I recently read "A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going", by Michael Muthukrishna: https://www.atheoryofeveryone.com/  The book starts out strong in Part I: Who We Area and How We Got Here by building a so-called Theory of Everyone that draws on interesting connections between psychology, sociology, and evolution together with resource usage in the form of the concept of Energy Return on Investment (EROI). While this theory falls far short of the kind of rigorous mathematical theory the name Theory of Everyone is a play on (i.e., the fabled Theory of Everything in physics), it at least has some potential as an exploratory outline and model of human intelligence and cooperation. Part II: Where We're Going is where things fall apart as the author runs into the very real limitations of his under cooked theory. I will be harsh in this review, particularly about Part II, but I want to be clear: I think the broad ideas Muthukrishna weaves together are important and he offers a fresh and much needed perspective.

I don't want to dwell on Part I because my discussion of Part II below will expose the limitations of the Theory of Everyone. However, I will say that Part I did present some interesting studies and perspectives on intelligence and knowledge. For example, the author goes into some detail differentiating genetic, cultural and individual knowledge or information. He makes a strong case that humans rely on cultural, or stored, sources of information as well as social mimicry and that this highly differentiates us from other life on Earth. One thing that really stuck out to me was his anecdote about ravens being smarter than human children. He refers to a study in which ravens are given a tube with a piece of food at one end and a wire. The ravens were generally able to figure out a way to use the wire to get the food out of the tube. When human children were given a similar challenge, a tube with a sticker at one end and a pipe cleaner, the children were unable to get the sticker. However, once the children were shown how to get the sticker by an adult they had no problem mimicking the steps and getting the stickers. The author's point is that there are different kinds of intelligence and even among life on Earth some animals may out perform humans in some ways, but that ultimately cultural and social intelligence/knowledge allows us humans to learn much more over time than any other species.

Energy Return on Investment (EROI) and levels of cooperation are two big concepts that stuck out for me in Part I too, because Muthukrishna develops them and weaves them into this larger model of human intelligence and civilization in a way that seems to result in a genuinely new and useful perspective. At least, it's new to me. According to him, "This may sound dire, but history has shown us that every major civilization has been crushed by a falling energy ceiling - as their space of the possible shrank, they were defeated by forces both outside and within." EROI refers to an economic measure that is meant to be a proxy for energy budget: how expensive or difficult is it to power work. By Muthukrishna's estimates Western countries had plentiful and cheap energy sources from the 1940s through 1960s, but now we're seeing a Great Stagnation due to a continued decline in the ease of getting new energy sources. He thinks we need big advances in energy production and, in particular, thinks that we need to unlock nuclear fusion as an energy source in order to truly progress to a new era of plentiful and cheap energy. In turn, this new era will increase wealth creation, and if we plan ahead properly to ensure diversity and innovation, will result in greater levels of cooperation, peace, and social and technological progress than ever before in human history. It sure sounds great!

On the other hand, he also points out challenges we will face as humanity grapples with a deeper understanding of itself. One thing that stood out to me here is that, "It may be counterintuitive, but a more equal society is one in which genes play a greater role in success." I hadn't thought about it before, but his point is important: if in the future humanity is able to make fairer and more equal societies, societies where opportunities, knowledge, and basic resources are more consistent for all members (Muthukrishna points out later in Part II that this would include enormous changes like preventing wealthy families from passing down enormous wealth through inheritance), then there would be far fewer variations and differences between any two members of that society. Therefore, we would more easily see how genetic differences play a role in outcomes such as health, education, wealth creation, etc. This is one of the double edged swords that Muthukrishna brings up through out the book: while we can learn a lot about ourselves it also potentially opens the door to new forms of inequality or even calls to abandon progress. According to him, the benefits far outweigh the problems, because we can plan ahead and end up preventing abuses. He largely leaves that to the reader's imagination.

The other thing that sticks out to me from Part I is the author's Seven Secrets of Innovation which follow the acronym COMPASS:
 

He says that he worked with an executive at Uber to help implement a version of COMPASS that fit their company culture. I don't want to go into too much detail about COMPASS here. Suffice it to say that I do think they are useful general rules to follow and helpful for developing a strategy that promotes an open and innovative culture. However, Silicon Valley tech startups already benefit from a similar fixation on culture that extols many of these things and has roots going back more than a hundred years to Thomas Edison and how he ran his labs. Surprisingly, this last point about Thomas Edison is something I was reminded of recently not by Michael Muthukrishna's Theory of Everyone, but instead by David Lipsky's "The Parrot and The Igloo: Climate and The Science of Denial", which is an extremely engaging, smart, and well written book and one I highly recommend: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/david-lipsky/the-parrot-and-the-igloo/

Note: you can also read more about Muthukrishna's research on innovation on his blog here: https://www.michael.muthukrishna.com/tag/innovation/

COMPASS and the Theory of Everything as presented in Muthukrishna's book bring up some of the fundamental ideas and research that underlie modern conceptions of invention and innovation. However, they remain vague and ambiguous when it comes to implementation. Part II of the book, Where We're Going, comes face-to-face with this limitation when Muthukrishna attempts to use the model of humanity he developed to predict what human civilization will do in the future. Part II consists of chapters seven through twelve which wrap up before the book's Conclusion.

Chapter seven, Reuniting Humanity, a similarly grandiose title as the title of the book, but similarly fails to deliver. In this chapter we are invited to consider a number of examples of comparative politics and economics. These are the kinds of things I would wager most people are familiar with: look at what Norway did with their oil wealth compared with Great Britain, consider how Australia handles immigration and acculturation, etc. Sure! I love that stuff, but I have a bachelor's degree in Political Science and I love learning about how other people do things. There are two important things missing from this chapter: how does the fact that other people do things a different way translate to the action of actually borrowing what they do and then actually implementing it? And what about cases where it's not possible to just borrow and implement our way out of where we're at?

Let's look at some examples. The author suggests that some of our social troubles could be ameliorated by adjusting national immigration policies so that those people with demographic profiles that are associated with success (economic success specifically) are given preferential admittance. Additionally, national immigration agencies should provide compulsory acculturation education to all immigrants. Neither of these ideas are new and many countries implement various forms of them. Additionally, both ideas are far from simple to implement and come with their trade-offs as well as controversies. For example, how ethical is it to give preferential treatment to immigrants who are deemed to have a greater likelihood of success? How do we even define success and determine which data points equate with it? Does that mean an immigrant from a country that doesn't have reliable data is automatically disqualified from immigrating? Acculturation programs can be ethically complex as well, but more importantly they are expensive and difficult to administer. For example, how reasonable is it to expect a new immigrant to spend weeks or months taking regular classes? How would that impact their abilities to find and go to work and support their families?

Maybe Muthukrishna isn't trying to solve the complexities of immigration policy, but instead is pointing out that the Theory of Everyone can help guide policy. Still, it seems strange to pick out policies that many countries already implement and then suggest merely that there could be an opportunity for the Theory of Everyone to provide minor input to incremental policy change. The bigger problem, in my view, is that the really difficult issues, like mass migrations caused by global warming, are barely mentioned and in a way that strongly suggests acculturating millions of such migrants would simply be impossible. Indeed, the author makes clear that he believes that without abundant new sources of clean energy we won't be able to get out of the Great Stagnation he believes our civilization finds ourselves in right now. He implicitly makes the case that rich and powerful countries competing for "successful" immigrants will be what enables economic and scientific progress on new sources of energy such as nuclear fusion which in turn will enable millions more people to innovate and create wealth in a positive feedback loop for civilization.

I don't doubt that these are all issues and that the particular policies he identifies could be tweaked to help. We can and should learn from other countries, encourage successful immigration strategies for innovation in our economies and science, and we absolutely need to expand our energy sources, and nuclear fusion does seem like one of the Next Big Thing we must tackle as a civilization. I just don't see how his Theory of Everyone and Part II of his book in particular provide any new predictive insight or new actionable prescriptions, let alone dealing with the real world complexities of the international political economy and the very real ethical questions these policies raise.

Take chapter eight, Governance in the Twenty-first Century. In this chapter the author turns into a crypto bro suggesting startup cities and programmable politics will solve our problems. Later in the book he says, "[...] our three main lines of information - genetic, cultural, and individual learning [...] Machine learning is the missing line of information [...] It is the combination of cultural and individual learning." Perhaps this will turn out to be true. His views here aren't a huge surprise given his general emphasis on individual responsibility, EROI, and innovating humanity's way out of problems. But it comes with serious contradictions as well as a continued lack of specifics. The most obvious contradiction is simply that relying on blockchain for the future of governance seems counterproductive from an EROI perspective: blockchain technologies tend to be highly resource intensive. Even if we had a reliable and prevalent network of nuclear fusion power stations across the world (something that remains in the realm of science fiction, by the way, despite all of my optimism and hopefulness), blockchain technologies still might not make good sense.

But consider all of the downstream repercussions of these suggestions. Startup cities, as the name implies, are cities that would be run more or less like a tech startup. The idea is a neat one, but as Shoshana Zuboff documents in such fine detail in her 2019 book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" (https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2019/11/04/book-review-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-the-fight-for-the-future-at-the-new-frontier-of-power-by-shoshana-zuboff/) and with Google's abandoned attempt to implement Sidewalk Toronto smart city project (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/06/06/warning-surveillance-capitalism-nightmare-big-tech-investor-turned-critic-pushes), startup cities can take regulatory and policy choices out of the hands of local communities and elected representatives and put them in the hands of algorithms and automated systems. On top of that, the extreme level of surveillance of everyday activity of residents is highly invasive and a great obstacle to general adoption.

But the author doesn't even stop there. He suggests DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) as a model for future governance where members of the DAO vote on changes to regulations and policies which are then encoded in the blockchain structure of the organization. The author never mentions what the legal status of a DAO and its members have. Have you ever heard of a wildly successful DAO? No? OK, how about just a run of the mill, everyday DAO? I didn't think so. Imagine being an immigrant to a startup city: not only do you have to successfully interview and get sponsored for work and learn the culture, customs, and language, but additionally you now have to learn about the DAO, how it works and its history, plus you must take part in city governance directly. Driving home my suspicions, Bloomberg's Matt Levine has a great breakdown of a court case involving a DAO here in his Money Stuff newsletter: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-24/big-bonuses-are-back-at-uk-banks.

I mentioned individual responsibility earlier. This comes up again in chapter nine, Shattering the Glass Ceiling, when he suggests yet another existing policy choice that has been around for many years. I am very amenable to these policies in theory, but they are quite extreme and politically difficult to raise support for without an extensive and efficient social welfare system: tax generational wealth at extremely high rates and convert tax structures to one predominated by land tax. Taxing inheritances, in particular, the author believes will level the playing field and help refocus a meritocracy that has been marred by nepotism. I agree in broad terms, but listen to how extreme it sounds in the author's own words: "Are their [people like Bezos, Musk, and Gates] children really best placed to have that much control over the vast portion of our energy budgets that their parents' wealth represents? The answer is that if they were, they would similarly and independently achieve levels of wealth as their parents did without that inheritance." Apparently, Muthukrishna has never heard of luck.

These kinds of bizarre over simplification, like assuming that governmental institutions can be replaced with constantly evolving programmatic entities or that the ultra wealthy independently achieved their wealth and are "best placed" to have that much control over the extant energy budget of humanity, make more sense when we get to chapter twelve, Becoming Brighter. It's not just a misplaced optimism in meritocracy. In this final chapter he talks about the "format of the school day, which need not be 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. [...]". I have a child in middle school so, OK, I'll bite: if not 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. then what?  He suggests something that happens to be more convenient for him personally: "An alternative arrangement would be one that matched a typical adult working day [...]". OK, but what if you're a parent who doesn't have a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. job? He doesn't even mention it. Muthukrishna's Theory of Everyone, in this light, sounds a little more like a Theory of Muthukrishna. 

No mention is made of what a typical adult working day might look like for denizens of his start-up city either. Gig workers who have to work at the busiest times of day. Shift workers with early, late, or overnight shifts. Even typical tech start-up engineers and business professionals work 60+ hours a week: school from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.? Thanks to the DAOs he proposes they will additionally need to make time to participate in complicated governance voting; a new layer of unpaid work to add to things like raising a family, household chores, etc.

Yet he writes: "The message is clear: more educational opportunities can help a society discover and nurture the next generation needed to take us to the next energy level. Unfortunately, intergenerational mobility has been falling; wealth and other outcomes are becoming more entrenched. And as the energy ceiling falls, for the first time in a long time, by many metrics, children are leading worse lives than their parents. An American born in the 1940s had a greater than 90% probability of being better off than their parents [...]. A child born in the 1960s had around a 60% probability. The American Dream died in the 1980s with the oil crisis, when the probability of a child born in that decade earning more than their parents became a coin toss: fifty-fifty."

What chapter twelve showed me was that Muthukrishna is writing from a very particular perspective: his own. That's fine, but in my opinion it leads him to over promise his Theory of Everyone and lays bare its limitations. In particular, we find that we must fully buy in to goals like wealth creation and progress. Note that these words are doing a lot of heavy lifting in Muthukrishna's book. Indeed, in order to solve the paradox of diversity, which he brings up multiple times, it would seem that we all need to align with Muthukrishna's goals. Apparently, a diversity of goals is not included. A human existence that is dignified and respected as such, without creating wealth or otherwise being productive, would seem not to fit in with his idea of "everyone". If we take his narrative at face value there's not much room for that kind of diversity. Ultimately, I'm not sure how his vision of the future overlaps with the American Dream either.

Some may think my comments above are overly harsh. It is true that Muthukrishna's book, especially the first half, has many interesting and thought-provoking ideas that do come together into a loose model of human intelligence. And I do think it is important that we think more about humanity's strengths and weaknesses and the larger histories and structures that guide as well as limit us at higher levels of cooperation. The Theory of Everyone is a fascinating and surprisingly easy read in that regard. I caution the reader to take Part II: Where We're Going with a grain of salt, but on the other hand, I applaud his effort to get at foundational issues and start the task of planning ahead for a future that I think is going to be pretty wild one way or the other.