Joseph Henrich

And then if you take each of those and you look at you correlate it with modern patents, places that spent more time under the church produce more patents between 1980 and 2014 based on European patent data.

And this holds if you just compare regions within the same country.

So you can see long-term effects of this and you can see immediate effects in the historical record on the production of creatives.

Well, so he's, I mean, I guess one of the things that I think is a mistake is to focus too narrowly on England.

Because, I mean, England was benefiting from ideas that were flowing in from France.

There's a lot of great science being done in France.

And, I mean, I don't think Gregory Clark's right.

I can explain almost everything he explains with cultural evolution.

And he doesn't even really take that seriously.

Right.

So patience.

So one of the things he argues is patience.

So in Weird, I use the exact same data.

I actually get the data from him to show that you have this increase in patience.

But we know that people can culturally learn patience and this can all be culturally transmitted.

And in this world, it leads to more success.

So if you're the kind of person who doesn't waste a lot of his money and we begin to value thrift and stuff, which Protestantism does, then we should expect there to be an increase in fewer murders and lower interest rates.

Well, we know that populations, migrants into the U.S.

and Europe shift their psychology over a few generations of being there.

And we know there's been like natural experiments done by economists like Chris Blattman where you actively try to teach people, train them essentially to discount the future less.