Explaining the Great Divergence

I have posted on what mades Western Civilization great, because if we don't know, then we may not know how to preserve it.

Noahpinion blogger cites historian Niall Ferguson's theory in 2011:

The West first surged ahead of the Rest after about 1500 thanks to a series of institutional innovations that I call the “killer applications”:

1. Competition...

2. The Scientific Revolution...

3. The Rule of Law and Representative Government...

4. Modern Medicine...

5. The Consumer Society...

6. The Work Ethic...

For hundreds of years, these killer apps were essentially monopolized by Europeans and their cousins who settled in North America and Australasia. They are the best explanation for what economic historians call “the great divergence”: the astonishing gap that arose between Western standards of living and those in the rest of the world...

Noahpinion rants that this is racist and pernicious:

By "Western," Niall Ferguson means "white people." ...

I believe ... That killer app is meritocratic diversity. Where other countries cling to blood-and-soil tribalism, America absorbs and employs the energy and talent of a vast array of peoples. ...

In fact, Niall Ferguson pines for the days of Anglo-Saxon empire, but in fact, many historians believe that race-blind meritocracy is the key to all successful hegemons. Empires of the past have been successful when, like modern America, they didn't limit their talent pool to people with the right genes.

The biggest threat facing American civilization now ... is political dysfunction and distrust of our national institutions, brought on by the refusal of a large bloc of white Americans (the "Tea Party" etc.) to accept nonwhite Americans. The very denial of "Western-ness" to nonwhite Americans is what is threatening the West.

Noahpinion seems to have missed the point. Ferguson is explaining what happened 500 years ago.

Possibly America could extract wealth from other countries by importing their best and brightest. But that is not what is happening. We are not getting meritocratic diversity either. The more diverse our population, the more racial and other preferences we get, and the less meritocratic.

I never heard of the Tea Party not accepting nonwhite Americans. The political dysfunction of today is mostly on the Left, as they are the ones intolerant of other Americans, and always trying to censor them.

The NY Times and Wash. Post celebrate White Replacement.

Steve Sailer writes:

Why did Europeans come to dominate the world from roughly 1492 onward?

We live in an age increasingly resentful of the world-historical achievements of white men over the last six or eight centuries. Therefore, it’s worth trying to understand better how and why Europeans accomplished so much. Was it due to their vices, which surely our brave new world can do without? Or was it due to their virtues, about which we ought to think twice before discarding?

For example, during the racial reckoning and the not so great reset, American institutions are jettisoning willy-nilly their time-tested selection systems such as standardized testing. What if rather than a malign white-supremacist conspiracy, IQ-like tests are instead one characteristic development of a long Western tradition of progress that has, among much else, reduced infant mortality by a couple of orders of magnitude?

IQ is just one of many factors favoring Europeans.

Rather, Crosby argues, around 1250 at the peak of the Middle Ages, when the West had finally achieved an impressive level of civilization after its long Dark Ages, instead of subsiding into self-satisfied stagnation as most civilizations would, Europeans kicked off a new revolution in habits of thought.

For example, around this era, people began reading silently to themselves. The first library rules stating that patrons must be quiet date from the 1400s. Before then, almost everybody read out loud all the time.

That is news to me, but there was a huge growth in intellectual activity, and something must explain it.

Crosby suggests that the Italian invention of double-entry bookkeeping around 1300 gave Europeans a much-needed handle for dealing precisely with masses of numeric detail, and thus the rise of business did more than anything else to introduce Europeans to the quantitative turn of mind. ...

he West’s distinctive intellectual accomplishment was to bring mathematics and measurement together and to hold them to the task of making sense of a sensorially perceivable reality, which Westerners, in a flying leap of faith, assumed was temporally and spatially uniform and therefore susceptible to such examination.

Using math and measurement was certainly important to civilization.