A long bio
Tamás Dávid-Barrett was born in Budapest 1970. He grew up in the Hungarian capital thin, unremarkable, nerdy. He liked maths and history, played with lego, and enjoyed being in or on top of water. In 1982 he got his first computer, a ZX Spectrum 48; he started to code in basic. Since then the computer changed, the computer language changed — his primary tool has been Mathematica since 1995 —, but he still does essentially the same: he sits at the computer and calculates stuff, intercepted by a swim, a day of kayaking, a week of sailing, or time-off on a real-world anthropology journey.
Tamás’s first serious brush with science had come when, at age 16, he had acquired an age-appropriate crush on a classmate who was a member of the grammar school’s biology club. Tamás figured that joining the club would yield benefits, so he did. To achieve his goal, he also showed adequate enthusiasm, for instance by reading and reporting a book on why some mammals have large brains. This is funny for some 25 years later he ended up figuring out the mathematical model that explained the phenomenon.
At school he liked the idea of travelling, but under the communist regime, that was impossible. Unless, as he was told, he becomes an “international trader”. For this, he needed to become an economist, the advice had come. So he studied hard, and got in the country’s main economics university. He was still a by-the-book nerd. At university he read mathematical economics and international relations. This he liked a lot, but wanted to know why people were behaving the way he saw them. His exact question was: why does everybody always want more, even when they already have a lot.
Crucially, the country’s pre-eminent behavioural scientist, Vilmos Csányi, took interest in this young man with weird questions, and started a weekly conversation with him. These were tutorials with dinner, and Vilmos taught Tamás biology, systems science, and ethology. And thinking. And humanity. They loved each other, and became very close. This was in part due to the warmth that radiated from Évi, Vilmos’s wife, as well as, their shared enthusiasm about crafted plates of food.
In 1995 Tamás finished his studies in Budapest, and had gone to Cambridge for two years. He studied economics, and found another way of being on top of a river: punting. In fact, as Darwin College’s Admiral of Punts (note the fact that an admiral has two stars), he probably reached his peak.
In 1997 Tamás was to move to Chicago to write a doctoral thesis on endogenous growth theory, i.e., the long-term behaviour of economies. It never happened. In a fateful decision, he decided that he wanted to see an economy before he builds models of them. If economies were individuals of a species, no self-respecting behaviour scientist would model them without first observing the behaviour, no? At least this was his argument. He also thought that in Chicago there might be nowhere to hike.
A year later, 1998, Tamás had a boutique research company, based in Budapest, later also in Frankfurt, Dubai, and Oxford. The company forecast the future of emerging market economies. It was a medium-size, international team of analysts, which focused on macroeconomics, politics, and government finance. The company ended up covering 11 countries real time, but also another two dozen occasionally. Tamás loved doing this, especially that as the head of the company he could do what he always wanted: travelling around the world and thinking about the long-term behaviour of societies. He did this a lot.
For a few years during this period, Tamás had also involved himself with policy making. Although he advised several governments about their policies, the only deep involvement was in his birth country, Hungary. He had become the writer of the election program for the liberal party. Tax system, infrastructure reform, health care reform, anti-corruption. Standard stuff. The learning was more about the way policy happens, or rather how it does not. To his running around the world work, the policy making was the perfect accompaniment. It was all very interesting, exciting, and he kept learning.
However, there was a fly in the ointment (or in the soup — in the Hungarian version). He and his team saw the seeds of a global crisis coming. This was winter 2005. But despite the team’s forecasting awards, and his personal reputation, nobody believed him. He was rather disappointed by this. Finally, in 2007 he organised one of his annual investment conferences around the themes of the coming crisis. And with that, he left the financial markets altogether. By then he had been planning to return to academia for many years, he had observed enough of the behaviour of this weird species of macroeconomies.
The plan was great, but the re-entry point into academic research was less than obvious. The solution came via two friends. A few years back, around 2002, two of his good friends took Tamás aside for a week to teach him network science. Gábor Csányi and Balázs Szendröi were wise enough to see the importance of, that time still emerging, network science, and they wanted to share their knowledge. It was very generous of them. It was also crucial for Tamás, for in his science he ended up working on the evolutionary origins of behaviour that builds social networks.
At first Tamás thought that he would write his thesis on financial networks of emerging markets. But, after the first few models, in 2008, a fatal invitation came. A friend of his invited him to be a development economist on a World Bank mission to the western side of the island of New Guinea, a huge territory that belongs to Indonesia. Their task was to figure out a plan that develops the economy, something that the local population, understandably, wanted, while at the same time not to mess up the exceptional ecological and cultural treasure that the island was, the interest of all humanity. It was a pretty impossible task, and they indeed failed at it. To this day, Tamás hates looking at the satellite image of the island, where, on his part, where he could have had an impact, the deforested patches grow by the day.
He returned depressed but with a brand new observation: although culture obviously matters, humanity is surprisingly uniform in basic social behaviour. That can be only for one reason: people must inherit the dominant part of their behavioural repertoire’s fundaments. If this is true, then to understand all societies, we need to understand how the inherited behaviour comes about, that is, human evolution. So, in 2010, he gave up his idea of writing a thesis in macroeconomics, and he turned to anthropology. Lucky for him, another giant of science, Robin Dunbar, was willing to tolerate his presence. They ended up friends, co-authors, and, thanks to Robin’s patience, they even shared a university office for a few years.
While still doctoral student at the economics department of Birkbeck, but sitting in Oxford, and collaborating with Robin, Tamás had started to write papers: on the evolutionary origins of behavioural synchrony, on the origins of social stratification, inequality regulation, the mathematical version of the social brain hypothesis (foreshadowed by his teenage self trying to impress his first love by his knowledge of large brained mammals). These were all mathematical models, followed by many more on the evolution of religiosity, origins of ideologies, the ability to speak, and even hairloss and bipedality. It was all rather miraculously lucky, really.
Yet, he was suddenly doing the same mistake all over again: he was building models and crafting theories, without real world observations. To mend this, even if a bit late, he started empirical work on actual people’s actual behaviour, resulting in insights about friendship, kinship, and mate choice. Observations about regulating the structure of social networks, designing macro-scale social network architecture, and how societies come up with norms for the behaviour between women and men.
Somehow, miraculously, many of his past models and data started fall into shape, into an image of something larger. A few science friends called it a theory and asked for a name, so Tamás came up with the accurate but clumsy ‘structural microfoundations theory’. Building this theory and finding collaborators around the world is what take most of his focus and time now.
“I love changing my mind. It is the ultimate intellectual pleasure. The trouble is that it’s damn difficult to do so.”
And this is where he is now in his life.
The family base of Tamás is a many century-old stone cottage in Wytham, a tiny village just north of Oxford. His ex-wife, Liz David-Barrett is a world renown researcher of political corruption lives in Vienna. Their two sons, Artúr and Leó are into music, geography, sleeping in, and being teenagers.