What's the Matter With Economists?

My new column in Taki's Magazine straightens out a collaboration between economists and prominent anthropologist Joseph Henrich on diversity and innovation.

From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

What’s the Matter With Economists?

Steve Sailer

November 05, 2025

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. …

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.

Read the whole thing there, where you’ll find out what Brigham Young’s widows have to do with patents, and much more.