Professor Nathan Nunn presented the 2025 Griffin Public Lecture at the University of Melbourne, on Monday, April 14, 2025.
Cultures in Crisis? Cultural Evolution and the Potential for Global Mismatch
Humanity stands at a crossroads. The global climate crisis, extreme wealth inequality, and rising discontent continue to pose significant challenges, yet progress in addressing these issues has been slow. Why is it so difficult to move forward? In the 2025 Griffin Economic History Public Lecture, Professor Nathan Nunn demonstrated how an understanding of cultural evolution offers important insights that help to answer this question.
The presentation explored how, throughout history, the moral values and traditions of societies have tended to evolve in systematic ways that shape political, economic, and social life. Professor Nunn presented evidence suggesting that, over the past 500 years, cultural change has been largely driven by a form of evolution that favoured traits conducive to conquest, enslavement, and colonisation. He examined how these values, despite historically conferring advantages, now appear to be misaligned with the challenges currently faced by humanity.
The crises of climate change, inequality, and political instability demand global cooperation, yet the values that shape the modern world were, in large part, forged by global conquest. Professor Nunn presented evidence consistent with the possibility that humanity is now experiencing a historically unprecedented form of cultural mismatch — one in which the traits that ensured success in the past are increasingly at odds with those required for future survival.
Drawing upon insights from cultural economics, economic history, and evolutionary anthropology, Professor Nunn provided an overview of the current understanding of why human societies rely on culture, why cultural change tends to be slow-moving, and how cultural mismatches emerge. By applying recent advances in the study of long-term cultural dynamics, this lecture traced the roots of today’s challenges and offered reflections on potential pathways forward.
About the speaker:
Professor Nathan Nunn is a Professor at the Vancouver School of Economics. His primary research interests include political economy, economic history, economic development, cultural economics, and international trade. He holds a Canada Research Chair in cultural economics and is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) in the Boundaries, Membership & Belonging program, an NBER Faculty Research Fellow, and a Research Fellow at BREAD. He is currently an editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Professor Nunn’s research focuses on the historical and dynamic process of economic development. In particular, he has examined the factors that shape differences in the evolution of institutions and cultures across societies. He has published research that investigates the historical processes behind a wide range of factors that are crucial for economic development, including distrust, gender norms, religiosity, norms of rule-following, conflict, immigration, state formation, and support for democracy.
His research also explores economic development in contemporary contexts, including the effects of Fair Trade certification, CIA interventions during the Cold War, foreign aid, school construction, climate shocks, and trade policies. He is particularly interested in the importance of the local context (e.g., social structures, traditions, and cultures) for the effectiveness of development policy and in understanding how policy can be optimally designed given the local environment. He has studied the relationship between marriage customs and female education, generalised trust and political turnover, the organisation of the extended family (lineage) and conflict, and traditional local political systems and support for democracy.
About the lecture series
The Griffin Economic History Public Lecture is named after Peter Griffin AM, an alum of the Faculty (BCom 1963) who has had a long and successful career in business, particularly in the investment and banking sectors. In 2008, he was honoured as a Member of the Order of Australia for his service to the Australian community through support for medical research, arts and charitable organisations. Peter is passionate about Economic History and is keen that students graduate from the University of Melbourne with a solid understanding of business and finance, and a deep awareness of previous mistakes made by governments, industry and the banking sector. The University of Melbourne gratefully acknowledges support for the Griffin Economic History Public Lecture from the Peter Griffin and Terry Swann Foundation.