Michael Muthukrishna
About
Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at LSE; author of A Theory of Everyone
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Claims by Michael Muthukrishna (20 of 30)
Energy return on investment is declining
The energy return on investment is decreasing, shrinking the excess energy available per person; oil discovery illustrates this—in 1919 one barrel of oil found another 1000 barrels, by 1951 only 100, and by 2010 only 5—and since roughly 50% of GDP growth comes from energy and 50% from innovation/efficiency, this decline drives a return toward a Malthusian, scarcity-driven world.
Cooked food and fire as early cultural knowledge
Human jaws are too weak and guts too short to process raw food like gorillas, implying we relied on cooked food and therefore fire millions of years ago; since fire-making cannot be figured out de novo and we have no genes for it, fire knowledge must have been culturally transmitted, constituting some of the earliest evidence of accumulated cultural information.
We are smart because we copy without understanding
Because of our cognitive limitations, humans deferred computation and innovation to the population level by selectively copying successful or prestigious others without fully understanding why—so we hold heads full of recipes we have never checked; we are 'smart because we're dumb,' surpassing other apes precisely because we defer to accumulated cultural information rather than figuring everything out from first principles.
Internet is a second enlightenment, not just an industrial revolution
We are not in a fourth or fifth industrial revolution but in a second enlightenment—driven not by coffee shops, pamphlets, and books but by tweets and shared articles that anger us precisely because they expose us to out-group ideas—while a countervailing force lets people assort into ever-smaller competing online tribes (e.g. niche subreddits), so whether we are siloed or more exposed is an empirical question with both being simultaneously true.
Decentralized experimentation as engine of progress
Radical decentralization—where local units (schools, municipalities, states, business divisions) autonomously experiment and successful innovations 'bubble up' to the whole—is a powerful engine of development; Estonia's education success, Brandeis's 'laboratories of democracy,' Nadella's restructuring of Microsoft into startups, the Catholic Church's tolerance of orders like the Jesuits, and 'startup cities' like Hong Kong and Singapore all exemplify this principle as a way to escape stagnation.
Illusion of explanatory depth in everyday knowledge
People hold beliefs they cannot actually justify (why brush teeth twice daily, why finish antibiotics) under an 'illusion of explanatory depth' that stops them from probing further—for example, the intuition that finishing antibiotics prevents superbugs is undermined by the observation that incomplete courses would leave the most resistant bacteria—demonstrating that we acquire interfaces to interact with the world rather than true causal models.
Land value tax as the non-distortionary tax
Land is the one valuable asset owners did not create, and there is both a moral and economic case for taxing it: a land value tax is non-distortionary (unlike income, sales, or capital gains taxes which distort productivity and commerce), could replace those taxes while funding government, leads to the most productive use of land, and addresses housing problems and entrenched inequality—the only barrier being that implementing it would require a 'revolution.'
Number systems as upgrades to cultural software for thinking
Numeracy advanced through cultural inventions that upgraded our mental tools: small-scale societies counting '1,2,3, many,' then using stones, body parts, or phalanges as metaphors, then the number line which made zero and negative numbers comprehensible (centuries after counting numbers), and then orthogonal number lines yielding the complex plane—each a reusable cognitive technology teachable to children.
Reasoning ability is culturally endowed by education
Many capacities we treat as innately human—reading instincts (Stroop effect), hypothetical 'if-P-then-Q' reasoning, IQ test performance—are in fact endowed by accumulated cultural knowledge and formal education; Luria's Uzbekistan studies showed unschooled people refused to reason from hypothetical premises while schooled people did, demonstrating that abstract reasoning is a culturally transmitted ability rather than a raw biological given.
Human and social sciences have reached a unifying framework
The human and social sciences have reached a point analogous to the scientific revolutions of physics, chemistry, and biology, where an overarching theoretical framework now unifies an otherwise chaotic understanding of human behavior—we know the rules by which humans differ from other animals, acquire and synthesize information, and by which societies change over time.
Culture is a second inheritance system that evolves
Humans possess a third line of information—cultural software accumulated over time and 'running' on our brains—that is not merely learned but genuinely evolves as an extension of population genetics into culture, evolving beyond conscious awareness so that the world becomes more complicated than the smartest individual could recreate.
Children over-imitate while chimps optimize
In an experiment with a box that has a top and side hole, both children and chimps imitate an experimenter poking both holes; but when the box is made transparent and the first action is visibly useless, chimps skip it and go straight to the rewarding action while children continue to imitate the useless step—demonstrating humans' reliance on faithful copying over personal optimization.
Big brains created the obstetric dilemma and extended childhood
Human brains tripled in size relative to our last common ancestor with chimps, and once head size passes roughly the 85th percentile, emergency cesareans and forceps deliveries spike (the 'curse of Eve'); this drove compensating adaptations including self-domestication, neoteny, extended childhood, and a lengthened adolescence that keeps growing as the body of knowledge to be downloaded grows.
Environmental variability matched to generation length favors social learning
Population genetics models show that highly stable environments favor genetic adaptation and highly unstable environments favor costly individual trial-and-error learning, but an intermediate zone of environmental variability—matched to generation length so that parents and grandparents hold useful knowledge—is where reliance on socially transmitted information becomes adaptive; ice core data later confirmed humans evolved exactly when climatic variation hit this moderate zone.
Language is part of the package, not the explanation
Language cannot be the explanation for human exceptionalism because of an evolutionary startup problem—the first individual with language genes has no one to speak with, and language only works if there is already something worth transmitting—so language, like much of human cognition, is part of the human package that co-evolved rather than a primary cause.
Bipedalism freed hands and enabled gestural communication
Bipedalism, likely evolved for separate reasons, did two things that bootstrapped cultural accumulation: it freed the hands so tools became worth carrying and reusing (cheapening the cost of toolmaking), and it opened a new gestural modality for communication that could later support the evolution of language.
Industrial revolution unlocked stored solar energy
Every major leap in human progress corresponds to unlocking a new energy source—fire (chemical energy predigesting food), agriculture (a solar technology), and the industrial revolution (exploiting stored solar energy in coal, oil and natural gas)—with the industrial revolution making 'a mockery of all the world's earlier history,' and the Haber-Bosch process letting roughly half the world's current population exist by 'eating fossil fuels.'
Life competes over excess energy
A master organizing principle—articulated as the 'law of energy'—is that life is fundamentally competition over excess energy; from the earliest self-replicators through photosynthesis, eukaryotes, and multicellular life, organisms that capture and use excess energy outcompete those that cannot, and running out of energy means being defeated by lower scales (bacteria) or having resources taken by larger scales.
Scale of cooperation set by energy ceiling and efficiency floor
The 'law of cooperation' holds that the optimal scale of cooperation—cells, individuals, employees in a business—is the level at which per-unit return on energy is maximized; this scale is governed by a 'space of the possible' bounded above by an energy ceiling and below by an efficiency floor, and as excess energy shrinks that space contracts, pushing societies back toward smaller scales of cooperation.
No equilibrium exists in evolutionary systems
Any stable, zero-sum equilibrium for society is impossible because evolutionary systems have no equilibria: even if individuals or societies decide they have 'enough,' they will be out-competed by a cultural or genetic mutation that wants more, so any state of contented stagnation is 'invadable'—meaning theories of society that depend on a complete shift in human nature are broken from the start.
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