I just finished an excellent book by Joseph Henrich called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. The WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic.
I’ve read many books that seek to explain the origins of the Industrial Revolution. Among my favorites are
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the ones that point to the early 1600s Dutch, a unique non-hierarchical Protestant society that created many of the tools of modern commerce and
- then conquered England in 1689, to plant the commercial models there.
- Max Weber expanded this into a general connection of Protestantism to the Industrial Revolution.
- The subsequent movement of a stonemasons guild in the 1700s into The Order of Masons which expanded from England to most of Northern Europe, spreading science, technology and democratic forums.
- Next was the English experimentation in agriculture in the late 1700s that released a free labor pool to support newly formed water and steam- driven factories and urban areas.
Henrich’s contribution is to find the force that moved much of Europe, over the period from 400CE to 1400, from tribes and clans to a large population of independent individuals. It was the Roman Catholic Church with an unremitting teaching that advocated two person monogamous non-relative marriage that was the vital source of this change. Henrich further finds the Cistercian Order of monks, that grew to thousands of abbeys throughout Europe while promoting this monogamous teaching plus advocating for the value of hard work. From that point on Gutenberg and Protestantism played a major role.
Much thanks to Henrich for this important contribution. Sadly I wasted a great deal of time with his psychological testing of every detail using data from college student psych labs which is absurd. Seventeen year-olds in college answering questions on computers do not represent any larger universe. He also uses anthropologists’ data which I find equally unconvincing. A European with crayons, paper and simple questions in a tribal setting gets no meaningful material to generalize. All such research gets the results it sets out to get.
All these studies that I like to explain the Industrial Revolution are missing the key ingredient that I explain in my book The Most Important Book in Human History. The European empires in the 1700-1800s allowed the second and third sons to escape the innovation- stifling primogenitor of their homelands. Colonialism was a source of innovation from those who escaped Europe. The greatest escape from hereditary family domination was the Great American West in the mid-1800s. The breakdown of the stifling hereditary family is the source of modern innovation. To this day hereditary elites, the world over, stifle innovation.
Henrich’s book allows me to examine the modern world with the stunning modern commercial success of many tribal and clan societies. Nothing could be a more startling example than the United Arab Emirates; two gigantic super modern cities Dubai and Abu Dhabi with a population over 5 million are run by two Arab Bedouin tribes. These are super modern cities with only tribal members as citizens.
There is also Hong Kong, notoriously run by 51 tongs, and Singapore run by one family from one canton.
See the next blog above.