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”.
