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

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.

and that seems to be culturally transmittable.

So this suggests that, you know, I can't rule out that there's been any genetic evolution, but I can show that culture can operate on this quickly and powerfully.

Yeah.

He doesn't actually fit any cultural evolutionary models.

And if you include that people are learning from parents and learning from their social milieu, your parents determine where you are in the social milieu.

So you're surrounded by people who are being more –

patient and behaving in certain economic ways, then that's going to have a huge effect.

I just told you about how if you grow up in Silicon Valley, you're going to patent in computers.

It's not because you have genes for computers.

Yeah.

Right.

So we have a paper under review right now in which we show that from 1850 roughly to 1940, a big driver of U.S.

innovation, both the quality and quantity of patents, is the cultural diversity of counties.

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