Like where in this chain is, is, is, is breaking. So like, I don’t know to what extent, like you think about these things, what extent they’re your, your, your kind of university life is, is, is impacted to them. And to what extent, like given that universities are a key driver of cultural evolution in some ways, right? Like how your, your, your kind of research inputs into your kind of considerations of some of these things.

Michael: Yeah, I mean, lots of things to be said here. I will try to say them in some reasonable order. I mean, the first thing to say is like, you know, I’m an issues guy, not a tribe guy, so I’m pretty centrist. And, you know, it feels to me like, you know, anyone who’s in the center is ducking as the axe swings from one side to the other. You had like crazy administrative overreach on the left for a long time. And now you’ve got administrative overreach on the right, which is, which is, you know, maybe there’s a correction basically going on and I totally get where everybody’s coming from. The second is there is a place for basic science research, right? Like not everything needs to be applied and it doesn’t need to be immediately applicable. I mean, we wouldn’t have gotten to cryptography if we hadn’t done some number theory beforehand and discovered one way functions, right?

And so when computers came out, it was the ideal, you that was great. We had everything we needed to make the internet work. But at the same time, you know, in my view, at least for a lot of my work, if it doesn’t work in the real world, it actually doesn’t work at all. And there’s a lot of research whose value is questionable and that is not all that rigorous actually, right? So in my particular field, like I don’t know what that field is, but let’s call, let’s say psychology for now, you know, we had a replication crisis where, you know, 50 % of studies didn’t replicate, right?

How many billions of dollars went into producing flashy studies and TED talks that actually weren’t true, that were not true reflections of the world, right? When it came to social psychology, was a 25 % replication rate. It was 50 % actually for cognitive psychology and 36 % overall. That’s not great, right? That’s not great. And so there’s a lot of, there’s an alt-ac kind of I should speak personally. So because I’m not wedded to being a professor and never intended to become one, I do a lot of other things. I’m a scientific advisor at an AI startup, Electric Twin, where we’re replicating human behavior. I’m obviously involved in the development of new cities in Zanzibar. I also interact with what I would call alt-ac. Mark, I’d consider you kind of alt-ac.

Mark: What is alt-ac?

Michael: So alternative to academia. you’re still doing kind of research and you are, you’re doing things that an academic ought to be doing actually, like professors and researchers ought to be doing, but they’re just not, they’re not engaging with crypto. They’re not engaging with the marketplace and the market dynamics that are going on. They’re not, AI is a threat rather than something that ought to be. And the way that it’s being studied is just ridiculous actually and so far away from what’s going on in industry. Another example of alternate ALDA would be like what’s going on in a lot of companies, right? So there’s research going on in firms. There always has been Microsoft research, Yahoo research before that. You had folks like Duncan Watts, for example, you know, sitting in and out. So I think the Academy needs to have a serious conversation. Like at the moment, the way things are going, we’re to lose a lot of things as a result of not demonstrating sufficient value and allowing a lot of very low value and arguably even harmful research or I don’t even know what to call it, a scholarship, let’s call it, to exist and not pushing back on it and the way that it interacts with the world, we’re going to lose a lot, right? We’re cutting NIH funding for actual drugs that are actually helpful because we were allowing for things that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

What does the future look like? Sometimes, you know, I thought if I were to try to reform, reform a field, an agency, I’m not sure if there is a better way to do it than to kind of just cut it off and then look at what bleeds and build around what bleeds. And, know, maybe that’s the direction that things are going in. And I think that as an academic, God, I this doesn’t get me in trouble, but like as an academic need to wake up to that. The rest of the discipline, the rest of the academy needs to wake up to the way that we interact with the world. The ivory tower has to exist in a place where people understand. This is tax money we’re talking about, We’re civil servants. The way that people act sometimes, indirectly or directly, it’s either through student fees or through direct taxes being used for scientific research. And other kinds of research. Like we are civil servants and we ought to be able to justify our existence. And whether that is, you this is basic science that will one day be useful and that’s why Terry Tao should keep doing what he’s doing. Or whether, you know, this I’m actually now working with a company and we’re putting the science into action and that’s good for economic growth in this way. Or we’re actually out there testing it. And obviously some academics do this better than others. And obviously some universities do this better than others.

And some people are better at this than others. And some people’s work is more valuable. So I’m going to say all of that. The only caveat I would say to that is that scientific research is the nature of innovation is that you are at the forefront of knowledge and you don’t know what is like inherently. And so a high failure rate is to be expected. But that high failure rate means that you ought to be asking the world questions. That is likely to lead to some reasonable answers even if they suck. And when we have, you know, areas of scholarship that are divorced from reality, postmodernism, you know, divorced from how the world actually works and imposing on the rest of world how things are, you’re going to get a pushback and I think that’s what we’re seeing now and it’s going to be incredibly harmful at least in the short term.

Mark: Nope. So previously you had discussed your model for China where this kind of hot. Oh, yeah, I generally agree. I’m just trying to, I’m quite sympathetic to that point. I think academia has like, yeah, it’s one kind of too far in one direction. My read my understanding is basically right in the 60s, there is kind of a compromise between the

Michael: Wait, did you agree with all that or?

Mark: Science parts of academia and the humanities parts. Or is like, look, we’ll let the humanities parts go, hire activists, go do their thing, leave science alone. And that kind of truth worked for 60 years or so until now, when the humanities parts have started doing kind of a lot more, then they’re also starting to infringe on some of the science parts with some of their kind of restrictions and expectations, as well as starting to write, like make demands of society at large that are probably not the place of that part of academia to make those demands. And there’s a big pushback. mean, and then two, in addition to that, right, like at least in the US, I’m less familiar with abroad, but you’ve got the federal government, it would not be surprising to see Trump kind of cut student aid or substantially limit student aid, right? Because Biden basically waived some student aid payments, which was functionally a handout to his political supporters.

So seeing Trump do something similar, not to mention the red states are likely going to start looking at substantial cuts to state schools. I suspect a lot of the brun of that will fall in the humanities. And then you will also get a lot of collateral damage from some of the hard science programs that just fall by the wayside too. think there is a significant question for what a university looks like in 50 years, right? What role is it providing? What services are providing? All right, like are the smartest kids even going to university anymore? It’s kind of like before 10, 20 years ago, the highest status thing was MIT, Harvard, Stanford. Now the highest status thing is like getting in or maybe not even going and starting a company. And yeah, and right, how much prestige?

Michael: Yeah, as just a signal and then you think, yeah.

Mark: Is there available. UC University of Austin, which has been reasonably successful at least as creating a new kind of university model. How sustainable that is remains unclear, but they got out the gate stronger than I expected. Anyway, let me jump. I’m trying to jump to, yeah.

Michael: But you know, just the only thing I would say to all of that is that you when the economy slows, like, you when growth slows, you have to make some cuts, right? And so you end up doing things that are more valuable. And now, when things are booming, you can do crazy things and it’s fine because you can afford to do that. So, you know, that includes everything from like high energy physics, like we need another collider to parts of, let’s say, the humanities that just don’t seem immediately useful. My only concern around this is that the people doing it are painting this kind of broad brush.

I’m, there are aspects, like take the database of religious history, or let’s call it the database of history. It’s a humanities project, but the humanities could be doing things on their own accord a lot better, right? It’s a digital humanities project that emerges because, you know, engineers and economists and evolutionary biology get together. And, and a lot of historians are actively antagonistic to the very idea of looking for patterns in history, like to the point where they just do not want to touch anything to do with that. A lot don’t want to use AI to be measuring this stuff, but there is also the good side of this. We do need good scholarships in the past. James C. Scott doesn’t get to write his book unless we’ve got good humanities, but then there’s also the crazy side of things. We can leave it there, I think.

Mark: Yeah, I mean, it’s also right oftentimes when I’m reading history, I’ll try to read history that was written before 1960, or like 1970. I remember I was reading a book on Zanzibari history, and there was one like an early book, written in 1920, which was just like a very autistic presentation. It was like, here is Zanzibar, here are the facts, here are the people, here are where they come from, here’s how they interact, here are their practices, just like, listing that all out. Not super charismatic, but really useful for just like intake of knowledge. There was a book from like 1980. I remember it was talking about the, it was like, okay, the British are evil and the Omanis who controlled Zanzibar, Zanzibar was actually the head of the Omani Sultanate for like 30 years. So it wasn’t just part of the Omani Sultanate, it was the head.

And then the Sultan died and one of his sons went back to Oman, one of the sons stayed in Zanzibar. And they were talking about, right, it was basically a slave trading hub. And they were like, okay, but this wasn’t as bad as the British because if a slave owner slept with, slash raped a slave, the son was considered a free person. And therefore, the slavery wasn’t that bad. And it’s just like, okay, is that better than them being a slave? Yes. But is that really the framing that is appropriate in a book about Zanzibari history?

Especially when literally I think was the shortest war in human history was the British versus I guess it was the Omani Sultanate at the time where the British were like, hey guys, end slavery. They were like, no. And the British fired a few cannon shells and 30 minutes later, were like, just kidding. We surrender. The shortest war in human history, which was like, yeah, the British ending slavery and then seeing a book kind of written from this lens of like kind of making that slavery seem not that bad was just like, okay, this is like kind of a goofy framing that kind of makes it really difficult to trust the facts and the presentation of the rest of the book because of what are kind of very mismatched kind of ethics and priorities than I have. And I don’t think that’s a single book that is a large.

Michael: Yeah, it will be totally

Mark: Another book this was written in the 80s as kind of a reaction to this I think Which kind of looked at the fall of Rome because for a while there were people like look right the fall of Rome Like oh it wasn’t that bad people claim it was like civilizational collapse But in fact these people just went to their like indigenous ways of knowing whatever and like I’m caricaturing them so But yeah this book looked at it was like no look you can look at the areas of room that fell and see trade patterns. Like the pottery now came from 10 kilometers away instead of from 100 kilometers away. Right?

Like it’s pretty easy to actually track like economic sophistication dropped substantially and that led to worse standards of living for people. And yeah, that focus on, I don’t know, truth underlying reality has dropped out, unfortunately, of some university departments. And that’s part of the reason for the kind of swing back these days.

Michael: Yeah, I hear you. I have a sub stack on autism and how I create autism culture. Normally you should if you haven’t read it, I think you’d enjoy it. But I think I think that’s kind of one of the conflicts we’re seeing in the world, like there’s enough people on the spectrum to form communities and build companies and operate. Then eventually, as the company grows, you end up with people who don’t prioritize just plain speaking truth who are just obsessed with I just want to know the answer. Like I don’t like I’ll decide what the implications of the answer are after I know the answer.

But first I want to know the answer and you know and science is a kind of autistic enterprise when it’s done in that way because it’s aligned with I just want to know the truth. I’ll figure out what I want to do with that after I know the truth. And there has been a breakdown of that like you know in my neck of the woods talking about. The fact that islam is the most culturally distant religion from the west you know i’ve had journals try to like block that you know or or showing that labor force participation more culturally distant migrants is lower and it’s not to do with female labor force participation. I’ve had editors just say like, you can’t publish that, you can’t say things like that. Or if you try to say even publicly that, yeah, lots of bad stuff happened and it depends on when you’re talking about the empires. But if you were going to be, like if you were going to be colonized. You were best being colonized by the Brits. People can’t compare this, you know, but I mean, if you look, that’s what, you know, the economics show, right? That they laid down better institutions that led to better outcomes for those countries relative to at least, you know, the French and the Spanish and the Portuguese and certainly the Germans and Belgians. But you can’t, like a lot of people, like the very idea of saying that you’re defending colonialism, you’re defending whatever, but you can have, you can also, like in my view, the job of the scientist is a more clear-eyed view of how the world works. And this is where this is really going to play out, just to bring it back to the earlier stuff, is the ancient DNA stuff. There are implications of that. Go read David Reich’s work that I don’t think people are ready to deal with.

Mark: You have that, I think the US has some public, my understanding is that some public, government sponsored data sets of basically DNA and they restrict access to them depending on what research questions you’re asking. And so if you ask research questions that are uncomfortable, then you don’t get access to it.

Michael: So they will let me know, right? Yeah, you don’t get access to the files, which, right, like, look, if it’s your private DNA, like, sure, if it’s your private data set, like, people should be able to do private property what they want, but like, for the government to intermediate these disputes, right, the truth is gonna come out because this technology exists, and it just ends up making the people trying to man the walls look a little bit foolish.

Michael: Yeah, right. And the other problem, Mark, is that like that should be a societal discussion, not the, you know, the purview of like a few administrators. Like, we see this all the time, right? Like, I would love to see it published. Everyone who tries to access, you know, all of these restricted data sets and the kind of questions they’re asking, just make that public. Like, I want, I want people to know what we’re saying yes and no to and see if they agree. If they agree, fine, you know, but if they don’t, I think, I think you’re going to discover we have a real problem here where we have gatekeepers who were never elected to be gatekeepers that are halting and holding back, actually important questions that have human welfare, human flourishing progress and development implications.

Mark: Yeah, I think it’s especially like the new technologies coming out, namely, yeah, vast drop in cost of DNA sequencing, plus kind of a lot more research into historical DNA and migration patterns. It’s possible to keep quiet when it costs a million dollars to sequence every. Genome but once it’s a bit cheaper and there’s a bunch of alternative mechanisms, it was only what, like $23 billion, $23 million was 23andMe before it got delisted from a stock exchange and declared bankruptcy.

Michael: Yeah, well, all of that data is going to get bought. Let’s see where that goes.

Mark: Hopefully not by the Chinese. Hopefully we had a competent government. Anyway, so yeah, switching gears a little bit. Like previously in this conversation, you had mentioned your kind of model for China, which was a highly conformist society that kind of explained the ups and downs, periods of stability versus periods of chaos, where like when you have high conformity, you might be a little bit more likely to kind of follow the leader and a little bit less likely to change things. And that leads to perhaps systems getting baked in for longer than they’re like evolutionarily ideal. And that makes the kind of disruption process much more difficult. One, is that a fair summary of that framework?

Michael: Yeah, except a bit about, you know, even leaders can be constrained by that process. So it’s just that you can have particular leaders who end up with enough support that they can actually spread this kind of stuff. Like, I mean, you know, I didn’t realize this, but Mao, for example, he was kind of a social scientist. Like he went out and he was doing these surveys out in these villages to figure out what people wanted and how to do this. And then on the back of that, he launches this revolution.

Mark: Yeah, interesting. My kind of question, yeah, it’s like, let’s say you can change some of the, like, I don’t know, like, let’s call it traits of humanity or of like a subpopulation. What traits, like, would you change and what outcomes would you have? So if you’ve got a conformity dial, right, you dial it up or you dial it back, or maybe you’ve got an agreeableness.

A violence dial, trust dial, like where you can imagine dialing this up and dialing it back. Like how does human society differ and how might it differ at different periods in history where, right, like, I don’t know, agreeableness might be very selected for now, but maybe in Hunter-Gatherer society agreeableness was like less selected for.

Michael: Yeah. So there’s a concept in evolution called evolvability, which is really like the mean variance trade off. So you can be well adapted to the situation to a particular ecology. Like you’ve got beaks that fit perfectly the seeds. But the problem is if you don’t have variation where you have suboptimal beaks, if the seed size changes, your species goes extinct. So what you actually want is a lot of suboptimal behavior out there in the world and that’s about the behavior that actually allows the system to evolve into you know to change. However, I think that there are some discovered cultural traits that are difficult to defend but are essential to the evolutionary process and to progress. One example of that is free speech. Free speech is freaking weird. The fact that it was enshrined in a constitution, is, Americans take this for granted, it doesn’t exist pretty much anywhere in the world. Everyone claims to have free speech around the world, they don’t, because they’ll say except for and then the list of a litany of harms due to hate speech or whatever.

Blasphemy has been on the books forever. Like you’re not allowed to criticize God. You’re not allowed to religion. You’re allowed to criticize the leader. That’s mostly because of the rise of particularly Islam. You know, we’re getting blasphemy laws back in action in Europe. And there is no constitutional protection against it. There is no First Amendment and a Second Amendment to defend that right.

But free speech is essential. It’s the free speech of the synapses of the collective brain, right? It’s the connections between us. It’s the only way that ideas flow. You know, I don’t have to quote like John Sturr-Mill or something, but you know, if you don’t leave room for the truly vile and unconventional, you are robbing everyone’s right to hear that. But also you assume that the conventions that we currently have are the right ones. And so you have to leave room so that we can decide in the future where we’re supposed to go. So if I could turn one thing up for the entire world, it would be defense of free speech. Like in the country that I live, I would love to see that.

Mark: Sure, but defensive free speech is not a, like, it might be a human value, but it’s not like a human trait. So like, is there a human trait? Like, I don’t know, agreeableness versus disagreeableness, right? People probably have a genetic propensity to be agreeable versus disagreeable. And maybe disagreeableness is more favorable for free speech because then you’re willing to let people say things you don’t agree with without resorting to violence.

Michael: So what do you mean by a genetic thing?

Yeah, but see, personality traits are frequency dependent, right? Like the reason we have multiple traits. So actually, like the big five doesn’t replicate in smaller scale societies. You typically get like the big two. Which is like extraversion and agreeableness, like those two exist everywhere, but the others don’t. And it seems to correlate with like socio-ecological complexity. So you get more bifurcation and more independence of these different traits. The more like your society allows for different types of people where your coordinates in this five dimensional space. like there is, if there was like a right personality, like the one that should dominate over everything else, you wouldn’t see the other personality trait actually. So I wouldn’t be turning anything up. It’s fine for there to be this kind of frequency dependent and an evolutionary process tuning it. Both culturally.

Mark:I don’t know, it feels like, if height is partially genetically determined, it feels like personality is partially genetically determined. Like, I mean, I don’t know enough of the research to know like on exactly what axes, but like it does feel like, yeah.

Michael: Yeah, the propensity is in the same way that the Dutch weren’t all that tall until they started ingesting dairy and then they did. You know, the propensity. So even in these small scale societies, the propensity to be high in openness to new experience exists. But culture beats that down because openness gets you killed because it gets you to try things in a dangerous environment. Whereas in an environment where the market is large and there’s lots of innovations to be gained and entrepreneurship might actually pay a lot of the time, then openness to new experience is very good.

So what I’m saying is there is no right answer because it depends on the sort of like

Mark:Yeah, I’m not questioning. Yeah, like my question was not like a universal. My question. Well, no, no, I don’t really have a thing. It’s just like, right. So typically you see like people say like, the world would be better if everyone was more kind. And it’s like, I’m not sure that’s true. Like, yeah, like what does kindness mean? And then two, it’s probably good that you have like assholes on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor, figuring out how to allocate resources slightly better. Right.

Michael: Yeah, but do you have something in mind that you want to like, like just like a thing? YeahI don’t buy that. Yeah

Mark: And like for me, I agree like context dependent, right? Like the optimal set of traits is going to be different hunter gather versus like early stage agricultural versus like early stage city versus industrial era but it seems to me that there are like certain traits that would be preferable in certain environments. And I know. I haven’t put a lot of thought into that. It’s just like, it feels like it’s, it’s the other thing I’m trying to get at, which I’m not.

Michael: Yeah. I mean, it could be that there are things that come from our ancestral environment that are mismatched to the modern world. I mean, an example that, you know, a preference for eating sweet foods was really good when, you know, detecting sweetness was an indication of vitamins and calories in a world where calories were scarce. But today it just leads to obesity, right? It could be, but…

Mark: Yeah, the other thing I’m just trying to get at, and maybe I’m not doing a very good job, is like, right, you have a framework for cultural evolution. And part of it is we focus most of this discussion on cultural evolution itself, right, on how it’s changed, these things. But the other way to get at the framework is saying, look, let’s change some of the parameters that are not cultural evolution, some of the inputs to cultural evolution. How does that change your views on these outputs?

And that is kind of a way to test how to think about cultural evolution, to say, OK, look, if we change kindness scale, if we change conformity scale, how does that change how you think about cultural evolution and this set of optimal traits? I’m not sure I’m doing a good job of articulating it, but that’s kind what I’m trying to hint at.

Michael: Yeah, it could be a lie, I just might be misunderstanding you, but like I actually I don’t think it’s the firmware that I wouldn’t change the firmware because I think the stuff on top of the firmware like the cultural traits constraint. Let me give you an example. The dark triad, right? Psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism, right? People generally think that this sucks and we should get rid of this thing.

But I suspect that these traits are present in the population because A, we don’t study them well. So we think that psychopaths are impulsive. And the reason I think we think psychopaths are impulsive is because we study them when they end up in jail. reality, we catch the ones who get caught. And in reality, think most CEOs and most even the leaders that you might like, let’s say Barack Obama, I bet Barack Obama is a psychopath. I bet he’s a narcissist and I bet he’s Machiavellian because

Mark: The impossible ones get caught, yeah

Michael: He’s got to believe he’s better than everyone else to like wanna rise to the top says a narcissist he’s got to be mcveille actually get there and if you’re dropping bombs on kids in another country gotta be able to turn off the empathy right and maybe you want some that way

Mark: And part of this is also just going to be like, we’ve been talking about situation and how that influences traits and using that to be like, I don’t know, point in time, but there’s also like point in society. Right. And so even if Barack Obama didn’t have those traits fully instantiated when he’s 18 years old, right, like as he wins the elections, as he starts getting up there, right, like you start adopting more of these traits. But let me come up with a slightly different analogy to get this point to see if it makes sense. If not, we’ll move to the next point. But like, right, you’re using kind of the firmware like hardware software analogy, right? And like one way, we’re talking about Windows or Apple operating system or whatever, right? One way to understand the software is to change the hardware a little bit, right? Like you change the hardware a little bit and you see how the software operates. And like the software is gonna operate like a little bit differently depending on how the hardware is. And so my point is like, yeah, like we’ve been talking about the software all the time, like how do we think about like, minor alterations to hardware and seeing how the software interacts and what parts of the software we want to tweak depending on what changes to the hardware. I don’t know if that analogy works better, but that was what I’m trying to poke at.

Michael: Yeah, I get it. I guess my answer is that I just don’t have anything at that level because I think like a lot of it’s virtualization and you know, we don’t, maybe it’s simply that as someone trained in cultural evolution, I don’t think enough about the kind of little, mean, okay, curiosity maybe. So I think given how the fast paced nature of the world, more curiosity and less confidence in what people believe. Would allow for maybe some increases in the pace of change. People get really locked in and maybe a longer period of exploration versus exploitation. So we have these developmental periods where you’re kind of, what is it like your favorite songs are set by the time you’re 18 or something, your favorite kind of music. Like maybe a longer window on some of that stuff, given the pace of change would be useful for cultural evolution. Yeah, but I don’t think that’s really the… I don’t think the constraint is at the firmware.

Mark: Yeah, I agree it’s not. It’s more like a question of how to test intuition. It’s an intuition pump for the software in terms of you change the firmware and then that leads to forcing you to think differently about changes in the software.

Michael: Yeah, okay, let’s play with the intuition pump, right? So for example, I think that if we weren’t so conformist, right? And everybody, like the fact that we have different views, that would be a disaster actually because we would have to be able to coordinate on anything most people are don’t have the time and energy and and cognitive resources to be well-informed enough to have good opinions most of us should have opinions they should actually be what they do which is follow with the crowd things

Mark:I mean, yeah, so you change the conformity dial and in one case, like conformity dial up, you get better social coordination, but you might get worse innovation, right? Conformity dial down, you get lower innovation or better innovation, but perhaps worse social coordination. And like, depending on what of those you optimize for and what social context you’re in and how they might be instantiated, that depends whether you want to do the dial. And obviously the conformity dial is not, it’s part.

Michael: That’s right.

Mark: Hardware part software, like people probably have some genetic component that says, I am open to new experiences, I am disagreeable or agreeable, but there’s obviously a major cultural component that instantiates as they learn and interact.

Michael: Got it. Yeah, that’s right. And but but again, I think, you know, I guess maybe the maybe I’m just trying to find where we’re differing is that there is no like human nature per se, like there’s a lot of variation and structured variation. And that’s kind of important. So one example of this is like the way that innovation works. Right. So in societies that tend to be more loose rather than tight, more kind of open to new experiences, you get more leaps in innovation, but you also get more inequality. Right. Like so Silicon Valley and just the general American tech sector is it’s a graveyard of failure.

And you know, the Asian tiger mom model actually works really well in environments where the cost is very, is very high. More of the population gets to move up, but it tends to harm radical innovation. It leads to kind of incremental innovation. So we see this in different parts of China. There’s papers on that. We see this in Japan versus the United States. You see this kind of more incremental improvement, Kaizen, Shuhari, the bonsai, whatever this kind of thing, rather than this kind of like, and now we’re going to have flying cars, you know

Michael: And so, and so I want both of those. Like I want Japan, I want China, and I want the United States.

Mark: Yeah, we want one kind of maybe counterfactual to make this a little more concrete, right? Like, what is it? Like, understanding is like, what, 50,000 years ago, there was kind of the any population outside of Africa went through a bottleneck of like a thousand people, right? And let’s assume a different minor tribe survived, right? Like that minor tribe survived probably somewhat due to their own skill and probably somewhat arbitrary being in the right place at the right time. And it’s possible to imagine a different minor tribe survived with slightly different genetic and slightly different cultural features, right? Like what does the world look like today? And like, I don’t really know. I’ve never thought about this before, but it feels like it’s not going to be exactly the same. There are going to be like slight differences and feeling like how those differences play up depending on like what, how that bottleneck differs, like does feel like it’s not a trivial question.

Michael: Yeah, it could be, but I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that it would be all that different because I think so much of our cognition and so much of our values are not driven by that bottleneck. know, the difference between like, you know, the like, I’m not saying the genes don’t play a role in this. I’m just saying that like, I don’t think that is what has led to the differences that we see across the world today.

Mark: Even if not genes, even if they had like a slightly different starting culture, do you think that would have been outweighed by the subsequent history?

Michael: Yeah, I think path dependencies do matter. Like, I think like the path that China went down in its particular trajectory to do probably with its ecosystem and, you know, yeah, I think that’s true compared to, let’s say,

Mark:Yeah, so your intuition is like different kind of tribe makes it through the bottleneck 50,000 years ago. Different genes don’t matter, different culture probably does matter a little bit.

Michael: Yeah, think, yeah, that’s right. So I think the environment and the ecosystem, so even things like agricultural practices, So societies that practice plow agriculture tend to have a greater division of labor, even in second generation migrants, than societies that practice hoe agriculture, because it required a greater degree of strength, right? That was a product of the actual physical environment. Herder societies tend to have more honor culture. They are the descendants are in the South.

Mark: Yeah, I agree with all of these examples. To me, it’s interesting just because we have different intuitions about that. And I think we’ve agreed on most of other parts on this call is that I understand that culture matters. My intuition is like 50,000 years would be enough for the environment to determine cultural evolution substantially. So my intuition is that even if tribe makes it through Balinik 50,000 years ago,

Michael: Yeah.

Mark: Because even with kind of a substantially different culture, because it would have to follow similar evolutionary paths constrained by environment, that feels less deterministic than perhaps a slight difference in genes. that is just, intuition pump was useful in terms of getting.

Michael: Yeah, it’s interesting. just have, yeah, we just have a… Okay, so I guess let me share like what some of the stuff is. Just share some of the stuff in my head, right? So, you know, a lot of the ways that we think we now know are endowed by our education system, really. So many societies in the past and even today, some small scale societies count like this. One, two, three, many. Right? They don’t have a full counting system.

The societies that do, they did it because they use stones as a metaphor, the app that they download in their minds, or, you know, stones notched into clay, the beginning of writing, or they use body parts. Like we use a decimal system. There’s, as you know, there’s absolutely nothing special about the number 10. It could have been eight, right? In fact, I would lose two fingers so we could get back to eight so I can map back to binary more easily. 10 sucks, actually, right? So, yeah, so that ability to count. Is not a human ability, it’s an ability that was endowed. And you can see like that’s why it took us centuries to get to the concept of zero because zero is real. There’s no body part for zero. Zero stones or rocks is like zero. It’s nothing, right? And right up until the 18th century. So there’s a quote in my book from Francis Masuriz, who’s this Canadian. British mathematician i guess all the canadians are brits you know who says negative numbers darken the very fabric of reality is that right and it’s because they are is a really hard to understand until we move to a new metaphor and that if it was the number line so it would work for objects to movement of position and they gave us a new metaphor that enabled us to think in new ways

Right? So that’s numeracy. From my own data, if you think about things like logical reasoning, F, P, then Q, cognition, sorry, syllogisms. Alexander Luria, 1920s, goes out to Uzbekistan. He asked people, where it snows, the bears are white. In Navaja, Zimla, it snows, what color are the bears there? People with education were like, it’s white. People without education were like, I’ve seen a black bear here once. Maybe black?

You know, obviously humans can reason, like, obviously, but it’s a taught skill to some degree, right? The tendency to use these abstract categories and so on. So I guess, like, you if you look around you, like if you look at like the experience of the people that you interact with, even if you look at most of, you know, history, right, you in the last several centuries, you’re dealing with a population that is so highly cultured that you think that that’s what humans are like, and it’s not. It’s what like our particular cultural milieu is like, and that means that the latitude for what humans are capable of is actually a lot wider. And it is a lot less constrained than perhaps we think it is. And it just happens to be constrained in this way. So I guess that’s where my intuition is coming from.

Mark: Cool. That makes sense. Well, let me end. You previously mentioned kind of freedom of speech as one of the core, let’s say, values for continued evolution. Are there other two other values? So let’s say what are your top three values, like kind of based on your research, based on how it’s informed your world understanding, right? What are these key things that people should value? People should adopt experiments people should run, like kind of broadly defined to make sure like we can get the benefits of cultural evolution over the coming centuries.

Michael: Yeah, I mean, if I had to put this as number one, it would be like freedom of speech. I think the blockers in a lot of these places are corruption, which are really just low scales of cooperation, people prioritizing family and friends over the state.

Mark: But is that a blocker to cultural evolution or is that a blocker to economic growth? Like, let’s differentiate these because like they’re similar, like they’re both important, like, I’m not sure they’re the same.

Michael: Yeah, I mean, I’m not a values person. Like, I think they’re a blocker to cultural evolution insofar as… So I think they prevent these… Okay. I can talk out of two sides of my mouth on this one, right? So on the one hand, they prevent these communities from taking on ideas and taking on different ways of organizing themselves that would help them compete in the cultural marketplace. And at the moment, the only reason that they’re able, but then on the other hand, the reason that they’re able to exist in this way is because they’re exploited by other groups that give them the resources that they would do. Otherwise, just market competition between states. Wars or whatever would eliminate this. There is always a race to the bottom, Like in evolution in general, the moment resources fall, you’re more susceptible to disease and cancer and all of that stuff. And then the same is true in other places. Like the moment we’re no longer exploiting these high energy resources with efficient technologies, the, like when you’re at war, you want Churchill in charge. You want like the best general you’ve got in charge of the war. But when the war is over, why not your brother-in-law?

Why not Attlee who converts the whole thing into a social welfare state? And so I don’t know how to say that as a kind of like, what is the trait that’s required to make that work? It’s just the blockers to a lot of this stuff are these lower scales. Like Europe will bounce back and the, like who are the successes? It’s Europe and it’s daughters, right? Britain and its daughters really. America, Canada, New Zealand, Australia. In other cases that we don’t have a lot of examples. Of states that can on their own bring actually their own because there are aspects of their culture that I think are are valuable and ought to be recombined and would enrich the kind of cultural evolutionary landscape but they’re stuck in these places that and in these in these let’s say cultural groups or regimes that prevent them from properly participating in the human story. I mean just just to end on this you know I think if there’s if there’s like you know different people have like a know a north star right like a motivating thing.

Mine is that like there’s a thinking of humanity. There’s a there’s this awful mismatch between Opportunity, you know talent and opportunity like we don’t know what humans are capable of we know that Europeans in an era gone by we’re not at capacity and when empowered they were and There is a lot of wasted computation on the planet like human computation wasted on the planet because of circumstance of birth and that is the autistic side of me. It’s the inefficiency of the whole thing. Like meritocracy, another example, I guess is meritocracy. Like I would like to strengthen meritocracy, but do it in a way that we are still judging society on the best of us, the middle and the least of us, right? Like we’re judging it as the whole distribution, but we still allow for a system that is able to kind of rejuvenate. And if you read my book, a lot of the suggestions are kind of aligned with that, right? They’re like, how do we…

A lot of redistribution is distortionary. Is there a way to do it in a way that’s non-distortionary? You know, has things like land value taxes. Yeah, you asked a broad question. I gave you a broad answer.

Mark: Cool, well great. Thanks so much for coming on. As a reminder, his book is A Theory of Everyone. Thanks for coming.

Michael: Thank you so much for having me on the show. Loved it.

[OUTRO]

Mark Lutter: Thanks for listening to the Charter City podcast. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. You can follow us on your favorite podcasting platform or subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you enjoyed this conversation, we’d appreciate you sharing it on social media. Thanks for listening and we hope to see you again.

About the Author(s)

Mark Lutter

Dr. Mark Lutter is the Founder & Executive Director of the Charter Cities Institute.

Mark Lutter

Dr. Mark Lutter is the Founder & Executive Director of the Charter Cities Institute.

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Michael Muthukrishna on the Charter Cities Podcast

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Charter Cities Podcast Episode 72: Michael Muthukrishna on Cultural Evolution and the Human Advantage

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Mark Lutter

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