MM notes, chapter 1

Continuing my review of Michael Muthukrishna's A Theory of Everyone

This is the second essay in a series. The first essay is here.

Chapter one starts by acknowledging that

the world is complicated. Arrows of causality showing what causes what split, rejoin, point in multiple directions, and even feed back on each other.

He points out that the economic backwardness of North Korea relative to South Korea illustrates the importance of institutions, but institutions

can’t explain why different ethnic groups have different outcomes in the same country. For that you might need to understand culture and intergroup competition.

MM focuses in this chapter on four factors: energy, innovation, cooperation, and evolution.

The ultimate ceiling on the biomass and complexity of all life forms is the availability of energy. . .Energy is why you and I enjoy a life that would be the envy of the richest monarch a few centuries ago.

Life innovates new ways to efficiently capture and control available energy in competition with other life. . .These innovations, whether biological, technological, or social, increase the amount of energy available by discovering ways to use more of it or use it more efficiently.

When there is sufficient energy to exploit and more that is reachable with the help of just a few more helpers, we can make the leap and work together to capture it. . .

The more energy unlocked, the larger this space. The larger this space, the larger the possible scale of cooperation.

The exploitation of energy, the way in which we innovate, and the mechanisms of cooperation are typically not intelligently designed solutions but rather the product of millions of attempts, with successes outcompeting failures [evolution].

I would note that energy is a tangible force. Innovation, as driven by humans, comes from ideas—it is a mental force. Cooperation is a social force. And evolution is an intertemporal force.

I do not buy the claim that this schema of four forces is sufficient for understanding humanity. Among the forces that are left out are: the tangible elements of food cultivation, geography, and transportation; the mental elements of information, including the inventions of writing, printing, the telegraph, and the Internet; the social elements of belief systems, particularly relative to markets, trade, and innovation; and the intertemporal elements of revolutions and wars.

Borrowing from Charles Hall, MM calls attention to the Energy Return on Investment (EROI), which is the ratio of energy output to energy input.

The EROI of coal ranges from around 10 to 80. . .The EROI of oil and natural gas are much more variable because of the variety of sources, but the EROI has been falling for a century. Consider oil discovery:

In 1919 1 barrel of oil found you at least another 1,000.

In 1950 1 barrel of oil found you another 100

In 2010 1 barrel of oil found you another 5

We can see where falling EROI would be a problem. Moreover,

The EROI of renewables is much lower than that of fossil fuels. Photovoltaic solar panels are currently in the single digits, typically no higher than 2 to 4, and the higher values are really only when you add a battery.

In MM’s framework, when prehistoric man began hunting and eating large animals, that was an innovation.

Meat is the original superfood, offering a denser energy source than plants.

MM views the industrial revolution as consisting of the innovations that enabled us to exploit the energy density of coal. I would point out that this is a very controversial take on what sparked the industrial revolution. Many economists instead focus on institutional and cultural changes that encouraged commerce. The Netherlands, which enjoyed an early economic take-off, is not rich in coal.

For me, the most interesting ideas in this chapter, and indeed in the entire book, concern how the scale of human interdependence depends on energy surpluses.

More abundant, high-density, high-powered energy sources with higher EROI lead to a corresponding increase in the complexity and scale of cooperation. This increasing scale happens because the potential pay-offs are higher and it may be worth working together with others to access the reward. The reward is large enough that even if it’s shared, it’s still worth working with others.

If there is not much energy surplus to be exploited, we stay in small units of organization and we do not engage in much specialization and trade. With more energy surplus, the gains from economies of scale and from specialization and trade are sufficient to motivate us to create the institutions that facilitate large corporations and states.

MM describes the current state as one of declining energy surplus. We could improve by making more use of nuclear energy (fission), which he says has an EROI of 75. Eventually, he believes that we will see fusion.

Once we reach the next fusion-fueled energy level, we will enter a new era of peace and prosperity. It will make our current era, with all its conflicts, seem to our descendants as primitive and barbaric as we see the Middle Ages…

To repeat the story: when new discoveries allow humans to better exploit energy, an energy surplus appears. Humans cooperate at larger scale. Eventually, the surplus gets used up, and cooperation starts to break down. We are in such a period today.