Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…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? That’s a very good question. There’s some debate about how much persistence there really is. Particularly, the communist regime under Mao did all they could to erase the influence of clans and replace it, of course, with communist functionaries. There’s some evidence, and some research has recently shown, that that wasn’t 100 percent successful. I think what you get, particularly in societies such as China, but in other places as well where corporations were largely absent and where your society was organized by family, is that it actually changes people’s culture and people’s values. If you look at all the work that’s been done by economists like Stephen Enke and anthropologists like Joe Henrich, they all show a very tight correlation between attitudes and cultural values and kinship, whether that’s extended kinship or nuclear family. I think what you could do in China and in Europe is you could maybe change your organizations, but you cannot change the state of mind. An interesting fact is that many of the corporations that we talk about that were established during the Middle Ages eventually disappeared or became very unimportant. For instance, guilds eventually got abolished after the French Revolution on the continent, and they were weakened in England much earlier. Monasteries still exist in Catholic countries, in Protestant countries, and in England. They were completely abolished. But the frame of mind and the cultural values that growing up in a nuclear family imbues, that kind of thing sticks around. Corporations, of course, remained, but they changed their form very much. The one most persistent of all those corporations, interestingly enough, were universities. Effectively, the form of universities, with the fact that they are self-governing and they’re sort of self-contained organizational units that write their own rules and their own bylaws, that thing, despite a lot of pressure on them, is still surviving, which I find very striking. We should think about a world that consists of lots and lots of different organizations like that, in which cities, for instance, were self-governing and made their own rules. Again, you see cooperation between people who share a location but not necessarily an ancestor. These things tend to be very persistent precisely because of institutions interacting with culture and culture feeding back into institutions. They evolve or co-evolve, I should say, together. That makes them, I think, much more persistent, Tyler.…

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