The Hajnal Line, Trust, and Somalia. By Hunter Ash.
What made Europeans WEIRD [Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic ] — that is, high-trust, individualist, and classically egalitarian?
The Hajnal line labels the portion of Europe that has historically practiced the distinctive Western European Marriage Pattern. In these cultures, marriages typically happened at older ages, the consent of the bride was more emphasized, and nuclear families — men starting their own households, rather than multi-generational living — were the norm. According to many scholars, this was largely driven by the Catholic ban on cousin marriage.
A prohibition on marrying close relatives inhibits the formation of tight-knit extended-family networks and forces cooperation with non-kin. This in turn requires (and thus selects for) trust.
In many cultures, it is not considered dishonorable to lie to, cheat, and steal from non-clan members. All morality applies only to the extended family group. This makes running large-scale modern nation-states much less efficient, since every clan is constantly grifting off the state for its own benefit, engaging in nepotism, etc. …
The Western European Marriage Pattern is a large part of what made Western Europeans unique and globally dominant.
Somalia And The High Cost Of Low Trust. By Mitzi Purdue at RealClearPolitics.
Anecdote:
Decades ago, long before Minnesota became synonymous with one of the largest fraud cases in U.S. history, I had an experience in Somalia that permanently altered my perspective on aid, trust, and good intentions. It is why I read the indictments differently, not with surprise so much as recognition.
What struck me most about the Minnesota case was not only the scale of the theft but the silence surrounding it. The fraud appears to have operated in plain sight within tightly knit circles, yet few people spoke out.
More than 40 years ago, when I was a rice farmer in California, American rice growers learned of famine conditions in Somalia. Competitors set aside their rivalry and donated an entire shipload of rice for humanitarian relief. I later traveled to Somalia, expecting to see that food had reached people on the brink of starvation.
It had not.
A powerful clan had taken control of the shipment. Once its own members’ needs were met, the remaining rice did not go to feed other Somalis. Instead, it was used to feed animals, while those outside the clan continued to go hungry. …
Cousin marriage –> Clans –> low trust societies –> poverty and fraud. Somalia is one of the worst:
Over time, I found language for what I had observed: the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a concept from game theory that explains how cooperation and trust either compound or collapse.
- When two parties cooperate, both benefit and trust grows.
- When one cheats while the other cooperates, the cheater prospers and the cooperator becomes the loser.
- When both are defective, everyone loses.
High-trust societies solve this dilemma by extending cooperation beyond family and tribe. Laws, institutions, and norms reinforce the idea that cheating ultimately harms everyone, including oneself.
Low-trust societies work differently. Trust is reserved for kin. Outsiders are assumed to cheat. In that environment, cheating is not necessarily immoral. It is often rational, expected, and even applauded.
Seen through this lens, both my experience in Somalia and the Minnesota scandal follow the same pattern. Institutions cooperated in good faith. Clan-based networks exploited that trust. Children and taxpayers paid the price.
Somalia represents the most destructive version of this equilibrium. When trust does not extend beyond blood ties, cooperation cannot scale. Investment dries up. Contracts mean little without enforcement beyond kinship. When everyone expects everyone else to cheat, no one can afford to cooperate.
In that context, Somalia’s ranking of 213th out of 215 countries in per-capita income is not shocking. It is almost inevitable. This is not an indictment of individual Somalis. We know that many, many Somalis live honest, productive lives, raise families, and contribute positively wherever they reside. Individuals can transcend the cultures they are born into. Social systems, however, change slowly and are likely to shape behavior.
Somalia sits at the end of a continuum, but the underlying dynamic is not unique to it. Whenever loyalty to the group eclipses loyalty to shared rules, corruption flourishes. The Minnesota scandal was not an aberration so much as a warning: When institutions assume trust without enforcing it, low-trust behavior fills the vacuum. Somalia shows what happens when that low-trust approach is entrenched.
Oh no, say the leftists, everyone’s a blank slate, all cultures are equally good, and importing the third world is diversity — which is our strength! You broke it, you fix it.
hat-tip David Archibald