The Invisible History of the Human Race (20 page)

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Catastrophic events like the plague or slavery are not the only ones that echo down the generations. Widespread and deeply held beliefs can be traced to apparently benign events too, like the invention of technology. In the 1970s the Danish economist Ester Boserup argued that the invention of the plow transformed the way men and women viewed themselves. Boserup’s idea was that because the device changed how farming communities labored, it also changed how people thought about labor itself and about who should be responsible for it.

The main farming technology that existed when the plow was introduced was shifting cultivation. Using a plow takes a lot of upper-body strength and manual power, whereas shifting cultivation relies on handheld tools like hoes and does not require as much strength. As communities took up the plow, it was most effectively used by stronger individuals, and these were most often men. In societies that used shifting cultivation, both men and women used the technology. Of course, the plow was invented not to exclude women but to make cultivation faster and easier in areas where crops like wheat, barley, and teff were grown over large, flat tracts of land in deep soil. Communities living where sorghum and millet grew best—typically in rocky soil—continued to use the hoe. Boserup believed that after the plow forced specialization of labor, with men in the field and women remaining in the home, people formed the belief—after the fact—that this arrangement was how it
should be
and that women were best suited to home life.

Boserup made a solid historical argument, but no one had tried to measure whether beliefs about innate differences between men and women across the world could really be mapped according to whether their ancestors had used the plow. Nathan Nunn read Boserup’s ideas in graduate school, and ten years later he and some colleagues
decided to test them.

Once again Nunn searched for ways to measure the Old World against the new. He and his colleagues divided societies up according to whether they used the plow or shifting cultivation. They gathered current data about male and female lives, including how much women in different societies worked in public versus how much they worked in the home, how often they owned companies, and the degree to which they participated in politics. They also measured public attitudes by comparing responses to statements in the World Value Survey like “When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than a woman.”

Nunn found that if you asked an individual whose ancestors grew wheat about his beliefs regarding women’s place, it was much more likely that his notion of gender equality would be weaker than that of someone whose ancestors had grown sorghum or millet. Where the plow was used there was greater gender inequality and women were less common in the workforce. This was true even in contemporary societies in which most of the subjects would never even have seen a plow, much less used one, and in societies where plows today are fully mechanized to the point that a child of either gender would be capable of operating one.

Similar research in the cultural inheritance of psychology has explored the difference between cultures in the West and the East. Many studies have found evidence for more individualistic, analytic ways of thought in the West and more interdependent and holistic conceptions of the self and cooperation in the East. But in 2014 a team of psychologists investigated these differences in populations within China based on whether the culture in question traditionally grew wheat or rice. Comparing cultures within China rather than between the East and West enabled the researchers to remove many confounding factors,
like religion and language.

Participants underwent a series of tests in which they paired two of three pictures. In previous studies the way a dog, a rabbit, and a carrot were paired differed according to whether the subject was from the West or the East. The Eastern subjects tended to pair the rabbit with a carrot, which was thought to be the more holistic, relational solution. The Western subjects paired the dog and the rabbit, which is more analytic because the animals belong in the same category. In another test subjects drew pictures of themselves and their friends. Previous studies had shown that westerners drew themselves larger than their friends. Another test surveyed how likely people were to privilege friends over strangers; typically Eastern cultures score higher on this measure.

In all the tests the researchers found that, independent of a community’s wealth or its exposure to pathogens or to other cultures, the people whose ancestors grew rice were much more relational in their thinking than the people whose ancestors were wheat growers. Other measures pointed at differences between the two groups. For example, people from a wheat-growing culture divorced significantly more often than people from a rice-growing culture, a pattern that echoes the difference in divorce rates between the West and the East. The findings were true for people who live in rice and wheat communities today regardless of their occupation; even when subjects had nothing to do with the production of crops, they still inherited the cultural predispositions of their farming forebears.

The differences between the cultures are attributed to the different demands of the two kinds of agriculture. Rice farming depends on complicated irrigation and the cooperation of farmers around the use of water. It also requires twice the amount of labor that is necessary for wheat, so rice-growing communities often stagger the planting of crops in order that all their members can help with the harvest. Wheat farming, by contrast, doesn’t need complicated irrigation or systems of cooperation among growers.

The implication of these studies is that the way we see the world and act in it—whether the end result is gender inequality or trusting strangers—is significantly shaped by internal beliefs and norms that have been passed down in families and small communities. It seems that these norms are even taken with an individual when he moves to another country. But how might history have such a powerful impact on families, even when they have moved away from the place where that history, whatever it was, took place?

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How do immigrants reproduce old values once they have left behind the old institutions and local beliefs that reinforced them? Raquel Fernandez and Alessandra Fogli wondered if second-generation daughters of immigrants to the United States might still be affected by the values of their parents’ home countries, even if the women themselves had never been there. Their subject group was women in the 1970s who were born in the States but whose parents came from elsewhere, and they asked specifically how much they worked and
how many children they had.

If the contemporary U.S. society in which the women grew up had the biggest effect on their lives, argued Fernandez and Fogli, then their work and family profiles should resemble those of their American peers who were not children of immigrants. If the culture of the family was a more significant factor, then women’s choices would look more like those of their grandparents’ generation. The researchers compared data about work and children in the 1970 U.S. census with data from each woman’s parents’ country of origin in the 1950s. They found that even when the present mattered, the past still had significant influence. If the 1950 data revealed that women in the parents’ country of origin worked more, then the U.S.-born daughter worked on average a week more every year. If the 1950s data showed that women in the parents’ country of origin had more children, then the U.S.-born daughter had more children than her peers who were not second-generation immigrants.

Fernandez and Fogli controlled for the effects of the husband’s and wife’s education, the education of their parents, the income of the husband, and the geography of markets. Even taking into consideration all these factors, it looked like the attitudes of the Old World still shaped the choices of
women born in the new.

The researchers also asked if the amount that a woman worked and the number of her children were more powerfully shaped by her own culture or her husband’s. Apparently, when a wife’s and husband’s parents’ cultures of origin are different, the husband’s parents’ culture of origin was the more significant factor. It’s unclear why this would be so, but as Fernandez and Fogli observe, the choice of marriage partner itself is hardly random.

It is possible that the interaction between a family and a small community makes the family’s force even more powerful, suggest Fernandez and Fogli. When there is no clear separation between the people at home and the people in the neighborhood schools and churches and other institutions, the researchers found that the power of a family appeared to be greatly enhanced. The parents’-country-of-origin effect on women was magnified when the U.S. women were raised in communities surrounded by many other families from their parents’ ethnic group. The higher the percentage of the parents’ ethnic group in the neighborhood, the more likely it was that the modern women made choices that were influenced by the old ways. Even though they were isolated from the institutions of the Old World, they were still surrounded by people from that world. The groups kept the old beliefs alive and passed them on.

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No study has found a single universal principle that dictates how beliefs and attitudes are reproduced down the generations. One study found that, like the second-generation immigrant women of the 1970s United States, Irish Americans in the 1910s had fewer children than their peers in Ireland but still significantly more than their peers in the States. By contrast, the childbearing patterns of German immigrants to the United States at the time showed no connection whatsoever with the culture of childbearing back in the old country.

Some cultures seem to perpetuate a community closeness that in turn fosters a perpetuation of values. Immigrants from Mexico, Italy, and Japan are more likely to cluster together in new neighborhoods and presumably to maintain the historical beliefs that shaped them. The Turkish, French, and Lebanese, by contrast, are less likely to live in a neighborhood with many people of the same ethnicity.

The way a trait is passed down in a culture may also depend on the trait itself. Trust affects economies all over the world, but in Italy, for example, it appears to have been shaped by different forces than in Africa. Guido Tabellini examined trust, respect for others, and “confidence in the link between individual effort and economic success” in economies in southern and northern Italy by comparing answers to questions like “[Would] you say that most people can’t be trusted or that you can’t be too
careful in dealing with people?” Even though all the regions he examined had effectively the same contemporary level of literacy and the same quality of institutions, some of them had been less literate and had more institutional corruption in the past. Tabellini found that these latter regions had less trust, respect, and confidence today,
as well as poorer economies.

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As Nunn was beginning his research, his field was undergoing something of a revolution. A group of economists had begun to explore the way that history could influence an economy. Obviously, an economy may be affected by such immediate factors as the destruction of important institutions, the death of key figures, the failure of crops, and the spread of disease, and the more recent such an event was (such as the terrorist attacks on America on September 11, 2001), the easier it was to assess its economic impact. But now economists were setting out to try to measure the impact of distant historical events
through
time. They began to talk about
horizontal transmission
, the things that are learned from one’s peers and society, and contrast it with
vertical transmission
, meaning, essentially, what gets passed down. The idea inspired an enormous amount of work on the impact of colonialism, especially the way that institutions like banks, governments, and the legal system were shaped by colonialism in different countries and the way that they in turn later affected their countries’ economies. It was the first time that economists made an evidence-based case that history mattered. Their work was particularly fruitful because it wasn’t based just on this general notion but also provided a way to connect specific outcomes to particular events.

But even though the idea that history could be measured was being taken seriously, most of the work focused on the impact of social institutions. Asking how hate or fear might affect the well-being of an economy was still considered unscientific. Partly this was a reflection of the lack of access to data that revealed people’s beliefs and the difficulty of defining precisely what culture is. This is now changing as more information about beliefs and attitudes becomes available, as large amounts of data from the past become easier to handle, and as researchers come up with innovative ways to interpret it. But partly—and ironically—researchers did not examine the economic consequences of elements like trust and hate and fear because of a
belief
that these things didn’t matter beyond the lives and lifetimes of individuals.

Yet as Fernandez and Fogli point out, markets have a fundamental relationship with beliefs. A culture’s belief about the permissibility of selling another human being as chattel will affect whether it has a slave trade and how widely it operates. The belief that it’s good for women to work outside the home will affect the size of the workforce. Since their research was published, Wantchekon said, the dismissal of culture as a factor in studying economics has changed: “‘Culture’ was no longer a dirty word.”

What lessons might we take from these extraordinary connections between ancestral experience and modern attitudes? First, let’s be clear: No one is suggesting that the lives of our ancestors may be examined like a fortune-teller’s deck of cards and our own fate foretold from them. Correlation is not causation. Our forebears may simply have nothing to do with our psychological makeup at all. But we may in some respects be profoundly shaped by what happened to those who came before us, and sometimes the past matters, whether we are actually aware of it or not.