The Secret of Our Success
Article
The Secret of Our Success is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between April 08, 2021 and July 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “the thesis of The Secret of Our Success”; “The author or The Secret of Our Success”; “His marvelous book The Secret of Our Success told the human narrative”. It most often appears alongside Rousseau, US, Adam Smith.
Metadata
- Category: Books
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: April 08, 2021
- Last seen: July 15, 2025
Appears In
- Your Book Review: Order Without Law
- Your Book Review: The Educated Mind
- Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World
- Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines
Related Pages
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- Rousseau (3 shared issues)
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- US (3 shared issues)
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- Adam Smith (2 shared issues)
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- Confucius (2 shared issues)
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- Europe (2 shared issues)
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- Greece (2 shared issues)
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- Harvard (2 shared issues)
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- Henrich (2 shared issues)
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- Herodotus (2 shared issues)
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- Hobbes (2 shared issues)
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- Ice Age (2 shared issues)
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- Ireland (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
It seems like we need to add a caveat to the hypothesis for this kind of thing, “if people believe that rain dances bring rain, then norms will encourage rain dances”. And I kind of want to say that’s fair enough, you can’t expect norms to be smarter than people. But on the other hand, I think the thesis of The Secret of Our Success and the like is that actually, that’s exactly what you can expect norms to be. And it seems like a significant weakening of the hypothesis – do we now only predict norms to optimize in ways that group members understand? Or to optimize not for welfare but for “what group members predict their future welfare will be”? I dunno, and that’s a bad sign. But if the hypothesis doesn’t lose points for rain dances, it probably shouldn’t gain points for manioc. (Though as Ben Hoffman points out, the cost-benefit of manioc processing isn’t immediately obvious. Maybe the hypothesis should lose points for both manioc and rain dances.)
Inline links: The Secret of Our Success, points out
Alice: The aerospace-engineer-turned-Harvard-professor-of-human-evolution who’s helping reinvent how we understand anthropology, psychology, and economics? The author or The Secret of Our Success and The WEIRDest People in the World? I’m familiar with his work, yes.
Inline links: The Secret of Our Success, The WEIRDest People in the World
The difference between Greece and Rome on the one hand, and Babylon and Egypt on the other, was that Greeks and Romans had written down their stories for us. Their stories had become our story. History was a narrative. Each of its chapters had a beginning, middle and end. How else would you tell it? Now, as we go farther back, we have less and less writing to rely on. Even when we have writing, on papyrus or stone, it isn’t self-interpreting – it’s not history the way Herodotus and Livy tell us history, with the explicit goal of recounting the past. Earlier still the texts die out completely, and we are left with stones and bones. Our knowledge of this history has to come from science: from archeology, anthropology (in the hope of using present societies to learn about past societies), and now also the new science of historical population genetics. Joe Henrich has done more than most to teach us our history using these tools. His marvelous book The Secret of Our Success told the human narrative from the point of view of the unique human capacity for cumulative culture1.
Y is correlated with X today Indeed this does seem to skip all the interesting, contingent bits: On the other hand, if you want to explain an all-important outcome like the take-off into modern economic growth, then you can't just mumble “one damn thing after another” or “irony and contingency”. That a hundred things randomly conspired to make the West Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic is not a satisfying story. Why would the die rolls keep favouring this one place? (And you can't invoke the law of large numbers. There are only five continents in the world, and modern economic growth did not have to happen anywhere at all.) To get from Europe 1 AD to modernity, while paying reasonable attention to the many accidents along the way, there are really only two possible narrative genres. The first is the rock falling down a mountain. It starts with one big, random event. This then triggers other events, and they trigger others, and now you have an unstoppable landslide. But the chance is at the start. The second is the cyclist pushing his bike up a mountain. It takes an actor who deliberately over time overcomes one obstacle and dodges another, until eventually they get to the top, and from there it's a downhill ride. WEIRD belongs firmly in the landslide genre. The big event is the Marriage and Family Program of the Western Church. This sets off a landslide, which the later chapters detail: the decline of kin institutions, the rise of Italian communes and city-states in the middle ages, the idea of individual rights in the European law merchant, the development of Protestantism, and finally the trifecta of science, commerce and democracy. WEIRD psychology is there, as an unobserved helper, for each stage of this journey, but each stage also builds on the previous ones. It's not by chance that WEIRD tells the West's story as a landslide. First, this is part of cultural evolution's baggage of intellectual commitments. Homo culturalis doesn't figure out solutions to his problems by abstract thought; he's not a natural optimizer. Instead he feels his way towards solutions. In a now famous example from The Secret Of Our Success, nobody just sat down and worked out how to detoxify manioc. Cultures which did this job better just had an evolutionary advantage. Second, the “bicycle push uphill” story would threaten the clean causality of the natural experiment. Suppose the Western Church promulgated the MFP with the deliberate plan of creating WEIRD psychology and causing the take-off into modern economic growth. Okay, that's unlikely, but suppose it promulgated the MFP with a plan that was somewhat related to increasing human welfare (in this world, not the next). Then we might suspect two things: Maybe in doing so the Church was reacting to existing conditions: reading the human situation and responding “hey, what we need here is less intensive kinship”.
Inline links: detoxify manioc
It seems important which of these two stories is true. So, after The Secret of Our Success and WEIRD, perhaps there is room to make it a trilogy.
But my own thoughts on anthropology have been shaped by two letter-S-intensive books. First, The Secret Of Our Success by Joseph Henrich (reviewed by me here). Second, Sick Societies by Robert Edgerton (reviewed by Jane Psmith here).
Inline links: reviewed by me here, reviewed by Jane Psmith here