In The WEIRDest People in the World , Henrich offers something of a big-think, global, social-science history that covers everything from psychology experiments to anthropological narrative, economic argumentation, and kinship studies, all grounded in a purported history of religious and family law. The book seeks to persuade that the West is cognitively different from the rest of the world and that its uniqueness explains every fundamental aspect of its modern trajectory—its wealth and education distributions, the progress and spread of its innovations, the presence or absence of trust outside its local communities, its formal institutions of democratic governance, and its beliefs about fairness and equality. Even more important for historically oriented readers, the book seeks to uncover how this major cognitive development emerged. The quantitative methods that the book employs to support its sweeping claims, however, are flawed, and its version of European church- and family-law history is inconsistent with the consensus view of specialist historians.

An economics that refuses to engage with the lessons of history or to engage in a dialogue about justice, values, and ethics risks either wishing itself back to a past that never existed, losing sight of the multiplicity of human interactions across interconnected spheres of life, or sacrificing genuine results to clever but inert methods and models. An economics that is sensitive to the complexity of the past, conducive to beneficial social conditions in the present, or even just an economic history with a viable future will depend fundamentally on the commitment to hold two disciplinary inclinations in fruitful and balanced tension. Economists and historians should continue to talk to each other regularly, with open minds, as many already do, and as the fifty-year existence of the JIH attests.

The seventeenth century, broadly conceived, marks an important turning point in the history of European population movements. Long cycles characterized, first, by population expansion and subsequently by mortality contractions due to famine or disease held long-term population growth largely in check. The subsistence and mortality crises of the middle decades of the seventeenth century and the fundamental shift in the capacity of the European population to grow after 1750 together suggest that the case for a “general crisis of the seventeenth century” has strong demographic support.