Tag: cousin marriage

Studying for Exceptionalism

Mark Davis1 Comment

Caustic modern American politics has arisen in the new metaverse of communications technologies. Everyone has an opinion and shares it. This perhaps leads to pervasive unhappiness with any kind of governance. There’s always something to bitch about because real change is both hard and always has winners and losers of some sort. But what do the happiest countries in the world do differently than those of us in the second and lower tiers? Worth reading is the seventh chapter of the World Happiness Report titled “The Nordic Exceptionalism.” Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, and Norway are all at the top, along with Switzerland, New Zealand, and Austria. And what do these countries do right that makes them so exceptional in terms of happiness? Well, it’s not due to some of the suggested culprits like low immigrant rates and cultural uniformity or high rates of suicide culling out the unhappy. It’s also not clearly due to lower levels of income inequality compared with peer countries. The effect of inequality on happiness appears to correlate with GDP per capita and is reduced in impact by the presence of a generous welfare state; it contributes but is not central.

Instead, important factors include trust in social institutions and low rates of corruption. People in these countries also feel freer than in peer countries, including the United States. Their overall life satisfaction levels are very high and have much lower variation within the populace than countries like ours, as well. Part of the sense of freedom may arise from the generosity of the welfare states by reducing the risk of exploring life options, which is also a side-effect of wealth in these countries.

A dive into potential root causes reveals some surprises, like:

Another important underlying factor might have been mass education.

… Read the rest

Pro-Individualism, Pro-Social, Anti-Cousin

Mark Davis1 Comment

I tend towards the skeptical in the face of monocausal explanatory frameworks, especially for ideas as big as human history and the factors that shaped it. The risk of being wrong is far too high while the payoff in terms of anything more than cocktail banter is too low, be it as a shaper of modern policy or bearer of moral prerogatives.

So the widely covered discussion of Schulz, et. al.’s AAAS Science paper, “The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation” (paywall) is a curiosity that admits to cautious reading at the very least. The hypothesis is that Catholic Church prohibitions on consanguine marriage that began in the medieval period in Western Europe explain globally unusual aspects of the psychology of the people of those regions. By banning cousin marriage even out to the 6th degree in many cases, the Church forced people away from tribal ideas and more towards neolocal family structures. That, in turn, led to pro-social attitudes based on social trust rather than family power, and towards more individualistic and independent psychologies overall.

The methodology of the study is fairly complex: look at the correlations between consanguine marriages patterns and psychological attitudes, then try to explain those correlations away with a wide range of alternative data patterns, like the availability of irrigation or proximity to Roman roads, and so forth. Data experiments that look at Eastern Orthodox versus Western Church differences, or even between northern and southern Italy are used to test the theory further.

In the end, or at least until other data supervenes, the hypothesis stands as showing that reducing cousin or similar marriages is a “causal channel” for these patterns of individualism and social trust.… Read the rest