The Weirdest People in the World

Joseph Henrich has been having a great run. He has an Anthropology background, but is abnormally numerical for the field.

This book is quite expansive in scope. It goes into detail on how WEIRD cultural characteristics that we often take for granted came about over the last several hundred years and succeeded under selection pressure.

Good anthropology is useful for epidemics because it helps inform us about what key intuitions we have that are quite arbitrary or that could be modified further in the future.