There are two primary benefits that culture provides over rationality. First, culture-based decision-making provides a quick and easy way to make decisions. To the extent that rational decision-making (narrowly defined) requires costs due to information acquisition or cognitive processing, then acting on one’s transmitted cultural traditions and values saves on these costs. The second benefit is that relying on culture allows for cumulative learning.
More separate excerpts below.
We typically model settings where the number of determinants is modest, payoffs functions are smooth and continuous, and therefore, equilibria are typically unique and nicely behaved. However, reality is much more complicated. . .an important characteristic of culture is to make optimization problems that are impossible for any individual in their lifetime possible for the larger society when the problem is tackled in an incremental manner over many generations.
consider an equilibrium where the proportion of traditionalists is high. As a consequence, there is little technological change and the environment is stable. Because of the stability of the environment, the relative benefit of tradition is high, which sustains the high proportion of traditionalists. Thus, such an equilibrium is stable. Second, consider an equilibrium where the proportion of traditionalists is low (even zero). In such an equilibrium, there is a lot of trial-and-error learning, which generates rapid technological change and a highly unstable environment. This in turn results in a relatively low benefit of tradition, which sustains the low proportion of traditionalists. Thus, such an equilibrium is also stable.
Within economics, the accumulation and transmission of knowledge within or across generations is not culture. That is human capital. When I first came across the anthropological definition, my immediate reaction was likely the same as the reaction you are likely having now. Knowledge and technology are conceptually very different from culture. They are examples of human capital and not of culture. But, I have come to realize that generally the difference is not clear and making a conceptual distinction between the two is problematic and not particularly helpful.
Even if the episode is short-lived and the society has not fully converged to the new equilibrium, as long as the culture of theft has become sufficiently prevalent by the end of the episode. . . the temporary event will have permanently moved the society from the equilibrium where everyone has a culture of work . . .to one where most of the population has a culture of theft
within matrilineal households, due to the greater empowerment of women, children are healthier and more educated. Thus, it is plausible that this evolutionary path is better for fitness. However, once a society has progressed down the patrilineal path, jumping to the matrilineal equilibrium is no easy task. . . . One would need to undo bridewealth, patrilocality, and fundamentally alter a society’s perception of kinship.
in a pastoral society, grazing requires men to be absent from the community as their herds move to new pastures. These prolonged periods of absence raised concerns of infidelity, which resulted in the evolution of restrictions on female sexuality.
“…within matrilineal households, due to the greater empowerment of women, children are healthier and more educated. Thus, it is plausible that this evolutionary path is better for fitness.”
Nope. This is something that has fascinated anthropologists and which has been studied extensively for a century and has quite well-known results that add a certain flavor of nuance to the interpretation of the data and also give us the ability to reject a blanket claim of ‘plausibility’.
Here is what we know:
1. Fitness is context-dependent, which in biological anthropology means what it takes in the local context to get enough calories to survive all year long and to make it through through periodic bad years. The reason Sara Lowes studies and works with IPUMS-DHS data from a definite matrilineal “belt” in lush, tropical Africa that had remained, until recently, at a lower level of civilizational development, provides us with a clue to what’s going on. Harpending and Cochran explained the impact of agricultural ease in that and similar parts of the world and the “cad vs dad” consequences in “The 10,000 year explosion” 12 years ago.
2. Nunn quotes Lowes that “children are healthier”. What they actually asked women was whether they had a kid die recently. But note, it wasn’t actually ‘children’, because there wasn’t any difference for boys, something that has also been known for a long time. Well, that is a mystery the answer to which probably has some important bearing on speculations about ‘superior evolutionary fitness’. But the papers leave us disappointed. The reasons behind the girl gap in that cultural and demographic context were not explored in detail.
The wisdom first point came home to me when I had to make a decision about my mother’s medical care. The decision has to be made quickly; there is uncertainty in multiple parameters, the uncertainty can’t be mitigated, and the decision had to be made in hours. Calculations settle nothing in this circumstance, but traditions (a combination of the secular tradition of medicine and our family’s perspective on life, treatment of illness, and death) settled the question pretty well, pretty quickly.
The good news is that such a decisions will seem reasonable in retrospect, at least according to traditional ways of evaluating decisions. (And what are the rationalistic ways of evaluating such a decision?)
It turns out that we did not win this bet. Of course, that doesn’t mean it was a bad bet, or that it was a good one.
He presently the highest tower ascends;
And, as he would haue flowne, his body bends:
The way you goe, said he, will I pursew;
And from the battlements himselfe he threw:
Who falling, strikes the earth with dasht out-braines;
Which with his wicked blood, he dying, staines.
-Ovid
Arnold, Nunn’s paper is the work of a historian that discovered evolution late in his career and is having a bad time relating history and evolution. Nunn claims that he’s interested in a new line of research that started in the 1980s. He’s wrong. He should have known that Ken Boulding in his 1978 books “Ecodynamics” included chapter 10 with the title “An Evolutionary Interpretation of History”. In the first 9 chapters, Boulding focused on how to extend biological evolution to what he called societal evolution, the latter referring to three types of social interactions. In chapter 10, he argued about how to apply “societal evolution” to history, that is, to what happened.
In the first chapter, Boulding made clear his intentions as reflected in these two paragraphs (pages 36 and 37):
“What we see is a four-dimensional carpet of immense complexity, in which we perceive patterns. It is the business of science or any organized human knowledge to help us perceive these patterns more clearly. The perception of stable patterns enable us to formulate laws; however, not all that we perceive is a pattern. There is real randomness, at least from the viewpoint of our own knowledge and image of the universe, and especially there is inescapable randomness and uncertainty in our image of social systems. The random we cannot possibly know except in probabilistic terms. We can only know probabilities, however, because there are patterns in the seemingly random. We cannot predict a single throw of the dice; we can predict with some confidence what will be the result of a thousand throws.”
And then he added:
“It is one of the occupational diseases of historians, indeed, that they think history had to happen, whereas the truth is that what happened was the result of a long succession of improbable accidents. Nevertheless, there are patterns to be detected amid the randomness and it is the business of organized human knowledge to detect them. It is to the search of these patterns that this volume is dedicated.”
Simultaneously but ignoring Boulding’s work, Hayek published the third volume of “Law, Legislation, and Liberty” (1979), whose epilogue was titled “The Three Sources of Human Values” (that is, the natural values of biological evolution, the traditional values of cultural evolution, and the artificial values of rational design). For Hayek, culture is “a tradition of learnt rules of conduct which have never been ‘invented’ and whose functions the acting individuals usually do not understand” (p. 155).
Nunn ignores both Boulding and Hayek. Their work, however, can provide a much stronger foundation for an evolutionary interpretation of economic history that takes into account post-1980-developments in the analysis of both biological and cultural evolution as well as in the analysis of rationality. Nunn relies on the great work of Joseph Henrich (see https://heb.fas.harvard.edu/people/joseph-henrich — his new book is coming out next week) but Henrich is too much focused on an idea of culture to which you referred in https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/joseph-henrich-defines-culture/
and deserves much more scrutiny.
The heuristics for rapid decision making, whether copied as part of culture or thru world experience or deep (or shallow!) thinking, making important decisions quickly is very important for life. It’s required, eve – so making good decisions or at least those good enough, is crucial for a successful life.
Relevant here is the note about Keynes:
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/the-keynesian-vision/
the central motif driving Keynes’s thought and activity: the preservation of a liberal society through measures which Keynes believed would alleviate the type of political and economic pressures that led to people seeking authoritarian answers to society’s challenges.
Theft vs work is the key division between barbarians and civilized folk — working and earning stuff is “civilizationally superior” to stealing stuff. It’s optimal for society. So riots and looters are sub-optimal. Religions are usually successful in giving a “moral heuristic” which is optimal, or close to it, for society.
All cultures have “religion” – including the PC faux religion that persecutes heretics. In studying any culture, all anthropologists include, if not start with and emphasize, the religion of the culture.
The “woke religion” of today will be studied, and condemned, sometime in the future.
I highly recommend The Secret of Our Success, which develops the same themes. It is full of excellent exposition of how cultural transmission and innovation worked for much of human history, including how truly recent good casual models for anything are. My personal favorites: repeated examples of enlightened European settlers or explorers deciding that a seemingly nonsensical indigenous practice was useless, and omitting it. Inevitably the result is horrible malnutrition.
The lesson that copying without analysis often beats reasoning is quite stark. Indeed, the author makes a reasonably convincing case that humans may not be meaningfully superior at reasoning than are other apes. Along some dimensions, such as working memory, we are demonstrably worse.
We have come a very long way in developing good casual models for physical and chemical processes. Less so for biological ones. Hardly at all for sociological ones. Chesterton was certainly right about the fence.