2025 Starling Bookshelf

“Without cooperation there would be no life. Not just no life as we know it, but no life at all.”

“As with the first reproducing molecules, so with all kinds of cooperators since the dawn of life: the first fundamental requirement for cooperation to evolve is that its benefits must outweigh its costs.”

“Cheat control is the second fundamental requirement for cooperation to evolve and ... it can be found present in some form or other from the dawn of life to the present.”

“Certainly, the biological evolution of human psychology under natural selection is an important part of our inheritance... But the modern world is also a product of processes of cultural evolution — the survival of innovations that spread successfully and the winnowing out of the rest.”

“Unfortunately, it is a basic dogma for most social scientists that one can and should study social and cultural systems without considering human nature.”

“This involves ignoring or dismissing much of the evidence from cognitive and behavioural sciences.”

Our thanks go to Harvey Whitehouse for contributing to the 2025 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“Nature has designed the human psyche for participation in cultural society... Our biology made us able to learn and change throughout life, so that cultural and social influences can continue to shape us.”

“The ability to see ourselves as others see us, and to care about what they think, is a crucial part of what makes us human — and it is also utterly unavoidable, indispensable, if you are going to live in culture.”

“Culture is what is special about human beings.”

Our thanks go to Roy Baumeister for contributing to the 2025 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“A history of morality is not a history of moral philosophy… This is the much bigger history of our values, norms, institutions and practices.”

“Our morality is a psychosocial mechanism that makes cooperation possible.” “Around 500,000 years ago we learned to use social sanctions to make uncooperative behavior relatively unprofitable.”

“If someone violates a norm, we seek retribution or revenge.”

“The logic of cooperation means we want to be identified as trustworthy group members.”

“One of the most important lessons we can learn from an examination of economic life is that a nation’s well-being, as well at its ability to compete, is conditioned by a single, pervasive cultural characteristic: the level of trust inherent in the society.”

“People who do not trust one another will end up cooperating only under a system of formal rules and regulations...”

“Widespread distrust in a society, in other words, imposes a kind of tax on all forms of economic activity, a tax that high-trust societies do not have to pay.”

Our thanks go to Francis Fukuyama for contributing to the 2025 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“The modern business environment is characterized by radical uncertainty. It can be navigated only by assembling the collective knowledge of many individuals and by developing collective intelligence — a problem-solving capability which distinguishes the firm from its competitors, and even its own past. Relationships in these businesses cannot be purely transactional; they require groups of people working together towards shared objectives, and such cooperative activity necessarily has a social as well as a commercial dimension.”

Our thanks go to John Kay for contributing to the 2022 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“Social capital has come to mean many things both in theory and in empirical work in the social sciences.”

“But the term ‘social capital’ currently has no singular meaning that is broadly accepted.”

“The way to make it comprehensible is to look under the umbrella and take it apart, focusing on the networks, norms, and trust included in its definition, treating them as distinct concepts with separate, but sometimes connected, roles in understanding important social and political processes.”

Our thanks go to Karen Cook for contributing to the 2022 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“Eroding confidence in global institutions is partly driven by the lack of operational alignment to the lofty goals, visions, and values statements these bodies espouse.”

“Values sometimes matter most when they are least convenient. As shown in the global decline of trust in government and business, paying lip service to organizational value systems, while not believing in and upholding them, presents a problem and seriously hinders both decision making and risk management.”

Our thanks go to Dante Disparte for contributing to the 2025 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“Nearly all the commands and constraints which afflict the modern individual, the decisions which used to be made by identifiable rulers and bosses, are now the result of systems and processes.”

“This is a book about the industrialisation of decision-making — the methods by which, over the last century, the developed world has arranged its society and economy so that important institutions are run by processes and systems...”

“If the system consistently produces a particular outcome, then that’s its purpose.”

Our thanks go to Dan Davies for contributing to the 2025 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“Many regulations exist only because of history, not because of logic. Most regulations are not the product of academic or scientific rigor.”

“While many regulations were well intentioned when written, they later have absolutely no basis other than somebody’s long-obsolete whim in trying to do the good thing. They are never scientifically considered. No one weighs their utility in the long run. Technology has given us a considerable opportunity to acheive positive regulatory outcomes that are less burdensome.”

Our thanks go to Eugene Ludwig for contributing to the 2025 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“Human society developed when most collective decision-making was limited to small, geographically concentrated groups such as tribes or extended family groups.”

“With technologies that can now facilitate discussion and decision-making among groups both big and small, we need new kinds of intermediating digital spaces, ones that provide perspective, attention, and action on shared rather than personal problems, while at the same time accommodating discussion and deliberation at local as well as national scales.”

Our thanks go to Sandy Pentland for contributing to the 2025 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“Humans are subject to all sorts of biases that impact our decision-making. But many of those biases come from our being stuck in our own minds. Now we have another (strange, artificial) co-intelligence we can turn to for help. AI can assist us as a thinking companion to improve our own decision-making, helping us to reflect on our own choices (rather than simply relying on the AI to make choices for us). We are in a world where human decision-making skills can be easily augmented in a new way.”

“Technology is a time-tested key to human flourishing.”

“Public identity equates to discoverability, trustworthiness, influence, power, agency. It is a form of social capital — and sometimes financial capital — that can help you move more productively through the world.”

“For me, LinkedIn was always about using networks to share and discover information in new ways, by using identity to increase trust... At heart, then, what LinkedIn and many other successful internet platforms do is scale trust.”

Our thanks go to Reid Hoffman for contributing to the 2025 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“Computers can translate seemingly mundane, innocuous information about what we do into highly intimate insights about who we are and, ultimately, prescriptions of what we should do.”

“We all have some kind of core identity, something that makes our behavior predictable across time and space. But who we are, and how we act, also depends on what is going on inside us and around us.”

“The intriguing part of all this is that the deviations from people’s trait averages are to some extent predictable.”

Our thanks go to Sandra Matz for contributing to the 2025 Compendium. Read his piece here.

“Our brains, like AI models, are largely powered by predictive processing... And these predictive powers, like AI’s, have provided the foundation for human mastery of our world.”

“The average AI supercomputer is already 120 million times faster than the processing rate of the human brain.”

“Powers we have not yet imagined are set to infuse our daily lives.”

“The laws of human nature might become just as predictable, and policy just as reliable, as the laws of physics are to us now.”

Our thanks go to Craig Mundie for contributing to the 2025 Compendium. Read his piece here.