Book review: A Theory of Everyone – The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going Energy, culture and a better future for everyone, by Michael Muthukrishna.
I found this book disappointing. An important part of that is because Muthukrishna set my expectations too high.
I had previously blogged about a paper that he co-authored with Henrich on cultural influences on IQ. If those ideas were new in the book, I’d be eagerly writing about them. But I’ve already written enough about those ideas in that blog post.
Another source of disappointment was that the book’s title is misleading. To the limited extent that the book focuses on a theory, it’s the theory that’s more clearly described in Henrich’s The Secret of our Success. A Theory of Everyone feels more like a collection of blog posts than like a well-organized book.
The final source of disappointment was the book’s first blog post, about energy, and how we need a more abundant supply of it. I agree with his basic ideas about the benefits of abundant energy. Alas, his argument in favor of nuclear energy is somewhat misleading. He focuses on the goal of maximizing energy return on investment. I.e. energy output divided by energy input. If that were the appropriate standard by which to compare investment in new energy sources, nuclear would be dramatically better than solar. But there’s no good reason to single out energy costs as more important than other costs. By the normal method of comparing new investments, namely return on investment, solar looks probably a bit better than nuclear, at least for next decade.
I advise readers to ignore Muthukrishna’s analysis on this topic, and instead read the rants against ergophobia in Where Is My Flying Car?.
Futurist Tidbits
Muthukrishna suggests that nations might become obsolete due to blockchains / DAOs. He doesn’t examine this in enough depth to impress me.
There’s significant room for improving how math is taught in US schools – just adopt the curricula used in Singapore and Shanghai.
More speculatively, schools could teach formal logic and reasoning at a much younger age, possibly generating some Flynn-like effects.
Immigration Policy
Muthukrishna’s experience with living in countries as different as Sri Lanka, Papua New Guinea, Botwsana, and Britain gives him maybe enough wisdom to lecture us a bit on how it should be done.
He suggests four models of how a country might reasonably handle immigration:
- The No Hyphen Model: France exemplifies the strategy of pressuring immigrants to identify as French, and to suppress their culture of origin.
- The Mosaic Model: Canada exemplifies the strategy of peacefully accepting large cultural differences within the nation.
- The Melting Pot Model: The US aims for a middle ground between the French and Canadian strategies.
- The Umbrella Model is an ideal in which the nation mimics a successful company: selective admissions combined with substantial support for assimilation. Australia comes somewhat close to this ideal.
Select Quotes
The most innovative teams are more diverse, but so too are the least innovative teams. This seeming paradox of diversity occurs because diversity offers recombinatorial fuel for innovation, but is also, by definition, divisive.
Race is socially constructed in the same way color is. … Different societies have different perceptions of where blue stops and where green begins …
We now know that the nature versus nurture debate for human behavior makes about as much sense as a right leg versus left leg debate for human walking. We have a dual inheritance, inextricably entwined.
[The] 1924 US Immigration Act … created immigrant ethnic quotas based on national origin. … Recent analyses suggest that the 1924 Act led to a massive 68% baseline decline in indicators of innovation, such as patents, in industries where these migrants, such as Italians and Jews, worked.
Conclusion
Muthukrishna tried to do what Henrich did in The Secret of our Success. But he didn’t want to repeat what Henrich had already published, and didn’t have a book worth of new ideas above and beyond what Henrich has published. So he ended up with something that would have been moderately good if published 10 years ago, but doesn’t seem like much today. Read his 2016 paper instead.