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Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 29, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Not-so-small scale question but this is probably the only place I can get an informed answer on this not constrained by political correctness: what’s your overarching theory of why Western Europe and its descendants are the world’s most influential civilization of the past few centuries?

HBD was always going to give Europe an edge in economic growth coming out of the Black Death, but a combination of state ideology and family norms with geography resulted in that higher GDP being leveraged to expand. Other parts of the world had individual ingredients(Asian HBD or the Islamic world’s missionary ideology), but only Europe had all of them.