Immigration and Innovation: Henrich and Houellebecq

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the West (or what Joseph Henrich calls WEIRD societies — Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich & Democratic) is an openness to strangers known as ‘impersonal prosociality’; that is, a set of ‘norms, expectations, and motivations for impartial fairness, probity, and cooperation with strangers’. Societies with high impersonal prosociality tend to be highly individualistic, but also ‘less inclined to distinguish in-groups from out-groups’ and ‘more willing to help immigrants’. This acceptance of Others makes WEIRD societies ‘psychologically peculiar’ — from a global and historical perspective — but also ‘particularly prosperous’ by that same measure.

Henrich indirectly makes the case that immigration contributes to prosperity by fueling innovation. He does this by debunking the individualistic myth of the solo inventor, which ‘exalts singular acts of invention by [individual] geniuses’, and ignores the fact that ‘complex innovations almost always arise from the accumulation of small additions or modifications’. According to Henrich, ‘even the most important contributors make only incremental additions’. This means that what is decisive is not individual ‘discoveries’ (which almost always occur simultaneously with other thinkers; e.g. Darwin and Wallace), but the network of such discoveries; what Henrich calls…