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 Shalem College in Jerusalem, and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org. We'd love to hear from you. Today is 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”

“ownsides, but overall it wasn't so bad. Human beings always had relatively high. child mortality that has to do with the big head, right? 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, 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. They didn't have long work days, not unusually long. At least that's what we now”

“ibes 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 going to become less violent, right? Because if you, I don't know, if you take out all the wannabe bullies and tyrants before they get to reproduce, you know, those genes are going to, you know, tend to be, tend to disappear from the population. And that sort of happened. And that is another mechanism that the self-domestimication mechanism is another way for us to stabilize cooperation and to do the next step in scaling up our group”

“Jared Diamond is a famous author who wrote many famous books, but Guns, Germs, and Steel made a huge impression on, it was a massive bestseller. And it's a great book.”

“Jonathan Rauch discusses the importance of Christianity in American democracy, highlighting its cultural role.”

“Gary Becker, who happened to be my advisor, in his economics of crime and punishment, advocated often for a large punishment with a small probability of being caught.”