Joseph Henrich

So males had a particular advantage in using the plow because it requires upper body strength.

This meant males became the dominant force in economic production at the household level.

And that even today in populations where most people aren't farmers, this persists.

So this is cultural persistence that has to do with whether you had the plow.

So this is work done by Alberto Alessina and Nathan Nunn.

A former postdoc of mine now at the Harvard Business School, Anca Becker, has done a similar thing with pastoralism.

So if your ancestors were pastoralists, and pastoralists for various reasons have quite strong gender norms, that persists into the modern world and still shapes, for example, female entrepreneurship.

Yeah, I have a lot of trouble trying to answer that because – so say – I mean China or someplace in the Middle East might have been the obvious alternative place for the industrial revolution to happen.

But I feel like you have to give those places a lot of –

Stuff that developed only in Europe.

So, for example, universities begin spreading in the high Middle Ages.

So you'd want them to have universities.

You'd want them to have universal schooling, which began to spread and wasn't present in these places prior to that.

So that begins to spread in this, well, 16th, 17th century.

And so by the time you add all this stuff, it basically starts to look a lot like Europe.

Interesting.

And these are all things that are global now, right?

So the universal schooling that we find around the world today, you know, begins with the Protestant Reformation, you know, in Germany and then later England.

Right.

Universities models are the European university and globalized.