Joel Mokyr: evaluation

Transcript context

…Do you take that change in policy from the Catholic Church as exogenous or that it is rooted in earlier features of Western society such as the ideology of Christianity itself or maybe earlier Roman times? What is causing what? What’s the most fundamental driver here in the West? Well, there’s some debate about that. They don’t, of course, tell you. There are, I think, two components about this, and I would not know how to weight them. There are two things happening here. The first is that the Catholic Church really becomes quite obsessive about certain sins that they consider to be particularly egregious. One of those sins is incest. Every society in the world prohibits marriage between siblings, but other more remote relatives is more ambiguous. The Church becomes quite obsessive about this. At the end, there are places where they actually prohibit the marriage of fifth-degree cousins. Now, how anybody in the Middle Ages would know who is fifth-degree cousin is, is unclear. I don’t know who my fifth-degree cousins are. Maybe you do. The other thing, which is also sort of Goody’s argument, and I think there’s a great deal of truth to that, is that the Church wants to weaken any kind of organizations that compete with it for power and control in the local communities. They also have figured out that if you organize society by nuclear families, then a certain proportion of people die without heirs. If they die interstate without heirs, that in many cases, the property that these people own reverted to the Church. Pure naked greed by the Church, which was not unknown in the Middle Ages, I think, was a driver here. Goody convinced me that that actually is a substantial factor. There are other arguments that have been made in this context, but I think these are the two that are most striking. The other question is, why is it that the clan in China is so convenient for the imperial bureaucracy to rely on? Both of those things happen in parallel. I would think, maybe, if I may allow one observation, in both cases, this is history as historical outcomes, as the unintended and unanticipated consequence of very different actions. There’s no question that the Church never, I think, foresaw the emergence of corporations in Europe, nor do I think that the Chinese imperial service ever seriously considered the possibility how this would change life in China. That’s what happens. You try to follow one objective and then something very different emerges over time. That’s what history is all about. Now, why are these cultural trends so persistent? I recall, in the 1990s, reading Francis Fukuyama’s book Trust. He argued that large Chinese corporations were going to be very difficult to establish because China did not have enough trust, unlike Japan. Now, a few decades later, that seems obviously wrong. There are many quite large Chinese corporations, and the large Japanese corporations, they’ve maintained a foothold, but they actually haven’t done that well. Things changed quickly. Why so much persistence here?…

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