Here are two more stories about history I found in recent articles:. One is about the Chinese family, one about the fall of Rome.
The End of the Chinese Extended Family
Nick Eberstadt argues in Foreign Affairs that the past kinship patterns of Chinese will be forced to change. Surprisingly, they haven’t yet.
Reliance on an extended family has been a fixture of Chinese history over 2500 years, he says, and the change will be “absolutely momentous.” In spite of the well-known one-child policy (which ended in 2015), he doubts that the Chinese Communist Party realizes how severe the impact will be on economic growth. Eberstadt is a respected writer about population and demographics who works for the American Enterprise Institute.
I am interested in the Chinese family partly because extended-family patterns may have inhibited a Chinese Industrial Revolution around 1800. In contrast, England, with its nuclear families and a willingness to let young men and women work outside the family, became the source of innovative growth. (For more about the contrast in family patterns, see my post on “Marriage, Families, and Economic Growth.”) Now, back to China.
Eberstadt summarizes past family patterns:
“From China’s earliest recorded history, guanxi networks of informal social relations (mainly but not exclusively through family ties) have helped get business done for the modest and the mighty alike by reducing uncertainty and facilitating economic transactions. These sorts of networks remain essential today and supply the necessary trust that helps business get done. The coming decades’ implosion of China’s extended family networks portends a national decline in this kind of trust and social capital.”
We all know that the one-child policy, which operated in China from 1979 to 2015, reduced the number of children, many of whom are now adults. And low fertility continues.
Yet today the extended family is probably operating as effectively as it ever has. It’s “counterintuitive,” says Eberstadt, but “on average, the Chinese extended family is larger now than in any preceding period.” He explains: “Birthrates were higher in the past than they are now, but living kin were much scarcer thanks to higher death rates.”
“The last 40 years have seen China’s breathtaking economic boom coincide with the strengthening of its extended family networks. . . . [F]amily dynamics surely helped China take advantage of its much-discussed ‘demographic dividend’ of having a disproportionately young, working-age population.”
“In addition, numbers of working-age siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts, and other relatives surged in post-Mao China, providing one another with access to professional and entrepreneurial opportunities as well as strengthening informal safety nets. Big families helped their members navigate the upheavals and transformations in the Chinese economy.”
Those days will end soon, says Eberstadt.
The Fall of Rome: A Lucky Break?
If you follow this blog, you may remember that Jay Schalin disabused us of the idea that the post-Roman “Dark Ages” were all that grim. Now comes along Walter Scheidel on Aeon to say that the fall of Rome was essential to the rise of the prosperity and freedom of modern life.
First, Scheidel says that the immediate effects of Rome’s fall (often pegged at 476 A.D. ) were beneficial. Aristocrats lost their iron control over poorer people and, especially since Germanic peoples weren’t as efficient at collecting taxes, poor people’s loads were lightened. Over the longer term, “power was widely dispersed among different groups,” causing “a patchwork quilt of breathtaking complexity” involving nobles, kings, cities, and the Catholic Church.
“Although nobility originally became strong, gradually kings increased their power, creating states that competed with one another,” says Scheidel.
One result of this competition was, sadly, “[e]ver costlier warfare. ” And that warfare honed the tools that allowed the takeover of distant lands It was a messy picture., but also a unique situation.
The fragmentation of western Europe “provided much needed space for disruptive innovation” as the competition “fed an insatiable appetite for new techniques and gadgets.” New ideas in politics, religion, and philosophy also blossomed because one principality often harbored a dissident from another—Luther, Galileo, Decartes, Hobbes, and Voltaire, among others..
“Nothing like this happened anywhere else in the world,” says Scheidel. “The resilience of empire as a form of political organisation made sure of that. Empires continued or, if they declined, they were replaced and built up again.
China is a well-known example of this process, but “similar patterns of waxing and waning can be observed in the Middle East, in South and Southeast Asia, in Mexico, Peru, and West Africa.” While efforts were made to restore empires in Europe, they failed , “as did the Inquisition, the Counter-Reformation, censorship, and, at long last, autocracy.” Capitalism and freedom were the ultimate result.
Scheidel is a professor of classics, history, and human biology at Stanford. University.
Image of Chinese family by True_Guowei on Pixabay.
Based on my limited sampling, I don’t agree with the thesis. In my view, what altered family life in China is not the one-child policy, but the Chinese Communist Party itself, which deliberately sought to destroy and still seeks to destroy all independent ties, from extended family ties to church ties to hobby groups. I think the Party has been pretty successful at this. Of course, people still have friends and loved ones, but the importance of family (beyond the nuclear family) is something pretty rare. On the other hand — in support of your thesis — the Party has turned everyone into a worker. So the industriousness of Chinese people has been great for the economic success of the country.
Wallace: A very clever verse! But, first, is Scheidel right that this creative complexity was unleashed only in Western Europe, in large part because its reigning empire fell apart? And, if so, why didn’t empires fail apart elsewhere (and not rebuild)?
There does seem to be an underlying limitation to Scheidel’s hypothesis: If the Roman empire was dying like other empires, why wasn’t it replaced? We know intuitively the answer, although proving it would be difficult. There were a lot of ornery people (including Visigoths, Vandals, and Gauls) and they didn’t stand for it! But why?
Allow a little levity perhaps excused by brevity:
Complexity, complexity, there’s no force like complexity
It is as painful as old dentistry, the enemy of brevity,
The planners’ greatest nightmare
And bureaucrats’ despair
It’s the labyrinth of history,
A statistician’s mystery.
[with a bow to TS Eliot’s “Macavity”]
My point being that that the fall of the empires often begins with their inability to control complexity and their fall unleashes a creative complexity. And as the world becomes more complex, predictions and thus regulations and planning become less effective. Consider such complexities as the world economy, climate, population.