Evolution and Social Order

The modern world suffers from a never-ending series of social and economic issues, such as unemployment, lack of affordable housing, waiting lines for healthcare, ballooning healthcare costs, pension schemes that are on the verge of bankruptcy, collapsing school results, high tax pressures, and stagnating economies. If these more or less permanent issues were not enough, every now and then, we are struck by a stock market crash or a collapsing housing market.

Every four or five years, we elect a new set of politicians who promise to solve all or almost all of these issues. Often, some or many things get better, at least for a while, but often other things get worse, and those things that got better soon regress again.

Why is this? First of all, why do we face these issues? Secondly, why can't we solve them? Thirdly, why can't we implement solutions, once and for all, that make at least most of them go away permanently? Or at least become bearable?

The answer provided in this book is that we are strangers in a strange land. For almost two million years, our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers. For at least the past 150,000 years, maybe far longer, they were almost exactly like us. Their tribes, their whole countries, consisted of about 500 people. The land all around them belonged to other tribes, who commonly spoke another dialect or a completely different language.

We still have the brain of a hunter-gatherer, but now we live in large societies with millions of inhabitants. A large society, with a market economy, is to a large extent a self-organized system, a complex adaptive system, what Adam Smith called a Great Society. In such a society, there emerges an extended order whereby we all interact with countless people we do not know and who we often do not even know exist. What's more, important aspects of large societies cannot be understood using our innate hunter-gatherer way of reasoning.

The key source of our problems is that our hunter-gatherer brain incessantly tells us to "do something", to deliberately organize society, to bend it to our will. But self-organized systems cannot be treated that way without producing negative and sometimes horrendous side effects.

This book examines this conflict using a combination of evolutionary psychology, classical liberal thought, economics, history, and the history of ideas.

It builds on insights from, among others, Adam Smith, David Hume, Alexis de Tocqueville, Friedrich Hayek, Thomas Sowell, Matt Ridley, Steven Pinker, and David Buss, but often takes the analysis further and derives a number of new insights. It also builds the arguments up brick by brick and makes explicit and develops things that are only hinted at elsewhere. Finally, the book seeks to convey complex ideas in as simple and straightforward terms as possible.