(Writer’s note: I have a newfound appreciation for good book reviews! This was so much more challenging and time-consuming than other posts)
Why did the Industrial Revolution take place in Western Europe? Why has the West continued to pull away from the rest? Why are Westerners so individualistic? These are some big questions! According to Joe Henrich, the answer to all three is… the Western Church. Bet you weren’t expecting that! I sure wasn’t (even after reading ~ 20 economic development books).
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joe Heinrich (henceforth WEIRD) is an ambitious book. It ties together research from a bunch of fields to explain how changes to religion, family structure, and social norms dating back to the beginning of humanity have changed psychology, biology, and ultimately the long-run economic prosperity of different societies. Most interestingly, it looks at how and why WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) societies have pulled ahead of non-WEIRD societies.
This was probably my favorite book of the last 2-ish years. It covered so much ground and had a very high “new content per page” ratio for me. If you are interested in economic development/history, psychology, religion, or political history, I’d highly recommend giving WEIRD a read. It’s one of the thickest books I’ve read, but at ~ 490 breezy-ish pages it isn’t nearly as long as it looks.
Without further ado, let’s get into it.
Summary
Again, it covers so much ground. I’ll do my best to hit the main points in under 1,000 words (see here for a better written, more in depth summary):
For almost all of human history, people have lived in “kin-based” societies. These cultures were optimized for hunter-gatherer society, meaning you saw a lot of tribal conformity, deference to elders, in-group norm policing, and little geographic mobility (people rarely switched tribes). These are great strategies for living in small nomadic groups, but do they work well in larger groups? And do they lead to the kinds of innovation you’d need to invent things and “advance society”?
Let’s jump forward a few thousand years or so, to early Medieval Europe. Those hunter-gatherer inspired cultures I mentioned? They obviously looked much different in Medieval Europe than they did in 8000 BC, but society was still strongly kin-based/tribal and the remnants of those norms could be seen everywhere. Enter the Western Church.
The first thousand years after Christ in Europe saw new religious variations springing up at the rate of today’s QAnon conspiracy theories. The Western Church, which later became the Roman Catholic Church, was one of these new entries. But they weren’t just any new entry. No, these guys were about to come in and DISRUPT European society as we knew it. How? Through a series of Marriage and Family Policies (MFP) that gradually dismantled the importance of kin-based institutions for those under the church. Marriage and Family Policies? Sounds kinda lame, but say more.
Well, there were four particularly important parts of the MFP. First, the church banned cousin marriage. This forced people to go outside their kinship networks to find partners. So much for keepin it in the family. Second, they banned polygamy. Polygamy creates extra competition for men and leaves a sizable subclass of them single and upset. No polygamy means lower testosterone, less violence, and more paternal investment in wives and children. Third, they encouraged nuclear families and “neolocal housing”, where married couples live separately from their parents. Moving out of your parent’s house will obviously lead to less focus on your elders. Lastly, the church pushed for individual property ownership and wills. This ended up giving tons of property and money to the church, and bled the coffers of kin-based institutions dry.
So kin-based institutions were in decline. Now what? In Western Church areas, they were replaced by more individualistic institutions. People started moving around more and joining “voluntary associations” like new cities (which had detailed charters and oaths that had to be signed), guilds, monasteries, and universities.
These changes were gradual and took place over centuries, but the results were profound. Western Europe underwent a major psychological and cultural shift. Competition among voluntary associations and states gradually led to better (i.e. more democratic and market-based) institutions, higher social trust and more prosociality. This competition played out both through voluntary migration, and through stronger states overpowering weaker ones in war. These shifts paved the way for the Protestant Reformation, where followers would no longer rely exclusively on religious elites to interpret the holy texts. As a result, literacy and education took on a new importance under the Ultimate Individualist Religion.
So now we're up to around the year 1600. Western Europe actually may have had below average incomes back in 1000 AD. Now, they were at similar levels to other “wealthy” societies, but nothing exceptional. With individualism on the rise, people learning to read and write, and markets and participatory institutions popping up, this would change quickly. The Industrial Revolution was not far behind, nor were the increasingly democratic legal structures of Western Europe.
The ~400 years from these Revolutions to the present are sometimes referred to by economists as The Great Divergence. By the mid-19th century, the average English income was 4 times more than the Indian average. By 1950 it was 14 times larger. In theory, we might have expected poorer countries to “catch up” to richer ones by adopting their already-existent technologies. It’s a lot easier to start using electricity than it is to invent it for the first time. But catch-up growth was mostly non-existent until the past 3 decades. According to Henrich’s thesis, these countries are still stuck in Kin-Based Worlds and not WEIRD enough to successfully take advantage of new technologies, as corruption and power struggles have set them back and discouraged investment.
But you don’t have to look at GDP statistics to see how the Western World diverged. How big are psychological/cultural differences between the West and the Rest today? Pretty big! These differences present a problem for psychological research.
Previously, researchers assumed psychological variation was much lower and that studies done on Western college students would more or less generalize globally. Whoops! A WEIRD person might describe themselves as a teacher or a lawyer, generally trust strangers, think in terms of categories, show up on time and be willing to wait for rewards (ie lower time discounting/interest rates). But a non-weird person would be much more likely to describe themselves as “John’s son”, be wary of trusting strangers, think holistically, and be less concerned with time.
Now that the limited variation assumption has been exposed, researchers continue to identify more and more ways that while us humans may be similar at birth, we see the world through completely different lenses by the time we reach adulthood and have absorbed the norms of our societies. That having been said, the psychological differences are starting to shrink as Western culture spreads, particularly among more educated and online groups.
So that’s the gist. There’s so many interesting details that went into all that, so again, I highly recommend checking it out!
Other Highlights
There were a lot of fun tidbits on top of the main ideas:
Intent is not important in deciding culpability and punishment in non-WEIRD tribal societies. If you kill someone, it doesn’t matter if it was an accident! This was super surprising.
Women are on average more religious than men. But after controlling for “mentalizing” (representing non-existent beings in your head) and empathy levels, this gender difference goes away
They are called In-laws because once the MFP was in place, your sister-in-law was treated as if she was your sister IN view of the LAW (ie you can’t marry her even if your brother dies).
As states grew in size, gods became increasingly powerful and all-seeing. Groups with stronger gods were more effective at getting people to follow social norms, so groups with stronger gods tended to swallow up groups with weaker gods.
The previous methods of uniting clansmen (rituals) became untenable in larger groups. It’s not doable to have a 10,000 person initiation ceremony. Stronger gods were one way around this. Another workaround was an evolution towards clans having “unique ritual powers” that made it so different clans all needed to be part of a larger group to share all their special powers.
Market oriented societies give more equal (ie higher) Dictator Game and Ultimatum Game offers even though economic theory says that people with more market exposure should be “more rational” and offer less. The likely explanation for this is that market-oriented societies have more “impersonal”/pro-social norms and are used to acting “fairly” to strangers.
I had not thought about how hard the initial emergence of markets and trade was! Strangers were often attacked on sight, which meant communication between groups was basically non-existent. Another challenging thing to get around was the “credence problem”, or how you can trust the manufacturer of goods. Due to both of these hurdles, most hunter-gatherer trade took place between groups that had some existing relationship to build on. “Impersonal trade” was rare, and when it happened it often took the strange form of “silent trade”:
“On reaching this country, they unload their goods, arrange them tidily along the beach, and then, returning to their boats, raise a smoke. Seeing the smoke, the natives come down to the beach, place on the ground a certain quantity of gold in exchange for the goods, and go off again to a distance. The Carthaginians then come ashore and take a look at the gold; and if they think it presents a fair price for their wares, they collect it and go away; if, on the other hand, it seems too little, they go back aboard and wait, and the natives come and add to the gold until they are satisfied. There is perfect honesty on both sides; the Carthaginians never touch the gold until it equals in value what they have offered for sale, and the natives never touch the goods until the gold has been taken away.”
The “Big 5” personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism) are a WEIRD thing! In other cultures, there are fewer than five high-variance traits and these traits don’t always align with the “Big 5” either. Henrich’s explanation is that there are fewer social niches in hunter-gatherer and non-WEIRD societies, so there are fewer areas where someone might differentiate themselves.
More researchers/tinkerers = more innovation. No surprise there. But arguably as important, more interconnectedness = more innovation. Europe was much more connected than other regions, as evidenced by the “knowledge societies” (ex. Republic of Letters) that sprung up in the 1600s.
Not all researchers are made equal. Having WEIRD psychological traits probably makes someone a better researcher through analytical thinking, hard work, increased patience, and a positive sum outlook.
Education is generally only as good as the “best person around”. At the kin level, this means people are being educated by the best of a small number of people. At a town level, the “best” person likely has much more advanced ideas to pass along.
Combine more interconnectedness, WEIRD psychology, and better education and it looks a lot less surprising that the Industrial Revolution took place in Western Europe.
Remaining Questions
There are still a few things that I’m unclear on:
Was the kin-smashing religion in Europe and not the Middle East because Islam dominated there (ie limited room for variation)? And it wasn’t in China because they were too centralized for religious diversity/experimentation? And Africa and the Americas (and India?) weren’t developed enough and/or too small to have reached the point where you might get a move away from kin-based institutions? How much did luck play a role here?
Did the Western Church spread because its Marriage and Family program (MFP) was “effective” (at either increasing survival rate/procreation among its members or winning converts)?
How intentional was the MFP? Did they know it would lead to spreading the religion and/or dismantling kin-based institutions or were their motivations for the MFP unrelated?
Why did growth take so long even after the Western European institutions diverged? The book kind of hints that population size needed to reach some threshold which took a while. And institutional change was gradual/took centuries.
How does the East Asian (Growth) Miracle fit in?
How can we speed up growth in today’s developing world under the Henrich/WEIRD framework?
Of course, the biggest question of all is how much faith I should have in the book’s central claims. To an uncomfortable degree, the details seem to rely on lab studies (which I am always wary of), correlational studies, and some outright speculation. But as you zoom out, there isn’t much reliance on any individual study or type of study. There was also some good and interesting “quasi-experimental” research included that made me feel much more comfortable with his points.
More rice cultivation = more holistic thinking
A fun one looked at the spread of Protestantism and found that areas in Prussia that were more Protestant (due to being closer to the original area that is spread from) had more schools and higher literacy rates both historically and in the present day. Another study found that African areas that had more missions in the 1900s are more literate today, and areas that had Protestant missions have even higher literacy rates. WEIRD psychological differences are also captured by these studies. In India and China, the more a region has been historically rice-growing, the more clannish/non-WEIRD traits are observed. Rice growing requires large-scale cooperation, unlike wheat production, and that random geographic quirk still shapes psychologies today.
Critical Reception
WEIRD got more buzz than most books I read, but as usual I was disappointed by the number of quality responses it engendered. If I was a researcher in one of these areas and there was a very popular and influential book published, I would definitely go out of my way to get my two cents out there! Especially if I thought he was wrong! But alas, it just doesn’t seem to happen that way.
As with any book that tries to cover such a huge range of fields and questions, Henrich definitely got a few details wrong, but it doesn’t seem like there were major factual mistakes. There were a couple substantive areas of disagreement though. Some historians (yes, that is an unironic link to an Amazon review, because apparently academic historians do not want us to read them or take them seriously) questioned the true power (only slightly less obscure review) of the church throughout Europe; especially before the 1200s. With limited power, they wouldn’t have been able to actually enforce the MFP. The same historians also seem somewhat skeptical about the early/gradual decline of kinship institutions. I can’t really evaluate these claims, but even if we take them at face value, it’s not clear to me how much of Henrich’s thesis relies on the 800 years from 400-1200. I really wish there was a Henrich response to these claims though!
My main takeaway from other reviews is that this is all a fairly novel thesis, so hopefully more research attention is directed to it and we get a better idea on where things stand in the coming years (Razib Khan thinks new genetic data might help us determine rates of cousin marriage over time!). That said, I know there must be a lot of already-existing research out there that might refute or confirm parts of the book, and I’m sad that very few people have bothered to surface and publicly debate these findings.
After reading the book and reviews, my confidence in what I see as the 3 key ideas:
The Western Church is what led to the dismantling of kin-based institutions: Somewhat high (40%?)
Note: This doesn’t mean the Western Church was the ultimate cause. The Western Church may have been able to institute MFP because of already-existing cultural differences in Western European society.
The dismantling of kin-based institutions is what led to economic growth: Fairly high (60%?)
Psychologies vary around the world, this isn’t just a finding you see in lab research, and these differences are not primarily a result of economic differences: HIGH (99%?)
Post-script: As this was going to print, I stumbled on some Tanner Greer commentary (pre-book release) on Henrich’s research (I kid you not, I only happened to find this because it was like the 20th result of a Google Image search for “WEIRD psychology”). While he’s largely supportive of Henrich, he does note that there was a lot of historian outcry on Twitter following the publication of “Origins of WEIRD Psychology”. The picture I painted above on where historians disagree seems pretty accurate:
“Strip away the emotional bombast and we are left with one essential critique: Schulz and company did not do their proper research. Their historical knowledge is too thin to support their claims. If they had read more books on the history of medieval Europe then of course they would recognize that the chasm between the letter of Catholic marriage laws and the reality was too large to support their thesis.”
Emotional bombast sounds about right
Luckily, Greer doesn’t shrug and move on like I did, but pushes back pretty strongly against Henrich’s thesis being “history blind”. The paper is 174 pages long and cites 43 papers written by historians! I’d recommend giving the blog a read if you have confusion over which claims to believe and/or want to see historians getting made fun of a bit more.
Development Economics Takes
A lot of the book is unrelated or only slightly related to development economics, but to me these are the most interesting parts. A large portion of the last chapter talks about the leading developmental theories (i.e. why the IR and Great Divergence happened in “the West”) and where he sees his work blending into them and disputing them. This makes synthesizing everything a bit easier than if I had to guess for myself. In many ways, the idea that Western Europe pulled away because of the downstream effects of the Western Church rules fits in well with my previous reads.
Guns, Germs and Steel (the good geography=growth theory of development) explains why Eurasia was the area with the most complex societies up to around ~1000. Then WEIRD theory comes in to explain why Western Europe won out over the rest of Eurasia that shared its geographic advantages.
Why Nations Fail (the good institutions=growth theory of development) can explain why Western Europe succeeded after it started producing “good governance institutions”, but it misses the “lower-level” institutions like the family and marriage rules that led to better “higher-level” institutions like property rights and rule of law coming into play.
The story with Farewell to Alms (the culture and genetics theory of development?) is more complex. Heinrich completely rejects the genetic component of Farewell to Alms and the evidence here seems pretty limited for either side. He doesn’t talk about the cultural component, but I think Heinrich and Clark both agree that cultural evolution was the key to growth. However, Heinrich thinks this evolution took place initially at the level of religion and then at the level of cities/states and voluntary associations, where the more culturally fit religions and associations absorbed or overtook weaker versions. Clark thinks cultural evolution took place at the family level, where richer families (in Western Europe) outbred poorer ones (which spread the cultural values of the richer families). It would be great to hear some back and forth on these two theories. Without that, it seems plausible that both theories could be true to some extent. I don’t remember the timeline on the Clark theory, but IIRC it has Western Europe diverging culturally from everyone else at a much later date than Heinrich’s does..
Lastly, we have the challenging East Asian Miracle case. I can think of 3 possibilities here. One, which Henrich puts forward, is that the East Asian countries were able to do quick catch-up growth because they had already done lots of cultural evolution towards education, and valuing hard work and patience. They had strong central governments that made it easier to quickly adopt WEIRD institutions once they had motivation to do so. This makes sense to me, but begs the question of why it took those countries so long to start growing. Second, maybe WEIRD institutions ARE what led to Western Europe taking off, but they are no longer the best (or only) way to have a growth spurt. The third possibility: Henrich’s thesis is wrong and East Asia proves it!
How Asia Works, popular among econ-bloggers (ex. Noah Smith) these days, explains East Asia’s rise through successful land reform, followed by industrial policy with export discipline, followed by finance reform. If Studwell is right that these are the keys to growth, then there is no role left for culture to play (beyond perhaps getting the right people into power). My proposed synthesis: the How Asia Works playbook could be a great way to grow, but perhaps would only work successfully in a country that has adopted some WEIRD institutions or is in a position to quickly adopt them. A typical non-WEIRD country is probably not capable of implementing these policies in a non-hopelessly corrupt way.
So, what are the implications for the most important part of the development economics field - how can we increase growth around the developing world today? Most obviously, we need to consider culture when we think about proposed changes. Changing institutions without changing the culture surrounding them is bound to lead to failure. Another key takeaway: we should be studying how to get non-WEIRD cultures to be WEIRDer in as short a time frame as possible, with the hope being that growth (and democracy?) will naturally follow this transition.
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