Consuming Behaviour

© John Desmond

First published, January, 2026

Grianan Publishing,

John’s Brae,

Shrove, ROI, F93E7R9

Cover design © John Desmond (with thanks to Alan Gillies)

Chapter Five (b) Multilevel Selection

Introduction

To briefly recap discussion in chapter three, multilevel selection (MLS) and cultural group selection share the same broad perspective. The history of evolution works towards greater complexity, from genes to cells, to the multicellular organism and to the collections of multicellular organisms we refer to as social groups.¹ Each level of organization is governed by the iron law succinctly expressed by David Sloan Wilson and E.O. Wilson, that, “selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. All else is commentary” (see Wilson, 2019: 78).

Sloan Wilson (2019) mentions the conundrum faced by Darwin who could not reconcile his theory with the existence of altruistic behaviour in a group which is disadvantageous compared to selfishness.  If this is so then how then to explain prosocial behaviour relating to the welfare of the group, honesty, loyalty, bravery and so forth?   It is understandable that the selfish behaviour of free riders can severely hamper group harmony and productivity, taking advantage of the prosocial behaviour of others by shirking, or otherwise cheating, to gain the benefits of group endeavour while others do the work. Between-group selection is based on the contrary finding that groups where members actively cooperate outcompete others, as in Wilson’s description of Muir’s experiment with two groups of chickens, described in chapter three. The harmony of a group may be undone by the selfishness of any of the individuals within it who maximise their fitness at the expense of the whole, but the group that can effectively constrain such behaviour and act cooperatively can transform itself into a successful super-organism.

Wilson argues that small effective groups of human co-operators developed in the ancestral environment to act as highly coordinated super-organisms that out-competed other hominids lacking in this capacity. This mentality is enshrined in sayings such as, “there is no “we” in team”, an oft-quoted adage that was realised when Leicester City beat Manchester City in 2016 to win the English Premier League, when the entire team was valued at less than City’s star player Kevin de Bruyne. In multilevel selection cooperation is involved at every level from the gene to complex animal and human societies. Silvertown (2025) describes the Siphonophore known as the Portugese Man O’ War and human pirates as two of the most dangerous and successful cooperators on the high seas. While cooperation is encoded into the genes of the Man O’ War, pirates who were vicious and merciless to their victims, developed an egalitarian culture where every man received his fair share of booty and practiced a form of democracy, where each had a vote, and could rely on disability payments if injured.

Some basic concepts pertaining to multilevel selection were introduced in chapter three.  Dual inheritance theory argues that Darwinian processes of variation, selection and replication can be applied beyond genetic evolution to the context of culture.  Sloan Wilson coined the symbotype as the phenotype of cultural evolution which is analogous to the gene as it potentially offers a different assortment of phenotypic traits for selection to work on.² Henrich et al., (2010) summoned attention to the wide diversity of cultural expression within and between human cultures and questioned why the vast majority of academic research ignores cultural diversity by overwhelmingly focusing on narrow WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) settings.³  In the view of multilevel selection this is fundamentally mistaken as by bracketing diversity, researchers occlude study of variation between cultural settings.  For instance, the ‘pick and mix’ attitude to religion that is prevalent in the USA would be met with incomprehension in India. Similarly, one ought to be alive to cultural variation in relation to the balance of exchange behaviour between sharing, hierarchy, the gift relation and market exchange in a particular setting. As described in chapter two, Daniel Miller and others understand that despite attempts globalize it, one should not assume that instantiations of “the market” in different cultures are organized and operate everywhere in the same way.    

Multilevel selection (MLS) theorists argue that explanations based on kin selection and reciprocity provide an insufficient basis to explain large-scale cooperation and focus instead on behaviours that enable the construction and maintenance of group identity. They cite extensive evidence of willingness to punish free riders in public-goods situations, even at a cost to the person who does so (Fehr & Gächter, 2002; Henrich et al., 2006). In this understanding, if humans are “hardwired” for anything, it is for language and culture.

This concept of culture is quite different to that of evoked culture presented by domain specific theorists such as Cosmides & Tooby, (1989). The supposition behind kin selection is that humans evolved in small groups with a tendency to act altruistically towards kin with the same gene for altruism. In this view the “big mistake” that enables large-scale cooperation in today’s complex society is that we respond altruistically to those who drive the same brand of car, by identifying them as part of “our” community and treating them as kin. Thus in this view the large-scale cooperation observed today in a host of different settings has arisen a by-product of a mechanism that developed during the Pleistocene period. This is criticized by MLS theorists on several grounds. Firstly, as discussed in chapter three, it is argued that the idea that our ancient ancestors formed small communities based purely on relatives is a myth. Secondly, in practice there is little evidence of a ‘big mistake’ in kin selection as individuals seem to have little difficulty in distinguishing kin from non-kin and will act more favourably toward the former. Finally, when non-human primates are placed in larger groups they do not make the “big mistake” by acting cooperatively within this wider circle. From the perspective of multilevel selection, the argument that we possess a ‘Swiss Army Knife’ of domain-specific modules that were originally developed in the Pleistocene is reductionist as it focuses narrowly on genes and ignores the massive role role played by cultural evolution.  MLS theorists argue that we should look instead to the selection processes at work amid the huge variation between and within groups, to consider, for instance, how the market is framed differently in the egalitarian context of  Nordic countries as compared to the individualism that is prevalent in the USA.

Culture is defined by MLS theorists as information capable of affecting individual behaviour that is acquired from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission (Richerson & Boyd, 2005: 5). In a multilevel explanation the reason why people behave differently is because they have acquired different information, such as ways of doing things, beliefs and values, which are passed from one generation to the next. Authors point for example to the thesis developed by Nisbett and Cohen (1996) to explain why there are more violent deaths in the Southern than in the Northern United Statues which they argue is due to a ‘culture of honour’ that developed in the former and which has been passed down through the generations.

Theorists argue that it is wrong to think that there is a gene which determines tallness, or something more complex, such as a behaviour like smoking. A better analogy is that genes are like a recipe, where all the ingredients and the cooking temperature and so on, are set by the environment. Culturally evolved environments affect which genes are favoured by natural selection and culture has shaped human innate psychology as much as the other way around (Richerson & Boyd, 2005: 4). Traits vary in how sensitive they are to environmental differences; for instance, all humans have developed five fingers on each hand, although genetically similar people end up with very different body sizes depending on nutrition or health during childhood. Different environments may thus cause genetically similar people to behave differently. Expressed more formally, epigenesis is the process by which genes are activated or not in relation to changing environmental contingencies. This does not mean that humans are ‘blank slates’ on which culture writes its script. Rather, learning and other developmental processes that cause individuals to respond differently to different environments implement structures built into genes. Culture affects the success and survival of individuals and groups and as a result, some cultural variants spread, while others diminish. Proponents argue that this leads to evolutionary processes that are just as real as genetic evolution.

Cultural adaptations have developed over millions years to greatly extend the reach and reproductive success of humanity. For example the discovery that some bitter plants are curative led some to override their reaction to the nasty taste of these and pass on their knowledge to succeeding generations (Richerson & Boyd, 2005: 11). Medicine today is no less bitter and infants learn to trust others and to imitate their behaviour. Some argue that while children are no smarter than chimpanzees, they more faithful and proficient imitators than chimpanzees by following every step of the process they observe a model performing, even those that are redundant (Whiten & Custance, 1996; Richerson & Boyd,, 2005: 110). Theorists argue that this may provide some insight into the widespread conformity that is characteristic of human sociality as it is in the individual’s interest to do things the way that others do them so that they can effectively coordinate their actions, especially in large social units where individuals work alongside strangers.

Imitation plays an important role in arguments made by Tomasello (2008) and others who note the ability of young infants to mirror the accent and facial expressions of those around them and infants as young as one year old have been observed copying the food selection choices of children of the (Shutts et al., 2009). By the age of three children are especially sensitive to language (Kinzler et al. 2009). Authors also focus on the sensitivity of young children are particularly attentive to the enforcement of group norms. Children are readily receptive to social norms, and will engage with others socially just for the fun of it (Tomasello & Carpenter , 2007) and as young as eighteen months old will cooperate with unfamiliar adults. Chimpanzees’ abilities in this regard are more limited (Warneken & Tomasello, 2006).

In what follows I sketch out some arguments pertaining to multicultural selection which are speculative and so are deserving of reflection and critique. The first part outlines the links between war, trade and religion (Turchin 2016, 2024; Wilson, 2003), moving on to discuss the use of trade as an instrument of war and the widespread assumption that it can forestall conflict through the creation of interdependencies between adversaries. This argument is further developed by discussing Mariana Mazzucato’s (2023) commentary on Lin Ostrom (1990). The penultimate section is devoted to a brief discussion of multilevel selection theory in organization studies and in marketing. The final section focuses on arguments by MLS theorists that groups can be maladaptive and is informed by arguments from David Sloan Wilson (2019) and Peter Turchin, (2016, 2024).

Multilevel Selection and Prosociality

Multilevel selection enables us to revisit modernisation theory, which was introduced in chapter one, to reconsider arguments as to the extent to which history can be seen as a record of development as an an arrow of progress leading human civilisation towards a better tomorrow. On one side Francis Fukuyama (1989) maintains that an evolutionary pattern towards greater complexity can be detected from the very dawn of life on earth, exhibited by the extension of prokaryotes to eukaryotes, to cells and then to multicellular organisms including human societies, which shows movement from one level to another leading to greater complexity arising from cooperation. In relation to human history Fukuyama (1989) famously argued that the combination of economic liberalism and liberal democracy comprise the endpoint of human development. On the other side of the argument the liberal theorist John Gray (2024) sees nothing but a series of random events in history. Multilevel selection theorists David Sloan Wilson (2019) and Peter Turchin (2016) disagree with Gray as they detect a discernible upward movement in human history towards cooperation and also with Fukuyama, by finding that development has not been linear but rather is been characterised by ups preceded by downs.

Relating to the above, consideration of multilevel selection theory affords an opportunity to speculate on the role played by the market in human development. Until comparatively recently it was thought that market societies are advanced as they arrived late in human development, originating from the dissolution of feudalism in Europe. Given that this understanding has since changed markedly, the following discussion centres on the relation of markets to cooperation, war and peace.

Chapter three advanced explanations by Freud, Girard and Wrangham who each purported to explain why humans are much more prosocial and pacific than their nearest hominid cousins. David Sloan Wilson argues that Wrangham’s (2019) argument is broadly compatible with that from multilevel selection. He mentions that Darwin was himself puzzled as to how to reconcile high levels of prosociality in human social relations given that ‘Darwinian’ evolution is presumed to drive a ‘zero sum’ game between individual ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. In his view Darwin paid insufficient attention to cultural evolution, so that although selection between individuals within a group can favour aggression which can undermine group cohesion, groups of cooperators outcompete groups of selfish individuals, or in short  “selfishness beats altruism within groups, altruistic groups beat selfish groups, and everything else is commentary” (Wilson & Wilson, 2007).

In what follows I offer some tentative thoughts on the market informed by my reading of multilevel selection theory which seeks to explain the rapid ascendency of humankind over the past ten thousand years in terms of our unique abilities for cooperation and cultural development. Turchin (2016) argues that successful societies are those with the most cooperators, as a corollary to which the weakest are the most divisive. However as is discussed below, cooperation has not arisen peacefully but rather as the result of war, genocide and conquest. The following sketches the argument that markets developed as a byproduct of warfare to enable the conduct of pacific transactions between strangers.

Exploring Prosociality in the Marketplace

Before discussing such matters it is important from the perspective of multilevel selection to consider what markets are for and how they may have arisen in the first place. It is important to mention that understanding of the origin of markets has been substantially revised in recent years. Until comparatively recently theorists tended to go along with Adam Smith’s (1776) contention that markets were a recent development in human history which emerged from barter economies. Karl Polyani (1944), followed Karl Marx, to argue that economies governed by markets economies could not have operated in the settings such as the Indian village economy which was assumed to be organised by reciprocal relations within a householding economy. In contrast, according to Polyani, ‘there was nothing natural about laissez faire…laissez faire economy was the product of direct state action.⁴. Moreover, ‘gain and profit made on exchange never before played an important part in human economy’.⁵

Although there remains much to learn about the historical development of economic relations in different societies, no evidence has been found to support the claim that market exchange emerged from simpler forms of barter.⁶ Additionally, it is now known that forms of market economy operated in African and Mayan societies prior to their conquest by foreigners.⁷ This raises the question, if not from barter, as to how market economies did emerge? What follows represents some preliminary thoughts.

The Emergence of Markets from Conquest

Desire and lust,

to gain goods, to

have a rich home

are yours, Inana.

Profit, absence,

Poverty, wealth

are yours Inana.

These lines are remarkable because they were reputedly written by the world’s first author, etched on clay tablets by the Sumerian princess Enheduana in or around 2,300 B.C. These show how the human desire for wealth, security and the good life go back to time immemorial. As the priestess with responsibility to prepare food and to feed the gods, Enheduana is placing the provision of these goods into the hands of the goddess Inana, or Ishtar, as she was better known. Subin writes that Ishtar had two natures, of which one, ‘memorably was the goddess of war, sex and metamorphoses’.⁸ This linkage of the good things in life with the goddess of war might seem peculiar if one takes the argument made by Stone (2017), for whom markets are fundamentally antithetical to warfare, which is disruptive of the pacific relations necessary for trade. Others might argue that in any case it is a mistake to bring markets into it, for surely markets are a modern invention and certainly were no part of life in ancient Sumer.

The following is informed by the argument from multilevel selection developed by Peter Turchin (2016) to suggest that market trading may have developed as a means to further the development of human ultra sociality arising from conquest by facilitating trade between strangers who came to share the same polity. Turchin (2010) argues that warfare is the chief selective force for increased society size, because larger societies can mobilize more resources and recruit larger armies which increases their chances of successful offence and defence.

Sargon of Akkad, who was the father of Princess Enheduana forged the empire of Ur from a number of warring states in what is now modern Iraq. In contrast to the functionalist argument that large scale societies formed partially as means to allocate resources more efficiently and to reduce competition for resources, Turchin (2010) argues from the perspective of multilevel-selection that conflict is the main driver and is causally linked to cooperation, as conquests have led to the formation of large and complex societies composed of different ethnicities and classes which were more cooperative than those they replaced (Turchin, 2016). For Roberts (2011) it was in such centrally administered societies that were organized on a scale larger than the tribe, as in Mesopotamia around five thousand years ago, that profit first became a consideration.  These were after all sophisticated societies, with cities populated by strangers from near and afar, comprising a populace that included a wealthy elite, committed to the accumulation of wealth. Private property, profit and the accumulation of wealth featured in such diverse societies of relative strangers. For instance, in relation to property rights, letters from creditors in ancient Mesopotamia threatened debtors with social exclusion and shame with the ultimate threat of police action if they did not return to pay back their debts.⁹.

From the above it seems that market trading in ancient Sumer operated to the benefit of the elite who controlled the huge temple complexes. Several thousand years later armed mercenaries in the Roman Empire stood to benefit most from the sale of booty. Although it is repugnant to think of the brutal Roman Empire as pacific and cooperative, many years after colonisation, the ethnic groups that Caesar had subjugated in Britain, Gaul and elsewhere had been assimilated into its vast infrastructure, consisting of a common language and coinage, a taxation system that funded transport and utilities, and a common legal system for the enforcement of contracts which facilitated a burgeoning trade in commodities between the furthest reaches of the Empire. Graeber (2011) cites Karl Jaspers, for whom the Axial age (800 BC - 600 AD) was a pivotal period in human history, notable on the one hand for extraordinarily violent wars of conquest, and on the other, of a counter-reaction involving the emergence of the great world religions. As mentioned in chapter four, Graeber describes exchange relations at this time as comprising a ‘military-coinage-slavery’ complex featuring one-off cash transactions between strangers that took place against the background of war, enslavement and the sale of booty,

Here, transactions really do become simply a figuring-out of how many of X will go for how many of Y, of calculating proportions, estimating quality, and trying to get the best deal for oneself.¹⁰

At that time profit seemed to comprise everything worth pursuing, “as if the violence of war or the impersonality of the marketplace has simply allowed them to drop the pretence that they ever cared about anything else.” While arguing that the underlying assumption is very similar to that made by neoliberal economists today, Graeber argues that,

It’s no coincidence - but with the difference that, in an age when money, markets, states and military affairs were so intrinsically connected, money was needed to pay armies to capture slaves to mine gold to produce money, when ‘cutthroat competition’ often did involve the literal cutting of throats.¹¹

The process was brutal, as members of the smaller groups which were colonised consisting largely of kin, not only lost their traditional language and customs but were treated at best as second class citizens in the new order. Initially resisting the new regime, over generations they were gradually assimilated and absorbed into the larger-scale society made up of relative strangers so that over generations the descendants of those once forced into collaboration became cooperators.

In light of the above, Graeber’s (2011) description of market trading under the moderating influence of religion and particularly of Islam in the early medieval period, seems astonishing. Noting that since Mohammed had begun early life as a merchant, Islam has been more hospitable towards trade than Christianity, Graeber argues that for Islamic scholars such as Ghazali (1058-1111 AD) and Tusi (1201-1274 AD) markets were primarily theorised in terms of cooperation as forms of mutual aid that matched supply to demand, rather than as competition.¹²  Amongst major differences between this system and market pricing today, usury was prohibited, price-fixing was frowned upon and there was no conception of profit but rather of service fees charged on a transaction. A notable feature was a system involving the widespread circulation of credit instruments such as cheques that was sustained largely on trust and reputation but also enforceable in law.  These networks of trust were in turn largely responsible for the spread of Islam along caravan routes.¹³

Turchin (2010, 16) argues that the formation of world religions was no coincidence, as the formation of Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and later Christianity, Islam, and Tengrism (the religion of Turko-Mongolian nomads), as well as Confucianism and Stoicism formed a social glue that allowed an otherwise disparate patchwork of ethnicities to amicably live, work and trade. David Sloan Wilson (2003) concurs that the development of large-scale religion was an extremely important development, as religion provides an ‘adaptive fiction’ that forms a powerful social glue that bonds and reins in selfish behaviour amongst believers who may otherwise be strangers. It is noteworthy that in the pluralist societies we live in today, religion is deployed cynically as a weapon by extreme right-wing elements in India, Europe and the USA as a means to legitimise and mobilize sectarian policies by grotesquely twisting the original meaning of religious texts.

The above argument is that societies where trade is conducted through some form of market pricing can be traced to at least five thousand years ago in relatively large scale societies with urban populations. In particular it seems that markets emerged from conquest to facilitate trade between strangers, operating in a system that served the interests of the ruling military and religious elite. During the Axial age this involved the trade of booty, including people who had been enslaved. However, by the early medieval period Islamic jurists had developed a relatively sophisticated code for the conduct of market transactions that instilled values of trust and cooperation.

Many years later when Adam Smith (1776) wrote the Wealth of Nations, at around the same time as the Spinning Jenny was invented, England was also engaged in a war with its colony in the USA and it would be another ten years before it would transport market relations along with its convicts to Australia. And while it is tempting to argue along these lines that the British, French, Belgian and Spanish regimes that were in many respects as brutal as their Roman predecessors, spread the spores of the market system to every continent, given the above, it is possible that some form of a market system may already have been operative in some of these places from before the time they arrived.

War and Cooperation in the Twentieth Century

From the above, Graeber (2011) argues that in the Axial age war indirectly played an enormous role in facilitating trade through counter-reactions that instated pacific relations of cooperation and trust. This seems also to have been the case in the aftermath of the two great wars of the twentieth century which not only resulted in the reconfiguration of the world’s political landscape but also because of a counter-reaction involving the formation of transnational institutions. The removal of constraints on trade formed a key plank of Woodrow Wilson’s proposal for peace made in a speech just before the end of the First World War in 1918, when he also called for the establishment of a world organisation to provide collective security for all nation-states. This presaged the formation of the League of Nations shortly after the conclusion of the First World War. The aspiration and existence of the League to end all war were abruptly terminated as the Wehrmacht swept into Prague in 1939, prompting the German jurist Carl Schmitt to propose dividing the world order by Nazi Germany, amongst other great powers.

Following the Second World War, as the United States emerged as pre-eminent, armed with a sense of evangelical exceptionalism, politicians were keen to extend its hegemony by exporting its peculiar blend of democracy and capitalism to the rest of the world. Some envisioned the emergence of a new global order made in the image of the US as a virtuous circle, where trade would create prosperity and mutual dependency which would lead to stability, and thence to pacific relations within and between nation-states that would in turn be favourable to democracy and antithetical to communism; ideas that formed the ideological core of arguments for US engagement with other powers, if not in its practice. 

Looking back, the ten years after the Second World War was an astonishing period due to the number of supranational institutions that were formed to underpin what came to be known as the ‘rules based order’, which was designed to forestall conflict by managing state relations through the promotion of trade. The agreement struck at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, sealed the end of British imperialism and brought US hegemony into full force as the dollar was instituted as the world’s reserve currency. This was quickly followed by the formation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. in the same year as the United Nations, followed in 1948 by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Now increasingly regarded as an irrelevance, although flawed, the formation of the United Nations was a major achievement, creating a new sphere of intergovernmental institutions numbering 7,0000 in 2018, compared to just fifty at the time of the League of Nations.¹⁴

In contrast to the humiliation suffered by the Germans at the hands of the allies in the wake of the Treaty of Versalles, the Americans showed some magnaminity in what was also a savvy move to forestall the spread of communism by funnelling billions of dollars to rebuild the devastated economies of defeated foes and their allies alike through the Marshall Plan.¹⁵ The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was formed in 1949 and in 1950, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman presented a plan for the integration of European coal and steel industries, laying the foundation for the formation of the European Economic Community.¹⁶

The end of the Second World War also had a major effect on national politics setting the tone for government in Britain for the next twenty to thirty years. In the first election following the Second World War returning military veterans dealt a blow to the incumbent wartime Prime Minister and hero Winston Churchill by voting in his rival, the labour leader Clement Attlee, who stood on a socialist platform of radical social change involving involving the nationalisation of core industries, full employment and the provision of a universal health and welfare system.

Even before the dust of the Second World War had settled over Europe the formation of NATO was a manifestation that a new Cold War had begun. As Fukuyama (1989) described it, two systems now confronted each other across the Iron Curtain, one capitalist, the other communist, each inspired by an Hegelian ideal that is ultimately Christian in origin, consisting in the belief of a dialectical progression towards a state of Absolute Being. Where Hegel prioritised spirit, or culture, over material wellbeing, Engels inverted Hegel’s logic to form the ‘dialectical materialist’ argument that communism would one day supplant capitalism. Fukuyama reinstated Hegel, not only to assert the primacy of culture in the unfolding of human history, but that a particular form of liberalism represented the acme of human development. As a liberal theorist, Fukuyama provided an argument compatible with modernisation theory to argue that this endpoint could be attained in a society where the polity is organised according to democratic principles and the economy is based on market pricing, a state that communists accepted as a necessary stage towards towards an even more perfectible state.

The so-called “Cold War” was only “cold” when it came to relations between the nuclear-armed protagonists who otherwise felt free to export their conflict to conduct “hot” wars and interventions through proxies in Asia, Africa and South America. In the ensuing years the two systems effectively became monstrous doubles seeking to outdo each other in demonstrating their destructive capacities and technological competencies through the production of bigger and “better” bombs and in demonstrating that they could launch these weapons from space. Through the formation of the ‘non-aligned’ movement in 1961, ex-colonies sought to protect their otherwise vulnerable status in this battle of the giants.

Events elsewhere in the 1970s had a major impact in shaping the landscape we live in today. In 1971, the dollar was transformed into a fiat currency when President Nixon abandoned the gold standard, to the lasting chagrin of neo-libertarians who complained that the currency was being debased. On October. 17th, 1973, in response to US aid to Israel during the Yom Kippur War, Arab governments belonging to OPEC imposed an oil embargo on the West. Oil prices rose tenfold over the decade and caused a massive shock which inflicted enormous damage to the world economy. In Britain this took the form of long queues at petrol stations, rotating power cuts and a reduction in the working “week” to three days that culminated in a sterling crisis and a “bailout” from the IMF in 1976. The effects of this shock on employment and wages in the West hastened the demise of the rather benevolent liberal consensus that had prevailed from the Second World War, ushering in the era of neoliberalism with its twin instruments of harsh market discipline and individual responsibility. What proved to be another momentous event occurred In December 1978, one year before the election of Margaret Thatcher as the first ‘neoliberal’ politician, when Deng Xiaoping initiated the ‘opening up of China to a market-based economy.

Following Deng’s initiative, with the exception of a dip in1990, China steadily increased growth from 1980 which hovered at around eight percent even following the Great Financial Crash in 2008 and reached its lowest of around two percent during the Covid epidemic.¹⁷ As illustrated in chapter two, this led to a huge rise in the urban population and to the formation of a substantial middle class consisting of about five hundred million people. In face of Western liberal arguments that the creation of such a middle class would then lead to democracy by pressing politicians to act to advance its interests, it gradually became clear from the announcement of the Belt and Road initiative onwards, that its leadership was bent on following a different course to match and then replace the USA as the dominant global power whilst remaining communist. The huge change that took place in China following accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 is clearly illustrated in the chart by Nicita and Razo (2021) which documents changes in the share of country exports between 1978 and 2020.¹⁸

Prosperity in China and cheaper goods for Western consumers came at the price of de-industrialization in the USA and in Europe provoking discontent in once prosperous cities turned to rustbelts. Life was much tougher for those living in the erstwhile Soviet Union for whom glasnost, a policy of opening up with similar intentions to the Chinese coupled with perestroika, the introduction of market reforms, could not be controlled led to a period of unravelling and a chain of coincidences that culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the formation of the Russian Federation in 1991. Chaos in Russia then led a decrepit President Yeltsin to promote a shadowy figure from the FSB to the role of Prime Minister of Russia in 1999, since when Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea and then the Donbas prior to launching his ill-judged ‘special military operation’ that raised once again the spectre of all-out war.

Discussion

From the above can anything be said from the perspective of multilevel selection about the relations between war, trade and cooperation? Most obviously, war seems to have a binding effect for those involved in it for whom adversity towards a common foe can act as a powerful social glue to tie individuals in bonds of cooperation and civic engagement.¹⁹ More widely, following the two great wars of the twentieth century, especially in light of the vast destructive power of chemical and nuclear weapons, strenuous efforts were made to construct supranational institutions in seeking to prevent war by promoting diplomacy and trade. An obvious problem is that these institutions are not neutral but have always been skewed heavily towards the interests of those countries that emerged victorious from the Second World War. The United States in particular constantly failed to live up to its obligations to fund and support these institutions even before the Trump-47 regime began to eviscerate them.²⁰

Trade as War By Other Means

While von Clausewitz, famously argued that war is politics conducted by other means,²¹ trade is widely used as a weapon of war. War between countries can come in a hard form consisting of economic warfare and sanctions, on in softer forms by promoting envy in one’s opponent or by otherwise acting as a Trojan horse.

Economic warfare

Trade was used as a complement and not as an alternative to warfare in the two great wars of the twentieth century. Harrison (2024) explains the goal of economic warfare as to deny resources to the adversary’s war effort. The adversary responded to protect the war effort by shifting the costs onto civilians resulting in falls in consumption and nutrition, a policy that took time but which proved to be effective.²². Sanctions have been used in place of war in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the Syrian regime and Russia, following its two invasions of Ukraine. They have provoked moral controversy in some of situations for being disproportionately harmful to the population of the target country whilst remaining ineffective in relation to the issue they set out to address.²³ While tariffs are not in the same league as sanctions and indeed seem to do more harm domestically than to those they are aimed at,²⁴ nonetheless, one does not expect them to be deployed against one’s allies, as is the current practice of the Trump-2 regime.

Trade as Soft Power

Trade has also been used as a means of soft power to demonstrate the superiority of one group over another. For example the Marshall Plan that was put in place after World War Two sought offered a means to project the power of the USA. During the Cold War visitors to Russia were presented with a portrait of a system that prioritised the public good, where ordinary workers could consume caviar, drink champagne, attend the ballet, enjoy free holidays and travel to work in a subway system that was the equivalent of a cathedral.²⁵ The Americans on the other hand believed that they had two aces up their sleeve; the Hollywood film industry and consumer goods. The US army had already brought Coca Cola²⁶ and Lucky Strikes and Camels to the countries in which they were billeted abroad and in what some might have regarded as a logical extension of this and others as a campaign worthy of Dr. Strangelove, “The Bar Harbor Project’ of 1951 involved the literal bombardment of cities as far apart as Rostov, Vladivostock, Odesa, Yakutsk and Smolensk with U.S. produced nylons, cigarettes, home perms, tampons, watches and yo-yos. This was greeted initially with bemusement by the Soviet authorities who soon retaliated by parachuting caviar, fur coats and speeches by Stalin into cities in the USA.²⁷

By the end of the 1950s, the discrepancy in consumer goods proved to be a sore point for Nikita Khrushchev, as was made plain in a row with Richard Nixon in what came to be known as “The Kitchen Debate’.²⁸ Stung, Khrushchev unwisely announced a 42% increase in the production of consumer goods by 1961²⁹, from which he subsequently had to climb down.³⁰ Shapiro mentions that continuing shortages in the succeeding Brezhnev era meant that a rise in real incomes could not be realised in consumption and that, ‘people do not equate a rise in their standard of living with watching their money pile up’,

While Soviet citizens have been socialized into expecting long shopping lines, time-consuming shopping expeditions, scarce and poor quality goods, and lack of repair and maintenance facilities, they are apparently less willing to accept these inconveniences indefinitely’ (Shapiro, 1978, 100).

Shapiro notes that Soviet youth were particularly frustrated.

By the 1980s when the vast majority of citizens of the USSR had access to a TV, they could view licensed western series such as The Forsyth Saga and David Copperfield. These conveyed images of characters walking through a series of well-furnished rooms and kitchens with well-stocked refrigerators and appliances. Viewers were also fascinated by changing fashions in clothing and cars and the apparently widespread ownership of telephones and even photocopiers.³¹ According to Lass, a shift happened during the period of perestroika from 1984 to 1991, when the focus shifted from the procurement of goods to that of constructing a legal framework for consumer protection to enable consumers to insist on having faulty goods repaired or returned for a refund. (Lass, 2025).

Although the full story has yet to be told, while the lack of variety and poor quality of consumer products was a source of frequent grumbling, inefficiencies arising from the micromanagement of the economy did not play a major role in the quickening implosion of the Soviet system. Instead it seems that the attempt to recover from defeat in the war against Afghanistan provided the spark that led Gorbachev to introduce the reforms whose unintended effects spilled over into dissolution and collapse.³² Thus in the view of several authors this was not so much a victory for capitalism over communism, but rather took the form of an unravelling from within as a consequence of political mis-steps and unintended consequences. The true test came later through the imposition of a harsh market regime in a state that was barely functioning, ending up as a dictatorial kleptocracy on a potential path to Armageddon.³³

The introduction of ‘shock therapy’ by Harvard economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, who was a close adviser to Yeltsin played an important role. In his view sudden, dramatic changes could jolt a corrupt state-controlled economy from languid complacency to free-market enthusiasm. According to one informant at the time, privatisation was a mantra for the US government, so that when asked about its goals the answer that came back was, “our priorities are privatization, privatization, privatization”…“That was the ideology of the day’.³⁴ As Kotkin put it,

Technocratic ‘reform’ in some other country is the opiate of experts and pundits. Give any country some 15,000 rust-belt factories, perhaps two-thirds of them non-viable in market conditions, as well as several million brigands empowered to act in the name of state, and see how quickly such a place achieves the ‘transition’ to paradise.’³⁵

As the country plunged into a financial crisis in 1998, Yeltsin’s government became increasingly unpopular, and he resigned a year later.

Trade as a Trojan Horse for democracy?

A pervasive argument for soft power is linked to the trenchant belief by liberals in the superiority of the twin forces of capitalism and democracy over alternatives. Although the intellectual foundations for this belief are widespread, Francis Fukuyama can usefully be compared to the liberal political theorist Robert Dahl (1998), for each has argued that the market system and democracy together provide the most convincing rational basis for the construction of the good society. Dahl advocated a combination of polyarchy, which is the limited form of democracy based on competition between political parties that operates in many countries today, and competitive rivalry between firms in the marketplace, as means to put the individual citizen and consumer in the driving seat. In this situation firms are motivated to compete for the favour of consumers and politicians to compete for the favour of citizens. Early in his career Dahl argued that democracy and capitalism are complementary, as the latter comprises the engine that produces the continuous economic growth necessary for prosperity, leading to the formation of a large middle class which in turn provides the ballast for the social stability necessary for effective governance by keeping politicians in check to serve its interests.

Dahl was concerned to preserve the equality of all citizens before the law and argued the need for a system of checks and balances to preserve the social whole against capture by vested interests such as corporations. In his early career he had argued that this unwelcome prospect could be checked by pluralism, a system that encouraged lively competition between groups to ensure that no single of interests could impose its unilateral will on the whole.³⁶ However he became progressively worried about increasing economic and social inequality and the increasing power of business corporations and their owners to capture the state, eventually advocating a form of worker ownership.³⁷

Francis Fukuyama (1989) is more openly meliorist and more explicitly linked to modernisation theory than was Dahl who constantly reflected on the imperfections of the system of government in the USA. Dahl did not postulate an inevitable progression towards liberal democracy but rather a process that could and did go awry. Fukuyama argued similarly to Dahl that market growth should lead to the formation of a prosperous and conservative middle class,³⁸ which would then call for increased accountability through the formation of democratic institutions and policies that advance its material interests.³⁹ Focusing on the role of the state, the rule of law and democratic accountability in China, Fukuyama (2016) argued that the situation in China is not sustainable, as all three institutions are lacking, with the state representing the narrow interests of the elite rather than the majority, q rule of law that is unable to address the misuse of power, and corruption, because the political system lacks democratic accountability.

Switching to a policy perspective, the expansion of global trade in the 1980s and 1990s was pushed forward by neoliberals for political and economic reasons. It was argued that Inflation would be reduced through the export of manufacturing to low cost countries to the benefit of domestic consumers who would gain rom the provision of cheaper goods, whilst those displaced, would move into work in the rapidly developing high value-added services.⁴⁰ Another reason was political, linked to the belief that global trade would increase prosperity and lead to the extension of US hegemony. The reasoning behind developments such as this and the visit of Richard Nixon to China was simple, “where economic freedom takes root, political freedom blossoms”.⁴¹ The logic was that by engaging in global trade, communist states and dictatorships would have to subscribe to global trading rules, with the ultimate aim that trade would promote the growth of a confident middle class by encouraging entrepreneurship and economic growth, which would in turn demand democratic accountability and oversight. As made clear in a speech he made just before the accession of China to the World Trade Organizaton in 2001, President Clinton was motivated by the same fundamental belief as Fukuyama,

The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people — their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power, not just to dream but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.⁴²

Liike many at the time Clinton also believed that the internet would offer a path towards democracy, quipping that to control it would be like trying to pin Jello to the wall.⁴³ As we now know, he could not have been more wrong.

Trade and Peace

A related idea linked to liberals of a meliorist disposition is that trade can further the ends of peace by tying the hands of potential adversaries. Over all was the belief that mutual trade would create mutual dependence that would tie the hands of potential aggressors. This belief informed the thinking of West German politicians in the Cold War when they engaged in Ostpolitik, or ‘change through rapprochement’ with their East German counterparts at a time of heightened tension over nuclear conflict. This was fatefully repeated by the Merkel Government in the belief that through the joint Nord Stream 2 initiative, Russia would never start a major war in Europe.⁴⁴. Given that the admission of China to the WTO then led to the subsequent mass transfer of jobs there from the West, leading to China’s swift ascension to superpower status, and also given the failure of the Nordstream initiative to prevent the second Ukraine war, in retrospect, the overall mindset that informed these initiatives seems ill-judged from the perspective of those who embarked on them. Gerlinde Groitl (2021) argues with the benefit of hindsight that such thinking has since been revealed as a fairy tale, as a globalised world has not turned out to be orderly or harmonious as free trade has stabilized dictatorships and eroded democracies from within due to the ‘explosive backlash’ of those citizens who have lost their entitlements”.

Bookstaber (2021) notes that in the “Mad Max” world of today, bonds of interdependency can remain in place when political connections break apart and nations come close to war. For example, Western Europe, which is a major funder of Ukraine’s defence against and is itself engaged in a covert war with Russia has paid more for the oil it imports from Russia than for its aid to Ukraine. Stranger still, one of the major pipelines continued to transit gas to Europe through Ukrainian territory.⁴⁵ If that wasn’t sufficiently strange, even more bizarrely, when Russia bombed the Druzhba-2 pipeline which transferred its oil to Hungary and the Czech Republic, the latter countries demanded that Ukraine should repair it. Then President Trump warned Ukraine not to damage American assets in Russia, days after Russia had destroyed an US confectionary manufacturing plant near Kyiv with no response from Washington.⁴⁶

Multilevel Selection and Organization.

The result of an experimental study of two weight-loss drugs announced on the 23rd February 2026, found that one resulted in a 23% weight loss over a period of eighty four weeks compared to 25% for the other. Not a lot of difference one might think, as from a consumer perspective the drugs appear broadly comparable. On the same day shares in Novo Nordisk which produces CagriSema, the former of the two next-generation drugs tested fell by 16%, whereas those of Eli-Lilley, which produces Zepbound rose 4%. The consequences were staggering, as Reuters reported that Novo Nordisk’s capitalisation fell by 16% on the announcement, contributing to a fall of over $400 billion from a high of $600 billion in 2024, to $183 billion less than two years later. A stark reminder that, as one commentator put it on the BBC Today programme, ‘business is a dog-eat-dog world’

The above idea of capitalism as a ‘dog-eat-dog’ world was partly shaped by Schumpeter (1994) who described innovation as a constant process of selection by which what is less efficient is ruthlessly weeded out. The argument for competitive isomorphism (Weber, 1968, Hannan & Freeman, 1977) was first mentioned by Max Weber who had described the rapid spread of machine bureaucracy in the capitalist economy,

which demands that the official business of administration be discharged precisely, un-

ambiguously, continuously, and with as much speed as possible. Normally, the very

large, modern capitalist enterprises are themselves unequalled models of strict

bureaucratic organization (Weber, 1968, 974).⁴⁷

In this dog-eat-dog scenario firms quickly model their products and processes on others that are successful in a constant game of catchup. In line with this Hannan and Freeman (1977) criticised the prevailing tendency in management education to focus on how firms formulate strategies to adapt to environmental contingencies, arguing instead that it was necessary to study selection pressures that lead to the demise of organisations.⁴⁸ The authors offered a novel way of viewing organisation by arguing that the formation of large forms such as multinationals is not straightforward but rather involves a special case of selection where movement from “small” to “large” results in the death of the small organization and their replacement or ‘rebirth’ as a larger organisations.⁴⁹

This rather simple model of cutthroat competition was challenged by DiMaggio and Powell (1983), who professed that they found it hard to reconcile this view of organization with the ‘confused and contentious bumblers that populate the pages of organizational case studies’ (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, 156). In addition to competitive isomorphism, they argued that institutional isomorphism plays a role in securing institutional legitimacy and political power. Coercive isomorphism results from firms obeying a common legal requirement which requires them to adhere to regulations that safeguard employee and consumer welfare. The authors also describe as mimetic isomorphism the role played by visits to the USA by the Japanese government in the nineteenth century which aimed to modernise its industry based on the model of US success, and the reversal that occurred in the 1980s when the US sent delegations to Japan to find out more about quality circles and Just in Time management. Normative isomorphism is also important as for instance, firms will often hire individuals from within the same industry or graduates from a narrow range of colleges, favouring top executives in finance or legal departments; and from skill-level requirements or particular jobs. In relation to multilevel selection the main point of the above is that against arguments that business organization is a ‘dog-eat-dog’ affair, organisations are better understood as complex systems within which selection may occur on several grounds other than economics, such as politics.

Market competition and within-group selection

The case of Novo-Nordisk recounted above invites the question as to who calls the shots, the shareholder or the customer? Although still valued at over $150 billion the business was now dwarfed by its main rival so that the prospect of market exit seemed real. If realised this prospect could hardly be good for customers as a degree of competition is required to ensure customer value.

An important issue raised by DiMaggio and Powell (1983) relates to who runs the business, or in today’s parlance, who occupies the ‘C-suite’? They note the autocratic nature of business where a ruling clique may cluster around a CEO who prefers the company of others from his (and it is still usually ‘his’) own kind who share his opinions. Normative isomorphism may work efficiently to serve the needs of the overall business if managers and key staff are drawn from the same universities and are judged on a common set of attributes. As a consequence executives, “will tend to view problems in a similar fashion, see the same policies, procedures and structures as normatively sanctioned and legitimated, and approach decisions in much the same way.”⁵⁰

Gaining An edge for marketing?

Marketing managers have long been aware of the twofold problem, comprising firstly, how to gain access to the ‘C-suite’ and secondly, if they do so, of how to wean their fellow executives from backgrounds in economics, engineering, accountancy or IT, from their prejudicial assumptions as to what marketing is about. This is perhaps partly due to the lingering assumption in the public imagination that modern marketing employs a similar mix of boosterism and the dark arts of deception practiced by hucksters and snake-oil salesmen in the past. Nor is it helped by the long-lived quip attributed to John Wanamaker, that ‘“half the money I spend on advertising is wasted: the trouble is, I don’t know which half’.

Enshrined in the marketing concept, marketing ideology has the quality of an aphorism or an easily disseminated meme or prayer that asks production engineers, accountants and salespersons to forswear their allegiance to the technical superiority of their product, their commitment to reducing costs, or to incessantly rising sales targets, respectively, and rather, as Peter Drucker puts it, to see the whole business from the point of view of the customer.⁵¹ By asking that the needs of the customer should be taken as the end and not as the means to the end of business this is of course merely repeating the key point mentioned by Adam Smith (1776), that consumption is the end point of all production.

Conceptual developments do not just serve the purpose of better helping the firm to attune its offering to its customers. Given its lowly status, arguments about the centrality of marketing as the glue that gives meaning and purpose for the organization not only emphasize the centrality of marketing ideas but lend ideological support to enable marketing managers to leverage their position in the ‘C-suite’. While a customer orientation might seem obvious to the enlightened, CMOs who sought to gain legitimacy by persuading sceptical CEOs and their peers in the C-suite of the argument that a customer orientation can lead to greater profitability, had to wait for academic studies by Narver and Slater (1990) and others. This assumes that CMOs and their peers understand the marketing concept, that CMOs have a relationship with other Board members and have authority over the marketing activities of the business. If one is to believe the results of two reports by McKinsey (Boudet et al, 2019; Brodherson et al., 2023), then one should not take any of these assumptions for granted.

The report by Boudet et al, (2019) centres around the perception that the main task of marketing is not customer service but growth in sales, which 23% of CEOs felt Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) had failed to deliver. The authors mention too that less than a third of CMOs had a strong relationship with other Board members. In the later study, Brodherson et al. (2023) reported that just 10% of CEOs in Fortune 250 companies had a marketing background and that almost two-thirds of CMOs did not believe that their CEOs understood the technical, data-driven nature of marketing.⁵² Moreover the authors note that the role of the CMO had fragmented, as this was integrated in just one third of companies and was otherwise split between chief growth and chief brand officers.

In retrospect, the marketing concept with its primary focus on serving customer needs as the route to profit might be seen as part of the ethos of the post-war era of state-managed capitalism before egalitarianism became a dirty word, when only a few were aware of the argument by an obscure academic called Milton Friedman (1962), that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. One reason noted by J.B. McKitterick (11957) of the need for the concept was because of the oligopolistic situation in the 1950s, euphemistically referred to as ‘orderly marketing’, involving a cosy situation of convenience that enabled a few big players to reap supernormal profits whilst ‘satisfying’ the customer by pursuing a strategy of product differentiation. In this situation although profit was regarded as ‘a basic condition that must be satisfied’⁵³ the maintenance of market share was viewed as at least an equal, if not the primary goal.⁵⁴

While McKitterick's (1957) argument for a customer orientation was on practical grounds, Theodore Levitt (1960) introduced a moral dimension over and above this to argue that short-term thinking is selfish and will ultimately have the consequence of threatening the survival of the enterprise. As well as a stick he also offered the carrot, that by implementing a system of self-regulation through disseminating a belief in the marketing concept throughout the organisation, the firm could fend off otherwise unwelcome intervention from the state. Levitt’s argument came too late as social unrest led the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to establish consumer protection agencies and enact a raft of legislation in this direction.⁵⁵

A contributing factor that adds to the murkiness of the subject, is that the marketing concept proved insufficiently tacky to form the glue that binds the relatively disparate interests of those working across a range of sub-disciplines in marketing strategy, product development, advertising, logistics, relationship marketing, market research, growth marketing and digital marketing, each of which forms a community of practice which has developed its own formal, and unspoken rules. Fundamental disagreements arise as some of those coming from a strategy perspective advocate a ‘marketing warfare’ approach to focus on the mind of the customer as a battlefield, who criticise those they disparage as ‘customer huggers’.⁵⁶

The marketing academy is also divided into groups with the principal division between a mainstream split between quantitative and qualitative empirical research where the former is dominant, a relatively homogeneous grouping that focuses on Consumer Culture Theory and a small loosely aligned group of critical researchers. The school of Macromarketing deserves attention from the perspective of multilevel selection as it focuses on the operations and effects of the marketing system for good and for bad, which thus has relevance for the discussion that follows. For example Kilbourne et al., (1997) drew attention to the mounting environmental crises, noting that it is difficult to criticise this because it had arisen not from market failure but as a byproduct of the success of the industrial system. They ascribe blame on what they call the

Dominant Social Paradigm (DSP) which combines faith in the future discovery of technological fixes as a substitute for real engagement with problems and faith in a steadily growing economy, which are each nurtured by neoliberal politicians. Their argument is understandably dated and appears rather muted from today’s perspective, as it would be hard to find anyone in Europe or the USA who believed that the economy will deliver steady growth, while a growing number are worried about the rapidly escalating crises in loss of biodiversity and global heating. Social inequality has increased and new challenges have emerged such as the sudden development of machine intelligence.

Disarray and Dissolution

In this last section discussion turns to consider the processes involved in social dissolution and disarray Here it is not warfare between systems such as the Romans and the Britons that causes the collapse of one group and its assimilation into the other but rather corrosion from within resulting in an unravelling or of an even more radical implosion. Reflecting on the formation of a new world order following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Simon Kupfer pondered on Donald Trump’s warmongering over Greenland to suggest that a new world order is arising ‘like an Ultimate Fighting Championship for states, They can do what they want: invade other states, commit war crimes or genocide, acquire nukes…AI is being developed with no regulation, because what could go wrong?”⁵⁷. Since the Great Financial Crash of 2008 and particularly the elections of Donald Trump as US President there has unsurprisingly been something of a revival of such apocalyptic arguments about forces that have the potential to provoke political, commercial, societal and cultural collapse. In this section I describe two broad arguments informed by multilevel selection theory, from David Sloan Wilson and Peter Turchin, respectively. The core of Wilson’s argument is that optimisation by an individual or a group or sub-system can work to undermine the global system. Peter Turchin (2016, 2024) develops an alternative argument that the key mechanism involve economic and social inequality where a wealth pump transfers resources from the poor to the rich resulting in the immiseration of the poor whose resentment is easy to mobilise by counter-elites.

David Sloan Wilson: Optimisation of Parts Undermines the Whole

David Sloan Wilson (2023) singles out reverse dominance, the peculiar characteristic of human societies which in contrast to other hominids punish free riders and rein in the actions of individuals who threaten the integrity of the group. As explained in chapter three, Freud, Girard and Wrangham each offered explanations as to how the remarkable level of human prosociality emerged through reverse dominance, leading to the punishment of free riders. Thus cooperation within a group can be undermined by the optimisation of individual sectional interests (Wilson, 2019). What might be seen to be good at the level of the individual by maximising individual fitness can be destabilising at the higher level of the group. As described in chapter three, Wilson cites the case of the ‘psychopathic chickens’ as an example to illustrate how competition can go too far and can ultimately undermine the ends it was supposed to serve.  In groups of humans this can lead to a perverse outcome consisting of a culture of fear where the group is run by bullies and riven by dissent. Wilson singles out as an example the radical individualism prevalent in Microsoft under the leadership of Bill Gates who imposed a highly competitive dog-eat-dog ‘rank and yank’ system of management.

Wilson distinguishes two forms of complex adaptive system (CAS). CAS1 is adaptive as a system, whereas CAS2 is a system composed of agents who follow their respective adaptive strategies. He argues that despite their complexity, CAS2 systems do not self-organise into CAS1 systems. Wilson argues that there is a need for some form of top-down management at the level of the whole system because it tends to be undermined by selection at lower levels. Moreover, he ascribes almost every social pathology to the actions of individuals or groups within the system acting at cross-purposes with each other (CAS2). Given this dissension he argues that the main policy question is how to upscale CAS2 systems into CAS1 systems.

Competitive individualism

Wilson’s (2023) argument is based on optimisation of the system from the top down and so he does not discuss the spontaneous order described by Adam Smith (1776), that arises from the bottom up through the peculiar form of impersonal “cooperation” of customers who are unknown to each other, whose decisions form the basis of selection for the businesses that supposedly vie for their custom. He rather distinguishes Adam Smith’s understanding of self-interest from Milton Friedman’s (1962) assertion that the sole responsibility of a business is to increase profits for its shareholders.⁵⁸ He mentions that Smith had argued to the contrary, that the pursuit of self-interest is informed by a moral framework and that selfishness exhibited in the excessive pursuit of profit can have the effect of harming the social good by violating the rights of others and by ignoring one’s duty to the wider community.⁵⁹ Wilson's (2023) criticism is directed against selfishness rather than at the market system per se, although he devotes a lot of attention to discuss Lin Ostrom’s (1990) organising principles for the management of common pool resources, which suggests that his aim might be to construct a form of super-organism over and above the market that possesses the power to define a sense of purpose, an equitable distribution of benefits. Discussed earlier, Mariana Mazzucato (2023) argued the need over and above this to reframe what Wilson calls the symbotype, or the ideology underlying the division Ostrom made between markets, common pool resources and public goods, as this very distinction limits the role of the state to that of ‘fixer’ to address the problems created by market externalities after the event.

If the system of capitalist accumulation can itself be described as a super-organism, then its fitness-enhancing activities have been hugely successful in making it indispensable to the conduct of trade relations in the global economy and thus formidably resistant to change.⁶⁰ As argued by Mazzucatto (2023), according to the enclosed logic of the market, consideration of externalities, such as pollution, waste, decline in biodiversity and global heating mean precisely what they say, that they are largely beyond the remit of the market and so it is for others to sort them out. By limiting discussion to the exchange of commodities Mazzucatto has little to say about the neoliberal extension of competitive individualism by shifting responsibility onto the shoulders of individual citizens to maximise their self-interest through astute management of their human capital. Despite which, states have since only partially implemented this socially corrosive doctrine, for example by intervening heavily to support the bulk of their populations following the shocks created by the Covid epidemic and the second invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Ameliorative action by states has further energised the right-wing to press for an even more radical post-liberal agenda with the twin aims to destroy democracy and the central institutions of the nation-state and to replace them with societies based purely on contractual relations and organised on the basis of ‘neurocastes”.⁶¹

The rest of this section is devoted to a wider discussion of aspects of competitive individualism that threaten to undermine the system.

Weighting Individual Interest over the good of the whole

As conceived by Wilson (2019), the global order, including the global economy, should be considered as a nested multilevel system. From this perspective one should explore the extent to which optimization at one level of the system works to enhance or detract from performance of the system as a whole. He uses ‘cancer’ as an analogy to describe lower-level developments such that cells are undermined by action at the level of genes, individuals by cancerous cells and groups of people by ‘cancerous’ ideologies which act to undermine cooperation and solidarity. Consequently, Wilson and Wilson (2008) argue that, “we must be vigilant about preventing, detecting, and removing such cancers for the body politic no less than our own bodies”.

,The authors note that while all ideologies are framed as means of promoting the social good, the effects of a cancerous ideology should not be judged by the claims made by its proponents but rather by the material effects of a specific ideology on the body politic. As an example the authors mention Alan Greenspan who presided over the U.S. Federal Reserve Board prior to the Great Financial Crash (GFC) of 2008, who had thought he was doing the right thing and who was, “genuinely dumbfounded that the policies he helped to implement led to such disastrous results”. This section discusses two broad contexts where the perceived interests of an individual country or of a business or industry have been privileged over the social whole.

Globalisation: America (or Europe) First!

As discussed in chapter two the globalisation of trade that took place in the 1980s and 1990s was widely viewed as beneficial, enabling the formation of a large middle-class in China and lifting millions elsewhere from conditions of destitution and poverty and fuelling progress towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. However this the formation of the governance institutions that underpinned this were largely at the behest of the USA, as the global hegemon.

Close to the end of the Second World War the Bretton-Woods system was put in place at the instigation of the USA, inaugurating a system of adjustable exchange rates under the auspices of the World Bank and the IMF that were centred around the US dollar which was itself pegged to the price of gold.⁶² This provided exchange rate stability and independence of monetary policy which enabled nation states to maintain capital controls and full employment. Despite its benefits the system proved to be unwieldy, resulting in a cycles of ‘stop-go” economics amongst other problems which led Nixon to decouple the dollar from gold in 1971 and from capital controls in 1974. The financialization of the global economy started in earnest during the 1980s under the Reagan and Thatcher governments and the regulatory framework that had been put in place since the Great Depression of the 1930s began to be dismantled, precipitating a pattern of deregulation and crises that have continued since.⁶³ The reduction in barriers led to greater interdependence of trade and with the end of the Soviet Union and the development of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, capitalism became the global order of business, when, as noted by Wallerstein, a world-economic system became conjoined to an international state system (Fraser & Jaeggi, 2018, 78).

Along with financialization came debt. With floating exchange rates and the abolition of capital controls states lost the ability to control their own currencies and steer their economies through deficit financing and were at the mercy of international lenders and bond rating agencies. Transnational governance exercised by the non-democratic institutions of the IMF, WTO and World Bank ensured that the world was made safe for capitalism but not vice versa, as in the wake of deregulation came crisis and debt.

The centrality of the USA was made apparent in 1989, through the formation of the “Washington Consensus’, a ten point prescription devised to rein in the Third World debt crises by teaching wayward governments in South America and Africa the lessons of “motherhood and apple pie”.⁶⁴ The background to this was the oil embargo of the 1970s, when OPEC countries invested their massive profits from the hike in the price of oil in Western banks. Flush with funds the banks in turn readily leant out this money at extremely low rates to countries, many of them dictatorships, in what was then known as the Third World. However, by the early 1980s the economic climate had changed dramatically, when a spike in interest rates led several countries to default on their loans. Escalation in the numbers of defaults coupled with the suffering of the poor and indigent led to a twin response from the “international community”. On the one hand the IMF, informed by the“Washington Consensus” stepped in to demand the imposition of ‘market discipline’, including an end to the provision ofd free health care and education and even of price support for the basic foodstuffs required for daily life. On the other hand there was a response by church groups and civil society to demand the forgiveness of the debt.

A similar situation was repeated in the run up to the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008, involving the European Bank. German banks had leant huge sums based on lax standards of due diligence to citizens and businesses in Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain. The background to this sorry affair was traced to just before the Millennium, when the German financial regulator called senior bankers to a meeting where they were informed that Germany needed to catch up with London and New York as a financial centre,

“We were read the riot act,” one banker told Andres Veiel. “Germany was increasingly falling behind London and New York as a financial centre. We should get with it, get into more risk, expand the derivatives and structured finance products, finally get modern.⁶⁵

There followed a wave of deregulation during which German banks turned to the rising ‘Celtic Tiger’ as the place to conduct lucrative deals. Lending in Ireland was funnelled into the housing market, leading to a huge property bubble and an exposure of €135 billion which was virtually wiped out following the GFC. The Irish government was then forced to take drastic measures by shifting these private liabilities onto the public balance sheet by announcing that taxpayers would fund repayments to the German banks. What was the effect on the public purse? In 2022, the Irish Government announced that it had fully repaid its debts to the IMF as well as bilateral loans to the UK, Sweden and Denmark, stating that it was then in a position to begin paying its outstanding loan of €40 billion to the EU.⁶⁶

In his call on the 27th April 2023 for a new Washington Consensus, Biden spokesperson Jake Sullivan mentioned four challenges presented by the legacy of neoliberalism.⁶⁷ Firstly he critiqued policymakers’ reliance on the assumption of market efficiency, pointing out that this had led to the export of American jobs and knowhow overseas, principally to China, which in the meantime had vigorously subsidised its domestic industry. A second challenge was the need to combat growing geopolitical threats posed by global disintegration. Third he called for new thinking to tackle the accelerating climate crisis. Finally, he signalled the need to confront the challenge to democracy presented by growing social inequality.⁶⁸ Sullivan thus called for a new “Washington consensus” to build a “fairer and more durable economic order” and to reverse the trend for entire supply chains of strategic goods to move overseas.

The two regimes Trump 1and Trump 2 are good candidates to explain social dissolution as they have engaged in a series of ‘initiatives’ that undermine the social order which seem to be motivated purely by personal greed and self-enrichment.⁶⁹ They supposedly focused on the first issue identified by Sullivan’s pertaining to jobs, whilst coercing other countries to conform to their vision of a new world order based on blocs of power, while simultaneously attempting to destroy democratic institutions at home and abroad and reversing progress in addressing global heating. In so doing they have ripped up the “rules-based order” that the USA had itself constructed, not only by lecturing allies on their lack of democracy but also by imposing swingeing tariffs on them, as well as on the rest of the world. The move away from neoliberalism to a post-liberal form of state-managed capitalism gained traction through the administration’s acquisition of a ten percent stake in Intel and the suggestion that it might also acquire stakes in “strategic industries” such as Lockheed Martin.⁷⁰.

Both Trump regimes were notable for their focus on disruption through jobs given to self-proclaimed fans of disruption such as Steve Bannon and Elon Musk, and the appointment of a number of disruptive personalities to high offices of state in health, intelligence and defence.⁷¹ Through his apparently deepening relationship with Vladimir Putin it began to appear that the ‘disruptor in chief’, Donald Trump’s proposed solution to global dis-integration was to destroy the institutional basis of the post Second World War order composing the UN, WTO and World Bank and to replace them with blocs based on China, the USA and perhaps, the Russian Federation.

An aspect of intergroup competition is that members of a group may seek to maximise their relative advantage over another group to the extent that they are prepared to suffer a loss if this ensures that the other group will lose more than them. In The Betrayal of the American Dream, Bartlett and Steele (2013) mention a discussion of winners and losers in the global economy by members of a US based hedge fund who surmised that if trade liberalisation led to four individuals from China and India joining the middle class whilst just one US citizen fell out of the middle class, ‘this would not be a such a bad trade’.   The authors continue by observing that, “the only problem is that no one told working Americans they were going to forfeit their future so that people in China, India, Brazil and other developing countries could become part of a global middle class”.  In a study conducted in 2013, well before the first election of Donald Trump, the authors found that when it came to jobs, most US citizens viewed trade negatively, regarding the current situation as one where the US loses and the trade partner gains, with just 10% agreeing that trade constitutes a  net gain. By comparison, over fifty percent argued that trade helped the trading partner and hurt the US.  From their experiment the authors found that the majority of citizens were more likely to support a policy if it benefitted the USA as opposed to equivalent benefits elsewhere.  Additionally they found that a sense of national superiority encouraged a sense of exceptionalism, such that citizens of the US considered their compatriots as more deserving than those of other countries and that some individuals preferred policies that benefitted the USA and which hurt the interests of trading partners (Mutz & Kim, 2017, 845, 846).

Placing Industry Interest over the public good

There are many examples of industrialists who respond to the identification of harms caused by their product or process to put profit before the social good. A few instances are mentioned briefly here.

Fossil Fuels: Global heating is literally an existential issue that is already wreaking havoc which if left unchecked will reach one of a number of tipping points with disastrous consequences for many species, including humanity.⁷² The reality of global heating took some time to come to light and indeed in the early 1970s, it was thought that aerosols in the atmosphere would likely lead to global cooling (Peterson et al., 2008). However, by the late 1970s scientists at ExxonMobil became aware that it was global heating from continuing use of fossil fuels that posed the real danger, news that its executives did everything in their power to suppress. Apart from one or two exceptions at BP and Shell which others said had ‘got out of line’ by instigating failed ‘green revolutions’, the industry interpreted the threat differently to how a sane individual who was concerned by the existence of human life on the planet by viewing global heating not as the threat to humanity which it is, but rather to their business model and the survival of their industry.  Carbon Majors, which has compiled a database of the world’s fossil fuel and cement producers states that just twenty entities, many of them state-owned, have been responsible for almost 43% of global emissions, amongst them Saudi Aramco, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Gazprom, National Iranian Oil Co. BP,  and Shell.⁷³ Rather than facing up to the looming threat that their actions posed to the survival of the planet, they circled the wagons to fund a number of pro-industry campaign groups and so-called ‘think tanks’ that for the past fifty years have actively engaged in a programme of dissimulation and obfuscation, suppressing their own research and denying in public the very existence of a climate crisis. When eventually they were forced to admit the possibility that this was happening they claimed that this nothing to do with their operations. 

Individualism played a role in the insidious campaign to shift responsibility for global heating from business to consumers through the notion of the ‘carbon footprint’ developed by Ogilvy and Mather in 2004.⁷⁴ The aim behind the campaign was to shift responsibility and blame away from industry and onto the shoulders of the individual consumer. While the individual measurement of one’s own energy use is of course important, media revelations quickly undermined individual commitment by showing that rather than committing itself to lasting change, the fossil fuel industry was intent on continuing to do business as usual whilst ‘greenwashing’ its activities in public. In the meantime these corporations have acted ruthlessly to capture politicians, suborn scientists and academics and even to squash the mere mention that fossil fuels might be a factor involved in global heating. This deflection of blame onto the individual by posing a social problem as a matter of individual choice and responsibility, has also been employed as a framing device to deflect responsibility amongst others, the lead, alcohol, food and tobacco industries.

From the lens of multilevel selection, if it were any other organism such as a cell or a group of otherwise competing humans, one might argue that the corporate and state-owned monoliths involved in the fossil fuel industry acted in the same way as any other organism would have done by protecting its interest and survival from attack.  The difference is that these ‘organisms’ are themselves made up of tens of thousands of individuals, amongst them Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobiland Gretchen Watkins  President of Shell, who lied by denying the threat that their actions posed to the existence of their own children and grand-children.

As was the case with obesity through the development of weight-loss drugs, the typical institutional response has been to offer a technological fix that enables business to continue as usual. For instance, rather than recognise the immense harm caused at home and in countries such as Ghana where it is dumped by reducing output, the industry increased output and suggested recycling.⁷⁵ This shifted responsibility for problems created by business onto the shoulders of the individual and of public authorities. The ‘playbook’ used by individual companies and industries to deal with threats to their interests and survival is now well-known, dating back at least to the campaign run by the lead industry, since used by interests relating to asbestos, tobacco, alcohol, sugar, automobiles and plastics, to name a few. In sum this involve the following; discover the facts, then deny them in public; reframe the narrative by engaging in denialism and sew doubt in the minds of policy-makers and the public; work to delay regulatory action, suppress evidence by exerting pressure on internal scientists and whistleblowers and externally on academic institutions; co-opt politicians and academic institutions; and create a false narrative by engaging in a public relations campaign that supplements public image advertising with astroturf marketing.⁷⁶

Social Media: Social media giants are also putting their short-term interests over the public good as they perceive themselves to be engaged in a zero-sum game where winner takes all and are driven to maximise profit at the expense of the consumer and of society as a whole. In some respects one might think of the Internet as a superorganism which has opened up avenues for discovery, sharing and learning that were once almost unimaginable even to authors of science fiction. Today It can be hard to believe that the internet was once seen as a place where people could be brought together to share information. Back in the 1990s if one mentioned ‘amazon’ most people would have thought you meant the world’s largest river and not the relatively small scale David that sought to take on the mighty Goliath constituted by Barnes & Noble.

Although it is easy to target individual businesses and their greedy and self-serving bosses, the market has a lot to do with the social dysfunction produced by social media.

The current technological landscape optimises for profit of the individual enterprise by maximising the engagement of consumers based on algorithms that play towards extremes of behaviour. They are designed to arouse raw emotions of fear, anger and anxiety in the individual consumer in fora where the loudmouth and the bully get the most attention, and by arousing prurient desire by providing a seeming cloak of invisibility for perpetrators. Shoshanna Zuboff (2019), describes as instrumentarian power, the process by which FAANG are using instrumental conditioning techniques to gain unprecedented real-time information about the behavioural responses of individuals which they then monetise by selling it to third parties. The results are evident in a society that is riven by dissent and hatred, where the loudest and most extreme or profane voice gets the most attention, where individuals are driven to distraction by “doom scrolling” for hours, going down rabbit holes of misinformation that fuel the wildest conspiracy theories, where xenophobia and “toxic masculinity” thrive.

And although at time of writing, a chorus is rising to ban younger teenagers from social media, the irony is that adults are just as ‘addicted’ to such behaviour as are the young. At a societal level this has resulted in a huge decline in the access to what are disparagingly referred to as ‘legacy’ media outlets which go to strenuous efforts to verify facts, and a turn to reliance on social media ‘influencers’, many of whose sole aim is to maximise ‘likes’ and some with malign intentions who willingly spread misinformation that has fuelled the growth of conspiracy theories such as QAnon. As the social media user is provided with a personalised social media ‘feed’ tailored to suit their preferences, rather than sharing perspectives on a particular story as in days gone by, individuals now live in a mediated bubble distinct from others. The extensive use of social media and the creation of information silos has had a major corrosive effect on bonds of kinship and friendship that are the basic glue for traditional community, as family and friends now appear as strangers on either side of a social divide on a range of issues, feeding into anomie, social and cultural fragmentation and breakdown.

Machine intelligence. In a similar zero-sum game that is being played out as I write, Apple and Meta have been joined by newcomers such as Nvidia and Palantir in a race to the bottom driven by the age-old capitalist principle of maximising profit through efficiency as opposed to the improvement of human welfare. Machine intelligence is promoted to citizens, producers and consumers as an innovation that will work for the good of all by vastly shortening the time taken to make the computations necessary to track the aetiology of disease, leading to the design of new medicines and of technologies that will help reverse the effects of climate change, and of foods that will be resistant to global heating and also by reducing unnecessary routine drudgery from the work environment and by speeding up the development of safe autonomous vehicles. Thus portrayed it seems to offer the realisation of the visions depicted in comic books in the 1950s and in films such as Bladerunner (1982) of towering cities reaching into the clouds buzzed by hundreds of flying machines. Over and above that the development of AI is sold to us not as a choice but as an imperative, either join now or lose out to those who continue with the revoluti

Thus, despite the hype about how generative artificial intelligence will save the world, rather than being developed to improve human decision-making and wellbeing it may well be that the logic behind the development of this technology will be to replace humans.⁷⁷ In the post-liberal era with the fragmentation of the global order competition has been heightened by the clear emergence of the People’s Republic China as a formidable rival to US hegemony, not only through developments in space travel and its projection of military power but also by the establishment of its DeepSeek AI system. In the UK, machine intelligence has already proved highly disruptive to graduate employment and is leading to the shedding of ‘white collar’ jobs in accountancy, law and banking as challengers that are ‘leaner and fitter’, or in other words virtual, vie for supremacy over traditional businesses.⁷⁸ While some argue that the massive bubble in AI stocks will crash the market, Critini Research sought to provoke discussion by providing a list of scenarios of doom spirals that are truly apocalyptic, In one,

AI got better and cheaper. Companies laid off workers, then used the savings to buy more AI capability, which allowed them to lay off more workers. Displaced workers spent less. Companies that sell to consumers sold fewer of them, weakened and invested more in AI to protect margins. AI got better and cheaper. A feedback loop with no natural break.⁷⁹

The stakes of what appears to be the most significant change in the job market since the dawn of computing are extremely high, as without significant state intervention to ameliorate their situation the dismissal of tens or hundreds of thousands of educated individuals may well lead to resentment and the formation of a militant counter-elite. As if the stakes could not get any higher, a related concern is sparked by the fact that those engaged in this market-driven competition cannot fully understand the risks involved as they are not in control of the process. The simple logic underlying the technology is that machine intelligence increases by an order of magnitude in relation to scale, and so as scale increases massively, so will its ‘intelligence’. However the precise nature of this “intelligence” will be unknown until that level of scale is reached.⁸⁰

Radical Liberty or Free Riding?

Milton Friedman summed up his radical idea of liberty in the following;

To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them….How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect? (Friedman, 1962, 47-48).

In this vision of freedom, those who create wealth should be enabled to keep hold of it free from tax and to move it wheresoever they please, for after all, it was created through their individual enterprise. This argument has been criticised by many, including liberals, as a self-serving alibi used by the elite to appropriate credit for themselves for achievements that rightly belong to group endeavour. Thomas Piketty argues that wealth and prosperity are not created by individuals but rather emanate from a collective process and so there is a need to institute participatory democracy in business, a change that requires massive public support if it is to be realised. He thus questions the current state of affairs which accords power to stockholders who are accorded, “a quasi-sacred right to enrich themselves… and then, with the click of a mouse, to move their assets to a new jurisdiction”.⁸¹

Authors argue that entrepreneurs are nowadays very much the exception to the rule, as the economy in many countries is now dominated by rentier capitalism which accumulates wealth through a range of non-productive activities such as fees for financial institutions, rents from land and housing, share buybacks and digital platform monopolies which collectively drain a massive amount of resources from productive enterprise. This is a form of wealth extraction that effectively stifles innovation by diverting investment from productive activities, leading to a reduction in economic growth and incomes.

Mazzucatto provides cases of free riding in which “public investments have become business giveaways, making individuals and their companies rich, but providing neither access for all nor adequate (direct or indirect) returns to the economy or to the state”. This has most evident in the case of ‘Big Tech’ through state funding of the entire infrastructure required for the development of the Internet, and of pharmaceuticals, where publicly funded drugs end up being too expensive for the taxpayer (who funded them) to purchase (Mazzucato, 2013; Mazzucato et al. 2018).

Corporations Free Riding on the Public Purse

Writing over seventy years go the US political theorist Robert Dahl (1958) wrote that he was concerned that the optimization of business interests posed a threat to the integrity of the social whole, warning that ever larger multinational corporations presented a serious challenge to society at large because their unified autocratic organisation and the scale of resources at their command threatened to capture the political process.⁸² Well before the first election of Donald Trump to the White House, Dahl argued on several occasions that the increasing power of multinationals seriously compromised the democratic process in the USA, undermining political equality by generating massive inequalities in wealth, status, and control of information and enabling the rise of an elite that deployed resources to further its interests over the majority of citizens.

While a person born since the Millennium might take it for granted that the corporate landscape is dominated by juggernauts such as Apple, Amazon, Meta and Nvidia, the question arises as to whether or not this was inevitable? Moreover, how was it that corporations were able to reach to this size and scale of operation? Following Adam Smith (1776) for whom competition is vitally important to the successful operation of the market, when considering anti-trust cases, the effect of a proposed merger on the competitive landscape was once the major consideration for judges when hearing anti-trust actions. That changed in the early 1970s, due to the action of the US jurist Robert Bork, who successfully convinced the US judiciary of the neoliberal argument that when judging anti-trust actions consumer welfare is better measured in terms of the merger’s effects on price and efficiency rather than on competition.⁸³ This was a momentous event as it went against the argument by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations (1776) who specifically advocated for competition between firms as a means to prevent monopoly and thus to keep business honest in their dealings with consumers.

As a consequence of Bork’s intervention the emphasis in law shifted from protecting a multiplicity of small business competitors to considerations of operational efficiency. This had a huge effect on judgements made in competition law in the USA and beyond.⁸⁴ Matthews (2012), argues that without Bork the old rule of inhospitality to big business would still be in force and so there would have been no Dotcom bubble and so no FAANG, nor no scramble for machine intelligence, as the World Wide Web as we know it is dominated by economies of scale. The behemoth that is Amazon is a good example of how individual fitness can result in deleterious consequences at a higher level. Amazon prides itself on its extremely efficient dispatch system and unparalleled quality of service has allowed it to grow from being a small challenger to the power of the mighty Barnes and Noble in 1994 to a global leviathan today with a global net revenue of well over $600 billion. As with any company approaching monopoly status, this stupendous growth masks allegations of illegal conduct to in the words of the Federal Trade Commission, ‘block competition, inflate prices, degrade quality, and stifle innovation for consumers and businesses’.⁸⁵

Free Riding through Corruption and Kleptocracy

Milton Friedman’s (1962) argument was mentioned above in relation to his vision of a radically negative view of freedom which conceives of society as nothing more than an agglomeration of individual interests, and of a frictionless landscape where the individual ought to be free to move themselves and their funds wheresoever they please. In contrast, Piketty (2013) argues that sharp increases in social inequality have been due to low marginal rates of tax for top income earners and corporations which have fallen sharply since the mid 1970s across much of the world. Despite these low rates, many of the wealthiest corporations and individuals seek to avoid tax entirely. At time of writing Elon Musk paid a real tax rate of 3.2%, while half of the world’s billionaires live in countries with no inheritance tax.⁸⁶

The liberal Shaxson (2019) finds himself in company with Karl Marx when arguing that the accumulation of capital is parasitic on society and that whether constituted as a Multinational Corporation (MNC) or as a private individual, capital tries its best to evade the rules that ordinary citizens are bound to live by in a democratic system. He describes a complex international parasitic apparatus of specialists that enables the sequestration of funds from tax, consisting of a panoply of “corporate service providers”, from accountants to financial advisers, lawyers and property agents shield the beneficial owners of property and other assets from scrutiny by channelling funds through a thicket of shell companies fronted by sham directors. The system is lubricated by a lucrative “revolving door” whereby government officials and regulators on relatively low salaries transfer their loyalty to the other side advising those who hold dirty money as how to avoid loopholes. The system of lax regulation is enabled and perpetuated through donations to political parties. Capitalists, whether MNCs or individuals, evade the rules that bind everyone else by diverting funds, amounting to many trillions of dollars, through so-called tax-havens.

Anne Applebaum (2024) and Quinn Slobodian (2024) have focused attention on the rise of states that are not just tax havens but “bridging jurisdictions’ or hybrid states. The United Arab Emirates and Krygyzstan are legitimate states that also launder the proceeds of theft and drug-sales and enable “rogue” countries and individuals to evade sanctions. Slobodian describes how market libertarians enthuse about “statelets” such as Liechtenstein, Monaco and Singapore. After the G8 put Liechtenstein on a blacklist of states involved in money laundering in 2000, market radicals, market radicals described it as a “David fighting a globalist regulatory Goliath”. As Slobodian put it,

Paradoxically, a place that was amongst the wealthiest per capita in the world, tailor-made to protect the finances of the even-wealthier, was cast as the underdog - a victim of “financial imperialism’.⁸⁷

Applebaum (2024), describes a growing network of states that facilitate money laundering, including shipments of gold through Hong Kong and the transport of indentured labour and environmental crime involving the UAE.⁸⁸ Since its second invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has been facilitated in evading sanctions on military technology and trade, most obviously by North Korea and China, but also by Hungary, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where “Special Economic Zones” enable relabelling and re-export of electronic components and through “flag-switching” and unwittingly through countries such as Ireland via a complex network of sales to third parties.⁸⁹

Fetishisation of Individual Choice

The fetishisation of choice is another instance of individualisation. Taking a multilevel selection perspective, the argument is not that choice is bad in itself but rather is a social good that when taken to an extreme can be inappropriate and result damaging social consequences such as chronic anxiety (Salecl, 2004). This is especially so given that individuals are made responsible for making choices in contexts of health care where they have little knowledge and depend on experts for advice and guidance. Additionally, that individual choices are open to manipulation has informed calls made by Thaler and Sunstein (2008) and Kahneman (2011) who argue for a limited form of libertarian paternalism where individuals are ‘nudged’ to steer decisions without restricting their options.

Meritocracy

Meritocracy is linked to the above discussion because although it has been argued to be a social good by “levelling the playing field”, critics argue that it fosters a culture of hyper-individualism by allowing those with psychopathic tendencies to rise to the top. Those who argue that it is a good thing do so on the basis that the distribution of intelligence is more or less random and so the state needs to tailor social provision to enable talent to shine through irrespective of one’s race, gender or social class. From this a liberal aspiration has been to create a ‘level playing field’ to reduce disparities in income and wealth and to invest in education for those from poor backgrounds.

Meritocracy does not have one meaning, but rather, this varies in relation to context. Thus those in the USA seem perennially gripped by the stories of the nineteenth century author Horatio Alger who fed an individualist culture by providing vivid descriptions of plucky individuals who went from rags to riches by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. This was extended in the neoliberal age through arguments that humans are fundamentally competitive and that life is a zero-sum game such that if granted equality of opportunity, the most talented and industrious individuals will “naturally” rise to the top. From this it was presumed that CEOs and others of their ilk at the top of organisations possess a unique and rare talent. Consequently grotesque differences emerged between the “compensation” paid to CEOs as “just reward for talent” compared to the “pay” of their “fellow employees”. Some authors argue that this system has simply opened the door for manipulation by a cadre of individuals with psychopathic personalities (Ronson, 2011; Verhaeghe, 2015).

A more hard-edged view of meritocracy is emerging in the current era of post-liberalism that is not new but rather consists of long discredited arguments that arose in the nineteenth century in relation to social Darwinism. As mentioned in chapter three, proponents of this view who are usually white men, (who else!) draw on unreliable studies of variations in IQ research to argue for the separation of classes in relation to ‘neurocastes’. Given that modern genetics has since exploded the entire basis of “racial purity’,⁹⁰ apologists for this have had to resort to arguing on the more amorphous base of “cultural difference” to argue that some “cultures” are better fitted to living in market societies than are others (Slobodian, 2025). However the recycling of discredited assumptions about the supposed superiority of men over women and of white men to men of some other “races” further feed antagonism and so corrodes bonds of social stability and order.

Declining Fertility

The decision as to whether or not to have children is often presented as an individual choice which is heavily influenced by factors such as social stability and economic circumstances and is facilitated or restricted by the state, as was the case in the implementation of the enforced sterilisation of women by the regime of Indira Ghandi between 1975 and 1977 and the notorious ‘one-child’ policy imposed by the Chinese government.⁹¹ In contrast, liberals in “western’ societies have generally regarded human reproduction as a matter of individual choice that is outside the market system, as exemplified in the case of Wai Ching described in chapter one who decided to prioritise her career over that of settling down and raising a family.

As discussed in chapter two, the total fertility rate in most countries is declining rapidly and in many is well below the replacement level of 2.1. There appears to be no clear logic that links this trend to the costs and benefits of raising a child in a capitalist country as declines are reported in Iran, Afghanistan and the Republic of Congo as well in supposedly advanced post-industrial countries. However, in a capitalist system this is most concerning, as decline is exponential, meaning that once population growth passes an inflection point it is rapid and inexorable which will have a huge impact within a few generations. There are several exacerbating factors. Firstly, populations will continue to age until 2100, by which time population decline will be starkly evident in the lack of resources available to maintain the livelihood of those old and frail. As an example, in a ‘worst-case’ scenario the US Census Bureau estimates that if immigration is kept to zero, the US population will fall by 226 million by 2100, which is 107 million less than in 2022. Again in a zero-immigration scenario the proportion of those aged over 65 will be 35.6% in 2100 while those aged 16-18 will be less than 16%.⁹². Added to this severe effects from global heating are expected to be experienced within the next twenty to fifty years, which is well within the time period for population decline.⁹³ A study of population decline in thirty-three countries argued that policies supporting work and parenthood would make a difference (Ferrarini, 2018), population levels have declined rapidly even in socially progressive countries such as Norway, Finland and Denmark.⁹⁴ Finally, through the rapid development of non-human machine intelligence and robotics, it is not inconceivable that scenarios described in science fiction will be realised.

Inequality: Elite Overproduction (Turchin, 2016)

From the perspective of multilevel selection rising wealth inequality will be corrosive of the social body as it fuels resentment and social discontent with potentially catastrophic consequences for the maintenance of social order. For instance, there is evidence that high social and income disparities contributed to the collapse of the Roman, Han and Aztec empires.⁹⁵ Turning to more recent events, the publication of The Spirit Level (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2010) created something of a stir by suggesting a strong link between social inequality and negative outcomes for health and social wellbeing. Greener (2024) linked inequality to democratic functioning by finding that these effects were heightened when what he called integrative democracy is low, when governments reflect the interests of a narrow range of interests.

Rising wealth inequality is also corrosive of the social body as it fuels resentment and social discontent with potentially catastrophic consequences for the maintenance of social order. Contributors to the edited edition by Centeno et al (2023) pick the bones of history, ranging from the fall of of Rome, to that of the Aztecs, Byzantium and to cases such as the Black Death and the Siege of Leningrad to discern the shape of what is heading our way and how we ought to deal with it. Peter Turchin (2016, 2024) has gone one step further to argue that from his study of the dissolution and collapse of ancient societies he has discovered the key mechanisms by which societies unravel, and that ours is due to do so at any moment. In his account this will happen through immiseration of the bulk of the population at the same time as the overproduction of the elite. In his view the first sign of decline is that the distribution of wealth in society becomes skewed in favour of the rich, constituting a ‘wealth pump’ from poor to rich that fuels the growth of of a class of millionaires, deca-millionaires and billionaires while leading to the immiseration of the bulk of the population. Because of the numbers involved only a few members of the elite are successful in the scramble for power and status, the consequence being that some of this highly educated ‘white collar’ class, particularly lawyers, who cannot find a position suitable to their perceived rank feel spurned and turn instead to disruption, forming a counter elite to stir up the disenchantment of the immiserated mass of the population to challenge the legitimacy of the system. As Turchin tells the tale, from there on it is all downhill.

Although Turchin is a scientist, I am always wary of those who make much of their ‘scientific’ credentials, as despite their best efforts scientists are no less human than the rest of us.⁹⁶ Whether or not his thesis holds, Turchin is in good company when arguing that social equality is of paramount importance in maintaining stability in a democratic polity. Over a long career the political theorist Robert Dahl (1961, 1993, 1998) argued the necessity of recognising that all human beings are of equal intrinsic worth and that no person is intrinsically superior to another. Dahl argued that high levels of political and social inequality are dangerous for democracy because they threaten social cohesion. In direct contrast, Milton Friedman (1962) argued that inequality is a natural and indeed necessary by promoting individual responsibility, enterprise and wealth creation by spurring competition between individuals and groups. It is not hard to spot the social Darwinist, or more accurately, the group selectionist assumptions at work behind the contention that the rich are innovators and wealth creators whose wealth is the product of their own hard work and who thus ought to be allowed to keep their wealth, as to do so will benefit society as a whole.

Turchin (2024) devotes a chapter to discuss immiseration in the USA, which he argues began in the 1970s when the wealth-pump flipped from an egalitarian setting to its opposite to steadily swell the fortunes of the rich.⁹⁷ He cites evidence that when one takes into account the increase in women working and changes in working conditions, real household income has been declining since the 1970s, whilst at the same time the number of millionaires and deca-millionaires has risen steadily, as has the number of billionaires. He summons attention to the decline in key indicators of height and life expectancy arguing that the height and life expectancy of individuals in the USA that had been rising steadily began to decline amongst those born in the late 1970s.⁹⁸ These data are confirmed by Komlos, (2025) who describes how the U.S. healthcare and food systems have failed to create an environment in which the human biological organism can flourish. Consequently, key health outcomes, most notably life expectancy, have consistently lagged those of other high-income populations since the Reagan era, coinciding with the adoption of economic policies that increased inequality and precarity across the population. He argues that this decline in heights serves as corroborating evidence that the U.S.‘s laissez-faire approach to healthcare and food provisioning delivers suboptimal population health outcomes.

Given the above it is noteworthy that a group of experts convened at a workshop in King’s College London warned that due to wealth inequality the UK is ‘teetering on the brink’ and ‘one shot away from catastrophe’ in an era when ‘counter-elites’ such as that which has formed around Donald Trump are worsening the situation.⁹⁹

Dysgenesis

Dysgenesis may be unfamiliar to you because it harks back to the social Darwinism of the nineteenth century that has since been revived by the right-wing in today’s post-liberal climate. Specifically, dysgenesis relates to the resurrection in the post-liberal era of fears of ‘racial degeneration’, ‘dilution’ and of a ‘Great Replacement’.¹⁰⁰ arising from immigration and the growth of ‘non-native’ populations. You may recall the discussion of racist arguments by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton and Herbert Spencer, and of Adolphe Quetelet, who developed the idea of the Bell Curve, according to which those who are “average” or “normal” are thought to be the most socially desirable. For instance, a common view among early eugenicists was that the socio-economically disadvantaged are poor not because of circumstance or environment but because of deficits in their character and intelligence and because they imprudently had too many children, a prejudice that continues to inform judgements to this day (Levine and Bashford in Sear, 2021).

In explaining the development of eugenics in the nineteenth century Foucault (2011) provides an argument consonant with multilevel selection as a form of regulatory bio-regulation by the state that involved a seemingly beneficent focus on the wellbeing of the population, by attending to its health, hygiene and housing. Its darker side was racism, (and here Foucault employs ‘racism’ widely to describe the identification of anyone deemed abnormal) that sought to identify, sequester and excise those deemed abnormal from the social body. Foucault argues that,

evolutionism… naturally became within a few years during the nineteenth century not simply a way of transcribing a political discourse into biological terms, but a real way of thinking about the relations between colonisation, the necessity for wars, criminality, the phenomena of madness and mental illness….Whenever, in other words there was a confrontation, a killing or the risk of death, the nineteenth century was obliged to think of them in relation to evolutionism.¹⁰¹

These ideas were disseminated widely in the early twentieth century as close links developed between eugenicists from the USA, Britain and Germany. Arguments circulated for the need to reduce “degeneration”, by sterilising individuals who were deemed mentally defective, and racism was also evident, directed against minorities such as blacks in the USA and the Jewish population in Germany.¹⁰² The mention of eugenics became taboo for public discussion following revelations of the horrors of the Nazi ‘final solution’, through evidence of the murder of millions beginning with “euthanasia” programmes directed at psychiatric patients and the disabled and leading to mass murder of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and communists. So gross were the Nazi excesses that they overshadowed the use of eugenics in the USA, the UK and other countries, whose own excesses were kept well hidden from scrutiny.¹⁰³

In one sense the eugenics of the post-liberal era is not new but can rather be regarded as a turning back on the idea of meritocracy, which assumed that intelligence and other forms of potential are randomly distributed in a population. Fears of the “dumbing down” of the population were stoked by Hollywood films such as Idiocracy (2006) and Wall-E-(2008) which portray a future scenario of dysgenesis where evolution has gone into reverse. While these films blame the infantilisation of the individual on a society modelled on consumerist values and a culture where the food industry and media provide a diet that feeds the desire of the lowest common denominator, others contend that culture has nothing to do with it. Based on disputed evidence they contend that differences in IQ are ‘hard-wired’ and so programmes of affirmative action designed to increase social mobility are a waste of time. Slobodian (2025) describes how the intellectual basis for this contention was provided by disputed evidence of differences in IQ presented in The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray, (1994) whose argument is loosely based s on cultural group selection.¹⁰⁴ From this ‘new fusionists’ have argued for the segregation and sequestration of racial groups based on a presumed hierarchy with white males at the apex; an end to immigration; and closed borders. In sum rather than defining the problem in relation to inequality created by the economic structure the blame is shifted onto individuals who are deemed as being naturally feckless and lacking in willpower.

Classics from another dystopian genre such as We (Zamyatin, 1924), Brave New World (Huxley, 1932) and 1984 (Orwell, 1948) paint a frightening picture of a totalitarian society dominated by a shadowy elite. Given the recent designs of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and others labelled as the ‘Tech Bros’, or associated with the“Paypal Mafia’, the message in Apple’s advertisement that used the scenario in Orwell’s book to publicise the launch of the MacIntosh is ironic. Rather than turning to Zamyatin, Huxley or Orwell for inspiration, the ‘Tech Bros’ have instead embraced the works of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling to realise their individualist dreams of immortality and to seek to guarantee the superiority of their progeny. If this appears fanciful, Bill McKibben describes how such questions are very much on the minds of those at Google and elsewhere.¹⁰⁵ He quotes Lee Silver, a professor at Princeton who argues that the power of those he calls the GenRich class will be amplified by their use of germline engineering using CRISPR technologies so that the unfortunates he calls GenNaturals will act as low-paid drones whose only role will be to service the whims of the elite.¹⁰⁶. Silver argues that before long the two groups will be so genetically distinct that to crossbreed would be impossible as it would be akin to a human today crossbreeding with a chimpanzee.

On the other hand Sear (2021) argues that eugenicist arguments are mistaken because the whole idea subverts the process of natural selection and may result in outcomes that far from those intended. Whilst there may be some genetic basis to ’intelligence’ and certain mental health outcomes this is highly complex. Natural selection tends to increase the frequency of any traits associated with successful reproduction, whilst in contrast, eugenic thinking is stimulated by the belief of powerful individuals that the traits that they, not natural selection, value are in danger of being selected out of the population, so they should interfere with natural selection in order to artificially boost the frequency of traits they valued.

A perhaps more convincing explanation for eugenics is based not on genes but on power, operating either to justify one’s wealth and status against demands from others, or alternatively, as a means to disenfranchise members of another group whose wealth and status one seeks to appropriate. This idea, that those in power are naturally deserving of their situation, goes back a long way and can perhaps be traced in Europe to the notion of the ‘divine right of kings’, which held the person of the monarch is sacred and that the upper-classes are not just wealthier than those born into humble circumstances but are entitled to their wealth as thy are ‘naturally’ superior to them in all manner of ways. A similarly daft presumption conducive to the maintenance of power that prevailed around the time of the First World War held that only “gentlemen” could become army officers as they were naturally ordained, that army officers were naturally gifted and thus required a minimum of training in warfare, and that aristocrats with no experience or training in industry could be parachuted into jobs as senior executives.¹⁰⁷ No less a figure than Thomas Paine argued that the system where members of the aristocracy were provided with hereditary sinecures on the basis of the presumption of their supposedly natural superiority was itself societally degenerative.

Such beliefs were not necessarily corrosive of the social fabric to the extent that the mass of the population believed in the legitimacy of arguments based on the divine right of kings. Rene Girard takes from Cervantes the example of the relation between Sancho Panza and Don Quixote to describe how the latter would never have dreamt of desiring the desires of the former. This was due to their relation being one of external mediation, which operated in a social context where differences were maintained by a rigid hierarchy. The situation with meritocratic arguments today is more open to conflict as relations are open to internal mediation where individuals can believe that they are just as good as any other and can actively seek to imitate their desire.

Discussion and Conclusion

The arguments made in this chapter can be discomforting by suggesting that complexity and cooperation in trade and have arisen in cycles from the ashes of war and genocide and also by stripping religious belief of its numinous aspect. In this final discussion I want to focus on a few key points.

Multilevel selection asks us to think of cultures and societies as adaptive units.  This has resonances with modernisation theory as MLS theorists chart progress whereby systems have become more complex through the long course of evolution, where cooperation is found at every level. However, this does not equate with the vision of progress envisaged by some liberal thinkers, as evolution often results in outcomes where opportunists and free-riders gain short-term benefits at the expense of long-term benefits to the whole. Also, in a changing world, adaptations to past environments can become mismatched to current environments and maladaptive in every sense of the word. It is worth returning to how Darwin framed fundamental idea behind multilevel selection.

There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who.were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over other tribes; and this would be natural selection.¹⁰⁸

This raises fundamental questions as to what comprises the common good and how best to attain it?

Ideas of the Common Good

From a brief investigation, there appears to be little room for consensus as to what the common good comprises or on how to achieve it. From the perspective of multilevel selection advocated by Turchin (2016), the common good is simply achieved by maximising the number of cooperators within a group. As discussed in chapter four in relation to the marketplace, the paradoxical prescription offered by Adam Smith (1776) is that the common good in the marketplace is best served through the self-interested (not selfish) behaviour of millions of individual consumers. Can Smith’s prescription be construed as a form of blind, impersonal cooperation between strangers who form groupings that determine the fate of the businesses they do or do not patronise? The argument that social order can arise from the bottom up from the self-interested actions of individuals rather than being imposed from above leads to the corollary ‘laisser-faire’, that it is best to let these individuals alone to follow their interests free from interference. That negative freedom is key to the common good, and conceived of as the aggregation of private interests is also a key feature of arguments by liberal theorists such as John Stuart Mill, for whom individuals know best what produces their own wellbeing and thus should thus be permitted to strive for these goods free from coercion. Milton Friedman (1962) argued that the common good can be optimised in a competitive marketplace that selects firms which are profit maximisers and removes the weakest. In sum, the argument is that left to its own, the marketplace will give rise to the most efficient and welfare-maximising outcomes for society.

For the philosopher John Rawls and the liberal political theorist Robert Dahl (1998), in a democracy the common good is limited to the individual interests attached to equal citizenship, such as freedom of speech, equality of opportunity, and the liberty to vote. Based on this the role of the state is to create a ‘level playing field’ for competition between competing interests. However Dahl also argued that the economy and polity are closely intertwined, with the former providing the prosperity necessary for social harmony, so that government had an important role in intervening to ensure the equality of all citizens before the law. It is noteworthy that Dahl formulated his ideas in the period following the Second World War, when the demand for social reform expressed by the populace in the USA and in Europe led to the election of governments committed to “state-managed capitalism” which led to investments in social reproduction through high levels of taxation, the provision of universal social welfare and health care and of generous grants to fund higher education for the less well off. However in the 1970s his argument was overshadowed by Milton Friedman (1962) and others, for whom inequality is considered essential to progress.

Neoliberals have argued that the market should be allowed to stand on its own free from state interference. The use of the term “interference” is itself insightful, as its negativity is apparent in associations with undue obstruction and influence, as in ‘interfering with a person’s right to pursue their lawful business’. This idea is closely connected to a commitment to negative freedom as the highest good, which in its most radical form asserts that individuals should be able to be free to act as they please. From the perspective of multilevel selection this argument simply cannot hold because one should not simply presume that the greatest good will come from the universal exercise of negative freedom. A harder definition advanced by Marianna Mazzucatto (2023) is that this should be defined by the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

David Sloan Wilson (2019) critiques the competitive individualism advocated by Hayek and Friedman as forms of ‘cancer’ as they argue for the maximisation individual fitness at the expense of the social system. This description is literally true at one level of the organism, as cancers act as cheats that undermine the cooperation required by multicellular systems to preserve the common good.¹⁰⁹ The behaviour of transnational corporations might likewise be described as a threat to the social whole through their dominance of a global landscape that is tailored to suit their interests and those of the individuals who own and control them for whom borders are permeable, enabling them to amass wealth through practices such as transfer pricing and tax evasion, benefiting from lax regulation by jurisdictions where taxes are lowest where they co-opt politicians to advance their interests.¹¹⁰ Is it thus appropriate to describe this behaviour as cancerous? Although argued in a very different context, the equivalence drawn by Wilson (2019) between the social body and the biological body in referring to competitive individualism as a social ‘cancer’, Is in my opinion ill-judged, because it frames this in a similar way to how the Nazi regime applied biological metaphors to social ills (Wright, 2013). Such equations are particularly dangerous in the current moment because of the revitalisation of eugenicist ideas in the form of arguments for ‘neurocastes’ and selective breeding.

Reaching for Solutions?

With the advent of neoliberalism the market became transmogrified into the Market, no longer regarded as a caged tiger in need of restraint, but rather set free to roam where it might and indeed promoted as the transcendent principle or logic on which to base the organisation of society. Post-liberalism has arisen as a response to the chaos produced by the largely unconstrained rampage of neoliberalism over the past fifty and more years, leading intellectuals to wonder how it might best be restrained and put back into a new, stronger cage. Indeed some argue the need to rethink the entire basis by which we differentiate sharing from hierarchy, gift-exchange and market exchange in the allocation of goods and in how we perceive the division of goods between public goods, club goods, common pool resources and private goods (Mazzucato, 2023).

Wilson (2019) argues against those who focus on the individual, that the common good requires a top-down perspective, as the good of the whole can be undermined by groups of individuals or cooperators who threaten its integrity by cheating or by maximising their selfish interest at a lower level. I should admit that I find his argument difficult to follow in places because he states that he is allergic to “bottom up” explanations and so implicitly might be thought to argue against the operation of the market in favour of central planning. At other times, when arguing the need to drive a stake through the heart of the “monstrous Hayek” who proclaims “Government bad, Market good”, he seems more concerned to constrain the maximalist demands of laissez-faire thinking which he finds excessive. In this respect his dialogue with the complex systems theorist Richard Heylighen is informative.¹¹¹

Wilson (2019) perhaps expects rather too much of Ostrom (1990), who after all focused on the development of local initiatives to manage common grazing and irrigation systems. How can one possibly reconcile such initiatives with the problems created by a global interconnected market? But perhaps there will necessarily be a return to local solutions, given that the current system of global trade will be recognised as unsustainable in the short term, perhaps even in the next twenty years or so? In addition to deferred action to address the catastrophic impact of global heating we are slowly becoming increasingly aware of our vulnerability given our extensive reliance on technologies that distances us ever further from our forbears who lived closer to nature and who had developed forms of resilience based on experience of shortages caused by war, famine and disease.

Technology plays a central role in the ‘bottom up’ argument advocated by Richard Heylighen (2017) which might be seen as an alternative to the ‘top-down argument offered by David Sloan Wilson (2019). Heylighen argues similarly to Adam Smith (1776) through the belief that order can emerge spontaneously, while at the same time differing radically from Smith to contend that market exchange should be replaced by a system of gift exchange. His explanation also has resonances with Karl Marx, by proposing a money free gift economy where demand and offers are matched by a global brain consisting of distributed machine intelligence. Heylighen argues the need to dispense with money because it is too coarse to account for externalities and because the accumulative nature of the money system amplifies small differences into growing inequality and instability. Although there are some things that money cannot price, because money can be exchanged for anything, it has become the most important resource to possess, so that one’s power increases the more one has. Accumulation turns into the dominant value that has pushed aside important values such as sustainability, community, resilience or wisdom that are more fundamental, but more difficult to quantify or to accumulate. As a replacement for this he describes the development of a ‘global brain’ consisting of a distributed intelligent network resting on a gift economy where reputation counts rather than money.

The End

In one sense the market can be thought of as a super-organism that has led to unprecedented growth and prosperity for many. Reflecting on this personally, although I would number myself amongst its critics, I count myself lucky to have been born when I was and to have lived a life that would have been described as comfortable by anyone at any time in history, enjoying foods unknown to my grandparents and able to travel to fabulous destinations that lived solely in their imagination. Yet I am also aware of the mass exploitation of those living in the so-called “periphery” who have paid for the luxuries I consume with their sweat and blood, perhaps thrown off their land by mining interests, or as children forced to work as indentured labour on shrimp farms, cocoa plantations or carpet factories, and of the plight of the inhabitants of South-East Asia and West Africa, who live surrounded by the rubbish I created, and those populations who live on low-lying islands that will soon by swamped by rising sea-levels. Should we blame the market for all of the ills of society from global heating, to the creation of mountains of rubbish and waste, the collapse of biodiversity, the ‘forever chemicals’ that poison our veins and the plastics that are lodged in our hearts?¹¹² Macromarketers have argued that the answer is more complex involving a potent mix of technology, economics and politics, involving a commonly shared belief in material progress and consumption as the only route to happiness.¹¹³

Although a number of authors are seeking solutions to address the systemic threats presented by opportunism and free riding, Turchin (2024) suggests that based on his group’s analysis of more than a hundred crises, our societies are already well along the path that led many wreck and ruin. His team found that in two-thirds of the cases the ending of the crisis resulted in huge downward mobility and attacks on the elites, and resulting in three-quarters of cases, in revolutions or civil wars, of which around a fifth lasted for more than a century, 40% of which ended in the destruction of the state. As he puts it, “The overall conclusion is grim”.¹¹⁴

As mentioned in chapter three research described in chapter three based on Ultimatum and Dictator games suggests that those of us who live in or close to market societies are more concerned with fairness and equity than those who do not. Whilst this may be surprising to some, once one thinks about it this finding is perhaps unsurprising given that even critics who rail against the market can take for granted a sense of institutional trust, the term coined by Anthony Giddens to describe the stability and reliability of our personal world through everyday assumptions that fresh water will flow when we turn on the tap in the morning, that electricity will be available at the flick of a switch, that a number of outlets are available from which we can buy a wide variety of food. Indeed so trusting are we that customers routinely order products online costing up to many thousands of pounds sourced from countries many thousands of miles away and dispatched by individuals they will never meet, trusting too that they can return the goods simply if they do not like them and get their money back at no extra cost.

The things we privileged consumers take for granted, that we can eat strawberries in December, phone our relative abroad and place an online order for clothes made in the Philippines for next day delivery, depend on the fluid operation of a series of interdependent global networks that rely fundamentally on a fragile technological base. The worry expressed by Centeno et al., (2023) is that we suffer from the illusion that the bubble comprising the complex systems we live in can be fully controlled and that by investing our trust in them we have gradually distanced ourselves from our capacity to deal with system failure if and when it arises, leaving us much more vulnerable to disruption than our ancestors ever were. A fatalistic response might proceed along the lines argued by Turchin (2024) and others, that things are reaching a tipping point where events overtake us. A multilevel selection theorist two hundred years from now might reflect on this as a moment in time, of a tipping point that precipitated a scale of warfare that hitherto had been thought unimaginable, after which very slowly following a century of recovery, there developed a robust set of global institutions for the equitable management of trade. Who knows!

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Slobodian, Q. (2024). Crack-up capitalism: Market radicals and the dream of a world without democracy, London: Penguin.

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¹ Sober & Wilson, 1998, 2000a, 2000b; Richerson & Boyd, 2005; Henrich & Boyd, 2001, Henrich et al., 2001, Henrich, 2005, Richardson et al., 2016)

² Sloan Wilson et al., (2022).

³ See also the edited edition by Apicella et al., (2020).

⁴ Polyani, (1944, 139-141 in McCloskey, (1997, 484)

⁵ Polyani, (1944, 43, in McCloskey, (1997, 484).

⁶ Graeber, (2011, ch.2, The Myth of Barter, 21-41).

⁷ see for example, Curtin (1975).

⁸ Subin, A.D. (2024). Wreckage of Ellipses, London Review of Books, 46(3), 8th February.

⁹ Oppenheim, (1967, 77-78).

¹⁰ Graeber, (2011, 238-239).

¹¹ Graeber, (20121, 239).

¹² Graeber, (2011, 280).

¹³ Graeber, (2011, 277).

¹⁴ Mazower, M. (2026). What America forgets about the UN. Financial Times, Life and Arts, 1-2, 14th February.

¹⁵ Germany spent the money rebuilding its industry whilst Britain which received proportionally more, spent it to maintain an illusion of imperial superiority (Barnett, C. (2011). The Wasting of Britain's Marshall Aid, BBC, 3rd March.

¹⁶ European Union. History of the European Union 1945-59. https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-history/history-eu/1945-59_en

¹⁷ World Bank Group GDP growth (annual percentage) China, 1961-2024. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locations=CN

¹⁸ See, Nicita, N. & C. Razo, (2021). China: the rise of a trade titan: UNCTAD, 27th April. https://unctad.org/news/china-rise-trade-titan

¹⁹ See analysis of twenty studies by Bauer et al., (2016).

²⁰ for instance, the US contributed 22% to the entire UN budget in 2019 but was in arrears. United Nations, (2019) UN Underfunding - Please just use a Google search to locate this!

²¹ On War was first published in 1832.

²² Harrison, M. (2023). Economic warfare: Lessons from two World Wars, Vox/CEPR 10th October

²³ Christie, L., B.Haydar & K. Lidén, (2022). When are economic sanctions morally justified? PRIO., 17th November.

²⁴ Lowman, H.J. & M.H. Vorwig, (2026). America’s own goal: who pays the tariffs? Kiehl World Institute, January.

²⁵ Hessler & Gronow, (2003) describe how in the 1930s, at the same time as millions of Ukrainians starved to death in the Holodomar as the result of deliberate policy, the Soviet Government under Stalin developed plans to mass produce luxury goods, particularly Soviet Champagne, which launched in 1936.

²⁶ Museum of the American G.I. (2014). An American GI’s best friend: Coca-Cola, 12th June.

²⁷ Riesman, (1951, 165-166). See also entires to the edited volume by Tadajewski and Stole (2016) n the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, vol. 8(1).

²⁸ See, Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev: The Kitchen Debate - transcript, 24 July 959

²⁹ Roberts, (1959).

³⁰ Kalbmoscow, & Kalbmoscow, (1961). This happened again in 1963 when according to a CIA report disclosed on the 27th February, Khruschev ‘made a dispiriting speech’ where ‘The Soviet people have been told bluntly that the often-promised increase in the standard of living must again be postponed because of the strain on the nation’s resources”. Central Intelligence Agency, (1963). Soviet consumers face continuing restrictions. Current support brief, 26th April. CIA RR CB 63-41.

³¹ Kotkin, (2001, I 42).

³² Çiçek, (2015).

³³ This is a nod to Stephen Kotkin (2001). Armageddon Averted

³⁴ Brennan & Ritz-Jack, (2024).

³⁵ Kotkin, (2001: 7).

³⁶ MacGilvary (2015) suggests that, ironically, the moral basis for Dahl’s argument rests on the Madisonian system that Dahl rejects. While like Madison, Dahl focuses on the republican aim of preventing the arbitrary exercise of power, rather than the democratic aim of securing popular control over elected officials Dahl departs from Madison when arguing that the success of this project should depends on social rather than constitutional factors.

³⁷ This condenses Dahl’s arguments that changed over the years from advocating polyarchy to direct forms of democracy.

³⁸ Fukuyama did not define “middle-class” simply on the basis of income but more widely as, ‘the important marker of middle-class status would be occupation, level of education, and ownership of assets (a house or an apartment, or consumer durables) that could be threatened by the government’.Fukuyama, in Alpermann, (2016, 6).

³⁹ See Fukuyama, (1989; 2016); Alpermann, (2016).

⁴⁰ De-industrialization was promoted as a ‘good for the UK’ by some on the right on the ground that it would reduce state subsidies of uncompetitive industries, reduce he power of organised labour and stimulate growth in services where Britain had a competitive advantage. However the incoming Thatcher government did worry about the loss of manufacturing jobs and could not have anticipated the disastrous decline in the years immediately following the 1979 election. See Tomlinson, (2024, 624-625).

⁴¹ Looking back fifty to Nixon’s trip Mark Alford commented that the expectation then had been of a passive PRC that was keen to, “emulate and converge towards an idealised version of our economy, law and society”. (Neal, J., (2022). When Nixon went to China, Harvard Law Today, 17th Feb.

⁴² The American Presidency Project, (2000). Statement on Permanent Normal Trade Relations With China. From President Clinton's speech at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University, 11th April.

⁴³ “Now there's no question China has been trying to crack down on the Internet. (Chuckles.) Good luck! (Laughter.) That's sort of like trying to nail jello to the wall. (Laughter.) But I would argue to you that their effort to do that just proves how real these changes are and how much they threaten the status quo. It's not an argument for slowing down the effort to bring China into the world, it's an argument for accelerating that effort. In the knowledge economy, economic innovation and political empowerment, whether anyone likes it or not, will inevitably go hand in hand.”

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, (2000). Full Text of Clinton's Speech on China Trade Bill, 9th March, https://www.iatp.org/sites/default/files/Full_Text_of_Clintons_Speech_on_China_Trade_Bi.htm

⁴⁴ See Wood, (2024).

Shevchenko, V. (2025). How the west is helping Russia to fund its war in Ukraine. BBC, 30th May.

⁴⁶ Shalal, A. (2026). US warns Ukraine not to hit US interests in hits on Russia energy infrastructure, Reuters, 24th Feb. See also, Moffat, L.L. (2026). Russia hits American sweets factory with missile in northeastern Ukraine, Kyiv Independent 22nd February. See also Komuves, A. & J. Hovet, (2026). Escalating and oil dispute, Hungary says Ukraine plans to disrupt energy system, Reuters, 25th February.

⁴⁷ in Dimaggio & Powell, 1983, 151.

⁴⁸ Hannan & Freeman, (1977, 937).

⁴⁹ Hannan & Freeman, (1977, 938)

⁵⁰ Dimaggio & Powell, (1983, 153).

⁵¹ The formation of the marketing concept is usually attributed to J.B McKitterick (1957) which ignores that Peter Drucker (1954) wrote about more or less the same thing.

⁵² See Boudet et al., (2019) and Brodherson et a., (2023).

⁵³ McKitterick, (1957: 29).

⁵⁴ Ibid., 34.

⁵⁵ The American Presidency Project contains the notes of the speech made by J.F. Kennedy (1962) Special Message to the Congress on Protecting the Consumer Interest, 15th March.

⁵⁶ See for instance, the edited collection by Davidson et al. (2003).

⁵⁷ Kupfer, S. (2026). New world disorder, The Financial Times Magazine, 31st January, 12.

⁵⁸ Here he mentions that he has been guided by reading Jesse Norman’s (2018) biography of Smith, which I also recommend. See, Norman, J. (2018). Adam Smith, what he thought and why it matters, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

⁵⁹ Wright, (2005, 50-51).

⁶⁰ Descriptions of the firm or the market economy as an organism that has to be ‘jump started’ has been crticized as inappropriate by some. Others argue that it is appropriate (Makriyannis,, 2022).

⁶¹ These ideas are more or less summed up in The Heritage Foundation document Project 2025, which the Trump 2.0 regime has since been largely implementing (See the ACLU, “Project 2025 explained”). See, Slobodian, for the background discussion of “crack-up capitalism” (Slobodian, 2024) and neurocastes (Slobodian, 2025). The origin of these idea go back at least seventy years. One of the contributors to the discussion of Friedman (1962) mentioned that individuals should be free to move their wealth from one jurisdiction to another, arguing that, “it does not really require democracy”, as countries will try to maximise profits on their “enterprise”… “by offering low production costs and a high level of service in order to attract customers” (Friedman, 1962, 63).

⁶² Bordo, (2017).

⁶³ Cunha, J.R. (2003). The Advent of a New Banking System in the U.S. - Financial Deregulation in the 1980s. School of Economics and Finance Discussion Paper No. 200329 Apr 2020 (revised 3 Aug 2020) JEL Classification: G21, G28, G38, K20, N22, N42

⁶⁴ Williamson, (2003, 1475).

⁶⁵ Scally, D. & J. Bittner, (2013). Germany’s rethink on just where the blame lies for the Irish bank bailout. Irish Times, 27th March.

⁶⁶ Brennan, J. (2022). Ireland set to start repaying EU bailout earlier than expected in 2023. Irish Times, 9th June.

⁶⁷ The American Presidency Project. (2023). Remarks by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Renewing American Economic Leadership at the Brookings Institution.

⁶⁸ Remarks by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Renewing American Economic Leadership at the Brookings Institution, (2023). The White House. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/04/27/remarks-by-national-security-advisor-jake-sullivan-on-renewing-american-economic-leadership-at-the-brookings-institution/

⁶⁹ I am not going to start listing sources here - there are too many. Suffice it to say that Tyranny of Greed: Trump, Corruption, and the Revolution to Come by Timothy  Kuhner ,published in 2020. was too conservative in its assessment of what was going to happen.

⁷⁰ Tett, G. (2025). America’s new “patriotic’ capitalism. Financial Times, 30th-31st August, 9.

⁷¹ Honderich, H. (2024). Top Republican says Trump nominees are ‘disruptors’. BBC News, 17th November.

⁷² A tipping point is where a small difference precipitates a large, abrupt and potentially irreversible change. Tipping points that are rapidly approaching include loss of coral reefs, the degradation of the Amazon, the irreversible loss of ice-sheets and ocean circulation systems such as the overturning circulation in the Atlantic (AMOC) (Lenton, 2025).

⁷³ Carbon Majors. https://carbonmajors.org/

⁷⁴ Landman, A. (2010). BP’s Beyond Petroleum campaign losing its sheen. The centre for media and democracy’s PR Watch.

⁷⁵ See Serwaa Gyimah Akuoko, J., Jessica Vandenberg, J.C. Falman, K. Otsuka, G.K. Lau, M. Skrobe E.M. Faustman (2023). Rethinking plastic realities in Ghana: A call for a well-being approach to understanding human-plastics entanglements for more equitable plastics governance. Marine Policy, vol. 158. See also Chaudhuri, S. (2025). Consumed|: how big brands got us hooked on plastic, blink.

On a personal note I was a researcher in a consultancy project for a Dutch company in the mid 1980s that wanted to enter the UK market for plastic bags and remember asking buyers Marks and Spencer and Tesco and others retailers how many millions or billions of bags of different types they bought each year. Given the numbers, it proved fiendishly difficult to come to any firm conclusions. At the time no-one gave a second thought to the harms caused by plastics, although many in the industry had a good idea. In retrospect, some of the smallest changes barely noticeable to consumers have led to massive externalities, such as the export of mountains of waste overseas and the presence of microplastics as a layer that is discernible on the ocean floor and in plastics and “forever chemicals’ now present in animals, fish and in human heart valves. Simple changes such as the switch from paper bags to plastic bags, from glass bottles to plastic bottles, cotton nappies (diapers) to plastic, clothes-pegs to plastic; wooden sleighs to plastic, broom fibres from natural to plastic; plastic sheathing all manner of retail goods and used ubiquitously in farming and industry - the list goes on and on and on and on - for all its proclaimed uses and benefits, we are drowning in the stuff and it is largely left up to the individual to deal with it. Consumed, by Sabira Chaudari. (2025 tells an all-too-familiar story of exploitation and obfuscation engaged in by Coca-Cola and McDonald’s amongst many others.

⁷⁶ I discuss the playbook more fully in chapter seven of Desmond (2025).

⁷⁷ For instance, machine learning is promoted on the basis that it will lead to a technological fix for global heating when (a) the steps needed to address this are already well-known and (b) the technology is itself exacerbating the problem it is supposed to help solve by consuming vast amounts of energy. This follows a similar pattern to the ‘solutions’ found to combat obesity by providing individuals with drugs they may be on for a lifetime for which the long-term effects remain unknown.

⁷⁸ See Almeida, L. (2025). UK graduates facing worst job market since 2018 amid rise of AI, says Indeed., The Guardian, 25th June. Davenport, T.H. & L. Srinavasan, (2026). Companies Are Laying Off Workers Because of AI’s Potential—Not Its Performance, Harvard Business Review, 3rd February. Lowrey, L. (2026). The worst case future for white-collar job. The Atlantic, 18th February.

⁷⁹ Critini and Alap Shah, (2026). The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis, A thought exercise from the future. https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic

⁸⁰ See for instance, MacKenzie, D. (2026). AI’s scale. London Review of Books, 5th February, 32.

⁸¹ Piketty, (2022, 171).

⁸² See also Mizruchi & Hirschman, (2010).

⁸³ See Crane, (2014) for a discussion.

⁸⁴ See the account by Heyer (2014) of the Federal Trade Commission.

⁸⁵ Federal Trade Commission, (2923). FTC Sues Amazon for Illegally Maintaining Monopoly Power, 26th September. ‘Amazon ensures that no current or future rival can threaten its dominance. Amazon’s far-reaching schemes impact hundreds of billions of dollars in retail sales every year, touch hundreds of thousands of products sold by businesses big and small and affect over a hundred million shoppers.’ 

⁸⁶ Ibid.: 17.

⁸⁷ Slobodian, (2024, 145).

⁸⁸ Themis, Exploring The Nexus Of Sanctions And Trade-Based Financial Crime In Hong Kong. Also, UAE financial crime: Environmental Financial Crime Risk Mitigation. Accessed August 2025.

⁸⁹ Gallagher, C. (2026). Russia imports huge quantities of Irish components for use in suicide drones. The Irish Times, 18th February.

⁹⁰ For instance, it had long been supposed that due to its isolation, Iceland comprised a homogeneous ethnic group. Research has since discovered that the actual ethnic composition of ancient Iceland was varied, comprising of Norse, Gaelic and “admixed” individuals. The researchers found that these individuals had more in common with their source populations than with modern Icelanders due to “genetic drift”. (Ebenesersdóttir et al., 2018).

⁹¹ Chung R, J. Kurtzman & S. Brandes. (2022). India’s history of mass sterilisation. Journal of Urology, 207(Supplement 5):e214. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1097/JU.0000000000002541.08. See also, Wang F., Y. Cai & B. Gu B. (2013). Population, policy, and politics: How will history judge China’s one-child policy?  Population and Development Review, 38(s1), 115–129.

⁹² US Census Bureau. (2023). U.S. Population Projected to Begin Declining in Second Half of Century, 9th November.

⁹³ Lizana, J., N.D. Miranda, S.N. Sparrow et al. (2026). Global gridded dataset of heating and cooling degree days under climate change scenarios. Nat Sustain (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01754-y

⁹⁴ All three Nordic countries have experienced a sharp decline since 2010. TFRs declined in Finland from 1.9 in 2010 to 1.3 in 2023 and in the same period in Denmark, from 1.9 to 1.5, and in Norway, from 2 to 1.4. (World Bank Group, (2025). Fertility Rate, total (births per woman).

⁹⁵ See Nichols & Collins, (2023) and Scheidel (2023).

⁹⁶ As a Russian emigre it is understandable that he sees the world from this perspective. Although his paper on the war in Ukraine stoked obvious controversy, his argument seemed sound enough in principle, that Ukraine would lose if one took the ratio of available recruits into account and Russia would lose if its economy tanked first. However his brief and one-sided discussion of Ukraine as a plutocracy (Turchin, 2024, 179-186) departs in noticeable ways from accounts of historians such as Serhil Plokhy and Timothy Snyder..

⁹⁷ Turchin, (2024) The peasants are revolting, ch. 3, 55-83.

⁹⁸ Turchin, (2024, 67-69).

⁹⁹ Snell, W., J. Mitchell, S. Hall, & E. Oren, (2025). Inequality Knocks: Identifying and mitigating the risks of wealth inequality in the UK. Fairness Foundation and King’s College London, 26th January.

¹⁰⁰ Rose, S. (2022). A deadly ideology: how the ‘great replacement theory’ went mainstream. The Guardian, 8th June.

¹⁰¹ Foucault, (2011, 257).

¹⁰² I found that Allen (2004) constructs a balanced view of this highly tendentious topic.

¹⁰³ There is a voluminous literature on the practice of eugenics in the USA right through the twentieth century. Minorities of Latin origin, Native Americans, African Americans, poor whites and people with disabilities were targeted. Selected sources are, National Genome Research Institute, fact sheet on Eugenics and Scientific Racism which has many links and Kalomaris, M. (2021) Unfit to Breed: America’s Dark Tale of Eugenics. National Institutes of Health, 29(4), July/August.

¹⁰⁴ For a critique see Kamin, (1995).

¹⁰⁵ McKibben, (2019, 235-137).

¹⁰⁶ McKibben, (2019, 153).

¹⁰⁷ It was only because of high casualty rates in the First World War that the British Army recruited officers from lower social classes who were called “temporary gentlemen”. On de-mobiization they were then ‘de-officered” (Root, 2006). Also see quotes from Alfred Marshall, (1919) and Derek Aldcroft, (1964) who argued that the decline in British industry could partly be laid at the door of the elite, predominantly from the landed gentry, who had little business experience and were educated at elite private schools, such as Eton and Harrow and at Oxbridge. Indeed Adams et al. (2023) mention that there was a complete lack of management education in Britain before the Second World War. See, Adams et al.2023, 15-16. Adams, R.J C., M. Aldous, P. Fliers & J.D. Turner, (2023) :Aristocratic amateurs to fat cats? British CEOs in the twentieth century, QUCEH Working PaperSeries, No. 23-08, Queen's University Centre for Economic History (QUCEH), Belfast

¹⁰⁸ Darin, (1871), in Traulsen & Nowak, (2006).

¹⁰⁹ Silvertown, (2025, 146-147).

¹¹⁰ Two articles that ran almost side by side are illustrative. On 18th February 2026 the Irish Times reported that Meta was urging the Irish government to lobby the European Union on its behalf by ‘watering down’ proposed legislation that would act to reduce addictive ‘doom scrolling’ on social media. The very next day an article reported the dependence of the Irish state on ‘Big Tech’ and its vulnerability to corporate capture. See, Coyne, E. (2026). Meta urges Ireland to block planned EU law targeting addictive social media features, The Irish Times, 18th Feb. Burke-Kennedy, E. (2026). US firms Apple, Microsoft and Eli Lilly paid almost 50% of State’s corporate tax in 2024. The Irish Times, 19th Feb.

¹¹¹ The online exchange by Heylighen, R. & D.S. Wilson (2021). Glimpsing the global brain, The Library of Consciousness, 29th September can be found at https://www.organism.earth/library/document/glimpsing-the-global-brain. Heylighen professes that he finds the ‘invisible hand’ a beautiful idea through its assumption of a complex adaptive system whereby order arises spontaneously through the local interactions of different agents mutually adapting to each other. He argues that this happens in nature which propagates to the global level. Given this he disagrees with Sloan Wilson by arguing that one cannot optimise in some top down engineering sense. He does acknowledge that the system doesn’t work that well in relation to global warming.

¹¹² Having said that I have not been immune to hazard. Our domestic water supply consisted of lead pipes, our house contained asbestos and when I worked briefly as a labourer the union agreement allowed payment of the equivalent of a pint of milk a day when I was carrying sheets of asbestos up six floors. As children my brother and me looked forward to visits to the shoe shop which had a contraption called a fluoroscope which you stepped into that had a radioactive isotope that enabled you to see the bones in your feet against a lurid green background. Our alarm clock which glowed in the dark was also radioactive. Etc.

¹¹³ Kilbourne et al., (1997).

¹¹⁴ Turchin, (2024, 223-224).