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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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Towards the end of the book, I actually connect these features of the psychology to economic differences, including the industrial revolution that happened in Europe, which reshapes the world.
The story is that the key event is the spread of a particular form of Christianity into Europe, where the Catholic Church, what becomes the Catholic Church, systematically dismantles the intensive kinship systems in Europe, leading to small monogamous nuclear families.
And this transformation leads to the creation of new institutions.
So by the high Middle Ages, you get the rise of guilds, which are voluntary groups of craftsmen and self-help societies because people don't have their families to rely on.
People begin moving around.
There's occupational sorting into different occupations.
You get urbanization is rising.
Charter towns are on the rise.
Universities pop up.
New kinds of monasteries pop up.
And then Europe begins to urbanize and you get new kinds of law that are based around the individual contract law.
And then eventually this leads to a lot more innovation because ideas are flowing around Europe and then eventually the industrial revolution.
So that's the argument in a nutshell.
Yeah.
So the church outlaws polygyny.
And so that stops elite males from having multiple wives and concubines and whatnot and creating kind of a giant family through that.
It outlaws cousin marriage going all the way out to sixth cousins at some point.
And that included spiritual kin and other kinds of sort of non-genetic relatives as well as the cousins.
It frees up inheritance, so it has inheritance by testimony rather than normal patrilineal inheritance.
A simple example here is in most societies, you inherit access to land corporately, which means you and your brothers and stuff all own the land.
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