EA - New Cause: Radio Ads Against Cousin Marriage in LMIC by Jackson Wagner

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: New Cause: Radio Ads Against Cousin Marriage in LMIC, published by Jackson Wagner on August 15, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This New Cause Area is brought to you by my newsletter, Nuka Zaria. Reducing “kinship intensity” might give outsized boosts to a nation’s culture and economic productivity. Although rare in western countries, marriage between first or second cousins still make up about 10% of all marriages worldwide. It’s well known that the children of closely-related relatives are at higher risk for genetic disorders. By itself, this might be a reason to discourage cousin marriages, as has been discussed previously on the Forum. But the story quickly gets weirder. Some historians and academics think that when Western Europe shifted away from cousin marriage starting in the 1400s, this might have actually caused profound changes in the structure of European society — inadvertently creating a more individualistic, entrepreneurial, and high-trust culture which set the stage for the scientific and industrial revolutions. How is it that some random medieval Church edicts against cousin marriage could possibly have had such powerful effects? The idea is explored in more detail in sources like Harvard professor Joseph Henrich’s book “The WEIRDest People in the World” (review here), and covered in articles like this one. The basic concept is that banning cousin marriage helped break up the power of kinship-based tribes (imagine the Capulets and Montagues of “Romeo & Juliet”), which changes the whole structure of the social graph: instead of rival houses, you get a more atomized individualism where people become more willing to cooperate across families. Quoting from the article above, Before the Middle Ages, Europe was similar to other agrarian societies around the world: Extended kin networks were the glue that held everything together. Growing crops and protecting land required cooperation, and marrying cousins was an easy way to get it. Cousin marriages were even actively promoted in some societies because they kept wealth concentrated in powerful families. Traditional kin networks stressed the moral value of obeying one's elders, for example. But when the church forced people to marry outside this network, traditional values broke down, allowing new ones to pop up: individualism, nonconformity, and less bias toward one's in-group. The academic work here is speculative, but “big if true”, since it suggests the existence of a neglected lever for influencing long-term cultural outcomes. If discouraging cousin marriage leads to such good outcomes, let’s keep doing it! Lots of people have described the Industrial Revolution as "the best thing to have ever happened", "the most important event in human history", and so forth. Today, high levels of societal trust and high long-run economic growth rates are some of the most prized traits of the world’s most successful countries. So, how can we get more of a good thing? Since the medieval era, rates of cousin marriage have plummeted, not just in Europe but across the world, as societies changed their norms. But some places still experience very high rates of cousin marriage — it's most common in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia: Existing public health efforts could cheaply warn about genetic harms from consanguinity. So, if we want to slightly accelerate the ongoing global trend away from cousin marriage, and thereby accelerate the transition to a more high-trust, individualistic culture and a higher long-run economic growth rate for the civilizations of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, what should we do? Obviously, EA has neither the authority nor the inclination to implement coercive bans on cousin marriage, like the Catholic Church did centuries ago. But there are already a number of charities (l...