As a child, Michael Muthukrishna, an associate professor of economic psychology at the London School of Economics, witnessed the civil war in Sri Lanka and the Sandline affair, a violent coup in Papua New Guinea. He was living in Botswana when apartheid ended in neighbouring South Africa and was in London during the 7/7 bomb attacks. He’d come to wonder: are there underlying principles that would help us better understand the pattern of politics and why some countries prosper while their neighbours struggle, why war erupts or peace is brokered, why striking oil can be a boon or a curse?
You would not expect a book titled A Theory of Everyone to be anything other than bold, and Muthukrishna certainly delivers. He believes social science is undergoing a revolution comparable to Newtonian or Einsteinian physics, and that by combining theories of human behaviour and social evolution it is becoming possible to identify the fundamental “laws of life”.
The first is the law of energy: energy is the most important quality in the universe, he writes, and the trajectory of human existence has been shaped by periods of abundant energy, which give rise to greater cooperation, new ideas and new institutions, and periods of energy scarcity, which lead to greater competition and conflict.
The discovery of fossil fuels released huge amounts of surplus energy, driving the Industrial Revolution and creating the modern world. But this period of energy abundance is coming to an end. Muthukrishna believes political polarisation and the precarity of western liberal democracies reflect the coming era of energy scarcity and argues that the best way out of these looming crises is to unlock new sources of energy, perhaps through nuclear fusion. To achieve this, we need to encourage greater innovation. Much of the book subsequently explores the complex interplay between energy, cooperation and evolution, Muthukrishna’s so-called “theory of everyone”.
This is a dense yet accessible read; Muthukrishna explains complex concepts clearly and is fond of the odd wry aside. But I found myself wondering if it is possible – or even desirable – to study people with the scientific detachment of a physicist studying matter. If it is, Muthukrishna doesn’t manage it. When he writes approvingly of Australia’s approach to immigration, which combines a points-based visa system with tightly controlled borders that mean, as he puts it, “immigration is disincentivised through offshore processing”, he is clearly writing from the perspective of Australian citizens seeking to benefit maximally from immigration, rather than asylum seekers.
In fact, his entire argument about immigration and cultural diversity is written from the perspective of host nations. The policy recommendations might look very different if you centred the perspectives of those desperate to escape poverty or persecution, or indeed the governments of poorer countries facing a brain drain.
Muthukrishna is not afraid to discuss contentious issues and he is justified in defending the right of scientists to share their professional beliefs, even if they are politically unpopular. He dives into many fascinating and thorny discussions – but overreaches himself. Given that elsewhere he cautions against simplification, it is disappointing to see him assert, for instance, that Sudanese migrants are overrepresented in Australia’s crime statistics as a result of experiencing high rates of violence in Sudan, without considering whether other factors are at play. His credibility when discussing Afghan politics is undermined when he refers to the people as Afghani, the country’s currency. He imagines a future of entrepreneurial startup cities and “programmed polities” that enable people to enter automatically enforced contracts and move between political systems regardless of their citizenship. These are interesting ideas, but this vision of people as free agents moving frictionlessly through the global economy overlooks reasons people are often rooted to one place.
Any theory that views people primarily in terms of their consumption and productivity and treats other urges – to care for one another, to produce pointless art – as secondary offers only a limited, and limiting, perspective on human affairs. Maybe the “Theory of Everyone” is an interesting theory about some people – but then that wouldn’t sell as well.
• A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going is published by Basic (£22). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
