How We Tamed Ourselves and Invented Good and Evil (with Hanno Sauer)

- Welcome to Econ Talk Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalom College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe,

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We'd love to hear from you. (upbeat music) - Hey, it's January 28th, 2026 and my guest is philosopher and author Hano Sauer, his latest book and the subject of today's episode

is the invention of good and evil, a world history of morality. Hano, welcome to econtalk. - Thanks for the in-lets, Russ. - Now your book opens, this is a sprawling book.

It is full of interesting ideas and it covers an enormous span of human history and human behavior. So we're gonna do the best we can to get at some of the ideas in the book.

It you open with a passage that reminded me very much of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.

The first sentence of Smith is,

how selfish soever a man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it

except the pleasure of seeing it. And much of that book is trying to answer the questions,

“why do we ever do anything that is not self-interested?”

I would not say unselfish, I don't like that phrasing, but Smith starts with the idea that we're self-interested. So why do we ever do anything that even looks altruistic?

Your book starts with the following or not starts, but early on, the fact that cooperation, the fact that cooperation is unlikely, can be formulated as an explanatory problem, explanatory problem in evolutionary theory.

How did evolution manage to create altruistic or cooperative tendencies, even though apparently at any rate, these tendencies inevitably reduce our reproductive fitness, how could it ever be beneficial for me to help someone else, how could it ever be worth subordinating

my self-interest for the well-being of the community? So take a crack at your book in some sense, it's trying to answer that whole question. So it's a long answer, but give us the short answer. - Yeah, you're right, Adam Smith,

I greatly appreciate him, a fantastic writer,

“for more and more he gets, I think, also recognized”

as a philosopher, again, and of course, his economic contribution is without a doubt, first rate. So I enjoy that comparison. And you're right at the most abstract and general level, one way of putting it would be that

I try to deal with a kind of reverse the Odyssey problem. So when you think about it, in pre Darwinian times, when you have a theistic framework, a theistic outlook on the world, you get a the Odyssey problem,

you kind of need to explain how evil and suffering come into the world if you have a deity that is all kind

and all powerful and knows everything, right?

So how do you square these three classical features of this divine entity with the fact that there are children dying early and there are wars and genocides and torches and so forth? - And now that's right, yeah.

And now you get the opposite problem when you move to a naturalistic Darwinian framework. All of a sudden, the default assumption seems to be that it's nature, red and tooth and claw, right? It's doggy dog, it's elbows out,

“everyone is selfish, everyone is essentially sociopathic, right?”

And now you get the problem, okay, evidently there is friendship and heroism and love and altruism and sacrifice, where do those come from, right? It seems to not make any sense,

but people like Adam Smith noticed this tension as well and many others did, evidently such things do exist. So we have, on the one hand, we do have selfish and anti-social and uncooperative instincts and drives and inclinations,

but clearly we also have the opposite, we also have friendship and altruism and morality and nice and cooperative and generous dispositions where do they come from? And I think interestingly,

we haven't really figured out a good solid

and precise answer until well into the second half

of the 20th century where people started to understand

intending with economists indeed, sometimes these people

were one of the same, figured out how,

“where do the returns from cooperative behavior come from”

and people started talking about inclusive fitness and we started to understand reciprocity and how cooperation can get off the ground in a Darwinian world that in principle is morally indifferent and doesn't follow any divine design

or any plan. And those efforts, which include making the observation that well, your genes or what has docked in points out, your genes or what are driving this if your brother shares your genes,

you will maybe, it might be genetically valuable to be a sacrifice to save your brother even though you lose your own life or your cousin if the gains are large enough or multiple cousins and so on,

but what I liked about your treatment this and much of the book has this flavor, that's interesting, it's helpful, it's not quite the whole story though

“and why not and what do you go on to pass it”

as the full explanation? - So it's one thing to find out or to figure out why cooperation

is an explanatory problem in the first place.

But then you get a whole, another set of problems that are specific to human beings because we are indeed somewhat unusual in the animal kingdom because we do cooperate

and we thrive under conditions of cooperation. We are, in fact, especially good at cooperating in our own way. But what we do is curious and unique, namely, we have managed over the past years,

decades, centuries, millennia, hundreds of thousands and even millions of years in a way, when we're now talking about proto-human, pre-human beings, we have managed to scale up our cooperation in a way that other animals don't do.

So we have chimpanzees and they live in cooperative small groups of maybe a few dozen individuals,

but they never build societies of thousands of individuals

or millions. In fact, it would be a kind of science fiction, horror story, it would be uncanny to see millions of chimpanzees cooperate, right? Because we know they don't do that.

Now, there are some animals that engage in large-scale cooperation for instance, certain insects, termites and so on and so on. But also, they always do just that, right? So they have a specifics of genetic programming

and they live one way and not any other way. But human beings have this maliability and plasticity and capability to live in all sorts of ways. We can and sometimes occasionally we still do, even nowadays, live in very, very small hunter-gatherer groups

and also we live in the society that you and me live in. You know, we talk across thousands of miles with modern technology and we use trade that spans continents and so on and so on. So the society that we are part of,

“essentially has more than, it has billions of members, right?”

Who cooperate on the basis of institutions and norms and social practice and so on and so on. And only we can really do that. And so the book that I've written is essentially a story of how we manage to expand our institutional toolkit

to scale up human cooperation from very small groups to contemporary times with billions of people cooperating, sometimes inadvertently or not even knowingly but we do, in fact, cooperate with people from Egypt and Taiwan.

- So what are the evolutionary pressures that created that unusual result for human beings as opposed to other animals? - I mean, obviously there isn't this one, but I try to narrate this story of the various mechanisms

that we use to scale up cooperation. So you can think of it as groups grow in size from very small, Jeanette largely genetically related people that interact face-to-face almost every day,

know each other very well. And occasionally meet other groups that they are distinct from and that maybe some of the hostile, maybe unremarkable, but we're talking about small groups. But the larger these groups become,

you need to introduce new mechanisms to stabilize cooperation, which becomes increasingly fragile, the more people you have. It becomes more entropics at a sort of speak,

just think about a camping trip

that you do with like six people in your family and compare that to a camping trip with 60 or 600 people. You see, you need complete different solutions regarding division of labor, enforcement of norms, who gets up in the morning and when,

who takes care of the kids, who's cleaning the pots, who's doing the fishing, who's building the tents, who's repairing the tools and so on and so on.

“And so you need to figure out all that out.”

And after a while, maybe the people are supposed to clean the pots and repair the tools, they say, Adam, feel like it today, and cooperation tends to unravel when this happens, right? So you need enforcement mechanisms.

So I dedicate a whole chapter to this idea of enforcement,

social sanctions from softer sanctions,

such as telling people off gossip or the way to capital punishment and the way that this plays a role in so-called in the so-called self-domestication of humans. So we are kind of the golden retriever in the primate kingdom, right?

So we relate, so think about how the golden retriever is related to wolves and that's how we relate to chimpanzees and gorillas, right? Very docile, you know, kind of peaceful, at least towards the in-group, very norm conformist,

a very eager to learn, to play, relatively low aggression, at least in pulse of aggression and so on and so on. And we have become that way. Well, the question is, how did we become this way?

“And I think the story that is best supported”

by the evidence and also some theoretical considerations

is that we just killed the most aggressive members of our tribes and bands for hundreds of thousands of years. So you get a kind of very, very intense selection pressure on human groups where if you take out the 10% of the most violent people, each generation,

you're gonna become less violent, right? Because if you, I don't know, if you take out all the wannabe bullies and tyrants because before they get to reproduce, those genes are gonna tend to disappear

from the population. And that sort of happened. And that is another mechanism, that the self-domestication mechanism is another way for us to stabilize cooperation

and to do the next step in scaling up all group size. - Yeah, I love that idea of the self-domestication and the role of punishment, although it's a little hard to believe, we're not a docile species.

“And I think about sometimes a different version”

of how we through our own actions changed our gene pool, which is in early days the alpha males had lots of wives made, so I'll call them as a better term. And those who couldn't find a mate

would launch off into territories unknown, consider the caricature of be a Viking. You get your boat with a group of other satisfied men and you go conquer something and you come back with treasure

and you earn some mates that way. And we are in some dimension, I suppose, maybe the descendants of both those groups, the people who were remained after the bullies were killed and the descendants of people who had the taste

of risk, danger, and violence, maybe they're the ones who escaped the punishment and got out of town and came back later. I don't know, what do you thought said that is another story?

- Well, I think this also happened. We know that humans can be very violent as well. They can coordinate on violence. They can form at hot coalitions. They can practice violent cooperation in hunting,

which is a kind of very similar to, you know, ambushing and raiding a different tribe. I believe that that's what, you know, primordial warfare is mostly supposed to have been is sort of like raids, right?

- Yeah. - A nightly raid. So if you don't really have like, you know, we're gonna meet war like in an open field and engage in combat like that.

It was mostly, yeah, and we take what we can get and we take as many women as we can get. And so this was probably, you know, that is left some mark on our genetic makeup as well and then the question would be like,

which of these processes may be swamped the other?

would be something that applies more to the in group,

“with group itself and these violent tendencies”

would largely remain directed at the out group. And that is indeed another factor in our moral psychology is that we inherited this strong us and them cognition. - But as you point out, a lot of times these urges

are not confined to the places they were first directed to.

So, you have a great line, great two lines here. One of humanity's greatest moral developments was delighting in cruelty. It was all the word difficult to unlearn this lust for cruelty after it had fulfilled its purpose.

Explain those two sentences. Why would it be a great moral development to delight in cruelty? - Well, if you have an increasing need to enforce social norms and sometimes you need violence,

it just helps to kind of install a disposition for people to enjoy violence, right?

“Just like if you want to get people to reproduce,”

it makes sense to have people enjoy that, right?

And that is not a justification for being violent today. It's just under certain circumstances, that can be an asset. And later on, once you have solved the problem as it were, that you were going to solve with this taste for violence,

it can be that it becomes a kind of evolutionary hangover, right? So we still have it in our psyche. But now it's impractical and we are too violent and too harsh and too punitive. And I think that is what we see sometimes

that in contemporary societies and modern societies, it is sometimes possible to need very little violence to enforce cooperation for various reasons, but it's still possible for that instinct, for that atavistic instinct to flare up

and when an egregious crime happens, that's very, very salient, perhaps, in the public, people get this taste for punitive reaction. It's understandable, but at the same time, it's useful to know where that comes from

and when it may or may not be appropriate. - Yeah, but your claim, which is,

“but I think an unusual claim is that the source of that,”

what do you call lust for cruelty, we could also call a psychopath has this lust for cruelty. You argue that it is the, the evolutionary hangover of a positive impulse, which is to really put an economics language,

the punishment for free riding. - People who exploit for their own benefit, whatever the group is doing and cheat on the agreement or on the norms has to be punished. It's interesting, you can punish them by expulsion,

you can punish them by social exclusion, social isolation, but none of those are as effective as violence and in fact, of course, as you point out, sometimes there's a leader who doesn't just free ride, that person becomes a tyrant over the group,

in which case, a group of people take the tyrant down, brutis and his friends take down Julius Caesar. And that's the, it's that need for that punishment mechanism, that way to reduce free riding and tyranny, that has an, you're arguing as an external,

a negative externality in our behavior in other areas. - That's right, that's right. I fully agree with that with that description. And the reason I describe it as, well, some things can be moral improvements,

or moral changes that for the time, for a certain point in time are constitute a moral improvement, even though looking at them from today's perspective, we would also view them as something unpleasant.

And at least ambivalent. And I think the evolution of punishment in cruelty is a little bit like that, where it was kind of like a ladder we needed to get on the roof, and now we want to kick the ladder away.

It has that kind of thing about or kind of feel about it. The very general point is that, as human groups become larger, the need for enforcement of norms increases, we know from experimental studies, economics, games, public goods, games, for instance,

that people start with, in the first cup of rounds,

and then cooperation unravels. So when you do these experiments with a punishment option, you see that that cooperation can be stabilized.

Now that's not the first best way

that we would like humans to be, but that's the way it is. Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made, and the social sanctions are one of the ways to straighten out the crooked timber of humanity.

And it still works today. It makes sense to think about also, you know, to engage in cost benefit analysis of how punitive we need to be.

“And I think we often overlook that, because our psychology”

isn't really cost benefit psychology, as new to the greater grind of economists, who keep reminding people of trade-offs and hidden costs, right? It's one of the big frustrations that economists have with the general public

is that they only see benefits or they only see costs and so on and they just completely omit and ignore one side of the equation. So we should engage in cost benefit thinking when it comes to punishment and a punitive instincts

and social sanctions. But they did play that role in the past, and they still continue to do to play that role today. And I don't think we could really do without any social sanctions. We tend to need some mix of incentives

and sanctions, of course. And ideally more incentives and fewer sanctions and ideally the sanctions aren't too harsh, but in principle collective action problems remain present

and they always threaten to undermine social cooperation

and so you need some sort of enforcement. - Yeah, just to criticize economists a little bit. I think go ahead and let's go. - Well, yeah, easy for me, right? I'll do the dirty work for you.

The other you may down to great with this. Gary Bakker, who happened to be my advisor, it is economics of crime and punishment. If I remember correctly, advocated often for a large punishment with a small probability

of being caught because arguing that the expected value of the punishment is what would have an impact. And by having a low probability being caught, you could reduce the cost of monitoring and enforcement.

So you could have a relatively small police force as long as sometimes when people got caught, they would pay the huge price and then the expected cost would be sufficient to deter a future crime. And I would argue somewhere on this program

and years ago that a morally that's for disturbing to most people because it means that a handful of the criminals, they're all guilty in theory. Of course, that's part of the problem is that they're not all guilty that once you impose

upon a shrine on, even if they are all guilty, you're posting a large punishment, way above probably the crime, to make sure that the expected value deterers the other criminals.

And that offends our sense of justice, even if it's quoted in vision.

“It's deeply disturbing, I think, to human beings.”

- Yeah, and I think that's a nice, so I like this way of thinking. I just disagree with this specific point, but because I think this, so I may not be 100% up to date on this topic,

but last time I looked at the evidence, I'm definitely not up to date, so, okay, so for it. - So, so, so, then I'm just leaving it to the audience to look at up, but my read of the evidence right now is that in terms of making deterrence

and the threat of punishment actually effective in deterring unwanted anti-social behavior, it's the opposite. So, it seems to be motivationally, the most effective when people are quite certain that they get caught,

even when the punishment is not as harsh. So, you can tell people, so if you have a society where you rob someone and there is 90% chance you're gonna get flogged, right? People find that very motivationally disincentivizing.

And if they have an extremely harsh punishment, such that they're just gonna get drawn and quoted

in the town square, but it almost never happens.

“People think they're gonna get away with it, right?”

And apparently, well, this would make sense because I mean, there is a kind of selection effect of people who self-select into criminal careers. They tend to not be very, very, you know, prudent, right? - That's good, a probability for sure.

- Right, so maybe. - Yeah, so I suppose that you and I don't tend to contemplate the pros and cons of bank robbery very often, right?

that contemplates seriously, whether or not to rob a bank,

may not be the one that is most susceptible to the kind of cost benefit analysis that Gary Becker recommended. So it's a little bit of a kind of, it's the kind of punishment that would work

on economists with an IQ of 145, right? But not on the people that you want to deter. So, but I like that idea. I like that way you're thinking. I remember that there is an example

that God and Taluk gives at some point where he says, if you want to increase road safety, don't install ab eggs.

“You should install a shop dagger into the steering wheel, right?”

That's gonna increase safety.

And it's just so counterintuitive.

And as you said, it's upsetting to most people to think that way, but I like that way, I like that way you're thinking if only because it's contrarian and it cracks something open, I like that. - It's a perfect Gordon Taluk example.

- Yeah, he delighted in that kind of provocative, provocative example. - Yeah. - But of course the problem with that is yes, if there were a spike in the car or a dagger,

you'd drive very slowly very cautiously, but more likely you wouldn't drive at all, but that highlights what the costs are excessive punishment. - Exactly, exactly. - Well, before we leave this, I know my listeners are eager

to hear me say that quoting Smith, "Man naturally desires not only to be loved, "but to be lovely, that is we are hardwired "to care about what other people think of us, "but we also want to be actually good

"and praiseworthy, not just praised, not just honored, "but honorable, but you write, I love this, "the exchange of gossip and rumors

"is played an important part in a revolutionary history,

"especially for the evolution of language "who's original function may primarily "a been so social communication "about other people's behavior. "And of course, Smith, that's very semethian, right?

"The way we care about our reputation, "we care about what other people think about us "and what they say about us. "And that's an amazing thing. "I could be truth about that.

- Yeah, I mean, I think you'll write that, "we do not just desire to be loved, "but to be worthy of love, "right, to be lovely." Now, I think in the vast majority of cases,

these things are sort of almost identical,

“because the best way to be loved is to be lovely, right?”

So the best way to seem good is to just be good, right? If you want to just sort of aim at seeming good straight without the detour through being good, it's a little bit like the paradox of hedonism, right? If you aim for fun directly, you're gonna miss it, right?

Fun needs to happen, yeah, on at your behavior, right? So there's a kind of paradox of being moral, which is that if you aim at seeming moral, if you aim at seeming moral directly, there's also gonna come off as calculusive and manipulative, right?

And just keeping up appearances. And if you just go for, you know, just authentically caring about people, you're gonna seem moral, and that's gonna be something that people appreciate much more.

And I think the process of evolution is smart in that way, in that it has equipped us with these abilities to be motivated in ways that feel authentic to us, and that are authentic, right, so we genuinely care about friends, we genuinely care about people we love,

we genuinely care about our kids, or whatever group that we identify with, you know, the tennis club or the nation or the tribe, or whatever, this is not fake. But of course, underlying it's distantly speaking,

there is a strategic rationale that led to the evolution of these tendencies that have become authentic, authentically experienced in our minds. So it's sort of both, you have an underlying strategic rationale for the evolution of authentically felt dispositions of virtue.

So it's great primatologist Franz DeVal, Dutch primatologist, one said that he's an advocate

“of this so-called veneer theory of morality, right?”

He has this great line, I think it's false, but it's a great line, watch an altruist, a scratch an altruist, and watch hypocrite bleed. And the idea is that, you know, altruism is skin deep. But I don't think that's really true.

I think our altruistic and cooperative dispositions,

there is a selfish gene kind of rationale underlying them. - But it's like you suggest, if it's authentic, it's a much more effective signal that if it's fake. I used to, I always liked the example of Herb Calahur, when he was CEO of Southwest Airlines on Christmas

and Thanksgiving would go work the baggage claim, and to be with the workers who is workers, and it's a tremendous stunt. And he claimed, as far as I know, that they never publicized it much, of course,

we know about it, but it wasn't. It didn't, or Patel reporters to show up, it's just something he did.

And I always wondered, it's a very powerful cultural

benefit for some company. So his workers knew that he was on their side.

“And I always asked, you know, why didn't other airline CEOs do this?”

And the answer would be, I thought was pretty simple. They wouldn't enjoy it. And they'd have to pretend they weren't enjoying it. I think her actually enjoyed it. He was a very down to earth guy.

He was not a pretentious guy. And the idea, I'm sure there were times he'd rather be with his family, but doing the annual labor with his workers was fun for him. It wasn't a stunt.

Yeah, yeah, it could also help to be a CEO

that used to start at the very bottom in the company, right?

Were you really know the ropes? Yeah. So if you actually used to do that 45 years ago, it's going to be much more believable. You know, the culture and how people talk,

you know, the movements and so on and so on.

“And then that's going to be a huge plus for your credibility”

in the business. I once heard a story about someone who is walking around London, late at night, kind of, 11 o'clock or something. And there was this famous, you know, world famous chef, there's many restaurants in London.

And he was getting out of a black SUV in full kitchen garment to only two sort of like,

walk through the back door and then greet the guests

as if he had been in the kitchen. And then he would go back into the SUV and go to the next restaurant. And so once you hear that kind of stories really of putting to people, right?

Because people, people absolutely hate that kind of mimicry. And we are very, very sensitive towards deception and people trying to manipulate us with the signals that they sent. And when they do it so strategically,

people absolutely hate them. And before we leave Smith, I want to get your action to something you didn't talk about, but put in a Smithian context. So Smith is very, very eager not to invoke

religious upbringing as an explanation for good behavior. He does have a role for what he calls, so I forget now, the term, the author of Nature, I think he calls God. But so we argue, well, into the book

that God put this desire to judge others in us as a way to monitor free riding. Doesn't put it like in that, those turns. But that's the difference. Yeah.

But what was interesting to me is that you're not a believer. I'm pretty clear, I'm pretty confident. That's right. And you don't, or for you don't invoke the divine other than to talk about the change in culture

that you mentioned earlier. But for believers and some others, you could include, I guess you could include Nietzsche and this, Miss Lest or Dostoevsky for sure,

“that religious play is an important role in constraining”

behavior in modern times, meaning post-1500 or modern era generally broadly defined. And so without God, everything is allowed is the quote. You don't talk about that. Do you have anything to say about the human

belief that you don't accept. But the human belief is that some morality is divinely revealed. OK, so I'll try to give a nuanced answer to this question. I do think that religion is very important

in the biological and cultural and social evolution of human society, cooperation and morality. But I say that as an outside observer. So I do not think that that's the case because morality gets some or all of its authority

And I do not think that morality can only have authority over human behavior if there were such a thing as a divine entity asking us to behave a certain way. So I do not think that without God, everything is allowed.

“I think we can ground morality in human level considerations.”

And we don't need transcendent justification or backing our foundations to do that.

At any rate, I would always want to know why should I accept

the verdict or wishes of the divine entity then? If there were one, that is sort of the classical objections to a realistic validation of moral norms. But I do think that religion is very important, not just in constraining moral, in constraining human behavior,

but also it's kind of cheesecake for some of our moral instincts. So it activates some of our moral instincts. And religion, in the most abstract level, famously, there can be religions without God, without a deity like the Abrahametic religions would know it.

But religion, first and foremost, sociologically speaking, I think what it does is that it practices ritual and respect for authority and a cohesion of a group. So when you think about, I don't know if you've been to one, but like a Catholic, I've been to, I guess, one,

or two in my life as a witness to a Catholic mass. It's singing, it's ritual, it's very regimented. It's very structured. It has very, very clear symbolic affirmation of roles.

“Who's the boss who gets to call the shots, if I may say so?”

And I think it practices all respect for higher values and authority and it practices ritual. That's why there's a lot of singing. There's a lot of praying is a kind of, we are in sync. Kind of activity, right?

Obviously, there is, there is what is isolated prayer, is like, you know, lone prayer, I suppose. But I think, first and foremost, it's a social activity that you then sometimes enact privately in your room. So that's the sort of conducive way

in which religion or a taste for transcendent forces, such as authority and the group, inculcates, in us, a sense, that can then be harnessed for the sake of cooperation in general. And likewise, you have very, very interesting,

very recent investment studies and contributions in theories of cultural evolution,

which noticed that you almost always see the co-evolution

of early urbanization and empires together with what these people call big gods, right? So in many, in many sort of small-scale societies, you have a bunch of gods. Even the Greeks still had a bunch of gods

with like different roles, right? One was for war, one was for science, one was for the arts, one was the, you know, big guy. This strikes us as a kind of infantile way you're thinking.

“At least that's how it always seemed to me.”

These are great stories, right? Where you have Zeus and Poseidon battling, but it's great, you know, I don't really believe that, I don't really believe an Odin and Thor. I assume you don't either, but these are great stories, right?

And at a certain point in time, around a couple thousand years ago, in different places, but largely in Mesopotamia, so the Middle East, basically. You see these big gods, big moralistic gods, and they are larger than life.

First of all, it's sort of tends to gravitate towards one God, right, who does everything? And not, and you don't have these goofy nature gods, the river God and the forest God or whatever, right?

But one huge God who gets increasingly powerful, right?

Until you have this idea that it's an otherworldly creature that knows everything, it's been do everything in son and so. And the reason is that as societies, again, scale up and become larger, you have cities that maybe have 50,000 inhabitants, right?

In Iraq or in, or in, or in, or in, what is what used to be pleasure or something, you know, that kind of region. And you can't monitor people's behavior, right?

with anti-social behavior. So then it becomes very, very useful to have a cultural invention where you tell people, "Oh, by the way, we have bad news. "You're not getting away with anything "because God sees everything."

And God knows your thoughts and your wickedness. And in fact, this divine entity doesn't just know everything you do, but he's another piece of bad news. Namely, you get to live after you die. And so you can be punished, you know,

in whatever the construct in his purgatory or hell, or some sort of conception of continued existence of the mind, that can be subject to retaliation or punishment, even after your death.

And that becomes a very, very powerful idea.

“So in that sense, I think religion is very important”

for human morality and corporation, even though I personally say this as someone who is not a personal faith, but just looks at it from a theoretical and empirical standpoint. - So I'm a person of some faith,

and I take religion seriously, but I wanna put that into your story in a different way and see how you, if you like this. So your early story of morality, and we've touched on it here, your book spends much more time on it, and readers,

listeners can go read the book. If they want to learn more about the evolutionary story, but the evolutionary story is fundamentally

cooperation is in your self-interest,

because if you don't cooperate, you can be punished. And you will find that if you do cooperate, everybody's better off, the group thrives. And so it has a somewhat of a self-readable or signacatism, through just that,

that result. But that's not the quite the same. Co-operating versus free writing, it is not quite the same as good and evil. It's not quite the second, which has a should connotation.

The story of morality that you're telling is in some dimension, a self-interest story. So is the religious one, of course, because God's gonna reward you, but with the revelation of divine morality,

certainly in the Abrahamic religions, you have this idea of should and what one ought to do. And in theory, that's necessary for the more, again, I'm being very pragmatic here, and I'm talking about faith.

That should be a very powerful incentive/motivator

for when you find yourself in much more complex social situations. And I'm talking about cheating on your taxes, under weighing your goods with a trading partner. These aren't just about cooperating versus not cooperating. This is about nuances of what it means

to be a "good person." And I think, here's the challenge,

“I think, for your view about the real religion.”

A lot of people these days, they could be wrong, but they're starting to wonder whether the decline in religiosity is having a social consequence that's quite serious, because the evolutionary underpinning

is not sufficient in the 21st century, and the role of religion, which built up all these muscles and cultural effects, is dying for many people. And we're dealing with a consequence

that I'm thinking about Jonathan Roushaw, here at the last year of at his book on the importance of Christianity to American democracy. Even Richard Dawkins, maybe the most famous atheist alive now that Christopher Hitchens is dead,

Richard Dawkins, you can say there were three. Rick Dawkins, Harrison, Sam Harrison, and Hitchens. Dawkins says, you know, Christianity has an important culture role to play. And then we have Ian Hush Ali,

who can burn to Christianity, was it a short quite sure, it wasn't a conversion of faith, as much as it was a conversion of cultural necessity in her view. So, react to that.

“- I think these are all very interesting questions.”

And I think I'm happy to, like I'm not against any possible answer, whatever the truth is. - Yeah. - And the reason why, the reason why,

well, this is easy to say, like I only came up with it, but the reason I'm saying this is it could turn out that having religion of some sort in a society is beneficial because the vast majority

and orientation and value system.

“It doesn't bother me, if this were true,”

because on the one hand, it wouldn't show that it's there for true. Sometimes, you know, untrue opinions or theories can be more socially beneficial, right? It could also be, like we just we talked earlier

about what kind of cost benefit analysis would in terms of punishment or what kind of threat of deterrence would be effective for different people in society. And it could also be that, yeah, maybe most people

in society need religion to be cooperative and cohesive and compliant, but maybe some don't. So, and thirdly, I also think that

there are certain places that are quite cohesive

and high trust and very low in religion. So, I mean, this kind of cheap to bring this up, but often people talk about Scandinavia and so on and so on, has no, no, than Europe. And I mean, just anecdotally, people around me are nice

and I don't even, I don't think I've even ever met a person of faith in my life. So, it's very rare. I mean, people baptize their children sometimes, but it's sort of like, yeah, but no one,

“I've never heard anyone say, I believe in straight up.”

And so, but everyone is perfectly well-adjusted and, and, you know, good person to be around. - Yeah, the question is whether that'll persist or the next huge generations, exactly. So, but I'm curious, where do you go up?

- I'm German, so I grew up in a small town close to Frankfurt. So, in this center of Germany, and my parents have from Düsseldorf where I live now, this is sort of the Rhine land area. So, very Western Germany, close to the Dutch border.

So, like Dawkins, I would refer to myself as a cultural Christian, right? So, evidently, I am, I am, you know, a grew up in a country that, whether culture is Christian.

I celebrate Christmas, for instance, you know, and Eastern, Eastern, and there are churches around, and so on and so on.

So, culturally, yes, but I never,

“I didn't grow up, you know, as a participant.”

- But you don't, you don't know anyone who is. - I don't think I really think so, man. - Wow, fascinating. Well, it's about 66 years growing up in America where religion is obviously more prevalent.

- And now, where you're from if I'm asked? - Well, I grew up most, a lot of different places, but I'm a Jew, which makes my role in a Christian, more Christian country a little bit, more complicated, but I knew, I know I have known many Christians,

many religious people. So, it just fascinating to me that, and here in, I live in Israel where I know, even larger number, but they tend to be limited to this. - But it's not all of this.

- Israel is a kind of young and modern country. I suppose there are many people who, you know, do the rituals, I suppose, and culturally Jewish, but maybe if you don't, then really believe in the Old Testament, run.

- Well, it's, I could give the answer of, often attributed probably not correctly to, to either sometimes I heard about No Spore, I heard about Fermi, it's probably been told about Einstein, you know, the student walks into his office,

and is he's leaving, he sees a horseshoe over the door. And he says Professor Fermi, you don't really believe in that, he says, "Oh, of course not, "but they say it works even if you don't believe in it." Now, what it really means to be a believer,

I know lots of, of troublemakers in Judaism. I would put my, my own faith in a more complicated frame that I would struggle to put it to words, but there certainly are people both in any faith who go through the motions or who like the camaraderie,

for many, many reasons. - Yeah, sure. - But there are, there are believers. And when you say to, they believe in the Old Testament, I'd say there are a lot of Christians and Jews who think it happened more or less the way it's described,

and it's worth keeping many of the strictures that are in there, but let's move on. Let's talk about agriculture, which I find extremely interesting with economists. You have a section called, "The Greatest Mistake of All Time."

in human history. Why? And what's the justification for that claim? And do you agree with that? You gave a little, you have a more nuanced view.

- Yeah, but yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure whether I agree with it,

and I've never had a firm view on this,

because I'm not sure what the criteria for evaluating that would be. And let me explain what I mean by that. So the phrase comes from Jared Diamond. Jared Diamond is a famous author who wrote many famous books,

but guns, germs, and steel made a huge impression on. It was massive bestseller, and it's a great book. I don't know if that one still holds up, I mean, light of the evidence, but it still recommended guns, germs, and steel,

which also explains certain global inequalities in economic development, or how some places got a head start sort of. And he coined this phrase that worst mistake of humanity was the invention of agriculture.

Now, I think what this means,

and this seems to me to be largely accepted in the people who study archaeology and the neolithic period and the transition from, essentially, the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle that human beings were engaging in for the whole place

to scene, two millionish years. And then there was a switch. People used to think it was 10,000 years ago, maybe 11, maybe 12,000 years ago. Maybe at one point, we'll realize it was 15,000 years ago, who knows.

Certain climatic upheavals probably happened that enabled new forms of living, and then human beings who are constantly experimenting, figured it out, and that turned out to be the successful variant, to become sedentary, to figure out seasons

and planting crops and irrigation and building larger and larger buildings and living closer together domesticating animals and so on. Now, this turned out to be the successful model

“because it also amplified military capability, right?”

So all the other people who wanted to remain hunter-gatherers, they were just killed or absorbed by this new model. And probably the populations that we know today as hunter-gatherers are not some sort of remnants of a primitive lifestyle.

They probably as some people sometimes say, they probably live in a post-apocalyptic world where a huge empire destroyed their life, right? So contemporary hunter-gatherers are sort of the people who, the very few people who escaped

this absorption by the culture evolution of empire a couple of thousand years ago. This same dynamic happened in East Asia, in various places, somewhat later, but analogous happened in middle America, in populations that are,

and so you keep seeing that. But to my knowledge, the earliest is in Mesopotamia, and why is it supposed to be the worst mistake of all time?

“And I think the argument is that it was a terrible deal”

for the vast majority of people, right? You were able to create an economic surplus via agriculture, storing calories essentially. So people had a higher calorie input, perhaps, but it came with oppression.

It came with very, very hard labor. It came with slavery. It came with huge inequality. It came with warfare and terror. It came with diseases because for the first time,

people who lived around animals a lot, and you get these zoonotic pandemics. And so at the very least, it seems to have been a terrible deal for the majority of people, maybe not for everyone, but for the majority.

And people now think that the nomadic hunter gathered a lifestyle had certain downsides, but overall it wasn't so bad.

Human beings always had relatively high child mortality

that has to do with the big head and various other things. So we always had that. But once people made it past four or five years old, life was apparently pretty good, right? People, people, they were 60, 70 years old in many cases.

There weren't many diseases. They didn't really have cancer. They didn't really have, you know, most diseases. They didn't really have the flu, perhaps, even, because that is an animal virus.

And they were telling stories that didn't have long work days,

“not unusually long, at least that's what we now believe.”

So compared to hunter-gatherer life,

for the vast majority of people.

And it's only somewhat recently that life became better for many people again. - Yes, I don't agree with that. I think it's an empirical question, obviously. And it's hard to answer, but listeners may remember

Uval Harari on the program, he's also thinks it's a mistake. We had a conversation about that. You can go back and listen to it, we'll link to it. Rachel Lawdon, food historian who's been a guest on the program, has a different view.

I don't know if she'll be talked about it when we talked about the history of food. I think we probably did.

“But the only thing I want to interject here on this dispute”

is that Margaret Meade did a fairly successful job in romanizing primitive economies and primitive peoples who were effectively hunter-gatherers. Others have come along and I'm blanking on the name. I'll remember it and we'll put a link to it.

Others have suggested that she was wrong, gathering enough protein in much of human history as a hunter-gatherer was extremely difficult. And life was very, very hard. It was not a short work week

and people struggle to stay alive. So that's a empirical question, I don't know. But it's just sort of an interesting question. But for you, the importance, putting it in side, whether it was a good turn for a dear dead end

for humans, it had an effect on morality because of the stationarity and the potential for advancing divisional labor, which hunter-gatherer

is small hunter-gatherers, societies are never going to have

a significant amount of divisional labor.

“And you recognize, I think quite eloquently”

on the book, quite spectacularly, the role of trust and cooperation, which enables a modern economy that is overwhelming to have been beneficial for most measures of material well-being, even if there was a long time when it wasn't so great

in the agricultural period of that should take. - Yeah, yeah. - So that's right, I mean, this is an interesting question. You write it in Pyrricle. - I think, I think for a long time, the view of what we would

now describe as hunter-gatherer populations was a kind of like these assavages and they are uncivilized. That was then overcome and overcorrected in a way by people like Mead who said, "No, this was all Kumbayar." - Yeah, yeah.

- Right, and then pendulum swings back and people say, "Well, that's not really, that seems to be a little bit like civilizational guilt "and you're kind of like trying to." So it wasn't all fine, it was actually hard work

and the diet was at least very unsteady. I think people still believe that, right? So you sometimes you would have a huge kill and then you'll find for a couple of days, right? But then there are periods of scarcity and so on and so on.

- And we killed off, we killed off all the big animals that made that relatively pleasant. So there was exactly a post extinction period where hunter-gathering must have been catching a lot of squirrels and that's so that much pertain.

I think that's the issue. - Exactly. And all of that, I'm not sure about the details, but it's just a conditionally I would be happy to ground that and still the transition to agriculture

could have been even worse than that, right? Where you have like grinding, grinding oppression and famine throughout. - Yeah. - Exactly and you get, you just get absolutely

murdered building the pyramids, right? - Yeah, that's sort of stuff. I think, well, it seems to me that at least in terms of, like I said, disease and oppression, I would be surprised if there hadn't been more of that

with the emergence of civilization. - Agreed. - Also, certain type of war fair.

I mean, there's always been out group violence

and like we said, raids and people, people are competing for resources with violence. And sometimes people just being hostile for no good reason, even other than these people look different. So we find that and you also have

“some things that that's why it's difficult”

to evaluate, so was it all things considered a mistake or not? Because you also have certain types of economic development that only become possible this way, right?

- You cannot have, you cannot have the fruits of a modern economy.

If you first and foremost, you need a large number of people, right?

There are fascinating studies about the populations from Australia and New Zealand, where there are no differences between them other than population size. And in New Zealand, the populations,

they couldn't sustain those and arrows, they could only had very, very primitive boats. They lost almost all their tools, not because they were stupid, right? Not because they were genetically inferior, they literally identical to Australians.

It's just that they got stuck on this island and it was too few people and you can't sustain a certain type of technology and corporation. If you have 20,000 people, right?

“So that's why I always find it hilarious”

when you have the lot of the rings or game of thrones

or these shows and you have like,

evidently a society where everyone is kind of in the army and no one, there's no economy, right? There's sort of like you need millions of people and like the lot of the rings, I'm not sure, but there are like 100,000 humans

or something in middle-earth and they have, essentially you're like a kind of like medieval civilization, which is just not possible, right? You can't have anything, you can't have armor and huge cities and castles with 100,000 people,

you have nothing, right? And so of course this is a fantasy novel, but I'm just saying the population size matters a lot and this kind of the emergence of civilizations and urban living indeed only made that possible.

And then it still took a couple of thousand years until the real escape from the Malthusian trap

“started to work and that's just like 300 years ago”

when that started, right? That's very recent. So I'm gonna, we're gonna shift gears here but before I do, I wanna read a paragraph that is really magnificent

and I could ask you to comment on it. It just stands on its own. There are more interesting paragraphs in the book but this was the most eloquent and I'm just gonna read it.

- No, I'm curious to you. - Quote, you talk about the modern era, modern times. You say quote, "This is a time when many are freed from the yoke of heart labor and can decide who they want to be

and where they want to live." It is an age when the sweet fruits from distant lands want so rare and unattainable that even the rich knew them only from paintings in the salons of the even richer are at hand at any time when the dream of lying has come true

and when the hearts of strangers can beat in the chests of those once destined to die and to quote. That's just magnificent writing. - Oh, thank you. - And there's some good jokes in here too

which I'm not gonna ruin a read about last but I wanna close with a question that hangs over the last, I don't know, maybe 20% of the book. And the book was written in,

I was published first in 2023.

- Chocking how much has happened in the world in the last two plus years. - Oh yeah. - And the, I'd say in the current addition, the book is guardedly optimistic about our potential

to continue to make progress. I want you to defend the idea that we have made progress and some of the examples are undeniable of progress, the way we treat women, the way we treat the world, treats women, the way the world treats people of color,

the death of slavery, they're more or less, or at least a dramatic reduction, sexual preferences are more tolerated. There are many, many beautiful and positive things that have happened to the human narrative

in the last few hundred years, but other things have happened, they're not so good. And I often spar with guests because it's easy to forget the bad things. I'm just gonna pick one.

The family is not doing well, the so-called family, and many people celebrate that. And maybe they're right, I'm agnostic, that's not true, I'm not agnostic, the family's important.

“And I think that the death of the family is troubling,”

and it's not, and it's a contribute to some of the things we're saying in the world around us. But forget whether that, whether you agree with that or not, it feels in January of 2026, like the world is in a very unhealthy equilibrium

that is only moving to an unhealthy everyone. And morality or human well-being, even though eyes

is quite dramatically better for millions of people, actually. It is troubling to me that our ability, I just call it our ability to get along seems to be in jeopardy. We see that in America.

We saw it in many parts, we see it in many parts of Europe, yeah, certainly in England struggling with Brexit and post-Brexit issues, are you optimistic? Make the case for why we're on the right trajectory, even though there's some ups and downs along the way.

“- Yeah. - 'Cause that's why we come to agnostic.”

I used to think-- - Yeah, that's right. - That's right, I'm less so today. - Yeah, totally, totally, I think about that too. I think about that too. And I do agree, I think, so actually the English version,

we've still working copy editing that in 24 and we did make some changes already. So it's very slightly, but even some examples that I give are turned down or even less up to me. So we already had to kind of adjust away from that a little bit.

I did become interested in that question of progress. You're right, we forget some bad things, but we forget some good things, but we also forget some bad things. And there's been this trend in thinking

about the past and about society over the past 10 years or so, where people try to say, really things are better now than they seem, right? This sort of like optimism. - Yeah. - So you did have Angus Dietin,

for instance, an economist who said, "You know, health and wealth, they improve." You had famously Steven Pinker, social scientists such as Hans Rosling, and I have a whole ride library of optimism,

like me, right? - Yeah. - And I think that was necessary, too, to avoid that kind of nostalgia and doomerism

about everything's always going to hell, right?

“I think that is a useful corrective as well.”

So I'm still kind of temperamentally on board with trying to be optimistic. And I think there's negativity bias in headlines, you know, suicide numbers get only get reported when they tick up, right?

Even when they're long-term, trend is that whatever, that kind of example. - Yeah. - So I'm still mostly on board with that. At the same time, you're right that the optimistic tone that people like Pinker had

or that I have in the book a little bit, is a little more awkward now. And I do think that essentially, well, pretty much exactly the past 10 years have brought certain changes that are,

that don't point in a direction that I think is great. I tend to think that Brexit was the first real big event that ushered in this atmosphere of returning to a kind of ethno-nationalist thinking about politics, groups, culture and the economy.

It was always a silly idea that, you know,

an isolated British economy would function better. That this is not really even a possibility, right? This has always been a cultural vibe kind of thing. You had the same thing with various right-wing, neo-conservative backlash,

kind of movements in the Netherlands, Hungary, in Germany, Austria, France, and so on and so on. So on where people also said, we do not like many of the things that are happening due to essentially the global integration

of institutions and the economy. This can be migration. It can be changes in the labor market and unemployment and so on and so on. I think part of that is understandable.

It does suck when your job appears, right? Well, it's an entire different question whether in terms of running an economy of 50 million or 500 people that costs doesn't have to be accepted. Well, easy for us to say perhaps, but it's a tricky question

but we have seen these movements, right? We have seen the election of Donald Trump makes it about one person, but it's more and more

“and I think increasingly we see that it's also”

a cultural normative shift in the erosion and our destruction of certain norms of decorum and the way people treat each other.

I always, every couple of years,

people share this video of the presidential debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. And it's a different country, shocking, right? It's totally, these guys, these guys, they spent five minutes each on stage and say,

And I cannot praise the accomplishments of Mr. Obama

and they're hugging and kissing, right?

“It's amazing, it's unthinkable, even couple years later”

and certainly today, that may have begun forever. I mean, we don't know that, but that's not something that I think is likely to be good. And so I would tone down the optimistic message a little bit. Now, what do we talk about long-term trends?

You have this or that guy, you have whatever representative of this or that party that is shot-sighted or vicious or both. But I still want to think about general trends in more optimistic terms, because I do think that these trends,

let's put our own country first, let's run our own economy

with our own interest in mind. Let's be more homogenous in some and so on. I don't really think they are functional in the world that we live in. I do think the trend still goes towards scaling up

corporation even more. And these, I'm inclined to think, are sort of growing pains of that. I hope that these growing pains don't become so large that people tear it all down and destroy things.

That is kind of, in a way, what happened in the '30s in Germany, right, where things were happening. And it created a moment that could be exploited by people

“who were, well, lucky from their point of view, right?”

So opportunistically, lucky in exploiting a kind of sentiment in a note where the part of the population. And it allowed them to, I mean, wreak havoc doesn't even, you know, something is inadequate, but just catastrophic consequences for the huge numbers of people.

So hopefully, that's not the path that we're on,

even though there's always that risk, I think,

that that can happen. So I'm, it's not, there's no wiggishness or naivety. I hope in the story that I'm inclined to tell. But I think that if I had to guess, the forces are still pushing in a direction of, you know,

“it doesn't really make sense to hate each other”

because your eyes look different or your skin is darker or lighter or whatever. And there can be cultural diversity without antagonism. And there can be tolerance for plural ways of living and so on and so on.

But then again, I'm, you know, I'm a 42 year old man now. So this is the, maybe these are my values. And, you know, now you have a bunch of 25 year olds who grew up on toxic internet content, they disagree. But if you ask me, you know, how does our right now,

this is my answer? - My guest today has been Honoha Sauer. His book is The Adventure of Good and Evil. Honoha, thanks for being part of the counter. - Thank you so much, it was great fun.

(upbeat music) - This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation.

The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday. (upbeat music)