2024 Starling Bookshelf

“While formal institutions may very clearly support cooperation on a very wide scale, they do so primarily through promoting confidence rather than trust… In contrast, informal institutions may have more direct consequences for trust and cooperation… They will provide practical guidance to actors about how to behave in situations that were not fully anticipated in the relevant institutional rules.”

Our thanks go to Henry Farrell for contributing to the 2024 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“From infancy, we copy those around us in order to be like others, to be one with the tribe. Other primates will copy behaviour that leads to transparent benefits, but only humans promiscuously copy actions that have no instrumental purpose... The main motivation to copy such behaviour is the desire to affiliate, and we imitate with higher fidelity when ostracism threats are cued, apparently as a reinclusion behaviour.”
“The ritual animal longs to belong.”

“Many behaviors are cultural in that they are socially learned by observation and interaction in a social group — social learning can then be understood as the foundational capacity that underpins what is typically glossed as ‘culture.’”

“We argue that both purely genetic and culture-gene interactions have shaped human social psychology such that people cooperate, help, trust, and punish in highly patterned and often contextually specific ways.”

“[A]t some juncture in our history, our ancestors began systematically to correct the behavior of the individuals they taught; in the process, they shifted their society away from reliance on mere conventions and toward governance through norms. People stopped illustrating a way to behave and began insisting on the way to behave. Eventually, each society was characterized by a particular set of norms that dictated how individuals should behave.”

Our thanks go to Kevin Lala for contributing to the 2024 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“Religion is about belief and about belonging.”

“Religious movements are a special kind of business — they are platforms. Platforms are organizations that facilitate relationships that could not form, or could not function as effectively, in the platforms’ absence.”

“[H]uman beings find purpose in activities that have a collective dimension. Religious platforms create communities that powerfully articulate that collective dimension to our lives.”

Our thanks go to Paul Seabright for contributing to the 2024 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“Whether we are aware of it or not, we rarely, if ever, make decisions completely independently and in isolation… When push comes to shove, humans are fundamentally social creatures, and to ignore the role of social information in human decision making ... is to misconstrue the process by which we come to do the things we do.”

“Lurking once again in the guts of the problem is the network — that ubiquitous web of signals and interactions through which the influence of one person passes to another.”

“Often, the biggest changes in history are the achievements of thinly-documented, informally organized groups of people.”

“When hierarchy is the order of the day, you are only as powerful as your rung on the organizational ladder of a state, corporation or similar vertically ordered institution. When networks gain an advantage, you can be as powerful as your position in one or more horizontally structured social groups.”

“For the historian, then, the insights of network theory, in all its forms, have profound implications.”

“Social networks permeate our social and economic lives… The countless ways in which network structures affect our wellbeing make it critical to understand (1) how social network structures affect behavior and (2) which network structures are likely to emerge in a society.”

“Peers exert enormous influence on human behavior. It is easy to cite examples, ranging from the products we buy, whether we engage in criminal activities, how much education we pursue, to which profession we choose.”

“To be an effective leader of a social unit is to be aware of (a) the relations between actors in that unit, (b) the extent to which such relationships involve embedded ties including kinship and friendship, (c) the extent to which social entrepreneurs are extracting value from their personal networks to facilitate or frustrate organizational goals, and (d) the extent to which the social structure of the unit includes cleavages between different factions.”

“Leadership is best understood as a human endeavour whose central concerns are to influence the individual and mould the collective in service of the ultimate mission.”

“Most importantly, it is a habit, the ability to do the right thing and make the dificult decision every single day: an accumulation of countless small choices, interventions and demonstrations that set the example required to uphold standards and drive performance.”

Our thanks go to Langley Sharp for contributing to the 2024 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“For a reader familiar with the economic literature two centuries prior to the publication of The Wealth of Nations, what is most striking about Smith was his reincorporation of philosophical and moral concerns into a literature on trade that had largely left these matters by the wayside... He was trying to reintroduce the moral framework of justice, equity, and benevolence that had dominated the literature in the medieval era but had been discarded by seventeenth-century merchant authors.”

Our thanks go to Emily Erikson for contributing to the 2024 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“Trust, to be simple with our definition, is an expectation of behavior built upon norms and cultural habits ... It is also a process orchestrated through communities and institutions.”

“If new forms of finance, commerce, and risk managemnt were essential to [18th century] capitalism’s vitality, new forms of trust were needed to safeguard that vitality in a world of strangers and speed.”

"A history of vice and capitalism, then, must also be a study of trust — or at least its absence.”

“[T]he collapse of trust in the state’s institutions undermines its ability to keep internal peace and order.”

“Because the most recent period of social and political turbulence in the United States was the 1960s, which were very mild by historical standards, Americans today grossly underestimate the fragility of the complex society in which we live. But an important lesson from history is that people living in previous precrisis eras similarly didn’t imagine that their societies could suddenly crumble around them.”

Our thanks go to Peter Turchin for contributing to the 2024 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“The health of our societies depends on sustaining a delicate balance between the economic and the political, the individual and the collective, the national and the global. But that balance is broken… A big part of the reason for this is that the economy is not delivering the security and widely shared prosperity expected by large parts of our societies.”

“In short, the liberal democracy and global capitalism that were triumphant three decades ago have lost legitimacy.”

“The public sector has the advantage that in principle it promotes the overall wellbeing of society rather than, as in the case of the private sector, just a small segment of it. However, in being accountable to everybody it suffers from no effective governance by anyone.”
“We need a system that encourages business to have an intrinsic interest in the common good, not just rely on it being imposed from above by fictional, socially minded guardian angles in the guise of governments and regulators.”

Our thanks go to Colin Mayer for contributing to the 2024 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“For reasons we don’t yet understand, the tendency to synchronize is one of the most pervasive drives in the universe, extending from atoms to animals, from people to planets… On the surface, these phenomena may seem unrelated... But at a deeper level, there is a connection, one that transcends the details of any particular mechanism. That connection is mathematics. All the examples are variations on the same mathematical theme: self-organization; the spontaneous emergence of order out of chaos.”

“Even if the behavior of starlings is a subject for biologists, the quantitative study of three-dimensional movements of individuals requires the kinds of analyses that can be accomplished only by physicists.”
“When two systems have been well studied, it is possible to apply to one field ... the myriad results and techniques obtained in the other field. In general, when the same formal mathematical system has two completely different physical manifestations, you can use physics insights from both systems to obtain valuale complementary information.”

“Today, prediction can ascribe features and probabilities to each cell of an embryo, to each biochemical change in an astronaut in space, to each cancer patient, to each tendency in financial markets, to complex natural processes, and to social behavior.”
“[M]arkets and biology share deeper affinities that large amounts of data can sometimes reveal.”
“[O]ur tools may be revealing the genesis of some elusive and stubborn complexities of human behavior...”

“Leadership is typically thought of as a ‘soft’ intuitive skill, while management is a ‘hard’ science, but those lines are blurring, and the days of purely intuitive decisions are over. Technological innovation, (big) data, an army of analytical experts, and savvy leaders are vaporizing the idea that leadership is purely a soft skill... Business and society is on the cusp of a shift where ALL aspects of leadership ... are overhauled through the application of computational methods, including AI, network analysis, predictive modeling, and simulations.”

“A scientific revolution is starting to bring order to the chaotic world of human affairs… Sapiens are still difficult to predict, but at least we now know the rules by which we work. We know the rules that govern how people decide whom to trust and learn from... We can use these rules to improve ourselves, our technologies, our governments, companies, schools, and societies; to develop strategies, policies, and interventions — social technologies — to chart a better future.”

Our thanks go to Michael Muthukrishna for contributing to the 2024 Compendium. Read his piece here.