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The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. By Francis Fukuyama.

Forty three years ago I discovered Marxism, and a world which had seemed baffling, messy and arbitrary suddenly made sense. Instead of a mass of shapeless events - kings and queens and wars - there was theory: theory stretching from the dawn of mankind in 'primitive communism' through the slavery of the Roman Empire to mediaeval feudalism and the rise of capitalism. The motor of history was class struggle, classes emergent from new modes of production. My own late-teenage angst was now explicable - we hadn't reached the destination yet, the final struggle for communism was yet to accomplish. I was a signed-up member of the Fourth International for almost a decade.

The generations of Marxist intellectuals were some of the smartest people on the planet and it took me years to absorb and integrate Marxist theory, and then to learn how to use it to create a 'political line'. In my late twenties conviction left me. It was only later I encountered E. O. Wilson's famous put-down ("Wonderful theory, wrong species") and finally realised that the Marxist theory of human nature required that we should all be very close kin, or ideally clones (like the ants).

Fukuyama has a similar project to explain world history in an overarching theoretical framework and use it to understand the dynamics and latent opportunities of the present day. He has a century and half of extra research to leverage over Marx, and a much more accurate view of human nature. I read "The Origins of Political Order" with increasing admiration as a largely successful attempt to account for how the world came to modernity in the strange form which exists today (the second volume, due this autumn, is already on my list). The Economist wrote a comprehensive review which I'm pleased to share with you here.

The Economist review (quoted in full).

WHY did the Catholic church's insistence on priestly celibacy in the late 11th century give Europeans an early advantage over other societies in establishing the rule of law? The answer in Francis Fukuyama's stimulating new book is that celibacy was one of several important reforms, instituted by Pope Gregory VII, which resulted in the development of canon law and the notion that even kings were subject to it. Gregory won everlasting fame by bending Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, to his will, forcing the most powerful man in Europe to do penance before him at Canossa.

Celibacy was vital in the battle against corruption and rent-seeking within the church, both of which were the typical consequences of patrimony. The reforms gave the church the moral stature to evolve into what Mr Fukuyama describes as “a modern, hierarchical, bureaucratic and law-governed institution” that established its authority for spiritual affairs—and by so doing set the ground rules for the subsequent rise of the secular state.

Mr Fukuyama (a pupil of Samuel Huntington who wrote a seminal work on political order 40 years ago) begins his own search for the origins of political order with the shift from small hunting bands to tribes. This eventually brought about the “coming of the Leviathan” or the coercive state. It was a development driven partly by the increasing complexity of societies founded on agriculture but much more by the organisational challenges of conducting warfare on an ever-greater scale.

With impressive erudition, the author travels across China, India, the Islamic world and different regions of Europe looking for the main components of good political order and at how and why these emerged (or failed to) in each place. The three critical ingredients, he argues, are a strong state, the application of the rule of law to all parts of society and a means of holding rulers to account for their actions.

The first unambiguously modern state, Mr Fukuyama believes, was the Qin dynasty in China, founded in 221 BC. Many of the control mechanisms perfected by the Qin had developed during the preceding 500 years or so of the Eastern Zhou dynasty when a host of small warring states across China began to coalesce. Such elements included a merit-based (non-aristocratic) military leadership combined with mass conscription, sophisticated taxation systems and a bureaucracy recruited from a permanent administrative cadre selected on the basis of ability rather than family connection. The Qin simply went much further, assaulting every section of society in its remorseless attempt to establish a form of proto-totalitarian dictatorship.

The Qin's extremism was also its undoing and it was soon replaced by the more enduring Han dynasty, which sought compromise with aristocratic elites and legitimation through a revived Confucianism. The Han state lasted for more than 400 years. But it was always vulnerable to what Mr Fukuyama calls “the bad emperor problem” as well as to the hardwired human tendency to make ties of kinship the primary criterion for conferring wealth, power and status. As Mr Fukuyama observes: “There is an inverse correlation between the strength of the centralised state and the strength of patrimonial groups. Tribalism…remains a default form of political organisation, even after a modern state has been created.”

Much of the book is concerned with the struggle between rulers in different parts of the world trying to forge powerful states (usually with the aim of military domination in times when conquest rather than technological progress was the main route to enrichment) while battling the astonishing ability of patrimonialism to undermine their efforts no matter what measures were used to break its grip. Chinese emperors favoured employing eunuchs in senior positions. Muslim rulers, from the Abbasids in the eighth century to the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt and the Ottomans, developed the institution of military slavery to lessen nepotism and the internal conflicts created by tribal loyalties.

The Mamluks were meant to be a kind of one-generation nobility owing loyalty only to the sultan. Similarly, the Janissaries, the elite slave troops of the Ottoman emperors, were not allowed to marry. But in the end both systems decayed as first the Mamluks and then the Janissaries became interest groups powerful enough to subvert the centralised states they had been created to defend. Once again, patrimonialism reasserted itself.

Mr Fukuyama makes an interesting comparison between 17th-century France, where royal absolutism was rather less absolute than it appeared and England, which, after the upheavals of the civil war and the 1688 revolution, became the first place (Denmark was probably next) to combine all three of the ingredients for a virtuous political order: a strong state, the rule of law and accountability. The problem in France was that the king did not feel strong enough to challenge the legal rights of the aristocracy, but both were happy to deny the rule of law to the peasantry and the rising commercial classes who bore the full brunt of meeting the king's need for money to fight wars, through taxation. England at the time could in no sense be described as a democracy, but the idea of accountability was entrenched at all levels of society by centuries of the common law, creating the political conditions for a constitutional monarchy and a dynamic economy.

Though this first volume concludes with the French revolution (a second, charting developments up to the present day, is in the works) its insights are relevant to our understanding of modern states and how they became what they are. For example, there is China with its incredibly smart centralised bureaucracy, weak rule of law and absence of accountability (Mao, argues Mr Fukuyama, shows that China has not yet escaped the “bad emperor” problem). Or there is India with its weak state, but much greater accountability and almost pedantic attachment to the law.

He also provides us with a yardstick for measuring the chances that the Arab awakening this spring will meet his three tests of political order (not high, at least not yet). Mr Fukuyama is still the big-picture man who gave us “The End of History”, but he has an unerring eye for illuminating detail. Books on political theory are not often page-turners; this one is.

"Our Posthuman Future" by Francis Fukuyama

Francis Fukuyama's "Our Posthuman Future" swings a now-rusty axe at advancements in biotechnology, its edges dulled by two decades of scientific progress following its publication in 2002.

At its core, the book muses upon a disingenuous morality play: technology mutates our "absolute human nature". The remedy? A state-guided ethical framework to restrain its monstrous potential.

So much for libertarianism.

Fukuyama's high-mindedness is crafted to appeal to both sides of the political aisle – leftists who fear technological disruption of their cherished shibboleths, and conservatives wary of moral relativism – but ultimately it only highlights his own personal  preferences.

Fukuyama needs a fantastical portrait of human nature, a static essence woven from language, consciousness and "spiritedness". This convenient Nietzschean fiction ignores the messy reality of evolution, whereby our biological and cultural landscapes constantly reshape what it means to be human.

His pronouncements on the dangers of genetic engineering are quaintly outdated, riddled with assumptions about heredity that have been thoroughly debunked by subsequent research. Fukuyama, at time of writing, was unaware for example of the polygenic formation of most complex traits - such as personality and intelligence - which feeds his convenient skepticism as regards the genetic component of their heritability.

The book's real agenda emerges in its calls for stringent regulation, its subtext tinged with suspicion both of scientific inquiry and individual autonomy. By invoking a static, nebulous and absolute "shared humanity" as the foundation of morality, Fukuyama unwittingly empowers the very state he claims to fear, entrusting it with the delicate task of policing human evolution. Sadly, this is what reactionary looks like, dressed in moderate, progressive clothes.

Such politically-convenient triangulation ignores the vast ethical complexities of biotechnological advancements, reducing them to a convenient bogeyman that justifies increased state control. That would be self-defeating for any state which unilaterally tried it. One thinks of the calls for unilateral nuclear disarmament echoing across the decades.

"Our Posthuman Future" may have sparked conversations at the margins two decades ago, but its attempt to impose an absolute Platonic morality on the contingent protocols of an evolved social primate is just an empty exercise in reification.

'The natural state of humanity is clannishness'

This note is a lemma to another post, 'Human Dodos', but you need to read this first.

Francis Fukuyama did a great service by reminding us that in the beginning, humankind was necessarily clannish. We are social creatures surviving only in groups, but there is no celestial police force guarding each one of us. If we don't stick with our kin, some other group will make us toast (in the baleful meaning of that phrase).

This argument was developed in the excellent "The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution" - I quote from this review (my emphasis):

"The Origins begins at the beginning with human evolution. This is no mere prolegomena. Fukuyama deserves credit for emphasizing that we are political animals and that evolved human nature is a basic influence on politics. Gathering evidence from a variety of sources – studies of chimpanzees as well as reports from the political life of hunting and gathering bands – Fukuyama proposes that humans have four key natural dispositions most relevant to politics. We evolved to be nepotistic, most inclined to cooperate with kin. We evolved to be religious; we evolved to be norm-followers; and we evolved to seek status or recognition.

"A particularly illuminating element of the book is how these evolved dispositions have continued to be influential. Nepotism, or kin selection, as expressed in strong tribal or clan lineages, is a continuing theme in the book as the nemesis of the modern state. If tribalism is strong, as today in Afghanistan or the Sunni Triangle of Iraq, modern states cannot flourish.

"The importance of religion as an influence on political development is another theme throughout. It was from religion, Fukuyama argues, that the rule of law arose.

"The key role of norms and institutions provides the subject-matter of the book: political institutions. Fukuyama regards the desire for status or recognition as the main source of change in history, and he engages in a running dispute through the book with rationalist or rational-choice explanations. Though Fukuyama uses a bio-historical and bio-political approach, he is by no means a ‘biological determinist’. Biology he treats as probability not determination.

"After briefly describing the transition from foraging to agriculture and then the development from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states, Fukuyama turns to his main concerns: (i) the origins of the modern state – in ancient China; (ii) the origins of the rule of law in the realms of powerful religions: India, Islam, and Christendom, but not China; and (iii) the origins of accountability in the assemblies of medieval Europe, especially the English parliament.

...

"Fukuyama makes the useful point that state-building requires overcoming the strong bonds of kin. States were recurrently prone to being colonized by their officials’ nepotism (favouring their relations), dynasticism (seeking to have their offspring inherit their office), tribalism, and clannishness.

"One method of bypassing kinship was to recruit military slaves. This was a common ploy in Islam and resulted in such bodies as the Ottoman Janissaries. Another was to rely on eunuchs, who were biologically prevented from founding their own mini-dynasties within the apparatus of the state. A third was to recruit officials on the basis of competence or merit. This, Fukuyama argues, was China’s main innovation.

"Europe was unusual: before state-building got underway, the Church had already weakened extended lineages (except in peripheral areas, such as Highland Scotland with its clans) with its ban on cousin-marriage. The bonds of extended lineages had already diminished prior to European state-building."

In the west we are so socialised into an atomised mode of life, mediated only by the nuclear family, that we see kin-groups (clans and gangs) as profoundly primitive and 'other'. But our way of life depends upon the integrity of a strong state exerting 'just power' through depersonalised laws. And a lot of conscious inhibition of retributive impulses.

Erode that state, or let it collapse, and the only individualists left will be dead individualists.

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Now continue to Human Dodos.

The End of History and the Last Man

Reading Francis Fukuyama's book (in the 2020 reissue of this 1992 published book) is an exercise in head-scratching perplexity and fist-on-wall-banging frustration.

Making Hegel's thymos (the Homeric/Platonic quest for status and recognition) a motor for historical change is certainly an improvement over basing your theories of history on that poor, selfish, solitary creature, homo economicus, with its purely consumerist motivations.

But that's like going from crass to merely poor.

In his 1975 book, "Sociobiology: The New Synthesis", Edward O. Wilson expressed a strong belief that the future of social sciences lay in their integration with evolutionary biology, specifically through the lens of sociobiology. Surely Fukuyama might have noticed this? We have advanced our understanding of human nature quite a bit since Hegel, who was writing only twenty years after the French Revolution of 1789.

Still, as a clear and coherent philosophical introduction to Kant, Hobbes, Locke, Nietzsche and Hegel, Fukuyama's chosen intellectual resources, this book could hardly be bettered.

Such a clever man, Mr Fukuyama. One could almost believe his attempts to stay Overton Window-adjacent might be… Straussian?

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Substantively, Fukuyama argues that capitalism - in its ‘bourgeois democratic‘ form - is truly the stable endpoint in human social organisation (an attractor in dynamical systems jargon). In his 2020 afterword he observes that militant Islam and system-busting populism have, despite widespread fears, not proven to be existential threats to the democratic order.

I am sure he is correct: a strong civil society composed of decentralised and fragmented economic elites welcomes a relatively weak, malleable centre of governance - one which won't get out of control.

Russia and China are examples of strongly-autonomous state structures pursuing nationalistic (thymos-driven?) projects to the detriment of their economic interests. It's tough being an entrepreneur in such countries: avoiding being 'disappeared' or worse.

The real (and long-term) threats to Fukuyama’s somewhat optimistic trajectory are twofold: (i) the massive expulsion of the mass of the population from social and economic life by elite-owned total automation; (ii) the entrenchment of a hereditary elite class by genomic engineering - a tech-constructed version of India's caste system (still covertly operational).

I would like to know more about Fukuyama's views on total automation. Meanwhile, his take on bioengineering, “Our Posthuman Future”, is on my reading stack.

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The short-term stability of 'liberal democracy' has its limits. It is worth emphasising just how ultimately fearful capitalist elites are of the masses - and how little they really care for their welfare. Unlike the lords of feudalism, economic and state-apparatus elites are not armed and are relatively few in numbers.

The military, not recruited from the elite in their mass, is not necessarily to be relied upon.

Fukuyama observes in the final chapters of his book just how much degradation and contempt politicians have to suck up in managing and defusing disgruntled mass movements and their cynical demagogue leaders.

It's therefore often the case that key government figures are not themselves socially or economically members of the top elite. No recent British leaders have been scions of the billionaire class; Trump is viewed with disdain by the truly well-off.

As in Tom Wolfe's essay, "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers", politics is theatre and the real stuff happens elsewhere. That's what Fukuyama's ideal of liberal democracy ultimately comes down to.

'Political Order and Political Decay' by Francis Fukuyama

The second volume of Francis Fukuyama's magnum opus, 'Political Order and Political Decay', is 548 pages and I therefore subcontract its review to the Wall Street Journal (I reviewed the first volume here).

" ... to the extent that he has an overarching narrative, it is this: Human beings are possessed of certain biologically rooted imperatives to favor kith and kin over others—what he calls patrimonialism. Successful political order entails the establishment of institutions that check and redirect these impulses in productive and publicly beneficial ways.

"Since the Industrial Revolution and the spread of market capitalism (i.e., globalization), the institutions that most successfully accomplish this feat have been the modern state coupled with the rule of law and some degree of democratic accountability. What we call corruption is really the imperfect realization (or absence) of such institutions.

"Political decay, to which the final section of this work is devoted, is the condition where public institutions, grown sclerotic over time, prove increasingly unable to manage the natural reassertion of patrimonial impulses."

In a close-to-home example of political decay, Dr Fukuyama sees the 'checks and balances' system in the US as having been latterly captured by special interest groups and lobbyists, constituting a 'vetocracy'. He is not an optimist as regards future governance prospects there. Interestingly, he's more a fan of the UK's 'elective dictatorship' which, he believes, gets things done and is much more resistant to special interest group capture.

'Political Order and Political Decay' is crammed full of insights and allows the re-framing of many contemporary hot-spots such as Ukraine and the Middle-East. The question of transition to advanced development status as in 'getting to Denmark' is a central preoccupation of the book. But talking in the abstract about institutions and social capital doesn't quite hack it given the biologically rooted diversity of both humans and human groups across the planet as regards pro-social and cognitive competences. Fukuyama appears somewhat aware of the literature on the subject but this is one hot potato he's (perhaps understandably) not prepared to engage with, to the detriment of his conclusions. Perhaps not everywhere, sadly, has an unaided route to 'Denmark'.

Human Dodos, Communist Man, Draka Serfs

Amazon link

A couple of years ago I wrote some posts reviewing Francis Fukuyama's "The Origins of Political Order". From the Wikipedia article:

"From chimpanzee hunting groups to tribes

In his quest for the origins of political order, he first looks at the social order among chimpanzees, notes that the war-like hunting group, rather than the family, was the primary social group, and claims the same for humans. Humans went further: to survive they formed tribes, whose armies were superior to hunting groups by their sheer size.

He uses recent work in sociobiology and other sources to show that sociability built on kin selection and reciprocal altruism is the original default social state of man and not any isolated, presocial human as suggested by Hobbes and Rousseau. He suggests that Hobbes and Locke present a fallacy when they argue humans developed cooperative ability only as a result of the invention of the state.

This is because chimps, the genetic ancestors to humans, engage in kin relations based on cooperation, and so Hobbes and Locke must be mistaken suggesting humans were once sociable, lost this instinct and then regained it due to the state.

Challenge of tribes on the road towards the state

The next step was to escape beyond tribalism and the "tyranny of cousins", to join tribes into larger coalitions towards states, again due to the advantage of larger armies. This was done with the aid of religion. This was because as groups grew in size, maintaining cooperation became more difficult as face-to-face interactions with much of society became difficult. Religion offered a way of providing a combining social force to hold society together.

For example, Fukuyama cites Mohammed as an example of what Weber labels a "charismatic leader" because he used the idea of an 'umma' (community of believers) to bind together the territory that he ruled over. This challenge to transcend tribalism partly remains today in many parts of the world outside Western civilization, for example in Afghanistan and in Somalia.

Restrictions on marriage and inheritance as a strategy against corruption

Loyalty to the tribe or the family, rather than to the state, leads to corruption and weakening of the state. Various strategies were used to overcome the corruption. One such strategy was restrictions against marriage among the ruling official class to make sure that loyalties would not lie with family or tribe.

• Mandarins or Scholar-officials, who were the ruling class of China, were not allowed to pass on the lands given to them by the emperor to their own children and were restricted as to whom they were allowed to marry.


• Mamluk slaves, the ruling class of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, were told which slaves to marry while their children could not inherit from them. Janissaries were originally forced into celibacy or prohibited from having a family.


• Pope Gregory VII forced Catholic priests in Europe to become celibate and they were prohibited from having a family for the same reason.


• Spanish administrators in South America were restricted from marrying local women and from establishing family ties in the territories they were sent to."

It should be added that the elites of empires of archaic despotism used extreme violence to break the powers of the clans. People do not take kindly to having a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

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The three articles I wrote were:

1. 'The natural state of humanity is clannishness'
2. Human Dodos
3. Human Dodos: the FAQs

which should be read in that order. I compared Jonathan Haidt's liberals (Myers-Briggs NFs) to dodos. Their naive optimism, their overarching (albeit abstract) compassion and their gullible belief in generalised human 'goodness' makes them easy meat for predators. Social liberalism is very much a northern european psychological trait, while most of the world's population (to its own economic detriment) continues to organise itself clannishly. Fukuyama's taming process has a way to go - and is not making any progress.

It's generally observed that extreme liberalism is required in a population to make Communism work. No more state, no more police, no more armies, no more war. We'd better believe in general niceness.

Just as Marx suggested that the historic role of capitalism was to develop the productive forces to enable the communist transition, perhaps it also has the historic task of breeding humans nice enough to make communism work at all. Then recall that a society of doves is unstable in the presence of predators. And then there is always the way of the Draka, which always seemed to me more likely.

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It's worth noting that western societies - so apparently liberal in appearance - are capable of extreme and non-liberal violence whenever push comes to shove. In America only about 20% of the population self-declare as liberals. Despite much sjw noise and fury, social liberalism is more a convenient facade for the imperial west.

I recall that fateful phrase: "Notice how the liberals all leave the room, wringing their hands, once the bullets start flying."

Paintings with Cats

Genius from Russian artist Svetlana Petrova.

Grant Wood's American Gothic

Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa

Titian's Venus of Urbino

I'm still meandering through Jack McDevitt's 'Alex Benedict' series. A well-written blending of far-future science-fiction and detective-story. They're rather slow, but well-written and engaging; I don't know if I'll have the energy to get to number 6 (having just finished 3 - 'Seeker').

What else is on my Kindle app right now? Mindbridge and Slan (and 'The Devil's Eye').

My current non-virtual book is Francis Fukuyama's "The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution". Although I'm in the early sections I really can't praise this book highly enough. Non-ideological writing - ie without an agenda, scintillating prose style and super-intelligent analysis. If only journalistic pundits started from where this author leaves off we might be having grown up debates about politics and strategy and maybe getting things somewhat right.

"A Troublesome Inheritance" - Nicholas Wade

Despite all you hear to the contrary, human evolution has continued up to the present: “recent, copious and regional” in Nicholas Wade’s words. This would appear to be of great scientific interest – what are the genetic differences between different races and what are they coding for? Unfortunately we have a ‘blank slate’ social-sciences establishment which denies even the existence of races and seems unwilling to admit to genetic input into such obviously inherited attributes as intelligence and personality. (‘Obvious’ means that everybody knows it really and that careful analysis, including twin studies, bears it out).

Is the author going to be sacrificed on the altar of ‘racism’?  Wade is naturally keen to defend the scientific study of human racial differences from the inevitable charges of racism and eugenics. This is a difficult discussion and one the author approaches historically, showing how American ideas of Caucasian superiority and eugenics were eagerly picked up by the German National Socialists. But in the urge to be on the side of decency one has to be careful to reason accurately:

“By analogy with animal breeding, people could no doubt be bred, if it were ethically acceptable, so as to enhance specific desired traits. But it is impossible to know what traits would benefit society as a whole. The eugenics program, however reasonable it might seem, was basically incoherent.” (p. 27).

Well, it seems that intelligence, a generally pro-social personality and good health are pretty good candidates for traits which would ‘benefit society as a whole’ and later the author will argue that western medieval societies effectively bred for those traits over the last thousand years to our advantage. We do our own private experiments in positive eugenics whenever we seek out the best possible marriage partner.

Such sloppy argumentation is, sadly, not uncommon in this book.

Having got his defences out of the way, Wade now gives us some science -a comparison between chimpanzee societies and our own. Chimps are highly aggressive and promiscuous; humans not so much. In fact the key differentiator is our marked ability to cooperate. Wade has some plausible ecological suggestions as to how these differences might have emerged and can back up the behavioural stuff with genes coding for hormones such as oxytocin (increased trust within an in-group) and mono-amine oxidase (associated with aggression).

The gene which codes for the latter, MAO-A, comes in different alleles – the “two-promoter group” in particular is linked with criminal violence. In a large study, (p. 55), Jean Ship and colleagues found that African-American men had a 5% chance of carrying the “two-promoter” allele (these were predominantly the delinquents). In Caucasians the proportion was 0.1%. Clearly we are at an early stage in this research but the correlations are certainly thought-provoking.

The next few chapters reprise the story of the out-of-Africa human expansion and how this is captured in genetic sequencing. This will be familiar to anyone who has checked out 23andme or similar companies. The arguments for the objective existence of races are kind of obvious to anyone without an agenda, and are apparent in analysis of allele frequencies. Nevertheless, it remains true that in 2014 we know next to nothing about what most of these variant alleles actually do. Most cognitive, psychological and behavioural traits are under the control of hundreds or thousands of alleles, each of small individual effect, which accounts for the ‘bell-shaped curves’ we see in population intelligence and personality attributes. This is a central problem for a book which is trying to create a compelling connection between race genetic differences and the distinctiveness we see today in human civilizations such as in the West (America, Europe), the East (China, Korea, Japan) and sub-Saharan Africa.

Such differences clearly interest the author and drive the second half of the book - which he deems ‘speculative’.  The author is particularly interested in how humanity made the transition from its default social model, kin-based tribalism, to states and empires. Citing Francis Fukuyama (“The Origins of Political Order”), Gregory Clarke (“Farewell to Alms”) and Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson (“Why Nations Fail”) we are taken on a multi-millennial tour of the great civilisations of the world. What was the evolutionary impact of these novel social environments on population psychology? His thesis is that of gene-culture coevolution – that people were selected for ‘tameness’ and prosociality as well, perhaps, for greater intelligence. There are good reasons for believing this is likely, but it has to be said that it may take a few more decades to get compelling genetic evidence.

The “IQ and Global Inequality” authors Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen get short shrift (p.191). They have demonstrated high correlations (c. 80%) between measurements of national IQ and GDP.  Given the well-known strong genetic underpinnings of observed intelligence (in societies without widespread material deprivation) it’s surprising to see Wade backsliding into confusion here. By highlighting poor and outlying data he makes his doubts clear but it just reads like he has an agenda. Perhaps he thinks his book is controversial enough as it is.

The final chapters cover the astonishing intellectual success of the Ashkenazi Jews, citing the well-known work of Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy and Henry Harpending (written up in “The Ten-Thousand Year Explosion”) and further speculate about the reasons behind the rise of the West in recent history. Interesting but does not break any really new ground.

This is a readable book but one which lacks a strong sense of direction. Occasional sloppy reasoning and ideological argumentation can irritate. Gregory Cochran has identified some errors of fact (on the “West Hunter” blog) which highlight the limitations of the author’s genetics sourcing but this is not where Wade’s real interests lie. He is clearly infuriated by the assumption of human genetic uniformity in economics, history and public policy and is consequentially highly motivated to give an account of the world as if human and racial differences actually mattered. In the current absence of hard genetic results his views remain plausible but speculative and will probably be ignored by politicians and policy-makers for another generation, more’s the pity.