Joseph Henrich

speaker

1,282 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard 25 May

Joseph Henrich’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · 12 Mar 2025 podcast

So if your ancestral populations had matrilineal, matrilocal social organization...

How likely are you to have it controlling for ecology?

And it turns out both of these things matter.

People adapt to their ecology, but you can still see the signal of past society.

So some degree of fidelity of transmission of social institutions, how we make our baskets, those kinds of things.

There's lots of examples in the modern world, and we see this all over the place.

So if you look at gender inequality in the modern world, you find that a history of the plow leads to greater gender inequality.

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.

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