MM notes, introductory material

on Michael Muthukrishna's Theory of Everyone

Michael Muthukrishna’s A Theory of Everyone (henceforth MM) is provocative, which is a polite way of saying I think that his project winds up collapsing in a heap. But because he touches on so many issues concerning human interdependence that have long interested me, I plan to give it an extended review, chapter by chapter. This essay will cover the introduction, which takes up MM’s first ten pages, and the introductory material on pages 13-20 that precedes the first six chapters.

For me, the most interesting idea in MM concerns energy, and he gets right to it in the introduction. He says that “Energy is to the human species what water is to fish.” By that, he means both that it is essential and that we tend to overlook the way that it surrounds and sustains us.

energy breakthroughs across the grand timescale of our species have led to periods of abundance that have in turn led to increases in the number of people and the scale at which they work together, which in turn have led to scarcity and conflict. This dance of energy and evolution eventually turns abundance to scarcity, but along the way it offers opportunities for critical social and technological breakthroughs. When these breakthroughs raise the energy ceiling then. . .a new period of abundance begins.

I want to relate MM’s views on energy to my dislike of SuperAbundance, a book which argued that we could follow economic progress by looking at the “time price” of various commodities. I wrote,

In Superabundance (henceforth SA), authors Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley document that over periods of several decades, commodity prices have declined relative to wage rates. The authors interpret this to show that human ingenuity has overcome scarcity in the past and is likely to do so in the future.

This interpretation, endorsed by all of the blurbs, including those written by Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton and Obama economic adviser Jason Furman, is wrong. As I will explain below, all that we can infer from price changes in resource markets is the direction in which speculators have been surprised over the periods studied. The fact that they have been surprised in one direction in the past in no way implies that they will be surprised in the same direction in the future.

Rather than using the prices of various commodities relative to wage rates, someone who reads MM would focus on the cost of extracting energy. We will see that he looks at the ratio of energy output to energy input. Think of how many barrels of oil you can obtain by using one barrel’s worth of energy to discover, drill, and pump out oil. I believe that this is a much more helpful indicator of how living standards have progressed and are likely to progress going forward.

Introductory material, p. 13-20

For me, the first red flag that I was not going to love the book came here. MM writes,

We are in the midst of a scientific revolution on the scale of Newtonian and Einsteinian physics, the periodic table, and Darwinian evolution. This scientific revolution is a theory of human behavior that, when combined with theories of social evolution, is close to being a theory of everyone. [It] is as profound as the revolutions in these older now adult sciences. It is a revolution that is bringing order to chaos and laying the path from science to technology—in this case, policy applications. For the first time, it is enabling us to see the causes of the problems we face and what we need to do to overcome them. The human and social sciences are moving from alchemy to chemistry.

He goes on in that vein. That level of intellectual arrogance leaves me speechless. I spend a lot of time thinking about an alternative to replace the term social science, which I consider inappropriate. I prefer “the topic of human interdependence.” In my estimation, our knowledge regarding this topic is far exceeded by what we do not understand.

I am familiar with a lot of the research MM draws on, and with much more that he seems ignorant of. And I would never claim the level of assurance that he displays.

MM writes,

Dual inheritance theory refers to the two lines of inheritance humans have—genes and culture. . .Culture makes us a new kind of animal.

Fair enough. I, too, appreciate Joseph Henrich’s view of The Secret of our Success. But in an article I wrote about Henrich and others, I began by saying

Socialists and progressives who seek to remake society have typically claimed that their efforts have a scientific basis. Frequently, they accuse their conservative opponents of being anti-science. They dismiss the warnings of Burke, Hayek, and other conservative intellectuals who doubted the ability of the individual scientist-reformer to fully comprehend the social order he proposes to overthrow.

Ironically, there is a growing body of academic research that supports the conservative view of the social process. Thanks to work in a number of related fields, collected in some exceptionally important books published in just the past few years, it is becoming increasingly apparent that progress tends to arise from the evolution of decentralized trial-and-error processes more than from grand schemes launched by planners and revolutionaries.

Although MM expresses respect for evolution, he seems like a wannabe social engineer.