Matthews, “Individualism, Not Just IQ: The Overlooked Driver of the Great Divergence”

by PFS on July 23, 2026

From Lipton Matthews, “Individualism, Not Just IQ: The Overlooked Driver of the Great Divergence,” Property and Freedom Journal (July 23, 2026)

PFP041 | Hans-Hermann Hoppe, From the Malthusian Trap to the Industrial Revolution: An Explanation of Social Evolution (PFS 2009)

Lipton Matthews, “Individualism, Not Just IQ: The Overlooked Driver of the Great Divergence,” Property and Freedom Journal (July 23, 2026)

Why did Europe, and not China, become the dominant power of the modern world? It is a question that has kept historians arguing for decades, and for good reason. Around 1000 CE, China was arguably the more advanced civilization, with better engineering, a more sophisticated bureaucracy, and larger cities than anything Europe had to offer. And it was not just China. Japan and Korea also had relatively high human capital levels during the pre-industrial era and by several modern measures East Asians score higher on IQ tests than Europeans do. So if raw brain power explained who ends up on top, the map of scientific and industrial achievement today would look quite different.

Peter Frost recently argued in Aporia that Europe pulled ahead because it built independent institutions that restricted the excesses of the state and promoted impersonal trust, while several East Asian states cut themselves off from the wider world during the very centuries that mattered most. Frost does touch on individualism himself, but it functions as a supporting detail in his argument rather than the fulcrum of it. There is real truth in what he says. But underneath both of those things, the rise of fair institutions and the willingness to engage with outsiders, sits something more basic and more psychological: individualism. Joseph Henrich makes this case at length in his book WEIRD, showing how the medieval church, by breaking up extended family and clan networks across Europe, nudged people toward seeing themselves as independent individuals rather than as extensions of a family line. That shift, he argues, rewired how people thought, felt guilt, and made decisions. Individualism turns out to predict how well a country does just as reliably as IQ does. Yet somehow it barely comes up when people discuss why nations succeed or fail. Institutions get discussed. Intelligence gets discussed. Yet, the cultural trait sitting underneath both rarely does.

The gap between Europe and the East opened up long before steam engines or factories existed. A related line of scholarship on political order makes a point worth pausing on here. Western European society had already grown considerably more individualistic than any society history had yet produced, and it had done so well before the rise of the centralized nation state, centuries before the Reformation, the Enlightenment, or the Industrial Revolution ever appeared on the horizon. Individualism, on this reading, was not something modernity produced as a byproduct. It came first, and modern institutions grew out of it.