Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
13 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“Certainly by 1900, they’re leading the world, certainly in chemical, in electricity, in food processing industries. It is, I think, above all, human capital, but also the policies that were there to support it.”
02 / belief
“In Europe, it’s particularly the Catholic Church that played a major role here. This was argued quite a while ago by a guy, an anthropologist called Jack Goody, but your own colleague Jonathan Schulz wrote, what I think is one of the best papers on the subject, who pointed this out in great length and actually provided a fair amount of systematic evidence for this.”
03 / commitment
“One of the things that’s working to make that worse is because I refuse to retire.”
04 / belief
“I think the idea that they had a concept of progress—they were practical people.”
05 / recommendation
“Interestingly enough, again, one of your colleagues, at George Mason, Mark Koyama, has a bunch of papers that describe this in great detail and quite, I think, elegantly and ingeniously, how that geographical differences created the difference between the Chinese government, which remained a unified state, and Europe, which remains fragmented, basically, until the present day.”
06 / evaluation
“I think, here it really is, to some extent, the improvement in human capital, but also the fact that the state in Prussia and in other places as well, this little state that basically convinced themselves that this was the way of the future.”
07 / evaluation
“What you get is that because this market is competitive, you get a quality of education to these people, which is vastly better than it is in continent.”
08 / evaluation
“That’s essentially the tenor of Joe Henrich’s book called The WEIRDest People, in which he points this out. That book, I think, has a big influence on us because it really shows, in great detail, how organizing people by nuclear family creates not only a different set of social organization but the culture that goes with it.”
09 / prediction
“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.”
10 / evaluation
“The notion that they were innovative because people were trying to save labor because wages were so high in England, misses sight of the fact that the reason wages were higher was because British workers on average were more productive.”
11 / evaluation
“European living standards, I think, should be measured, in part, by the fact that when the Europeans start their voyages across the globe in the late 15th and early 16th century, they are able to bring in a whole bunch of new crops and new techniques from other areas which they merely adopt.”
12 / evaluation
“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.”
13 / evaluation
“I think the reason is because the people who made things, the artisans, the workmen, and the people who knew things and studied things, which is the scientists and the mathematicians and the teachers, never talked to each other.”