About us

Mission

Our mission is to accelerate human progress by identifying and addressing the cultural and institutional barriers that prevent people and societies from flourishing. We use cultural evolution and economics to find levers that can shift whole systems, then work with partners to build, test, and scale solutions.

The Problem

Technology raced ahead; our social systems lagged behind. We have a sense of what good schools, cities, institutions, and systems look like, but we are missing the implementation layer to bring those ideas to reality. That gap, not a lack of ideas or intelligence, blocks progress. An effective new technology or a promising policy can fail when institutions cannot deliver it, incentives work against it, or people do not trust it. We need clear evidence about what works, for whom, and under which conditions and we need to test that understanding in real-world settings.

Our Answer

We look for Archimedes' levers - changes that a small team can pull off, but that are powerful enough to shift whole systems. We amplify existing research, support research that is missing, and bring together the partners and affiliates who can carry it to decision-makers. Our work with the United Nations Development Programme and the Global Solutions Initiative connects that research to international policy and to opportunities for implementation.

What Cultural Evolution Adds

Economists and policy practitioners already study why reforms succeed in some places and fail in others. Many of them are our affiliates. Cultural evolution adds a model of how people learn from one another, whom they copy, how norms spread and persist, and how cooperation scales from families to nations. It also shows how those processes shape institutions and even the cultural foundations that help institutions work. That gives us mechanisms we can test with partners, for example whether a new practice spreads through trusted peers and is likely to last once the incentives end. Some examples: Cooperation. What makes it work, and what makes it fail. Almost every reform asks people to cooperate - to pay taxes they could avoid, follow rules others might break, or trust institutions that have let them down before. Cooperation sustains itself when people expect others to do their part and believe commitments will be kept. That depends on incentives and enforcement. It also depends on reciprocity, shared identity, and whether people see opportunity as positive-sum rather than zero-sum. Corruption is often cooperation at the wrong scale. Loyalty to family or network at the expense of the wider public. The cultural foundations of institutions. Formal rules work best when they match shared expectations about how others will behave. Rules and norms evolve together. Rules can reshape norms, and norms shape how rules are applied. That is part of why the same constitution, tax code, or school system can produce very different results in different places, and why institutions copied without their foundations often disappoint. Cultural transmission. How good solutions spread and improve. Societies rarely invent from scratch. They borrow, adapt, and recombine. Japan, South Korea, and Singapore grew rich partly by remixing institutions and technologies from elsewhere with their own. Larger, better-connected networks of people (collective brains) can bring different knowledge together, helping people recombine and improve ideas. But practices also spread because influential people endorse them, or simply because they are common, whether or not they work. We look for what has worked elsewhere, what would be needed to adapt them, and connect the people who can do the adapting. If you think cultural evolution offers the right big-picture model of human behavior and social change, CHP is where that model gets put to work. If you simply think culture matters for progress, you'll find culture addressed alongside traditional approaches.

What We Mean By Progress

By progress we mean expanding people's real freedoms to live lives they value and have reason to value. This draws on Amartya Sen's capability approach and on the human development tradition behind the UN's Human Development Reports. Income matters, because it widens choices, but so do health, education, security, and a voice in how one is governed. Progress is defined with the people living it. We bring evidence, proposals, and partners. Governments and the communities affected set the goals, and we test and adapt approaches with them.