Western exceptionalism exists in individual behavior differences that are present since at least the first millenium AD

Very interesting: Longevity and the Rise of the West: Lifespans of the European Elite, 800-1800 by Neil Cummins.

The rise of the West has been a longstanding conundrum given that historically the wealthiest, most productive regions were always closer to the equator - Egypt, India, China, Mesoamerica. Obviously much was driven by the productivity arising from the industrial revolution but that simply begs the question. Why did the industrial revolution occur in Europe and not in any of the more productive realms? Geography, path dependency, culture, fractured national competition, genetics, etc. - there are many proffered explanations but there is no really satisfactory answer.

Cummins now adds new information which is interesting in that it is marginally unexpected and likely relevant to the larger question but it is not obvious how it is relevant.

I analyze the age at death of 121,524 European nobles from 800 to 1800. Longevity began increasing long before 1800 and the Industrial Revolution, with marked increases around 1400 and again around 1650. Declines in violence contributed to some of this increase, but the majority must reflect other changes in individual behavior. The areas of North-West Europe which later witnessed the Industrial Revolution achieved greater longevity than the rest of Europe even by 1000 AD. The data suggest that the ‘Rise of the West’ originates before the Black Death.

Their overall conclusions from the data are:

This paper makes four principle contributions. Violence declines for nobles in the 16th century, plague kills noble women at a higher rate than men. There is a structural break in noble lifespan about 1400 and there is a European mortality pattern that has existed since the year 1000. The ‘Rise of the West’ can be traced to the centuries before the Black Death. These new stylized facts may or may not only apply to this elite subgroup. Future research can test whether the patterns are more general.

The European mortality pattern to which Cummins refers is explained thus:

Finally, this paper documents a previously unknown European mortality pattern. Similar to that for marriage first documented by Hajnal (1965), the mortality gradient runs South-North and East-West, and has existed since before the Black Death. The long existence of such a geographic effect has implications for recent work which stresses the 'little divergence' between the North-West of Europe and the South-East (Voigtlander and voth (2013), Broadberry (2013) and de Pleijt and van Zanden (2013)). The Black Death is not the first turning point. There was something abouth the North-West of Europe long before 1346 that led to nobles living longer lives.

These results suggests that the 'Rise of the West' does not solely originate in institutional innovations of the 17th century (Acemoglu and robinson (2012)) nor in social reactions to the Black Death (Voigtlander and Voth (2013)). Western exceptionalism exists in individual behavior differences that are present since at least the first millenium AD.