Nevertheless, while large kin-groups beat nuclear families in size and interconnectedness by tying more people together, nuclear families have the potential to be part of even larger collective brains if they can build broad ranging relationships or join voluntary groups that connect them with a sprawling network of experts. Moreover, unconstrained by the bonds of kinship, learners can potentially select particularly knowledgeable or skilled teachers from this broader network. To see why this is important, consider the difference between learning a crop rotation strategy from the best person in your extended family (a paternal uncle, say) or the best person in your town (the rich farmer with the big house). Your uncle probably had access to the same agricultural know-how as your father, though perhaps he was more attentive than your father or incorporated a few insights of his own. By contrast, the most successful farmer in the community may very well have cultural know-how that your father’s family never acquired, and you may be able to combine insights from him with those from your own family to produce an even better set of routines or practices.
Once an ethnic group takes over an economic niche, these benefits are lost. Rather than learning from the best in any group, prospective entrants can only learn from the best in their specific group. And the mechanisms by which niches form and propagate further encourage kinship networks within these groups. From page 134 of Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots:
The vast majority of Korean immigrants invest what money they have for their own businesses, above all, and for close kin and possibly friends. In this regard, the nature of chain migration and the significance of kinship are crucial for many immigrant entrepreneurs.
Large-scale cooperation and a bigger collective brain, rather than individual exceptionalism16, is what allowed Western civilization to break out of the Malthusian trap and make real material, scientific, philosophical, cultural, political, and moral progress—thereby utterly dominating the world for centuries. Non-linear ethnic niches are slowly dragging Western society back into the default world of tribes, clans, extended families, and middleman minorities that we escaped 700 years ago.
Internal markets
In most agrarian societies, commerce, tax farming, moneylending, and many skilled trades were the province of particular ethnic minorities—whether that be Greeks and Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe, Fujianese in Southeast Asia or any number of castes in different parts of India (see Chapter 1 of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century for more examples).
By contrast, northwestern Europe was comparatively ethnically homogeneous, with middleman majorities. Homogeneity enabled Clarkian selection, that is, the diffusion of productive traits through the higher fertility of the rich in a market economy. Such traits do not generally diffuse from endogamous ethnic groups into the broader population. Market-dominant and middleman minorities are thus not conducive to national development.17 I believe lacking them was one of the biggest advantages of northwestern Europe in general and England in particular over Eastern Europe.
18th and 19th century nation-builders (from Bismarck to Alexander Hamilton to Pyotr Stolypin to Meiji Japan to Napoleon) were obsessed with creating national markets, the bigger and more homogenous the better. Breaking down internal barriers to trade allows for more competition and greater economies of scale, thereby boosting national prosperity and national power.