Using evolutionary Life History Theory, Baumard claims England's superior seventeenth-century living standards psychologically fostered spiraling wealth via sustained innovation grounded in less discounting and materialism, greater optimism and trust. Although behavior of elites and a growing middle class provides support, these factors are less evident for property-less workers compelled by emerging markets to sell their persons (labor) and traditional livelihood (land) as alienable commodities. Ensuing variety of choice and competition in selling and buying once inalienable parts of community life favored psycho-political notions of rational self-interest, criticism, experimentation and creative destruction, free-flow information, science, individual rights, liberal democracy, and society conceived as reciprocal, utilitarian relationships (economic, juridical, political) freely contracted between autonomous agents (Macpherson Reference Macpherson1962; Mill Reference Mill1956/1859). Performance-oriented ideals of trust based on competence, reliability, and verifiability (Mayer et al. Reference Mayer, Davis and Schoorman1995) replaced communitarian ideals rooted in devotion, shared fate, and emotional attachment.
Unique historical factors operated: England's highly individualized, impartible property regime, a twelfth-century world novelty (Maine Reference Maine2010/1875); general adherence to a thirteenth-century Church prohibition against cousin marriage to fourth degree (including through marriage [Worby Reference Worby2010]), which undermined kin-based society while encouraging wider socioeconomic relationships; England's singular proto-capitalist society by at least the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, contrary to presumptions by Marx (Reference Marx1867/1992), Weber (Reference Weber and Knight1923/1961), and Polanyi (Reference Polanyi1944/2001) that capitalism emerged from English “peasant society” (e.g., wills allowing landholders to disinherit any kin, late marriage for women and spinsters’ rights to contract land and labor, geographical mobility of rural families and individuals, hired agricultural labor, monetized markets [Pollock & Maitland Reference Pollock and Maitland1898/2010; Redfield Reference Redfield1956; Shanin Reference Shanin1971]; sixteenth- to eighteenth-century enclosures of village commons lands, which accelerated privatization, sale, and alienation to large and absentee landowners, facilitating wage labor and urban migration [Thompson Reference Thompson1991]; seventeenth- to eighteenth-century access to vast overseas populations and resources, spurring demand and production (e.g., the spinning jenny increased cotton production demanded by the textile industry, initial engine of an industrial-based world economy [Hobsbawm Reference Hobsbawm1962]).
Evidence that increasing affluence engenders less discounting and materialism, greater trust, and optimism comes mainly from studies of dubious historical relevance: that casino wealth distributed among Native American Cherokee increased cooperation and social trust in a fragmented society (sect. 3.6, para. 1) disregards tight cooperation before near extermination and herding into reservations (Hatley Reference Hatley1995); the claim that “individuals growing up in affluent environments are more motivated by long-term pair bonding and show stronger attachment to their spouses” (sect. 6.3.3) cites as support studies from contemporary Australia, the United States, Canada, Israel, and Italy (with Hungary one study's outlier); and so on.
Aspects of discounting and concern with material interests were sometimes more pronounced, or differently construed in capitalist England versus pre-capitalist societies. Thus, in peasant economies, household heads are only stewards and caretakers of land for subsequent generations, whereas in thirteenth-century England, welfare of future generations could be discounted (so children might require parents to formally contract for care in old age). True, one argument for disinheritance was that an individual would “scarcely be found to undertake a great enterprise in his lifetime if … compelled against his will to leave his estate to ignorant and extravagant children” (Bracton Reference de Bracton and Thorne1968/1235, p. 178); however, this relates little to belief in social or spiritual welfare. In seventeenth- to eighteenth-century England, as in the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries, land turnovers were so frequent that “the land market may have been utilized less for creating permanent additions to total acreage than to meet immediate and temporary needs or for quick gain” (DeWindt Reference DeWindt1972, p. 543).
Yet, as one sixteenth-century Frenchman noted: “England is so fertile and fruitful, that comparing quantity to quantity, it surmounts all other lands in fruitfulness…. Wherefore they live more spiritually … more apt and fit to discern in doubtful causes of great examination and trial, than are men wholly given to moiling in the ground” (Fortescue 1969/Reference Fortescue1567, p. 66). But such observation was more appropriate to England's independent farmers (yeomen) and trading class (including lawyers for contracts and inventors of new tools and means of production) than property-less laborers. Granted, England was Europe's first to implement poor relief (for centuries, Muslim countries had taxed for poor relief); initially, however, this was less for the poor's welfare than to prevent banditry and social unrest by an emerging laboring class, increasingly numerous and impoverished relative to the landed gentry and rising commercial class. In this vein, religion for Hobbes (Reference Hobbes1651, pp. 260–261), which is “above” and “against” reason, should be inculcated in “common-peoples” to provide “security, against the danger that may arrive … from rebellion.” Similarly, for Locke (Reference Locke1824/1695, pp. 146–157), “religion suited to vulgar capacities” is “the sure and only course to bring them to obedience and practice.”
Eventually, economic growth began to raise wealth and education levels among all classes. In Britain's American colonies, which boasted the world's highest living standard, property-less free laborers and artisans were first promised full political rights if they voted separation from Britain (lacking their support, a previous vote in the Continental Congress failed). But it was lure of greater individual rights and freedoms – of liberty – for which the rebels pledged “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor,” not greater wealth. More generally, the “constellation of affluence,” including “The Republic of Letters” and liberal democracy, arises not from affluence per se; rather, England's (and America's) increasing affluence and liberalism stemmed from a peculiar culture of economic liberty and individualism (Macfarlane Reference Macfarlane1978). (Even post-Mao China prospers with a political economy more akin to Hobbes's ideal than Marx's.)
According to Haidt (Reference Haidt2012), “liberty/oppression” is a universal moral dimension. Actually, individual liberty (versus group desire for freedom from other groups) is primarily an English cultural innovation that promoted individual rights and social mobility, market capitalism, affluence for an expanding middle class (but also mass impoverishment of property-less laborers), and world reach (now challenged partly because of social, economic, and emotional dislocation without a traditional community fallback, resulting from the forced gamble of globalization [Mishra Reference Mishra2017]).
Baumard concludes (sect. 6.4, para. 1): “From an evolutionary point of view, the “civilizing process” might indeed be a “constellation of affluence” expressed at a larger scale … explaining the strong association between affluence and democracy.” This is another recent version of Whig history popular in the post-Cold War West (Fukuyama Reference Fukuyama1992; Pinker Reference Pinker2011b; Wright Reference Wright1999), characterized by humankind's ostensible progress toward greater Western-like liberalism and enlightenment under presumptive universal evolutionary principles mechanistically applied to human history. (Marxism is a related story with another end game, produced when shared deprivation induces cooperation.) Although somewhat a corrective to relativism, the arc of history described glosses over the formative role of particular contingencies and their spiraling context-sensitive effects (Atran Reference Atran, Cohen and Kityama2019; Clauset Reference Clauset2018).
For Hobbes (Reference Hobbes1651) and Locke (Reference Locke1824/1695), philosophizing in the chaos and aftermath of an English Civil War prompted by royal privilege resisting emerging market forces, individual liberty acting for self-gain was the imagined “state of nature.” Domesticated from ruthlessness by social contract (Hobbes's strong sovereign, Locke's representative government of property holders, Jefferson's and Mill's minimalist authority), liberty would create collective affluence. Rising affluence, in turn, would make liberty contagious, despite the undertow from socially unmoored poor. But will rising affluence, by itself, promote liberty's further advance, as Baumard surmises – versus, say, a security state to protect affluence or a selfie degeneration into affluence-seeking identity cults?
You have
Access
Using evolutionary Life History Theory, Baumard claims England's superior seventeenth-century living standards psychologically fostered spiraling wealth via sustained innovation grounded in less discounting and materialism, greater optimism and trust. Although behavior of elites and a growing middle class provides support, these factors are less evident for property-less workers compelled by emerging markets to sell their persons (labor) and traditional livelihood (land) as alienable commodities. Ensuing variety of choice and competition in selling and buying once inalienable parts of community life favored psycho-political notions of rational self-interest, criticism, experimentation and creative destruction, free-flow information, science, individual rights, liberal democracy, and society conceived as reciprocal, utilitarian relationships (economic, juridical, political) freely contracted between autonomous agents (Macpherson Reference Macpherson1962; Mill Reference Mill1956/1859). Performance-oriented ideals of trust based on competence, reliability, and verifiability (Mayer et al. Reference Mayer, Davis and Schoorman1995) replaced communitarian ideals rooted in devotion, shared fate, and emotional attachment.
Unique historical factors operated: England's highly individualized, impartible property regime, a twelfth-century world novelty (Maine Reference Maine2010/1875); general adherence to a thirteenth-century Church prohibition against cousin marriage to fourth degree (including through marriage [Worby Reference Worby2010]), which undermined kin-based society while encouraging wider socioeconomic relationships; England's singular proto-capitalist society by at least the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, contrary to presumptions by Marx (Reference Marx1867/1992), Weber (Reference Weber and Knight1923/1961), and Polanyi (Reference Polanyi1944/2001) that capitalism emerged from English “peasant society” (e.g., wills allowing landholders to disinherit any kin, late marriage for women and spinsters’ rights to contract land and labor, geographical mobility of rural families and individuals, hired agricultural labor, monetized markets [Pollock & Maitland Reference Pollock and Maitland1898/2010; Redfield Reference Redfield1956; Shanin Reference Shanin1971]; sixteenth- to eighteenth-century enclosures of village commons lands, which accelerated privatization, sale, and alienation to large and absentee landowners, facilitating wage labor and urban migration [Thompson Reference Thompson1991]; seventeenth- to eighteenth-century access to vast overseas populations and resources, spurring demand and production (e.g., the spinning jenny increased cotton production demanded by the textile industry, initial engine of an industrial-based world economy [Hobsbawm Reference Hobsbawm1962]).
Evidence that increasing affluence engenders less discounting and materialism, greater trust, and optimism comes mainly from studies of dubious historical relevance: that casino wealth distributed among Native American Cherokee increased cooperation and social trust in a fragmented society (sect. 3.6, para. 1) disregards tight cooperation before near extermination and herding into reservations (Hatley Reference Hatley1995); the claim that “individuals growing up in affluent environments are more motivated by long-term pair bonding and show stronger attachment to their spouses” (sect. 6.3.3) cites as support studies from contemporary Australia, the United States, Canada, Israel, and Italy (with Hungary one study's outlier); and so on.
Aspects of discounting and concern with material interests were sometimes more pronounced, or differently construed in capitalist England versus pre-capitalist societies. Thus, in peasant economies, household heads are only stewards and caretakers of land for subsequent generations, whereas in thirteenth-century England, welfare of future generations could be discounted (so children might require parents to formally contract for care in old age). True, one argument for disinheritance was that an individual would “scarcely be found to undertake a great enterprise in his lifetime if … compelled against his will to leave his estate to ignorant and extravagant children” (Bracton Reference de Bracton and Thorne1968/1235, p. 178); however, this relates little to belief in social or spiritual welfare. In seventeenth- to eighteenth-century England, as in the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries, land turnovers were so frequent that “the land market may have been utilized less for creating permanent additions to total acreage than to meet immediate and temporary needs or for quick gain” (DeWindt Reference DeWindt1972, p. 543).
Yet, as one sixteenth-century Frenchman noted: “England is so fertile and fruitful, that comparing quantity to quantity, it surmounts all other lands in fruitfulness…. Wherefore they live more spiritually … more apt and fit to discern in doubtful causes of great examination and trial, than are men wholly given to moiling in the ground” (Fortescue 1969/Reference Fortescue1567, p. 66). But such observation was more appropriate to England's independent farmers (yeomen) and trading class (including lawyers for contracts and inventors of new tools and means of production) than property-less laborers. Granted, England was Europe's first to implement poor relief (for centuries, Muslim countries had taxed for poor relief); initially, however, this was less for the poor's welfare than to prevent banditry and social unrest by an emerging laboring class, increasingly numerous and impoverished relative to the landed gentry and rising commercial class. In this vein, religion for Hobbes (Reference Hobbes1651, pp. 260–261), which is “above” and “against” reason, should be inculcated in “common-peoples” to provide “security, against the danger that may arrive … from rebellion.” Similarly, for Locke (Reference Locke1824/1695, pp. 146–157), “religion suited to vulgar capacities” is “the sure and only course to bring them to obedience and practice.”
Eventually, economic growth began to raise wealth and education levels among all classes. In Britain's American colonies, which boasted the world's highest living standard, property-less free laborers and artisans were first promised full political rights if they voted separation from Britain (lacking their support, a previous vote in the Continental Congress failed). But it was lure of greater individual rights and freedoms – of liberty – for which the rebels pledged “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor,” not greater wealth. More generally, the “constellation of affluence,” including “The Republic of Letters” and liberal democracy, arises not from affluence per se; rather, England's (and America's) increasing affluence and liberalism stemmed from a peculiar culture of economic liberty and individualism (Macfarlane Reference Macfarlane1978). (Even post-Mao China prospers with a political economy more akin to Hobbes's ideal than Marx's.)
According to Haidt (Reference Haidt2012), “liberty/oppression” is a universal moral dimension. Actually, individual liberty (versus group desire for freedom from other groups) is primarily an English cultural innovation that promoted individual rights and social mobility, market capitalism, affluence for an expanding middle class (but also mass impoverishment of property-less laborers), and world reach (now challenged partly because of social, economic, and emotional dislocation without a traditional community fallback, resulting from the forced gamble of globalization [Mishra Reference Mishra2017]).
Baumard concludes (sect. 6.4, para. 1): “From an evolutionary point of view, the “civilizing process” might indeed be a “constellation of affluence” expressed at a larger scale … explaining the strong association between affluence and democracy.” This is another recent version of Whig history popular in the post-Cold War West (Fukuyama Reference Fukuyama1992; Pinker Reference Pinker2011b; Wright Reference Wright1999), characterized by humankind's ostensible progress toward greater Western-like liberalism and enlightenment under presumptive universal evolutionary principles mechanistically applied to human history. (Marxism is a related story with another end game, produced when shared deprivation induces cooperation.) Although somewhat a corrective to relativism, the arc of history described glosses over the formative role of particular contingencies and their spiraling context-sensitive effects (Atran Reference Atran, Cohen and Kityama2019; Clauset Reference Clauset2018).
For Hobbes (Reference Hobbes1651) and Locke (Reference Locke1824/1695), philosophizing in the chaos and aftermath of an English Civil War prompted by royal privilege resisting emerging market forces, individual liberty acting for self-gain was the imagined “state of nature.” Domesticated from ruthlessness by social contract (Hobbes's strong sovereign, Locke's representative government of property holders, Jefferson's and Mill's minimalist authority), liberty would create collective affluence. Rising affluence, in turn, would make liberty contagious, despite the undertow from socially unmoored poor. But will rising affluence, by itself, promote liberty's further advance, as Baumard surmises – versus, say, a security state to protect affluence or a selfie degeneration into affluence-seeking identity cults?