Caricature of Young's wives, published after his death

Source: Public Domain

I was reading a new academic paper from the Journal of Political Economy titled “How Social Structure Drives Innovation: Surname Diversity and Patents in U.S. History” on how Diversity Was Our Strength in 1850–1940, and I was reminded once again that quantitative economists tend to lack much of a feel for history.

Most people criticize economists because they don’t always get the future right. I’m more concerned about how, as economists have increasingly imperialized the other social sciences, they tend to get the past wrong.

First, why are academic economists squeezing out sociologists and the like? The main reason appears to be that economics doctoral programs attract more talent than the poorer paid fields.

Why are economists well compensated? The number of private industry job openings for economists has grown significantly because the computerization of everything allows businesses to implement microeconomics theory for maximizing profits by just rewriting some code. Amazon, for example, now employs several hundred economists with Ph.D.s.

Another advantage of being an economist is you have somewhat more intellectual freedom than in the more politically correct departments.

On the other hand, you are still a college professor, so few economists feel able to afford to be fully honest about today’s most controversial questions.

So there are good reasons why economists are outpacing other social scientists. But economists tend to lack a knowledge base about history. Thus, when they wander into questions where a sense of the past is crucial, they’ll often make disastrous errors.

I first noticed this tendency in 1999 when U. of Chicago economist Steven “Freakonomics” Levitt announced that because crime was lower in 1997 than in 1985, this meant that 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion must have culled the criminal class in utero. (This was one of the most eugenical intellectual fads of recent times, but nobody seemed to notice.)

I pointed out in response that the murder rate among black juveniles born right after Roe roughly quintupled due to the crack wars of the early 1990s, so who knows what the marginal effect of legalizing abortion was?

Likewise, future Nobel winner David Card announced that immigration must not lower wages because the 1980 Mariel boatlift from Cuba didn’t cause pay in Miami to drop relative to several other cities from 1980 to 1984. I responded that Miami in those exact years was enjoying the most notorious Cocaine Boom in pop cultural history (Scarface, Miami Vice).

Recently, Joe Biden appointed Lisa Cook to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors on the strength of her writing one prominent paper in which she had discovered, from looking at the number of patents awarded to black inventors each year, that America suddenly got much more racist from 1899 to 1900. I couldn’t think of anything that made that plausible. It turned out that most of her data on black inventors came from a survey done in early 1900 in order to honor black inventors at that year’s Paris World’s Fair.

So, here’s my offer to economists: Before you write up your big paper involving history, send it to me and I’ll tell you if you are on the right track or not.

This new paper on “Surname Diversity and Patents in U.S. History” is written by two economists, Max Posch and Jonathan Schulz, and one of the more prominent anthropologists, Joseph Henrich, author of The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Henrich’s acronym WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, and he invented it to point out that Americans and Northwest Europeans tend to have fewer of the self-defeating cultural traits, such as clannishness, of more normal human cultures like, say, Sicilians or Pakistanis.

Sixty years ago, in the days of Margaret Mead, anthropology was a glamour field. But nowadays, few people to the right of Zohran Mamdani pay much attention to anthropology, so it’s not surprising for the Harvard anthropologist to team up with economists.

The authors appear to be from the human biodiversity-adjacent wings of anthropology and economics, but they no doubt worry about that being recognized. (For instance, Henrich wrote a book about how the Catholic Church banning cousin marriage made Europeans less clannish and more innovative, but never mentioned that HBD Chick had beaten him to most of his ideas about how family structure drives culture on her blog.) So they need to be able to point at their Diversity Is Our Strength findings to avoid being canceled.

This new paper argues that before WWII more patents were awarded to residents of American counties with higher diversity of last names:

We show that innovation in U.S. counties from 1850 to 1940 was propelled by shifts in the local social structure, as captured using the diversity of surnames. Leveraging quasi-random variation in counties’ surnames—stemming from the interplay between historical fluctuations in immigration and local factors that attract immigrants—we find that more diverse social structures increased both the quantity and quality of patents, likely because they spurred interactions among individuals with different skills and perspectives. The results suggest that the free flow of information between diverse minds drives innovation and contributed to the emergence of the U.S. as a global innovation hub.

The researchers assume that having people with more diverse surnames move into a county increases trust, sociability, and cooperativeness:

Socially and behaviorally, we hypothesize…that social structures dominated by large and powerful families, indicated by low surname entropy, result in fewer interactions and collaborations among diverse individuals…. Previous work on the impact of kinship on sociality has shown that weaker ties are associated with increased openness towards strangers based on survey and behavioral measures of trust, cooperation and nepotism….

But Americans have been famous for the past 200 years for concocting huge corporations out of strangers. So it’s hard to see that America really needed to import Sicilians to overcome the notorious problems of Sicily.

I can imagine that having random outsiders move into Sicily might reduce Sicilian clannishness, but the English already ranked up with the Dutch and Danish as being among the least clannish people in the world. Among students of family structure, the lands around the North Sea are famous as being home to the “absolute nuclear family.”

The English upper classes traditionally could barely stand being with their own children and would dispatch their sons to boarding school at age 7.

And English-Americans were even less Sicilian in their behavior.

The authors descend into self-parody when explaining their methodology:

In other words, the arrival of a particular set of immigrants (e.g., lots of “Corleones”) can either increase or decrease surname entropy in different counties, depending on whether “Corleones” are initially relatively rare or common.

If having Corleones move into your county doesn’t boost your trust of your neighbors, I don’t know what would!

The authors conclude that we should strive for more government-mandated diversity:

Overall, our results highlight the central importance of social structure in driving innovation and suggest that policies aimed at promoting routine interaction among diverse individuals may foster more rapid innovation.

As I recall, America already tried extra hard to promote The Diverse into top jobs over the past dozen years, but it proved such a disaster that lately fewer and fewer people will even admit to having ever pushed DEI.

The most obvious question about this research project is: Why study the surnames of all the people living in counties where patents were awarded instead of just studying the surnames of the people who earned the patents?

Well, because the latter has been done several times, and the results are exactly what you’d expect: During the golden age of American invention from 1850 to 1940, most inventors had names like Miller and Johnson (or sometimes Mueller and Jensen). That’s not surprising: Most Americans back then were from northwestern Europe, which was the most technologically innovative part of the world.

So, what the authors have discovered is that from 1850 to 1940, the Millers and Johnsons who received patents were more likely to live in counties (typically in the industrial North) where there were more exotic surnames like Kowalski than the Millers and Johnson in counties (typically in the rural South) where few immigrants with, say, weird Slavic names bothered to move.

For example, one state with very low surname diversity is Utah, which is home to tens of thousands of descendants of its polygamous founder Brigham Young, who had 55 children by sixteen wives.

I once theorized that the great quarterback Steve Young, a direct descendant of Brigham Young, must have been the biggest Big Man on Campus ever during his near-Heisman Trophy year at Brigham Young University. But no, it turns out that BYU has many descendants of BY each year, so few Mormons found it sensational that a Young was the star of the BYU football team.

So, is Utah as deficient in technological innovation as it is in surname diversity?

Not as far as I can tell. Utah is kind of like South Korea, where a huge fraction of the population is named “Kim,” but the place is basically fine.

The researchers explain:

The core idea is that many, if not most, innovations arise from the recombinations of existing ideas, approaches and techniques that come together when diverse minds meet, share ideas and sometimes collaborate.

But how was this theorized benefit of diversity supposed to work in real life if the names on patents were the same old WASP names? Did Leland Miller, head engineer at the Carnegie steel mill in Allegheny County, hear about an old Ruthenian trick for improving the Bessemer process from puddler Jan Kowalski, but diabolically decided not to put his name on the patent application?

Or did the Kowalskis move to Allegheny County because the Millers and Johnsons had built a giant engine of prosperity there? This study is kind of like noticing that Los Angeles County is home to a lot of Mexicans and a lot of movie stars and then assuming that Mexicans must become movie stars.

Like most economists these days, the authors are averse to citing examples illustrating their purported findings, which they no doubt would disparage as “anecdata.” But examples ought to be helpful in grasping whether your thinking is realistic or not, especially when you, like many economists these days, are so adroit with such a variety of statistical techniques that you can make numbers do anything you want.

Now that I think about historical instances of times and places with major technological progress, diversity seems closer to a hindrance.

The highly diverse Roman Empire enjoyed remarkable economic prosperity because the Romans provided law and order for merchants over a colossal expanse in which all roads led to Rome, encompassing a huge number of different cultures, each with their specialty crafts. And yet, Roman times didn’t see all that much technological progress (outside of concrete).

To this day, Italians remain the masters of luxury crafts like marble. Many cheaper substitutes for marble have been invented, such as concrete, but lots of rich people still want marble in their houses. If you are willing to pay for marble shaped well, you’ll likely end up employing an Italian-American family firm of marble masons who have been in the business for who knows how many generations.

In contrast, many of the most important technological upheavals of the past quarter of a millennium were the creation of a single type of Briton: what the English used to call Dissenting Protestants, back when Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists were banned from Oxford and Cambridge until the 1850s for not belonging to the Church of England.

For example, the Industrial Revolution emerged not in relatively cosmopolitan London but in the provincial English Midlands, places like Manchester and Birmingham.

Similarly, the American industrial boom after the Civil War was largely, as Mark Twain noted, the work of Connecticut Yankees and the like, typically from the same post-Puritan Protestant sects as their cousins in Britain.

As Neal Stephenson points out, Silicon Valley was largely built by fellows from Northern college towns founded by the descendants of the Puritans who’d briefly won the English Civil War. Tom Wolfe noted that Intel’s Robert Noyce, “the mayor of Silicon Valley,” was the son of the Grinnell College chaplain.

Studying the maps in this paper closely, I see that the Kentucky–West Virginia border area, home to the famous feud between the Hatfield and McCoy clans, tends to stand out as the authors’ bête noire. I finally figured out that much of what they’ve discovered doesn’t actually have a lot to do with immigration or with what we think of as diversity.

Instead, they’ve laboriously re-created from surname analysis the four-tier structure of British-Americans documented by historian David Hackett Fischer in 1989’s Albion’s Seed. From north to south, America was settled by post-Puritan Yankees, Quakers, Scots-Irish, and southern English. (The Yankees were the most inventive, while the Scots-Irish were the orneriest.) This isn’t racial diversity or even ethnic diversity, it is the sub-ethnic diversity that laid the crucial templates for American regionalism.

The border of Kentucky and West Virginia in the Appalachians, which the researchers’ methodology emphasizes as their nominee for worst place in America, is the most Scots-Irish part of the country. And it’s the least WEIRD part of America, the most clannish, the most like the rest of the world. If you explained a 19th-century Appalachian feud to a Sicilian or Pakistani, he’d wholly understand it.

There, cousin marriage lasted longest in America after eugenicists had successfully campaigned against it everywhere else. It’s where the Hatfields lived in one county and the McCoys in another because they each feared violence from the other family.

Not surprisingly, it wasn’t a center of technological innovation.

Okay, well, that’s…interesting.

But even in the 1890s when the new tabloid newspapers loved to run stories about the outlandish behavior of the Hatfields and McCoys, those crazy hillbillies, it didn’t seem to have much to do with the American mainstream.

But today, the home of the Industrial Revolution, the English Midlands, is home to millions of inbreeding Pakistanis.

Perhaps America will also get less WEIRD in its pursuit of diversity?