MM notes, chapters 4 through 6

Continuing my review of A Theory of Everyone

Previous essays in this series are here, here, here, and here.

Chapter 4, “innovation in the collective brain,” is one where I highlighted no passages. This chapter gives MM’s take on business management. There is a a large volume of mediocre pablum on that topic. Rather than rise above the genre, MM’s chapter seemed to me to fit within it. He writes,

COMPASS is an acronym for the seven secrets of innovation that I teach to classes and companies.

The advice that follows is vague and non-actionable.

Chapter 5 is “created by culture.” It revolves around the problems posed by human babies being born helpless and with big heads. It includes just enough evolutionary psychology to annoy the average Grievance Studies professor.

Pastoralism requires men to be away from their families for long periods of time as they take their cattle to new pastures. Being away from their partners increases paternal uncertainty. Pastoralist dads are even less likely to know if a baby is theirs. . .

Researchers such as economist Anke Becker have found that pastoralist practices and ecological determinants of pastoralism can cause. . .stronger restrictive norms around female promiscuity, and even restrictions on female mobility. . .

Chapter 6 looks at cooperation. Here MM focuses on what I think of as the main contribution of his theory of everyone. He argues that cooperation increases with greater availability of energy. An energy surplus motivates people to cooperate, because the gains from cooperation are large. As the surplus gets used up, life becomes more of a zero-sum game, and cooperation withers.

For MM, the opposite of cooperation is corruption.

But corruption is not a function of bad leaders that can be replaced by better leaders; it’s a function of entire cultures where the same behavior of favoring friends, family, and close connections occurs at every scale: from the manager giving her friend a job, to an official allowing a connection to skip the usual bureaucratic process, to the minister giving his nephew a government contract.

…countries are always in danger of slipping back to these more natural, lower scales of cooperation. This is also why it’s such a challenge to try to export democratic institutions and fairer, impartial, non-family corporations to places around the world that lack these necessary norms. [my emphasis]

Key point: although it is the enemy of large-scale cooperation, corruption itself is a form of cooperation. What we call a “high-trust” society is one in which people are able to extend trust beyond their immediate family or clan. In a “low-trust” society, people may be very cooperative—just not with strangers.

Earlier, MM introduced us to Energy Return on Investment, the amount of energy you get from using energy. When this is high, there is an energy surplus. When it is low, there is scarcity.

the presence of sufficient energy leads to an overall increase in cooperation and corresponding decline in violence within these large cooperative groups, such as countries. . .as EROI falls and energy becomes scarce, future internal conflicts and large-scale conflicts are all but inevitable unless we address their underlying cause—energy scarcity and other threats to large-scale cooperation.

To summarize, people cooperate in ever larger groups to access available energy and resources. Within these groups there is more peace, cooperation, and kindness. But between these groups there is often cruelty, exploitation, and destructive violence.

…All of what we have achieved requires continued access to abundant, dense, high EROI energy sources. . .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.