Steve Sailer considers The Pinch, by U.K. Tory MP David Willetts, one of the best political books published recently in the English-speaking world — with one of the worst subtitles: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future — And Why They Should Give it Back:
By this point, American Baby Boomers have so endlessly (and insufferably) navel-gazed that it’s almost impossible to force yourself to read further once you reach the words “Baby Boomers” in a title.
The Pinch attempts to answer the question, What made possible the Anglo-American heritage of self-governing liberty under law?
We live in small families. We buy and sell houses.
Our parents expect us to leave home for paid work.
You try to save up some money from your wages so that you can afford to get married.
You can choose your spouse.
It takes a long time to build up some savings from your work and find the right person with whom to settle down, so marriage comes quite lately, possibly in your late twenties.
In the lands of extended families, the rules are quite different:
Helping relatives with contracts and jobs is not seen as corruption but as a moral obligation.
It means that voting is by clans: it is hard to have neutral contracts enforced by an independent judiciary when family obligations are so wide-ranging and so strong.
Extended families spread risks and rewards and thus serve as miniature welfare states. Small families need civil society more:
Instead of the mutual exchange of the extended family, small families must buy services. For example, insurance schemes, annuities, and savings help protect you when there is no wider family with such obligations.
And that’s how England developed capitalism without factories — which led to the more familiar capitalism with factories of the Industrial Revolution.
You’re singing my song. Englanders got civil society, which created capitalism and growth, which created the modern world.
Looks like an interesting book.
In a quick reading of the review, I didn’t see any hypotheses raised as to why English families were smaller. Lower sex drive? (Arthur Koestler snarkily said “the British have sex on the brain, which is a very unsatisfactory place to have it,” but that’s probably unfair.) Some now-forgotten contraceptive technology that never made it across the English channel? Or just the later marriages?
In A Farewell to Alms, Clark mentions that most northern European societies developed customs to keep young women from marrying until fairly late — average age 25 — and that kept the population pressure down. (Steve Sailer cites this factoid in an older article.)
I like the conclusion. Very different from this cry “back to patriarchal Middle Ages!” that I find so unpleasant in current conservatism.