It's reasonable to say that cooperation is downstream of trust, but nonsense to say that trust is downstream of "energy surplus".
Trust is downstream of robust, behavior-regulating institutions reliably ensuring trustworthiness by being good at detecting and penalizing violations. If such institutions are formally organized, they must be explicitly dedicated to this purpose as the prime mission.
Strong Trust-Making Institutions are downstream of some set of essential elements of what it takes to maintain such institutions and prevent them from succumbing to a number of common Social Failure Modes such as capture, diversion, entropy, corruption, decay, degeneration, etc.
I would be *much* more interested in a book or study of those elements. We have acquired a lot of insight into the failure modes which contributed to "the decline and fall of X" for a lot of X's. It seems to me we really need to shift focus to what it takes to keep Beneficial and Strong Trust-Making Institutions both Strong and Beneficial over the long-run.
Just spit-ballin' here but is it possible that trust building institutions are more likely to form when energy surplus is higher? I'm thinking of Joe Henrich's theory that monotheism, with an all powerful, all knowing God who will punish you when no one else can or will arose in response to increasing specialization and trade after the development of agriculture, and the need to treat strangers fairly and honestly in commercial interactions.
No, there's no relationship between the emergence of trust-making institutions and whatever the "energy surplus" was at any particular time and place. A more likely common thread is probably "strong government which consciously pursues an expected benefit or dividend from trust-making" or some effectively equivalent substitute for it.
So, one can look at the way various historical societies solved common problems with fraud and cheating, and the details of when and how and under what circumstances those solutions were implemented.
Really, since the dawn of history, all trade is fraught with all kinds of opportunities for fraud and cheating, and humans have been trying to cheat and trying to avoid getting cheated for thousands of years. One way of looking at the law itself is as a consequence of the many-iterations in the arms race between cheaters and cheatees. The institutional approaches across time and place seem to be more like a lot of independent rediscoveries of the same techniques as they have lots of similarities, and being a small set one suspects them to be something like 'natural' solution to these human problems.
For instance, if you were in Bronze-age, palace-economy Ur about 3,800 years ago and worried about that schmuck Ea-nasir swindling you by trying to pass his junk copper off as high quality ingots, then you would want to place your deposit not with that bum, that goniff, that schlock-seller Ea-nasir, but instead with the palace / the temple, which was used as a kind of centralized escrow-accounts transactions services provider and public accountant recorder of all major transactions and debts. It's not entirely clear, but it seems as if a merchant stood some chance of not getting paid if the palace or temple didn't release the funds from escrow because they received a well-supported claim of breach of contract. That's kind of like if a consumer today buys something with a credit card then disputes the charge later because of a complaint about quality. But the Fair Credit Billing Act was from 1974, while the Ur palace was doing that for a long, long time under the Sumerians before Hammurabi King of Babylon, in the generation before Nanni got pissed at Ea-nasir, finally got the notion to write it all down in his famous code, with detailed rules regarding commerce, loans, trade, fraud, deposits, warranties, and even price-fixing for boat rentals!
Another classic instance of fraud is when a buyer is being given an excessive measure of the weight when paying fixed prices per quantity to the seller. So many ancient states adopted and promulgated and enforced official weights and measures and even made certain government officials responsible for conducting investigations in their local markets (e.g., the Roman curule aediles) and/or to provide free "market official" weighing services at a central place during market operation.
See, people being able to get away with fraud at the marketplace is bad for trust, which is bad for commerce, which is bad for business, that is, the business of the empire, which is to say, taxes. Because whatever else you might fancy ought to be the business of the empire, you still gotta pay for it, so it comes back to taxes. And "Mo' Trust = Mo' Taxes!" means the strong state has a vested interest in trust-making and those interests are at least somewhat aligned with the welfare of consumers and (honest) traders.
And so, if the Roman officials found out you were cheating your customers, they would have you flogged or mutilated or enslaved or killed. That helps one lower one's guard a little when heading to the market regulated for trustworthiness by an imperial agent.
As for that monotheism theory, there are plenty of counterexamples (e.g., East Asia) of places well outside the Abrahamic theological sphere which had no trouble developing these traits of advanced civilizations. Even sticking just to Western History, the ancient Greeks and Romans had sophisticated commercial and legal systems that facilitated trade and contracting between strangers over vast distances in space and culture without any need for a single God identified with a particular ethical law.
Those who worshipped were polytheists with gods which acted in ways practically indifferent and often contrary to the common moral codes of behavior for mere mortals, and for a millennium the intellectual elites often adhered to (indeed, developed) what were effectively secular and atheist philosophies of proper behavior.
Strong states can only emerge with *some* kind of surplus, though. Trade surplus, agricultural surplus, labor surplus, etc. I don't know if it makes sense to categorize those all as a type of energy surplus, but I wouldn't immediately rule it out, either.
As for monotheism, I put a lot more stock in Joe Henrich's opinion than yours, thanks.
Trust who you want to, but is it reasonable to put stock in an opinion for which you've been provided clear non-monotheistic counterexamples because of an appeal to authority or because you think the guy isn't also wrong on other stuff? Better to put your stock in logical consideration of the evidence rather than in name-dropping some academic personality.
As for strong states and 'surplus', as I wrote above, if one plays the "level of generality" word-game to a high enough level of abstraction, one can prove anything. If anything, strong states are not so much the product of there being surplus in general but when there arise opportunities to capture and redistribute more of the surplus to state-aligned elites by expansion of state capacity and power. Surplus just invites the mobile bandits to steal it in a single predatory event. But annual surplus which can be taxed every year so long as production and trade are protected is how you get the competent stationary bandits, and how they get stronger and stronger.
I didn't make an appeal to authority. I just said I trusted his opinion over yours. I didn't deem it to be worth my time to explain why because you're clearly more interested in lecturing people here than anything else, anyway, so what difference would it have made?
If you change your mind about what's worth your time I'd be interested to learn what you or henrich think distinguishes those non-monotheistic examples of high level civilization with cooperation at scale and commerce with strangers from monotheistic examples with, I presume, some extra capacities those civilizations never achieved.
Sounds awfully vague and reductive. I don’t think that low EROI explains everything any more than I believe that racism, slavery, or climate change explain everything.
It is absurdly over-reductive unless one uses versions of "energy" and "surplus" so abstracted such as to make the theory a mere tautology.
"People cooperate when it's better for them to cooperate. However! Note that they *don't* cooperate, when it's in their interests not to cooperate."
That reminds me of Yoram Bauman's poking fun at Mankiw with his "Principles of Economics, translated." - "People Respond to Incentives = People are Motivated by Motives. You may think this is a bit like saying that tautologies are tautological."
I dunno man, the number of corporate managers who seem to think people will do things "because it is their job" despite having no interest in the outcome, no oversight and no accountability is pretty impressive in my experience.
Not to mention people who think politicians serve the public interest and not their own by default.
Many people seem to know logically that people react to incentives, but deep down in their bones believe that people do things because that is just what they do, with no reference to outside incentives, the same way that water flows downhill or fire is hot. People behave the way they do because that is the type of person they are, which is what they always were and always will be.
I imagine it is kind of like how it seemed really strange when you were a little kid and ran into your school teacher at the store; you knew logically they probably went home and had a life outside of school, but really deep down your model of the world assumed they only existed as "teacher" with no other roles, like they were a bit character in a movie. It seems that many people have that model of what other humans are, just bit characters in the background, not people who are making decisions individually with limited information and incentive structures.
In fact, in the short term people actually do keep doing what they do. The reason for this is that people invest in particular configurations for their lives: if you suddenly cut school teachers' salaries by a third, many school teachers would continue to teach, possibly for years, because that is what they trained to do, that is the career they have developed, the job is close to where they live, they have configured their personal responsibilities around the work hours, etc. Indeed, teachers may keep teaching and take on additional hours at the lower pay rate, to protect their total income because they need to eat and pay the mortgage. In the long run, however, many teachers will transition to other careers, and there will be far fewer new teachers.
This is why many policymakers and economists genuinely believe that higher taxes don't cause a reduction in effort and may even cause an increase in effort (and thus tax revenues): it's somewhat true in the short run. In the long run (roughly 20-30 years), however, people respond very differently: incentives matter a lot (as Sweden discovered, for example). This is also why there's a big difference between the short-run peak of the Laffer curve (which happens at very high tax rates) and the long-run peak (much lower - and rarely discussed).
A better way of formulating that is that people always respond to incentives in the long and short run, but the structure of the incentives and feasible responses changes over time. In your teacher example, finding a new job is hard when your previous employer has a near monopsony, but they are still looking, and probably are making other changes in their behavior as a result of the change, such as not putting in much effort. Put another way, there are many incentives going on at once, and it takes time for people to react to changes in those incentives in ways your might expect in the long term, but they are still responding. But you are absolutely right that we can't expect the changes to be instantaneous, yet somehow that seems to be the default position from people who definitely should know better.
When he says cooperation, I think you are depending on the dictionary definition too much rather than just taking it for what he means - highly cooperative. And corruption is his word for low-scale cooperation. A bit unclear terminology but so be it.
Similarly, he talks about about energy surplus and scarcity but I don't think he really means scarcity, without knowing what he does really means. And I don't see why energy can't be "abundant" when EROI is low.
"...countries are always in danger of slipping back to these more natural, lower scales of cooperation."
I doubt that is the case for nepotism. I don't see any path for a society that has almost completely eliminated cousin marriage to ditch the taboo and go back to it. Also, unless fertility rises dramatically in the future, your extended family will be a very limited group of people. That means nepotism becomes either non-existent or very blatant.
Other forms of corruption might increase again, but I don't see how nepotism could increase in the future for most of the world.
Arnold, it's great you're reading this stuff - so I don't have to. Cooperation is hugely important to getting things done, and energy is necessary for civilization and getting big things built. But Energy ROI seems a bit weak, unless it's to highlight the need to compare actual total lifetime costs of variable energy sources. Currently there's lots of inconsistent talk of solar & wind, with some big energy companies reducing their offshore wind farm projects, partly because of whales, partly because they're less profitable in practice than expected.
Low cost energy is good for civilization.
Corruption is usually mostly bad - but many post Commie countries, including here in Slovakia, have found that strong, principled dissidents, united against communism, were seldom united in exactly what to build. In disagreement about what was optimal to build, say a road or a tunnel, or which company to give the building country, they would often avoid corruption by not building. When replaced by ex-commie corrupt politicians, those guys seemed to have little problem in agreeing how to built a 100 million $ (or Euro) tunnel -- just spend 200 million so all involved get some corruption bonus. Then, after the money was spent, the tunnel is built, and at least is something visible and useful.
Huge numbers of construction projects seems to require some greasing of palms to get the project approved, and then built. It's a good goal to create processes to reduce this, but development literature, like from Chris Blattman, doesn't include many examples of this working well. (The EU offers many bad examples.) I'm pretty sure Trump was involved is bribing officials for some of his permits (I have NO EVIDENCE for this speculation), but he did build stuff.
Atheists are also often not in agreement on many things required for a high trust social cooperation - but the Anglo-American contractual obligations, with expectation of many future transactions, which developed under Christianity, might not require the religious dogma in order to maintain the needed agreement on basic values. But it might.
The wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Azerbaijani don't confirm his summary: "large-scale conflicts are all but inevitable unless we address their underlying cause—energy scarcity and other threats to large-scale cooperation. ... people cooperate in ever larger groups to access available energy and resources. Within these groups there is more peace, cooperation, and kindness."
None of these conflicts are based on energy scarcity - but on tribal support of the in power group with demonization of Ukrainians as neo-Nazis, with demonization of Jews as genocidal colonizers, with demonization of Armenians as dirty Christian infidel trespassers. Energy scarcity has little to nothing to do with these current, real world conflicts. In or Not "In My Tribe" has far more explanatory power for real disagreements and wars.
I'm not sure if I believe the argument that pastoralism => uncertainty about fatherhood => increased restrictions on female behavior.
For one thing, who'd enforce these restrictions? An absent husband can't do so; other adult males are likely to be out with their herds as well, or, if they're around, are presumably the very people we don't want getting too close to the wives of the absent men. Males too old to be out with the goats might be too feeble to restrict wives' conduct. The only people who'd have the ability and motive to enforce those restrictions would be the mothers and sisters of the absent husbands. The mothers might not be strong enough, and the sisters might well have an interest in lax enforcement so that they can enjoy illicit relationships while their own husbands are away.
I suspect that what would emerge would be a form of polyandry, in which a group of men hold their wives in common, with every member of the group allowed sexual access to every wife, but with such access denied to outsiders. I think this is the practice among the Masai, for instance. But this wouldn't necessarily impose any more restrictions on women than the situation in which a wife is married to a single husband who doesn't travel far, so is able to keep an eye on her behavior.
To a first approximation, the answer is, "Grandparents". They're around and they're watching.
Often they can't tend the fields or herd the cattle, but they can help with the kids and, ahem, with assuring fathers of the paternity of those kids. Modern life is very atomizing and alienating, so perhaps you've never lived in one of those old neighborhoods with the "human CCTV" early warning and detection surveillance system of everybody's grandmother looking out their windows to see anything interesting or fishy going on in the street and poking their noses in everybody's business so they can gossip with each other about it.
At any rate, you don't have to guess how it might be done or buy any arguments about it. You can validate the accuracy by simply reading any decent anthropological description of what life was really like in pastoralist communities or even see it in practice in the few which still exist in the 21st Century. If you look up "mate guarding" and "evolutionary stable strategy" you'll see many non-human examples too. If an ESS opportunity exists, human groups either discover and implement the cultural institutions necessary to support it, or they get replaced by those who did.
Although, looking further into Masai practices, it could be that the practice of clitoridectomy arose in order to enforce female fidelity in situations where husbands weren't always around to monitor their wives. Making sexual intercourse unpleasant or even painful for women would tend to keep them from pursuing illicit affairs, while a husband could presumably demand it from his wife whether she liked it or not.
It's reasonable to say that cooperation is downstream of trust, but nonsense to say that trust is downstream of "energy surplus".
Trust is downstream of robust, behavior-regulating institutions reliably ensuring trustworthiness by being good at detecting and penalizing violations. If such institutions are formally organized, they must be explicitly dedicated to this purpose as the prime mission.
Strong Trust-Making Institutions are downstream of some set of essential elements of what it takes to maintain such institutions and prevent them from succumbing to a number of common Social Failure Modes such as capture, diversion, entropy, corruption, decay, degeneration, etc.
I would be *much* more interested in a book or study of those elements. We have acquired a lot of insight into the failure modes which contributed to "the decline and fall of X" for a lot of X's. It seems to me we really need to shift focus to what it takes to keep Beneficial and Strong Trust-Making Institutions both Strong and Beneficial over the long-run.
Just spit-ballin' here but is it possible that trust building institutions are more likely to form when energy surplus is higher? I'm thinking of Joe Henrich's theory that monotheism, with an all powerful, all knowing God who will punish you when no one else can or will arose in response to increasing specialization and trade after the development of agriculture, and the need to treat strangers fairly and honestly in commercial interactions.
No, there's no relationship between the emergence of trust-making institutions and whatever the "energy surplus" was at any particular time and place. A more likely common thread is probably "strong government which consciously pursues an expected benefit or dividend from trust-making" or some effectively equivalent substitute for it.
So, one can look at the way various historical societies solved common problems with fraud and cheating, and the details of when and how and under what circumstances those solutions were implemented.
Really, since the dawn of history, all trade is fraught with all kinds of opportunities for fraud and cheating, and humans have been trying to cheat and trying to avoid getting cheated for thousands of years. One way of looking at the law itself is as a consequence of the many-iterations in the arms race between cheaters and cheatees. The institutional approaches across time and place seem to be more like a lot of independent rediscoveries of the same techniques as they have lots of similarities, and being a small set one suspects them to be something like 'natural' solution to these human problems.
For instance, if you were in Bronze-age, palace-economy Ur about 3,800 years ago and worried about that schmuck Ea-nasir swindling you by trying to pass his junk copper off as high quality ingots, then you would want to place your deposit not with that bum, that goniff, that schlock-seller Ea-nasir, but instead with the palace / the temple, which was used as a kind of centralized escrow-accounts transactions services provider and public accountant recorder of all major transactions and debts. It's not entirely clear, but it seems as if a merchant stood some chance of not getting paid if the palace or temple didn't release the funds from escrow because they received a well-supported claim of breach of contract. That's kind of like if a consumer today buys something with a credit card then disputes the charge later because of a complaint about quality. But the Fair Credit Billing Act was from 1974, while the Ur palace was doing that for a long, long time under the Sumerians before Hammurabi King of Babylon, in the generation before Nanni got pissed at Ea-nasir, finally got the notion to write it all down in his famous code, with detailed rules regarding commerce, loans, trade, fraud, deposits, warranties, and even price-fixing for boat rentals!
Another classic instance of fraud is when a buyer is being given an excessive measure of the weight when paying fixed prices per quantity to the seller. So many ancient states adopted and promulgated and enforced official weights and measures and even made certain government officials responsible for conducting investigations in their local markets (e.g., the Roman curule aediles) and/or to provide free "market official" weighing services at a central place during market operation.
See, people being able to get away with fraud at the marketplace is bad for trust, which is bad for commerce, which is bad for business, that is, the business of the empire, which is to say, taxes. Because whatever else you might fancy ought to be the business of the empire, you still gotta pay for it, so it comes back to taxes. And "Mo' Trust = Mo' Taxes!" means the strong state has a vested interest in trust-making and those interests are at least somewhat aligned with the welfare of consumers and (honest) traders.
And so, if the Roman officials found out you were cheating your customers, they would have you flogged or mutilated or enslaved or killed. That helps one lower one's guard a little when heading to the market regulated for trustworthiness by an imperial agent.
As for that monotheism theory, there are plenty of counterexamples (e.g., East Asia) of places well outside the Abrahamic theological sphere which had no trouble developing these traits of advanced civilizations. Even sticking just to Western History, the ancient Greeks and Romans had sophisticated commercial and legal systems that facilitated trade and contracting between strangers over vast distances in space and culture without any need for a single God identified with a particular ethical law.
Those who worshipped were polytheists with gods which acted in ways practically indifferent and often contrary to the common moral codes of behavior for mere mortals, and for a millennium the intellectual elites often adhered to (indeed, developed) what were effectively secular and atheist philosophies of proper behavior.
Strong states can only emerge with *some* kind of surplus, though. Trade surplus, agricultural surplus, labor surplus, etc. I don't know if it makes sense to categorize those all as a type of energy surplus, but I wouldn't immediately rule it out, either.
As for monotheism, I put a lot more stock in Joe Henrich's opinion than yours, thanks.
Trust who you want to, but is it reasonable to put stock in an opinion for which you've been provided clear non-monotheistic counterexamples because of an appeal to authority or because you think the guy isn't also wrong on other stuff? Better to put your stock in logical consideration of the evidence rather than in name-dropping some academic personality.
As for strong states and 'surplus', as I wrote above, if one plays the "level of generality" word-game to a high enough level of abstraction, one can prove anything. If anything, strong states are not so much the product of there being surplus in general but when there arise opportunities to capture and redistribute more of the surplus to state-aligned elites by expansion of state capacity and power. Surplus just invites the mobile bandits to steal it in a single predatory event. But annual surplus which can be taxed every year so long as production and trade are protected is how you get the competent stationary bandits, and how they get stronger and stronger.
I didn't make an appeal to authority. I just said I trusted his opinion over yours. I didn't deem it to be worth my time to explain why because you're clearly more interested in lecturing people here than anything else, anyway, so what difference would it have made?
If you change your mind about what's worth your time I'd be interested to learn what you or henrich think distinguishes those non-monotheistic examples of high level civilization with cooperation at scale and commerce with strangers from monotheistic examples with, I presume, some extra capacities those civilizations never achieved.
Sounds awfully vague and reductive. I don’t think that low EROI explains everything any more than I believe that racism, slavery, or climate change explain everything.
It is absurdly over-reductive unless one uses versions of "energy" and "surplus" so abstracted such as to make the theory a mere tautology.
"People cooperate when it's better for them to cooperate. However! Note that they *don't* cooperate, when it's in their interests not to cooperate."
That reminds me of Yoram Bauman's poking fun at Mankiw with his "Principles of Economics, translated." - "People Respond to Incentives = People are Motivated by Motives. You may think this is a bit like saying that tautologies are tautological."
To be fair to Mankiw, a lot of people seem to ignore that people respond to incentives, or at least fail to notice the incentives.
As Yoram put it, "People are stupid. But, people aren't *that* stupid."
I dunno man, the number of corporate managers who seem to think people will do things "because it is their job" despite having no interest in the outcome, no oversight and no accountability is pretty impressive in my experience.
Not to mention people who think politicians serve the public interest and not their own by default.
Many people seem to know logically that people react to incentives, but deep down in their bones believe that people do things because that is just what they do, with no reference to outside incentives, the same way that water flows downhill or fire is hot. People behave the way they do because that is the type of person they are, which is what they always were and always will be.
I imagine it is kind of like how it seemed really strange when you were a little kid and ran into your school teacher at the store; you knew logically they probably went home and had a life outside of school, but really deep down your model of the world assumed they only existed as "teacher" with no other roles, like they were a bit character in a movie. It seems that many people have that model of what other humans are, just bit characters in the background, not people who are making decisions individually with limited information and incentive structures.
In fact, in the short term people actually do keep doing what they do. The reason for this is that people invest in particular configurations for their lives: if you suddenly cut school teachers' salaries by a third, many school teachers would continue to teach, possibly for years, because that is what they trained to do, that is the career they have developed, the job is close to where they live, they have configured their personal responsibilities around the work hours, etc. Indeed, teachers may keep teaching and take on additional hours at the lower pay rate, to protect their total income because they need to eat and pay the mortgage. In the long run, however, many teachers will transition to other careers, and there will be far fewer new teachers.
This is why many policymakers and economists genuinely believe that higher taxes don't cause a reduction in effort and may even cause an increase in effort (and thus tax revenues): it's somewhat true in the short run. In the long run (roughly 20-30 years), however, people respond very differently: incentives matter a lot (as Sweden discovered, for example). This is also why there's a big difference between the short-run peak of the Laffer curve (which happens at very high tax rates) and the long-run peak (much lower - and rarely discussed).
A better way of formulating that is that people always respond to incentives in the long and short run, but the structure of the incentives and feasible responses changes over time. In your teacher example, finding a new job is hard when your previous employer has a near monopsony, but they are still looking, and probably are making other changes in their behavior as a result of the change, such as not putting in much effort. Put another way, there are many incentives going on at once, and it takes time for people to react to changes in those incentives in ways your might expect in the long term, but they are still responding. But you are absolutely right that we can't expect the changes to be instantaneous, yet somehow that seems to be the default position from people who definitely should know better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVp8UGjECt4
That is a classic- haven't seen that video for over decade.
When he says cooperation, I think you are depending on the dictionary definition too much rather than just taking it for what he means - highly cooperative. And corruption is his word for low-scale cooperation. A bit unclear terminology but so be it.
Similarly, he talks about about energy surplus and scarcity but I don't think he really means scarcity, without knowing what he does really means. And I don't see why energy can't be "abundant" when EROI is low.
I'm really enjoying these reviews, thank you!
"...countries are always in danger of slipping back to these more natural, lower scales of cooperation."
I doubt that is the case for nepotism. I don't see any path for a society that has almost completely eliminated cousin marriage to ditch the taboo and go back to it. Also, unless fertility rises dramatically in the future, your extended family will be a very limited group of people. That means nepotism becomes either non-existent or very blatant.
Other forms of corruption might increase again, but I don't see how nepotism could increase in the future for most of the world.
Arnold, it's great you're reading this stuff - so I don't have to. Cooperation is hugely important to getting things done, and energy is necessary for civilization and getting big things built. But Energy ROI seems a bit weak, unless it's to highlight the need to compare actual total lifetime costs of variable energy sources. Currently there's lots of inconsistent talk of solar & wind, with some big energy companies reducing their offshore wind farm projects, partly because of whales, partly because they're less profitable in practice than expected.
Low cost energy is good for civilization.
Corruption is usually mostly bad - but many post Commie countries, including here in Slovakia, have found that strong, principled dissidents, united against communism, were seldom united in exactly what to build. In disagreement about what was optimal to build, say a road or a tunnel, or which company to give the building country, they would often avoid corruption by not building. When replaced by ex-commie corrupt politicians, those guys seemed to have little problem in agreeing how to built a 100 million $ (or Euro) tunnel -- just spend 200 million so all involved get some corruption bonus. Then, after the money was spent, the tunnel is built, and at least is something visible and useful.
Huge numbers of construction projects seems to require some greasing of palms to get the project approved, and then built. It's a good goal to create processes to reduce this, but development literature, like from Chris Blattman, doesn't include many examples of this working well. (The EU offers many bad examples.) I'm pretty sure Trump was involved is bribing officials for some of his permits (I have NO EVIDENCE for this speculation), but he did build stuff.
Atheists are also often not in agreement on many things required for a high trust social cooperation - but the Anglo-American contractual obligations, with expectation of many future transactions, which developed under Christianity, might not require the religious dogma in order to maintain the needed agreement on basic values. But it might.
The wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Azerbaijani don't confirm his summary: "large-scale conflicts are all but inevitable unless we address their underlying cause—energy scarcity and other threats to large-scale cooperation. ... people cooperate in ever larger groups to access available energy and resources. Within these groups there is more peace, cooperation, and kindness."
None of these conflicts are based on energy scarcity - but on tribal support of the in power group with demonization of Ukrainians as neo-Nazis, with demonization of Jews as genocidal colonizers, with demonization of Armenians as dirty Christian infidel trespassers. Energy scarcity has little to nothing to do with these current, real world conflicts. In or Not "In My Tribe" has far more explanatory power for real disagreements and wars.
"As energy abundance turns to scarcity, what we are all feeling in our bones is the beginning of a slow descent before a societal freefall."
Is the fact that people are getting a lot fatter any refutation of this?
I'm not sure if I believe the argument that pastoralism => uncertainty about fatherhood => increased restrictions on female behavior.
For one thing, who'd enforce these restrictions? An absent husband can't do so; other adult males are likely to be out with their herds as well, or, if they're around, are presumably the very people we don't want getting too close to the wives of the absent men. Males too old to be out with the goats might be too feeble to restrict wives' conduct. The only people who'd have the ability and motive to enforce those restrictions would be the mothers and sisters of the absent husbands. The mothers might not be strong enough, and the sisters might well have an interest in lax enforcement so that they can enjoy illicit relationships while their own husbands are away.
I suspect that what would emerge would be a form of polyandry, in which a group of men hold their wives in common, with every member of the group allowed sexual access to every wife, but with such access denied to outsiders. I think this is the practice among the Masai, for instance. But this wouldn't necessarily impose any more restrictions on women than the situation in which a wife is married to a single husband who doesn't travel far, so is able to keep an eye on her behavior.
To a first approximation, the answer is, "Grandparents". They're around and they're watching.
Often they can't tend the fields or herd the cattle, but they can help with the kids and, ahem, with assuring fathers of the paternity of those kids. Modern life is very atomizing and alienating, so perhaps you've never lived in one of those old neighborhoods with the "human CCTV" early warning and detection surveillance system of everybody's grandmother looking out their windows to see anything interesting or fishy going on in the street and poking their noses in everybody's business so they can gossip with each other about it.
At any rate, you don't have to guess how it might be done or buy any arguments about it. You can validate the accuracy by simply reading any decent anthropological description of what life was really like in pastoralist communities or even see it in practice in the few which still exist in the 21st Century. If you look up "mate guarding" and "evolutionary stable strategy" you'll see many non-human examples too. If an ESS opportunity exists, human groups either discover and implement the cultural institutions necessary to support it, or they get replaced by those who did.
Although, looking further into Masai practices, it could be that the practice of clitoridectomy arose in order to enforce female fidelity in situations where husbands weren't always around to monitor their wives. Making sexual intercourse unpleasant or even painful for women would tend to keep them from pursuing illicit affairs, while a husband could presumably demand it from his wife whether she liked it or not.