The Magpie Strategy: Intellectual Arbitrage and Adjacent Possibilities

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Creativity is driven by serendipity and incremental innovation, and it involves intellectual arbitrage - piecing together ideas from multiple sources to create something new. This requires a prepared mind that understands the problem and can piece together solutions from various sources. It also involves exposing oneself to ideas from those with differing viewpoints. Additionally, being creative involves looking for adjacent possibilities, such as borrowing concepts from related industries that can be implemented immediately.

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What is a "theory of everyone"? Do the social sciences currently have enough firm knowledge to synthesize such a theory? Have we been getting smarter as a species over the last few hundred years? Were great historical thinkers smarter than today's greatest minds? Why are governments so prone to corruption? What is the COMPASS framework? What is the "no hyphen" immigration model? What is the "umbrella" immigration model? How can governments change how they think and talk about immigration so that racism is less likely to find its way into immigration policy?

Michael Muthukrishna is an award-winning professor of economic psychology and affiliate in developmental economics and data science at the London School of Economics. His research has been featured in CNN, BBC, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Economist, Scientific American, Time Magazine, Fortune Magazine, and many other news outlets. He is the author of A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going. Learn more about him at his website, follow him on Twitter at @mmuthukrishna; or read his writings on his Substack.

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