Culture Matters, How Values Shape Human Progress

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How Values Shape Human Progress

LAWRENCE E. HARRISON SAMUEL P. H U N T I N G T O N
Editors

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

Copyright 0 2000 by Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington Published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus BooksGroup All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. ,For information, address Basic Books, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY10022-5299. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Culture matters : how values shape human progress / Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, editors. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-465-03175-7 (cloth) ISBN 0-465-03176-5 (paper) 1. Socialvalues.2.Culture.I.Harrison,Lawrence E. 11. Huntington, Samuel P. HM68 1.C85 2000 306-dc2 1 00-022951
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In memory of Edward Banfield, who illuminated the path so m a n y of us for

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CONTENTS

Table and Illustrations Acknowledgments Foreword, SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON -Cultures Count xiii Introduction, LAWRENCE E. HARRISON- Why CultureMatters
I
I

ix

xvii

Cultureand Economic Development

2

3
4

5
6

LANDES-CUltUre Makes Almost All the Difference, 2 PORTER-Attitudes, Values, Beliefs, and the Microeconomics of Prosperity, 14 JEFFREY SACHS-Notes on a New sociology of Economic Development, 29 MARIANO GRONDONA-A CulturalTypology of Economic Development, 44 CARLOS ALBERT0 MONTANER-culture and the Behavior of Elites in Latin America, 5 6 DANIEL ETOUNGA-MANGUELLE-DOeS Africa Need a Cultural Adjustment Program?, 65
DAVID MICHAEL E.

11

CultureandPoliticalDevelopment

7 RONALD INGLEHART-culture and Democracy, 80 8 FRANCIS FUKUYAMA”SOCia1 Capital, 9 8 9 SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET and GABRIEL SALMAN LENZ-

Corruption, Culture, and Markets, 1 1 2
111

The Anthropological Debate and practices-

ro

ROBERT B.

EDGERTON-TraditionalBeliefs Are Some Better than Others?, 1 2 6

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...

Contents

r r THOMAS S.WEISNER-culture, Sub-Saharan Africa, 141
12

Childhood, and Progress in

RICHARD A.

SHWEDER-Moral Maps, “First World” Conceits, and the NewEvangelists, 158

IV

Culture and Gender

13 BARBARA CROSSETTE-culture, Gender, and Human Rights, 178 14 MALA HTUN-culture, Institutions, and Gender Inequality in Latin America, 189

v

Culture andAmerican Minorities
202

15 ORLANDO PATTERSON-Taking

Culture Seriously: A Framework and an Afro-American Illustration, r 6 NATHAN GLAZER-Disaggregating Culture, 219
VI

The Asian Crisis

17 DWIGHT H. PERKINS-Law,

Family Ties, and the East Asian Way of Business, 2 3 2 18 LUCIAN w.PYE-“Asian Values”: From Dynamos to Dominoes? 244 19 TU WEI-MING-Multiple Modernities: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Implications of East Asian Modernity, 256
VII
20

Promoting Change

2I

22

FAIRBANKS-changing the Mind of a Nation: Elements in a Process for Creating Prosperity, 268 STACE LINDSAY-culture, Mental Models, and National Prosperity, 282 LAWRENCE E. HARRISON-promoting Progressive Cultural Change, 296
MICHAEL

Notes Biographical Sketches of Contributors Index

3 09 3 29 333

TABLE AND ILLUSTRATIONS

Table
9.1

Corruptionperceptionsindex 1998

113

Illustrations
Locations of sixty-five societieson two dimensions of cross-cultural variation 7.2 Economic level of sixty-five societies superimposedon two dimensions of cross-cultural variation 7.3 Interpersonal trust by cultural tradition and level of economic development and religious tradition 7.4 Self-expression valuesand democratic institutions
7.1 8.1 A continuum of norms 8.2 The universe of norms I 85

88
90 93 103

8.3 The universe of norms I1 15.1 Interactions among cultural models, the structural environment, and behavioral outcomes

104 106

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book appears under the sponsorshipHarvard University’s Academyfor of International and Area Studies, which organized the symposium which it is on based. The project has also benefited from the supportof Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs its director, Jorge Dominguez. and We wish to express our gratitude to the Monitor Company, the Carthage Foundation, the JohnTempleton Foundation, the SidneyA. Swensrud Foundation, John Tanton of the U.S., Inc., Foundation, Richard Wittrup, and Max Thelen for the financial support that made the project possible. We are particularly indebted to Michael Fairbanks of the Monitor Company’s Country Competitiveness Practice, with whom we worked from the outset on thedesign of the symposium that led to this book. That the symposium ran so smoothly was largely the result of Beth Hastie’s dedication, energy, and efficiency. We are also grateful to Patrick McVay for his help with the financial management aspects of the symposium, and to Carol Edwards and Thomas Murphy for their administrative assistance. We wish to thank the moderators of the symposium’s eight panels: Jorge Dominguez, Christopher DeMuth, Harriet Babbitt, Howard Gardner, Roderick MacFarquhar, Phyliss Pomerantz, Richard Lamm, and Robert Klitgaard, all of whom not only added to the richness of the symposium but also succeeded in keeping iton schedule. We also wish to thank Stephen Thernstrom for his participation on the shortest possible notice. We are particularly indebtedto oureditor at Basic Books, Tim Bartlett,for his unflagging interest and support, and his wise counsel.The book hasbeen the beneficiary of the skillful and sure hand of copy editors Donald Halstead and Chrisona Schmidt. Finally, Lawrence Harrison wishes to acknowledge the encouragement and of help he receivedat the outset from William Ratliff the Hoover Institution.
Lawrence E. Harrison Samuel l? Huntington

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foreword

CULTURES COUNT
SAMUEL P. H U N T I N G T O N

In the early 1990s, I happened to come across economic data on Ghana and to South Korea in the early1960s, and I was astonished see how similar their economies were then. These two countries had roughly comparable levels of per capita GNP; similar divisions of their economy among primary products, manufacturing, and services; and overwhelmingly primary product exports, with South Korea producing a few manufactured goods. Also, they werereceiving comparable levels of economic aid. Thirty years later, South Korea had become an industrial giant with the fourteenth largest economy in the world, multinational corporations, major exports of automobiles, electronic equipment, and other sophisticated manufactures, and a per capita income approximating that of Greece. Moreover, it was on its way to the consolidation of democratic institutions. No such changes had occurred in Ghana, whose per capita GNP was now about one-fifteenth that of South Korea’s. How could this extraordinary difference in development be explained? Undoubtedly, many factors played a role, but it seemed to me that culture had to be a large part of the explanation. South Koreans valued thrift, investment, hard work, education, organization, and discipline. Ghanaians had different values. Inshort, cultures count. Other scholars were arriving at the same conclusions in the early 1990s. This development was part of a major renewal of interest in culture among social scientists. In the 1940s and 1950s, much attention was paidto culture

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Foreword

as a crucial element in understanding societies, analyzing differences among them, and explaining their economic and political development. Among the scholars involved were Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, David McClelland, Edward Banfield, Alex Inkeles, Gabriel Almond, Sidney Verba, Lucian Pye, and Seymour Martin Lipset. In the wake of the rich literature these scholars produced, work on culture the academic community declined dramatically in in the 1960s and 1970s. Then, in the1980s, interest in culture as explanaan tory variable began to revive. The most prominent and most controversial early contribution to this revival was written by a former USAID official, Lawrence Harrison, and was published by the Harvard Center for International Affairs in 1985. Entitled Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind-The Latin American Case, Harrison’s book used parallel case studies to demonstrate that in most Latin American countries, culture had been a primary obstacle to development. Harrison’s analysis generated a storm of protest from economists, experts on Latin America, and intellectuals in Latin America. In the following years, however, people in these groups began to see elements all of validity in his argument. Increasingly social scientists turned to cultural factors to explain modernization, political democratization, military strategy, the behavior of ethnic groups, and the alignments and antagonisms among countries. Most of the scholars represented in this book played major roles the renaissance of culin ture. Their successwas signaled by the emergence of a countermovement that pooh-poohed cultural interpretations, symbolically and visibly manifested in a highly skeptical December 1996 critique in the Economist of recent works by Francis Fukuyama, Lawrence Harrison, Robert Kaplan, Seymour Martin Lipset, Robert Putnam, Thomas Sowell, and myself. In the scholarly world, the battle has thus been joined by those who see culture as a major, but not the only, influence on social, political, and economic behavior and those who adhere to universal explanations, such as devotees of material self-interest among economists, of “rational choice’’ among political scientists, and of neorealism among scholars of international relations. Indeed, the reader will find some of these views expressed in this book, which by design includes dissent from the thesis captured in thetitle. Perhaps the wisest words theplace of culture in human on affairs are those of Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “The central conservative truthis that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” To explore the truth of Moynihan’s two truths, the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies organized, under the direction of Lawrence Harrison, the project of which this book is the principal but not the only product. To what extent do cultural factors shape economic and political development? they If

Foreword

xu

do, how can culturalobstacles to economic and political development be removed or changed so as to facilitate progress? To wrestle with these questionseffectively, it is first necessary to define our terms. By the term “human progress” in the subtitle of this book we mean movement toward economic development and material well-being, socialeconomic equity, and political democracy. The term “culture,” of course, has had multiple meanings in different disciplines and different contexts. It is often used to refer to the intellectual, musical, artistic, and literary products of a society, its “high culture.” Anthropologists, perhaps most notably Clifford Geertz, have emphasized culture as “thick description”and used it to refer to the entire way of life of a society: its values, practices, symbols, institutions, and human relationships. In this book, however, we are interested in how culture affects societal development; culture includes everything, it explains if nothing. Hence we define culture purely subjective terms asthe values, atin titudes, beliefs, orientations, and underlying assumptions prevalent among people in a society. This book explores how culture in this subjective sense affects the extent to which and the ways in which societies achieveor fail to achieve progress in economic development and political democratization. Mostof the papers thus focus on culture as an independent or explanatory variable. If cultural factors do affect human progress and at times obstruct it, however, we are also interested in culture as a dependent variable, that is, Moynihan’s second truth: How can political or other action change or remove cultural obstacles to progress? Economic development, we know, changes cultures, but that truth does not help us if our goal is to remove cultural obstaclesto economic development. Societies also may change their culture in response to major trauma. Their disastrous experiences in World War I1 changed Gerin the world to many and Japan from the two most militaristic countries two of the most pacifist. Similarly, Mariano Grondona has suggested that Argentina was making progress toward economic reform, economic stability, and political democracy in the mid-1990s in part as a resultof its disastrous experiences with a brutal military dictatorship, military defeat, and super-hyperinflation. The key issuethus is whether political leadershipcan substitute for disaster in stimulating cultural change. That political leadership can accomplish this in some circumstances is exemplified in Singapore. As the chapter bySeymour Martin Lipset and Gabriel Salman Lenz in this book emphasizes, levels of corruption among countries tend tovary along cultural lines. Among the most corrupt are Indonesia, Russia, and several Latin American and African societies. Corruption is lowest in the Protestant societies of northern Europe and of British settlement. Confucian countries fall mostly in the middle. Yet

xvi

Foreword

one Confucian society-Singapore-ranks with Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and New Zealand as oneof the least corrupt countries in the world. The explanation of this anomaly is clearly Lee Kwan Yew, who was determined to make Singapore as uncorrupt as possible and succeeded. Here “politics did change a culture and save it from itself.” The issue, however, is how uncorrupt Singapore will remain after Lee Kwan Yew is no longer there. Can politics “save” a society from itself permanently? How political and social action can make cultures more favorableto progress is the central question thatwe hope to explorein follow-up studies. The Cultural Values and Human Progress project and this book are overwhelmingly the product of the ideas, energy, and commitment of Lawrence Harrison. He conceived the project, identified the topics to be covered, recruited the panelists, edited their products, and raised the funds that made it all possible. The Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies was delighted to join in and sponsor this effort because it relates directly to the interests of the Academy. Since its start in 1986, the Academy has provided substantial two-year fellowships to young social scientists who combine excellence in their discipline with expertise in the language, culture, sociology, institutions, and politics of a major non-Western country or region. Alumni of the Academy now teachin leading universitiesand colleges throughout the country. The work of the Academy is supervised by a committee of senior Harvard scholars who are first-rank experts in particular foreign areas. Three years ago, the Academy undertook to build upon the this foreign area expertise and to expand its work from the study of individual societies and cultures to include the study of the similarities, the differences,and the interworld’s principal cultures and civilizations. A conference in action among the 1997 explored the perspectives of the elites of the major countries and regions on trends in worldpolitics and the characteristics of a desirable world order. This book is a second, comparable study of how different cultures affect economic and political development. In a 1992 study of the relationship between culture and development, Robert Klitgaard posed the question: “If culture is important and people have studied culture for a century or more, why don’t we have well-developed theories, practical guidelines, close professional links between those who study culture and those who make and manage development policy?” The central purposeof this book and the further work we hope undertake to is to develop the theories, elaborate the guidelines, and foster the links between scholars and practitioners that will foster the cultural conditions that enhance human progress.

ilztroduction

W H Y CULTURE MATTERS
L A W R E N C EE .H A R R I S O N

It is now almost half a century since the world turned its attention from rebuilding the countries devastated by World War I1 to ending the poverty, ignorance, and injustice in which most the people of Africa, Asia, and Latin of America lived. Optimism abounded in the wake of the stunning success of the Marshall Plan in Western Europe and Japan’s ascent from the of deashes feat. Development was viewed as inevitable, particularly as the colonial yoke disappeared. Walt Rostow’s highly influential 1960 book, The Stages of Economic Growth, suggested that human progress was driven by a dialectic that could be accelerated. And indeed the colonial yoke did substantially disappear. The Philippines became independent in 1946, India and Pakistan in 1947. The British and French post-Ottoman mandates in the Middle East vanished soon after the war. The decolonization process in Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean was substantially completedby the end of the 1960s. The Alliance for Progress, John E Kennedy’s answer to the Cuban Revolution, captured the prevailing optimism. It would duplicate the Marshall Plan’s success. Latin America would be well on its way to irreversible prosperity and democracy within ten years. But as we enter a new century, optimism has been displaced frustration by and pessimism. A few countries-Spain, Portugal, South Korea, Taiwan, and

xviii

Introduction

Singapore, as well as former British colony Hong Kong-have followed Rostow’s trajectory into the First World. But the vast majority of countries still lag far behind, and conditions for many people in these countries are not materially improved over what they were a half century ago. Of the roughly 6 billion people who inhabit the world today, fewer than1 billion are found in the advanced democracies. More than 4 billion live in what the World Bank classifies as “low income” or “lowermiddle income” countries. The quality of life in those countries is dismaying, particularly after ahalf century of development assistance:l Half or more of the adult population of twenty-three countries, mostly in Africa, are illiterate. Non-African countries include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and even one in the Western Hemisphere-Haiti. Half or more of women are illiterate in thirty-five countries, including those just listed and Algeria, Egypt, Guatemala, India, Laos, Morocco, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia. Life expectancy is below sixty years in forty-five countries, most in Africa but also Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Laos,and Papua New Guinea. Life expectancy is less than fifty years in eighteen countries, all in Africa. Andlife expectancy in Sierra Leone just thirty-seven is years. Children under five die at rates in excess of 100 per 1,000 in at least thirty-five countries, most again in Africa. Non-African countries include Bangladesh, Bolivia, Haiti, Laos, Nepal, Pakistan, and Yemen. The population growth rate the poorest countriesis 2.1 percent in annually, three times therate in the high-income countries.The population growth rate in some Islamic countries astonishingly is high: 5 percent in Oman, 4.9 percent in the United Arab Emirates, 4.8 percent in Jordan, 3.4 percent in Saudi Arabia and Turkmenistan. The most inequitable income distribution patterns among countries supplying such data to the World Bank (not all countries do) are found in the poorer countries, particularly in Latin America and Africa. The most affluent 10 percent of Brazil’s population accounts for almost 48 percent of income; Kenya, South Africa, and Zimbabwe are only a fraction of a point behind.

Introduction

xix

The top 10 percent in Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, and Paraguay claims about 46 percent of income; in Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, and Sierra Leone about 43 percent. For purposes of comparison, the top 10 percent in the United States, where income distribution is among the most inequitable of 28.5 percent of the total. the advanced democracies, accounts for Democratic institutions are commonly weak or nonexistent in Africa and the Islamic countriesof the Middle East and the of Asia. Democracy has rest prospered in Latin America in the past fifteen years, but the democratic experiments are fragile, as recent events in Peru, Paraguay, Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico underscore. And there remains a weighty question: Why after more than 150 years of independence has Latin America, an extension of the West, failed to consolidate democratic institutions? In sum, the world at the end of the twentieth century is far poorer, far more unjust, and far more authoritarian than most peoplemid-century exat pected it wouldbe. Poverty also lingers in the United States, decades after the heady years of the Great Society and the War on Poverty. Hispanics, with 30 percent below the poverty line, have displaced blacks as the poorest large minority, and on some Indian reservations the unemployment rate is above 70 percent. Impressiveprogresshasbeenrecordedforblacks, andparticularlyblack women, but 27 percent of blacks still live below the poverty line-at a time when the U.S. economy has experienced almost a decade sustained growth of and low unemployment. The optimism of those who fought the war on poverty at home and abroad has been replaced by fatigue andeven pessimism.
EXPLAINING THE FAILURE: COLONIALISM, DEPENDENCY, RACISM

As it became apparent that the problems underdevelopment were more inof tractable than the development experts had predicted, explanations with two Marxist-Leninist roots came to dominate the universities and politics of the poor countries and the universities the rich countries: colonialism and deof pendency. Lenin had identified imperialism as a late and inevitable stage of capitalism that reflected what he viewed as the inability of increasingly monopolistic capitalist countries to find domestic markets for their products and capital. For those former colonies, possessions, or mandate countries that had reby cently gained independence from Britain and France, far the most prominent colonial powers, but also from the Netherlands, Portugal, the United States, and Japan, imperialism was a reality that left a profound imprint on

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Introduction

the national psyche and presented a ready explanation for underdevelopment. This was aboveall true in Africa, where national boundaries had often been arbitrarily drawn withoutreference to homogeneity of culture or tribal coherence. For those countries in what would come to be called the “Third World” that had been independent for a centuryor more, as in Latin America, imperialism took the shape of “dependency”-the theory that the poor countries of “the periphery” were bilked by the rich capitalist countries of “the center,” who depressed world market prices of basic commodities and inflated the prices of manufactured goods, and whose multinational corporations earned excessive profitsat theexpense of the poor countries. Neither colonialism nor dependency has much credibility today. For many, including some Africans, the statute of limitations on colonialism as an explanation for underdevelopment lapsed long ago. Moreover, four former colonies, two British (Hong Kong and Singapore) and two Japanese (South Korea and Taiwan), have vaulted into the First World. Dependencyis rarely mentioned today, not even in American universities where it was, not many years ago, a conventional wisdom that brooked no dissent. There are several reasons, among others, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe; the transformation of communism in China into conventional, increasingly freemarket authoritarianism; the collapse of the Cuban economy after Russia halted massive Soviet subventions; the success the East Asian “dragons” in of theworldmarket;the decisive defeat of theSandinistasinthe 1990 Nicaraguan elections; Mexico’s initiative t o join Canada and the United States in NAFTA. (For an apt discussion of dependency theory, see David Landes’s chapter in this volume.) And so an explanatory vacuum hasemerged in the last decade of the century. Over the years, the development assistance institutions have promoted an assortment of solutions, including land reform, community development, planning, focus on the poorest, basic human needs, appropriate technology, women in development, privatization, decentralization, and now ‘‘sustainable development.” One 1970s innovation, by the way, introduced anthropologists in development institutions to adapt projects to existing cultural realities. All of these initiatives, not to mention the emphasis on free market economics and political pluralism, have been useful, in varying degrees. But individually and cumulatively, they have failed to produce widespread rapid growth, democracy, and social justice in theThird World. At mid-century, underachievement by black Americans was easy to understand. It wasan obvious consequence of the denial of opportunity-in education, in the workplace, in the polling booth-to the minority that had never been invited into the melting pot, the minority for whom the Bill of Rights

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xxi

really didn’t apply. In many respects, a racial revolution has occurred in the past fifty years, not only in terms of breaking down barriers to opportunity but also in sweeping changes in attitudes about race on the part of whites. The revolution has brought mass movementof blacks into themiddle class, a the substantial closing the black-white education gap, major blackinroads of in politics, and increasingly frequent intermarriage. But a racial gap remains in advanced education, income, and wealth, and, with 27 percent of blacks below the poverty line and a majority of black children being born to single mothers, the problemsof the ghetto arestill very much with us. The racisddiscrimination explanation of black underachievement is no longer viable fifty years later, although some racism and discrimination continue to exist. This conclusionis underscored by Hispanic underachievement, which is now a greater problem. Thirty percent of Hispanics are below the poverty line, and the Hispanic high school dropout rate also about 30 peris cent, more than twice the blackdropout rate. Hispanic immigrants have been discriminated against, but surely less than blacks and probably no more so than Chinese and Japanese immigrants, whose education, income, and wealth substantially exceed national averages. note in passing thesignifiWe cantly higher poverty rate-almost 50 percent-and high school dropout rate-about 70 percent-in Latin America.2
THE CULTURAL PARADIGM: THE HARVARD ACADEMY SYMPOSIUM

If colonialism and dependency are unsatisfactory explanations for poverty and authoritarianism overseas (and racism and discrimination are unsatisfactory explanations for minority underachievement at home), and if there are too many exceptions (e.g., tropical Singapore, Hong Kong, Barbados, and Costa Rica; see discussion below) to geographicklimatological explanations, how else can the unsatisfactory progress of humankind toward prosperity and political pluralism during the pasthalf century be explained? A growing number of scholars, journalists, politicians, and development practitioners are focusingon the role of cultural values and attitudes as facilitators of, or obstacles to, progress. They are the intellectual heirs of Alexis de Tocqueville,who concluded that what made American political system the work was a culturecongenial to democracy; Max Weber, who explained the rise of capitalism asessentially a cultural phenomenonrooted inreligion; and Edward Banfield, who illuminated the cultural roots poverty and authoriof tarianism in southern Italy, a case with universal applications. Cultural studies and emphasison culture in the social sciences were the in mainstream in the 1940s and 1950s. Interest then dropped off. But a renais-

xxii

Introduction sance in cultural studies has taken place during the past fifteen years that is moving toward the articulation a new culture-centered paradigm of develof opment, of human progress. In the summer of 1998, the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies decided to explore the link between culture and political, economic, and social development, chieflywith respect to poorcountries but also mindful of the problems of underachieving minorities in the United States. We were fortunate enough to interest a large proportionof the scholars who very are responsible for therenaissance in cultural studiesas well as others of contrasting views. The symposium, Cultural Values and Human Progress, took place at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 23-25 April 1999, with the participation of a distinguished audi.ence.
SYMPOSIUM STRUCTURE AND PARTICIPANTS

The symposium was structuredin eight panels, four on each of the first two days, followed by a half-daywrap-up. The firstpanel, moderated by Jorge Dominguez of Harvard, addressed the relationship between political development and culture. Ronald Inglehart, who coordinates the World Values Survey, argued that there is a powerful link between cultural values and the political-and economic-performance of nations. Francis Fukuyama discussed the key role that social capital plays in promoting democratic institutions. And Seymour Martin Lipset traced the connection between culture and corruption. Christopher DeMuth, president the American Enterprise Institute, modof erated the first of two panels on culture and economic development. David Landes elaborated on his conclusion in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations that “culture makes all the differen~e.”~ Michael Porter acknowledged that culture influences economic development and competitiveness but stressed that globalization includes cultural transmission that will tend to homogenize culture and make it easier for countries to overcome cultural and geographic disadvantages. Jeffrey Sachs argued that culture is an insignificant factor by comparison with geography and climate. In the second panel on culture and economic development, moderated by deputy administratorof the U.S. Agency for International DevelopmentHarriet Babbitt, Mariano Grondona presented his typology of developmentprone and development-resistant cultures, which derives chiefly from his appreciation of how the resistant factors have impeded Argentina’s progress. Carlos Alberto Montaner explained how that same Latin American culture influences the behavior of elite groups to the detriment of the broader soci-

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xxiii

ety. AndDanielEtounga-Manguellediscussedtheculturalobstacles to Africa’s development and competitiveness. The last panel on the first day, moderated by Howard Gardner of Harvard, brought together three anthropologists: one (Robert Edgerton) who believes that some cultures do better for people than others; one (Richard Shweder) who identifies himself as a cultural pluralist, tolerant and respectful of all cultures; and one (Thomas Weisner) who focuses on the transmission of culture, particularly in childhood. Harvard’s Roderick MacFarquahar moderated the panel on theAsian crisis, which included economist Dwight Perkins, political scientist Lucian Pye, and sinologist Tu Wei-ming. There were some parallels in the presentations of Perkins and Pye, both emphasizing the needfor change from the traditionally particularistic personal relationships that have dominated the East Asian economies, and the prominent role of government leadership in the private sector. Tu contrasted the Western and Confucian approaches development. to Barbara Crossette of the New York Times opened the panel on gender and culture, moderated by the World Bank’s Phyliss Pomerantz,by addressing the conflict between cultural relativism and the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights. Her conclusions were in sharp contrast with those of Richard Shweder. Mala Htun discussed changes in gender relationships in Latin America and the cultural and other obstacles to their effectuation. Rubie Watson spoke of’the cultural forces that shape the subordinated condition of women in China. In passing, we express regret that she chose to have her not presentation included in this volume. Former Colorado governor Richard Lamm moderated the panel culture on and American minorities. It was opened by Orlando Patterson, who, in stressing the link between culture and the problems of minorities, analyzed the impact of slavery and Jim Crow on the institution of marriage and related those experiences to the high incidence of single black mothers today. Richard Estrada was unable to attend the symposium because of a lastof minute health problem.* Stephen Thernstrom Harvard substituted for him with a presentation on population trends. Nathan Glazer addressed, among other issues, the political and emotional problems evoked by cultural analyses of the varying performance of ethnic groups. The final panel, moderated by the RAND Corporation’s Robert Klitgaard, was dedicated to a description of some of the initiatives already under way to promote positive values and attitudes. I referred to the growing literature that links underdevelopment to culture, much of it by Third World authors, “We were saddened to learn that Richard Estrada diedon 29 October 1999 at age forty-nine.

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Introduction

.

and also described several homegrown initiatives in Latin America whose objective is cultural change. Stace Lindsay and Michael Fairbanks described the approach of the Monitor Company, a consulting company located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to “changing the mindof a nation.” Each panel was followed a lively discussion that culminated in a debate by in the closing session of the pros and consof promoting cultural change. No consensus was reached, nor was one expected, given the controversial nature of the culture issue and the diverse orientations the participants. But most of of the panelists believe that cultural values and attitudes are an important and neglected factor in human progress. Moreover, even among the skeptics, there was recognition of the need for improved understanding of several questions that arediscussed at the endof this introduction.

MAJOR ISSUES

The presentations anddiscussions gravitated around five major issues, which I address in this section and which I offer my own views: on e 0

e e e

the link between values and progress the universality of values and Western “cultural imperialism” geography and culture the relationship between culture and institutions cultural change

The Link Between Values and Progress
Skepticism about the link between cultural values and human progress is found particularly intwo disciplines: economicsand anthropology. For many economists, it is axiomatic that appropriate economic policy effectively implemented will produce the same results without reference to culture. The problem here is the case of multicultural countries in which some ethnic groups do better than others, although all operate with the same economic signals. Examples are the Chinese minorities in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and the United States; the Japanese minorities in Brazil and the United States; the Basques in Spainand Latin A m e r i ~ a and the Jews ;~ wherever they have migrated. Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan was among the economic traditionalists on thisissue-until he pondered the post-Soviet experience of Russia. He started with the assumption that humans are natural capitalists and that communism’s collapse “would automatically establish a

Introduction

xxv

free-market entrepreneurial system.” He assumed that capitalism was “human nature.” But he has concluded, in wake of the Russian economic disthe aster, that it was “not nature at but culture.”’ all, Greenspan’s words constitute a powerful endorsement for David Landes’s analysis and conclusions in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, not to mention the long chain of insight into the importance of culture and its link to progress going back at least to Tocqueville. But the fact remains that most economists are uncomfortable dealing with culture, particularly since it presents definitional problems, is difficult to quantify, and operates in a highly complex context with psychological, institutional, political, geographic, and other factors. It is with these problems in mind that Iinvite the reader’s attention to Mariano Grondona’s chapter in this book. It presents a typology developmentof prone and development-resistant cultures. Although Grondona evolved his typology with Argentina and Latin America principally in mind, I believe that itsrelevance is far broader. Carlos Albert0 Montaner’s chapter compais rably important: it explains how a development-resistant culture shapes the behavior of elite groups. The chief problem for many anthropologists, and other social scientists influenced by them, is the tradition of cultural relativism that has dominated the discipline in this century and rejects the evaluation of another society’s values and practices. This is one of the factors in play in Nathan Glazer’s highly qualified, reluctant approach to the role of culture in explaining the wide rangeof achievement among ethnic groups in the United States (Chapter 16). Among the most compelling arguments for confronting culture is that of Glazer’s panel colleague Orlando Patterson, for whom cultureis a central factor in explaining the problems of Afro-Americans (Chapter 15). The very title of this book may pose problems for those who are loath to make value judgments about other cultures. Many believe that culture is, by definition, harmonious and adaptive and that conflict and suffering are the consequence of external intrusions.Yet some anthropologists see culture very differently, prominently among them panelist Robert Edgerton, who says, with particular relevanceto the symposium Humans in various societies, whether urban or folk, are capable of empathy, kindness, even love, and they can sometimes achieve astounding mastery of the challenges posed by their environments. But they also capable maintaining are of beliefs, values,and social institutionsthat result in senseless cruelty, needless suffering, and monumental folly in their relations among themselves as wellwith as other societies and the physical environment in which they live.6

xxvi

Introduction

T h e U n i v e r s a l i t y of V a l u e s a n d Western “Cultural Imperialism”

The idea of “progress” is suspect for those who are committed to cultural relativism, for whom each culture defines its own goals and ethics, which cannot be evaluated against the goals and ethics another culture. Some anof thropologists view progress as anidea the West is trying to impose on other cultures. At the extreme, cultural relativists and cultural pluralists may argue that Westerners have no right to criticize institutions such as female genital mutilation, suttee (the Hindu practice of widows joining their dead husbands on the funeralpyre, whether they wantto or not), or even slavery. But after a half century of the communications revolution, progress in the Westernsensehasbecomeavirtuallyuniversalaspiration. The idea of progress-of a longer, healthier, less burdensome, more fulfilling life-is not confined to the West; it is also explicit in Confucianismand in the creeds of a number of non-Western, non-Confucian high-achieving minorities-India’s Sikhs, for example. I am not speaking of progress as defined by the affluent consumer society, although an end to poverty is clearly one of the universal goals, and that inevitably means higher levels of consumption. The universal aspirational model is much broader and is suggested by several clauses inthe U.N. Universal Declarationof Human Rights: Everyone has the right to life, liberty and the securityof person. . . . human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief. . . . All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection. . . . Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives. . . . Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services. . . . Everyone has the rightto education. I note in passing that, in 1947, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association decided not to endorse the declaration on the grounds that it was an ethnocentric document. Their position notwithstanding, I believe that the vast majority of the planet’s people would agree with the following assertions: Life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Liberty is better than slavery. Prosperity is better than poverty.

Introduction

xxvii

Education is better than ignorance. Justice is better than injustice. Richard Shweder, who agrees with the American Anthropological Association Executive Board’s decision, viewed the symposium (if I may crib from the title of his chapter) as a “First World conceit” promoted by “the new evangelists.” The presence of three panelists from the Third World, Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, Mariano Grondona, and Carlos Albert0 Montaner, who believe that traditional culturalvalues are at the root of the poverty, authoritarianism, and injustice of, respectively, Africa and Latin America, constituted a direct challenge his views. Shweder dismisses them in endnote to an to his chapter as not trulyrepresentative of their societies, as “cosmopolitan intellectuals” for whom “travel plans now matter more thanancestry,” who “look up to the United States for intellectual and moral guidance and material aid.’’ The responses of Etounga-Manguelle, Grondona, and Montaner to the Shweder endnote areincluded in a section following Shweder’s chapter, along with a further comment him. The exchange leavesone wondering whether by some anthropologists may not be engaging in a kind of anthropological imperialism that would encase cultures in permafrost. Shweder may recognize that risk when he says, “I would define a ‘genuine’ culture, a culture deserving of appreciation, as a way of life that is defensible in the face of criticism from abroad.” (Presumably criticism from within should be all the more compelling.) If there are cultures “deserving of appreciation,” then presumably there are cultures undeserving of appreciation, suggesting that Shweder may in fact agree withRobert Edgerton’s views. Richard Shweder may thus not be as much of a “heretic at a revival meeting” as heprofesses.

Geography and Culture
In his chapter, Jeffrey Sachs emphasizes geography and climate as decisive factors in explaining economic growth. His views evoke Jared Diamond’s recent book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, which concludes that “the strikingdifferences between the long-term histories of peoples of the different continents have been due not to innate differences in the people themselves to differbut ences in their environments.”’ It is clear that geography, including resource endowment, and climate are major factors in explaining the wealth and poverty nations. Almost all the of advanced democracies are in the temperate zones, and the large majority of the poor countries are in the tropical zone. But the exceptions are notewor-

xxviii

Introduction

thy: Russia occupies the same latitudes as highly prosperous and democratic northern Europe and Canada. (We might add that the northern European countries and Canada account for most of Transparency International’s ten least corrupt countries in the world, whereas Russia appears among the ten most corrupt, reminding of Alan Greenspan’s comment.) Singapore,Hong us Kong, and half of Taiwan are in the tropics. Their success, which recapitulates that of Japan, suggests that Confucianism trumps geography, as does the success of South Korea; the Chinese minorities in tropical Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines; and the Japanese minorities in tropical Peru and Brazil. Geography cannot adequately explain the striking contrasts between the north and the south in Italy; comparable contrasts among Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua on the one hand and Costa Rica on the other;thedespair of Haiti,oncetherichestslave-sugarcolonyinthe Caribbean, and the democratic prosperityof former slave-sugar colony Barbados. And we might note that the three temperate-zone countries in Latin America-Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile-still do not enjoy First World prosperity, and all three experienced military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s. In his concluding chapter, Jared Diamond takes note of the potential power of culture: Cultural factors and influences . . . loom large . . . human cultural traits vary greatly around the world. Some that cultural variation is no doubt a product of of environmental variation. . . . but an important question concerns the possible significance of local cultural factors unrelatedto the environment. A minor cultural factor may arise for trivial, temporary local reasons, become fixed, and then predispose a society toward more important cultural choices. . . their sig. nificance constitutes an important unanswered question.8

The Relationship Between Culture and Institutions
To repeat, culture is not an independent variable. It is influenced by numerous other factors, for example, geography and climate, politics, the vagaries of history. With respect to the relationship between culture and institutions, Daniel Etounga-Manguelle says, “Culture is the mother; institutions are the children.” This is particularly true in the long run. In the short run, institutional modifications, often impelled by politics, can influence culture consistent with Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s sage observation. Such was to some extent the case when Italy chose decentralize public policyand administrato

Introduction

xxix

tion in the 1970s, a case that has been chronicled by Robert Putnam a k M in ing Democracy Work9Although Putnam’s central conclusion is that culture is at the rootof the vast differences between theNorth and South in Italy, he also notes that decentralization has promoted a degree of trust, moderation, and compromise in the South, the same area whose social pathology wasso memorably analyzed as a cultural phenomenon by Edward Banfield in T h e Moral Basis of a Backward Society. The relationship between institutions and cultureis touched on repeatedly in Douglass North’s work in ways suggesting that North, whose focus is on institutions rather than culture, might agree with Etounga-Manguelle’s observation. In Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance, North identifies “informal constraints” on institutional evolution as coming “from socially transmitted information [thatis] a part of the heritage we call culture . . [which is] a language-based conceptual framework for encoding andinterpretingtheinformationthatthesensesarepresentingtothe

brain.’’’o North subsequently explains the divergent evolution of the former colonies of Britain and Spain in theNew World in the following terms:

.

In the former, an institutional framework has evolvedthat permits the complex impersonal exchange necessaryto political stability andto capture the potential economic gains of modern technology. In the latter, personalistic relationships are still key to much of the political and economic exchange. They are a consequence of an evolving institutional framework that produces neither political stability nor consistent realization the potential of modern technology.” of In his comments following the panel on culture and political development, which he moderated, Jorge Dominguez questioned the power of culture, since all the countries in Latin America except Cuba have become democracies in the past fifteen years. The relevanceof Douglass North’s observation is apparent in the fragility of the democratic experiments in Latin America today. In Colombia, a democratic government faces a grave threat from an anachronistic left-wing revolutionary force. Economic chaos threatens to Peru’s president often topple democratic institutions in neighboring Ecuador. behaves as if he were a traditional caudillo. Argentina’s recent president, Carlos Salil Menem, repeatedly dropped hints about his interest in a third term, in contravention of the country’s constitution. And the recently elected president of Venezuela, a former military officer who attempted two coups d’itat, has left observers in doubt abouthis respect for democratic norms. Following a visit I made to Guatemala in December 1999 to lecture on the relationship between culture and democracy, the Guatemalan sociologist

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Introduction

Bernard0 ArCvalo made an apt observation: “We have the hardware of democracy but the softwareof authoritarianism.”’2 A question I posed earlier is evoked by the North comment: Why did it take more than 150 years for Latin Americato have come around to democracy, particularly given the fact that Latin America is an offshoot of the West? A similar question might be posed about Spain and Portugal, at least until the past few decades.

Cultural Change
A consensus existed among all panelists and members participatory auof the dience that cultural values change, albeit slowly in most cases. (Attitudes change more rapidly-the shift in Spain from authoritarian to democratic attitudes about governanceis a case in point.) One of the most controversialissues debated at the symposium, anissue that dominated the wrap-up session, was the extentto which cultural change should integrated into the concepbe tualizing, strategizing, planning, and programmingof political and economic development. The issue becomes highly controversial when the initiative for such changes comes from the West, as was the case with this symposium. Anthropologists have been working in development institutions like the World Bank and USAID for more than two decades. But in almost all cases, their efforts have been aimed informing decisionmakers about the cultural at realities that would have to be reflected in the design of policies and programs and in their execution. Few interventions were designed to promote cultural change, and indeed the whole ideapromoting cultural change has of been taboo. A similar taboo has existed in the United States with respect to cultural explanations for ethnic group underachievement. The in the domestic setissue ting was joined by Richard Lamm, moderator of the panel on culture and American minorities, whenhe posed the following question: “Approximately half of the Hispanic high school students in Colorado and most the other of states in the west are dropping out. what extent could or should the state To of Colorado be looking at cultural factors?” Had Richard Estradabeen able to participate in the symposium,he almost surely would have expressed similar concerns. He was a member the U.S. of Commission on Immigration Reform, chaired Barbara Jordan, which recby ommended significant reductions in immigration. Estrada had been particularly concerned that the heavy immigrant flow from Latin America impedes the working of the melting pot. Nathan Glazer points out that one of the reasons for the aversion to confronting culture is that it touches the highly sensitive nerves of national, eth-

Introduction

xxxi

nic, and personal self-esteem by communicating the idea that some cultures are better than others, atleast in the sense that they do more to promote human well-being. Glazer implies that the risks of pursuing cultural explanations, at least in the United States, may greater than thegains, particularly be since the melting pot tends to attenuate the initial differences. But Richard Lamm’s question must give him pause. The Lamm-Glazer debate highlights the question of where the symposium leads-how it should be followed up. If some cultural values are fundamental obstacles to progress-if they help explain the intractability of the problems of poverty and injustice in a good part of the Third World-then there is no alternative to the promotion of cultural change. It need not, indeed should not, be viewed as a Western imposition. Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, Mariano Grondona, and Carlos Albert0 Montaner are not the Africans only and Latin Americans who have cometo the conclusion that culture matters. Indeed, there are many people from different walks of life, at least in Latin America, who have concluded that cultural change is indispensable and are taking steps to promote such change-in the schools, in the churches, in the workplace, in politics. They want to understand better what is in their culit ture that stands in the way of their aspirations for a more just, prosperous, fulfilling, and dignified life-and what they can do topromote change. Orlando Patterson wrote in The Ordeal of Integration that (‘culture must contain the answers as we search for an explanation skill gap, the comof the petence gap, the wage gap, as well as the pathological social sink into which several million African Americans have fallen.”’3 Both in that book andits sequel, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries, he points to the slavery experience as the root of the cultural problem: Slavery, in which Afro-Americans spent two-thirds of their existence in this country was . . . a viciously exploitative institution that severely handicapped Afro-Americans, especially in the way it eroded vital social institutions such as the family and marital relations, in the wayit excluded Afro-Americans fromthe dominant social organizations and, in the process, denied them the chance to learn patterns of behavior fundamental for survival in the emerging industrial society.” Can the United States afford to ignore culture as it attempts find solutions to for black and Hispanic underachievement? A further issue that arose during the wrap-up session was the extent to which there are cultural universals-values that work, or don’t work, in whatever geographic, political, or ethnic setting. Several of the participants argued against a “black box” or “laundry list” approach to cultural change,

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Introduction

preferring what might be termed an “ethnographic approach”-one that looks at individual cultures with limited reference to experience elsewhere. I believe that there are value patterns that cross geographic boundaries with comparable consequences in very different settings. An example is the work ethic/education/merit/frugality values common to Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand, and East Asia. But it was clear that we need to know much more about several major issues if we areto have, in Robert Klitgaard’s words, “well-developed theories, practical guidelines, and close professional links between those who study culture and those who make and manage development policy.”

INTEGRATING VALUE AND ATTITUDE CHANGE INTO DEVELOPMENT: A THEORETICAL AND APPLIED RESEARCH PROGRAM

Human progress since World WarI1 has been disappointing, even disheartening, except among East Asians, Iberians, and Afro-Americans. A principal reason for the shortfall is, I believe, the failure of governments and development institutions to take into account the powerculture to thwart or of facilitate progress, It is, for example, the cultural contrast between Western Europe and Latin America that I believe chiefly explains the success of the Marshall Plan and the failure of the Alliance for Progress. Culture is difficult to deal with both politically and emotionally. It is also difficult to deal with intellectually because there are problems of definition and measurement andbecause cause-and-effect relationships between culture and other variables like policies, institutions, and economic development run in both directions. A substantial consensus emerged in the symposium that a comprehensive theoretical and applied research program should be undertaken with the goal of integrating value and attitude change into development policies, planning, and programming in Third World countries and in anti-poverty programs in the United States. The end productof the research would be value- and attitude-change guidelines, including practical initiatives, for the promotion of progressive values and attitudes. The research agenda comprises six basic elements:

1. A value/attitude typology: The objectives are(1)to identify the values and attitudes that promote progress, including an assessment

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xxxiii

of the priority that attaches to each, and those thatimpede it; and (2)to establish which valuedattitudes positively and negatively influence evolution of democratic political institutions, economic development, and social justice; and to rank them. 2. Relationship between culture and development: The objectives are (1)to develop an operationally useful understandingof the forces/actors that can precipitatedevelopment in the faceof values and attitudes that are not congenial to development; (2)to trace the impact on traditional values and attitudes when development occurs as a consequence of these forces/actors; and (3) to address the question of whether democratic institutions canbe consolidated and economic development and social justice sustainedif traditional values and attitudes do not change significantly. policies, and institutions: 3. Relationships among valuedattitudes, The objectives are (1)to assess the extent to which policies and institutions reflect values and attitudes, as Tocqueville and Daniel Etounga-Manguelle argue; (2)to understand better what is likely to happen when values and attitudes are not congenial with policies and institutions; and (3) to establish to what degree policies and institutions can change values and attitudes. 4. Cultural transmission: The objective is to gain an understanding of the chief factors in value/attitude transmission, for example, child rearing practices, schools, churches, the media, peers, workplace, the and “social remittances’’ from immigrants back to native countries. We need to know (1) which of these factors are today most powerful generally as well as in different geographicand cultural areasof the world; (2) how each can contribute to progressive value and attitude change; and (3) what role government might play with respect to value and attitude change. of 5. Value/attitude measurement: The objective is to expand the reach the international system for measuring value and attitude change, integrating it with the results research task 1 above. This would of include (1)identifying existing instruments for measuring valuesand attitudes (e.g., the World Values Survey) and (2)tailoring these instruments to support value- and attitude-change initiatives. 6. Assessing cultural change initiatives already under way: At least in Latin America, a number of homegrown cultural change initiatives are already underway, for example, the Human Development Institute in Peru, which promotes “the ten commandments of development” in school systems in several Latin American countries.

xxxiv

Introduction

Other initiatives, for example, property-titling programs, may have important cultural changeconsequences, although that is not their objective. Such initiatives needto be evaluated and the results converted into guidelines for governments and development institutions. The role of cultural values and attitudes as obstacles to or facilitators of progress has been largely ignored governments and aid agencies. Integratby ing value and attitude change into development policies, planning, and programming is, I believe, a promising wayto assure that, in the next fifty years, the world does notrelive the poverty and injustice that most poor countries, and underachieving ethnic groups, have been mired in during the past half century.

part one

CULTURE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

1
Culture Makes Almost All the Difference
D A V I DL A N D E S

Max Weber was right. If we learn anything from the history economic deof velopment, it is that culturk makes almost all the difference. Witness the enterprise of expatriate minbrities-the Chinese in East and Southeast Asia, Indians in East Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, Jews and Calvinists throughout much of Europe, and oh and on. Yet culture, in the sense the inner valof ues and attitudes that guidk a population, frightens scholars.It has a sulfuric odor of race and inheritande, an air of immutability. In thoughtful moments, economists and other social1 scientists recognize that this is not true, and indeed they salute examples bf cultural change for the better while deploring changes for the worse. But \applauding or deploring implies the passivity of the viewer-an inability to \use knowledge to shape people and things. The technician would rather change interest and exchange rates, free up trade, alter political institutions, manage. Besides, criticisms of culture cut close to the ego and injure identity and self-esteem. Coming from outsiders, such animadversions, however tactful and indirect, stink of condescension. Benevoto lent improvers have learned steer clear. But if culture does so much, why does it not work consistently? Economists are not alone inasking why some people-the Chinese, say-have long been so unproductive at home yet so enterprising away. If culture matters, why didn’t it change China? (We should note that withpolicies that now en-

AlmostMakes Culture

3

courage rather than suppresseconomic development, the imbalance between Chinese performance at home and abroad is disappearing, as China sustains the phenomenal growth rates that propelled the Confucian “dragons” from the Third World to the First.) An economist friend, a master of political-economic therapies, solves the earlier, perhaps now obsolete paradox by denying any connection with culture. Culture, he says, does not permit him to predict outcomes. I disagree. One could have foreseen the postwar economic success of Japan and Germany by taking account of culture. The same with South Korea versus Turkey, Indonesia versus Nigeria. On the other hand, culture does not standalone. Economic analysis cherishes the illusion that one good reason should be enough, but the determiprocesses are invariably plural interrelated. and nants of complex Monocausal explanations will not work. The same values thwarted by “bad government” at home can find opportunity elsewhere, as in the case of China. Hence the special success emigrant enterprise. The ancient Greeks, of as usual, had a word for it: These metics, alien residents, were the leaven of societies that sneered at money and crafts (hence the pejorative sense of the Greek-rooted word “banausic”-of an artisan, dull, pedestrian).So strangers found and sold the goods and made the money. Because culture and economic performance are linked, changes in one will work back on the other. In Thailand, all good young men used to spend years undergoing a religious apprenticeship in Buddhist monasteries. This period of ripening was good for the spirit and it also suited the somnosoul; lent pace of traditional economic activity and employment. That was then. Today, Thailand moves faster; commerce thrives; businesscalls. As a result, young men spiritualize for a few weeks-time enough to learn some prayers and rituals and get back to the real, material world. Time, which everyone knows is money, has changed in relative value. One could not have imposed this change, short of revolution. The Thais have voluntarily adjusted their priorities. (It should be noted in passing that the Chinese minority led the charge.) The Thai story illustrates culture’s response to economic growth and opportunity. The reverse is also possible-culture may shift against enterprise. We have the Russian case, where seventy-five years of anti-market, antiprofit schooling and insider privilege have planted and frozen anti-entrepreneurial attitudes. Even after regime fallen, the has people the fear uncertainties of the market and yearn for the safe tedium of state employment. Or they yearn for equality in poverty, a common feature of peasant cultures around the world. As the Russian joke has it, peasant Ivan is jealous of neighbor Boris because Boris has a goat. A fairy comes along and offers

4

MATTERS

CULTURE

Ivan a single wish. What does he wish for? That Boris’s goat should drop dead. Fortunately, not all Russians think that way. The collapse of Marxist prohibitions and inhibitions has led to a rush of business activity, the best of it linked to inside deals, some of it criminal, much of it the work of non-Russian minorities (Armenians, Georgians, etc.). The leaven is there, and often that suffices: the initiative of an enterprising, different few. In the meantime, old habits remain, corruption and crime are rampant, culture war rageselections hang on these issues, and the outcomeis not certain.
DEPENDENCY THEORY, ARGENTINA, AND FERNANDO HENRIQUE CARDOSO’S METAMORPHOSIS

Dependency theory was a comforting alternative to cultural explanations of underdevelopment. Latin American scholars and outside sympathizers explained the failure of Latin American development, all the worse by contrast with North America, as the consequence of the misdeeds of stronger, richer nations. Note that thedependency vulnerability implies a state of inferiority in which one does not control one’s fate; one does as others dictate. Needless to say, these others exploit their superiority to transfer product from the dependent economies, much as the earlier colonial rulers did. The pumpof empire becomes the pump of capitalist imperialism. Yet to co-opt independent sovereign nations requires lending and investment; simple pillage is not an option. So with Argentina, which saved little and drew increasingly on foreign capital. (The chief architect of dependency theory was Raiil Prebisch, Argentine economist.)Some economists contend an that foreign capital hurts growth; others, that it helps, but less than domestic investment. Much obviously depends on the uses. In the meantime, no one is prepared to refuse outside money on grounds of efficiency. The politicians want it and are willing to let the dependency theorists wring their hands. Argentina had some very rich people, yet “for reasons that have never been clear . . . has always been capital-dependent and thereby beholding [sic] to loaner [lender] nations, in ways that seriously compromise the country’s ability to run its own affairs.”’ The British built Argentina’s railroads-less than 1,000 kilometers in 1871, over 12,000 kilometers two decades laterbut built them to British purposes. But how does one build such a network without fostering internal markets? And if not, whose fault is it? What does that say about the spirit of native enterprise? Most Argentines were not asking such questions. It is always easy to blame the Other. The result: a xenophobic anti-imperialism and self-defeating sense wrong. of

lmostMakes Culture

5

In the nineteenth century, a distinguished Argentine, Juan Bautista Alberdi, worried about the spirit native enterprise. In1852, he wrote, in words that of anticipated what Max Weber would write fifty years later, Respect the altarof every belief. Spanish America, limited to Catholicism to the exclusion of any other religion, resembles a solitary and silent conventof nuns. . . .To exclude different religions in South America to exclude the English, the is Germans, the Swiss, the North Americans, which is to say the very people this continent most needs. To bring them without their religion is to bring them without theagent that makes them what they are.z Some have attributed Argentina’s low rate of savings to rapid population growth and high rates of immigration-to which I would add bad habits of conspicuous consumption. In any event, foreign capital flows depended as much on supply conditions abroad as on Argentine opportunities. During World War I, the British needed money and had to liquidate foreign assets. Although remaining Argentina’s biggest creditor, they no longer played the growth-promoting role of earlier decades. The United States picked up some of the slack, but here too politics and the business cycle called the tune, so that Argentina found itself in intermittent but repeated difficulty both for the amount and the termsof foreign investment and credit. All of this promoted conflict with creditors, which led in turn to reactive isolationism-restrictive measures that only aggravated the economic stringency and dependency. When Argentine economists and politicians denounced these circumstances and the misdeeds, real and imagined, of outside interests, they only compounded the problem. To be sure, cocoon economics-the logical prescription of the dependencistus-helped shelterArgentinaandotherLatin American economies from the worst effects of the Great Depression. Such is the nature of cocoons. But it also cut them from competition, stimuli, and off opportunities for growth. Dependencistu arguments flourished in Latin America. They traveled well, resonating after World War I1 with the economic plight and political awareness of newly liberated colonies. Cynics might saythat dependency doctrines have been Latin America’s most successful export. But they have been bad for effort and morale. By fostering a morbid propensity to find fault with everyone but oneself, they promote economic impotence. Even if they were true, it would have been better to stow them. And indeed, that is what Latin America appears to have done. Today, all countries in the Western Hemisphere, including Cuba, welcome foreign investment. Argentina has been a leader in the transformation. The statism that

6

MATTERS

CULTURE

dependency theory counseled has been dismantled in a welter of privatizations. Mexico, once the home of some of the most strident dependencistas, has developed a broad national consensus, symbolized by NAFTA, that its interests are best served by economic intimacy with the United States and Canada. The lamb has leapt into the mouthof the lion and appears to have benefited from the encounter. For years, Fernando Henrique Cardoso was a leading figure of the Latin American dependency school. In the 1960s and 1970s, the sociologist Cardoso wrote or edited some twenty books on the subject. Some of them became the standard texts that shaped a generation of students. Perhaps the best known was Dependency and Development in Latin America. In its English version, it ended with a turgid, less-than-stirring credo: The effective battle. . . is between technocratic elitism and a vision the formaof tive process of a mass industrial society which can offer what is popular as specifically national and which succeeds in transforming the demand for a more a developed economy and for a democratic society into state that expresses the vitality of truly popular forces, capable of seeking socialist forms for the social organization of the f ~ t u r e . ~ Then, in 1993, Cardoso became Brazil’s minister of finance. He found a country wallowing in an annual inflation rateof 7,000 percent. The government had become so addicted to this monetary narcotic and Brazilians inso genious in their personal countermeasures (taxis used meters that could be adjusted to the price index, and perhaps the client) that to serious economists were ready to makelight of this volatility on the pretext that certainty inof flation was a form stability. of This may have been true of those Brazilians able to take precautions; but inflation played havoc with Brazil’s international credit, and the country needed to borrow. It also neededto trade and work with other countries, especially those rich, capitalist nations that were marked as the enemy. So Cardoso began to see things differently,to the point where observers praised him as a pragmatist. Gone now were the anti-colonialist passions; gone the hostility to foreign links, with their implicit dependency. Brazil has no choice, says Cardoso. If it is not prepared to be part of the global economy, it has “no way of competing. . It is not an imposition from outside. It’s a necessity for US."^ To each time its virtues. Two years later, Cardoso was elected president, in large part because he had given Brazil its first strong currency in many years.

..

AlmostMakes Culture

the Difference

7

JAPAN’S MElJl RESTORATIONCOUNTERPOISE TO DEPENDENCY THEORY

Bernard Lewis once observed that “when people realize that things aregoing wrong, there are two questions they can ask. One is, ‘What did we do wrong?’ and the otheris ‘Who did this to us?’ The latter leadsto conspiracy theories and paranoia. The first question leads to another line of thinking: ‘How dowe put it right?”’sIn the second half of the twentieth century, Latin America chose conspiracy theories and paranoia. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Japan asked itself, “How dowe put it right?” Japan had a revolution in 1867-1868. The feudal shogunate was overthrown-really it collapsed-and control of the state returnedto the emperor in Kyoto. So ended a quarter millennium of Tokugawa rule. But the Japanese call this overturn a restoration rather than a revolution because they prefer to see it as a return to normalcy. Also, revolutions are for China. The Chinese have dynasties-Japan has one royalfamily, going back to the beginning. The symbols of national unity were already present; the idealsof national pride, already defined. This saved a lot of turmoil. Revolutions, like civil wars, can be devastating to order and national efficacy. The Meiji Restoration had its dissensions and dissents, often violent. The final years old, of the the first of the new, were stained with the blood assassinations, of peasant of uprisings, of reactionary rebellion. Even so, the transition in Japan was far smoother than theFrench and Russian varieties of political overturn, for two reasons: the new regime held the moral high ground, and even the disaffected and affronted fearedto give arms and opportunity to the enemy outside. Foreign imperialists were lurking to pounce, and internal divisions would have invited intervention. Consider the story of imperialism elsewhere: Local quarrels and intrigue had fairly invited the European powers into India and would soon subordinate China. In a societythat hadnever admitted the stranger, the very presence of westerners invited trouble. More than once, Japanese bullyboys challenged and assaulted these impudent foreigners, the better to show them who wasboss. Who was boss? In the face Western demands for retribution and indemniof ties, the Japanese authorities could only temporize and, waffling, discredit by themselves in theeyes of foreigner and patriot alike. The pretensions of the outsiders were the heart of the matter. “Honor the emperor; expel the barbarians!” went the pithy slogan. The leaders of the move for change, lords of the great fiefs of the Far South and West, once enemies, now united against the shogunate. They won; andthey lost. That was

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another paradox of this revolution-restoration. The leaders thought they were going back to the days of yore. Instead, they found themselves caught up in tomorrow, in a waveof modernization, because that was the only way to defeat the barbarians. You Westerners have the guns. All right, one day we’ll have them too. The Japanese went about modernization with characteristic intensity and system. They were ready for it-by virtue of a tradition (recollection) of effective government,by their high levels of literacy, by their tight family structure, by their work ethic and self-discipline, by their sense of national identity and inherent superiority. That was the heart of it: The Japanese knew they were superior, and because they knew it, they were able to recognize the superiorities of others. and Building on earlier moves under Tokugawa, they hired foreign experts technicians while sending Japanese agents abroad to bring back eyewitness accounts of European and American ways. This body of intelligence laid the basis for choices, reflecting careful and supple consideration of comparative merit. Thus the first military model was the French army; but after the defeat of France by Prussia in 1870-1871, the Japanese decided that Germany had more to offer. A similar shift took place from French to German legal codes and practice. No opportunity for learning was In October 1871, a lost. high-level Japanese delegation that included Okubo Toshimichi traveled to the United States and Europe, visiting factories and forges, shipyards and armories, railways and canals. They returned in September 1873, almost two years later, laden with the spoils of learning and “on fire with enthusiasm” for reform.6 This direct experience by the Japanese leadership made all the difference. Riding on an English train, Okubo confided ruefully that, before leaving Japan, he had thought his work done: the imperial authority restored, feudalism replaced by central government. Now he understood that the big tasks lay ahead. Japan did not compare with “the more progressive powers of the world.” England especially offered a lesson in self-development. Once a small, insular nation-like Japan-England had systematically pursued a policy of self-aggrandizement. The Navigation Acts were crucial in raising the national merchant marine to a positionof international dominance. Not until Britain had achieved industrial leadership did it abandon protection for laissez-faire. (Not a bad analysis. Adam Smith would have agreed.) To be sure, Japan would not have the tariff and commercial autonomy that seventeenth-century England had enjoyed. Here, however, the German example made sense. Germany, like Japan, had only recently come through a difficult unification. Also, Germany, like Japan, had started from a posi-

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tion of economic inferiority, and look how far it had come. Okubo was much impressed by the German people he met. He found them thrifty, hardworking, “unpretentious”-like Japanese commoners, one imagines. And he found their leaders to be realists and pragmatists: FOCUS, they said, on building national power. They were the mercantilists of the nineteenth century. Okubo came back and gave a German orientation to the Japanese bureaucracy. First came those tasks ordinary government: a postal service, a new time to standard, public education (for boys and then for as well), universal milgirls itary service. General schooling diffused knowledge;that is what schools are for. But it also instilled discipline, obedience, punctuality, and a worshipful respect for the emperor. This was the key to the development of a we/they national identity transcending the parochial loyalties nurtured by the feudal shogunate. The army and navy completed the job. Beneath the sameness of the uniform and the discipline, universal military service wiped out distinctions of class and place. It nurtured nationalist pride and democratized the violent virtues of manhood-an end to the samurai monopoly arms. of Meanwhile, state and society went about the business of business: how to make things by machine, how to do more without machines, how to move goods, how to compete with foreign producers. Not easy. European industrial producers had taken a century. Japan was in a hurry. To begin with, the country built on those branches of industry already familiar-silk and cotton manufacture in particular but also the processing of food staples immune to foreign imitation: sake, miso, soy sauce. From 1877 to 1900-the first generation of industrialization-food accounted for 40 percent of growth, textiles 35 percent. In short, the Japanese pursued comparative advantage rather than the will-o’-the-wispof heavy industry. Much of this was small-scale: cotton mills of 2,000 spindles (as against 10,000 and up in Western Europe); wooden waterwheels that were generations behind European technology; coal mines whose tortuous seams and hand-drawn baskets made the infamous British pits of an earlier time look like a promenade. The economists’ usual explanation for this inversion of the late-follower model (late is great and up-to-date) is want of capital: meager personal resources, no investment banks. Infact, some Japanese merchants had accumulated large fortunes, and the state was ready build and subsidize plants. As to it did. But the long haul to parity needed not so much money as peoplepeople of imagination and initiative, people who understood economies of scale, who knew not only production methods and machinery but also organization and what we now software. The capital would follow and call grow.

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The Japanese determined to go beyond consumer goods. If they were to have a modern economy, they had to master the heavy work: to build machines and engines, ships and locomotives, railroads and ports and shipyards. The government played a critical role here, financing reconnaissance abroad, bringing in foreign experts, building installations, and subsidizing commercial ventures. But more important were the talent and determination of Japanese patriots, ready to change careers in the national cause, and the quality of Japanese workers, especially artisans, with skills honed and attitudes shaped by close teamwork and supervision in craft shops. Japan moved into the second industrial revolution with an alacrity that belied its inexperience. The traditional account of Japan’s successful and rapid industrialization rings with praise, somewhat mitigated by distaste for the somber and intense nationalist accompaniment-the ruthless drive that gave the development process meaning and urgency. This was the first non-Western country to industrialize, and it remains today an example to other late bloomers. Other countries sent young people abroad to learn the new ways and lost them; Japanese expatriates came back home. Other countries imported foreign technicians to teach their own people; the Japanese largely taught themselves. Other countries imported foreign equipment and did their best to use it; the Japanese modified it, made it better, made it themselves. Other countries may, for their own historical reasons, dislike the Japanese (how many Latin Americans like gringos?), but they do envy and admire them. The explanation lay partly in an intense sense of group responsibility: an indolent, self-indulgent worker would be hurting not only himself but the rest of the family. And the nation-don’t forget the nation. Most Japanese peasants and workers did notfeel this wayto begin with-under Tokugawa, they scarcely had a notion of nation. That was a primary task of the new imperial state: to imbue its subjects with a sense of higher duty to the emperor and country and to link this patriotism to work. A large share of schooltime was devoted to the study ethics; in a country without regular of of virtue and religious instruction and ceremony, school was the temple morality. As a 1930 textbook put it: “The easiest way to practice one’s patriotism [is to] discipline oneself in daily life, help keep good order in one’s family, and fully dischargeone’s responsibility on thejob.;’ Also to save and not waste. Here was a Japaneseversion of Weber’s Protestant ethic. Along with government initiatives and a collective commitment to modernization, this work Any ethic made possible the so-called Japanese economic miracle. serious understanding of Japanese performance must build on this phenomenon culof turally determined human capital.

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ON W E B E R

Max Weber, who began as a historian of the ancient world but grew into a wonder of diversified social science, published in 1904-1905 one of the most influential and provocative essays ever written: “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” His thesis: that Protestantism-more specifically its Calvinist branches-promoted the rise of modern capitalism; that is, the industrial capitalism he knew from his native Germany. Protestantism didthis, he said, not by easing or abolishing those aspects of the Roman faith that had deterred or hindered free economic activity (the prohibition usury, for of example) nor by encouraging, let alone inventing, the pursuit of wealth, but by defining and sanctioning an ethic of everyday behavior that conduced to economic success. Calvinistic Protestantism, said Weber, did this initially by affirming the doctrine of predestination: One could not gain salvation by faith or deeds; that question hadbeen decided for everyone from the beginning of time, and nothing could alter one’s fate. Such a belief could easily have encouraged a fatalistic attitude. If behavior and faith make no difference, why not live it up? Whybe good? Because, according t o Calvinism, goodness was a plausible sign of election. Anyone could be chosen, but it was only reasonable suppose that mostof the choto sen would show by their character and ways the quality of their souls and the nature of their destiny. This implicit reassurance was a powerful incentive to proper thoughts and behavior. And while hard belief in predestination did not last more than a generation or two (it not the kind of dogma is that has lasting appeal), it was eventually converted into a secular code of behavior: hard work, honesty, seriousness, the thrifty use of money and time. All of these values help business and capital accumulation, but Weber stressed that the good Calvinist did not aim at riches. (He might easily believe, however, that honest riches are a sign of divine favor.) Europe did not have to wait for the Protestant Reformation find people who wanted tobe to rich. Weber’s point is that Protestantism produced a new kind of businessman, one whoaimed to live and work a certain way. It was the way that mattered, and riches were at best a by-product. It was only much later that the Protestant ethic degenerated into a set of maxims for material success and smug, smarmy sermons on the virtues wealth. of The Weber thesis gave to all manner of rebuttal. The same rise kind of controversy has swirled around the derivative thesis of the sociologist Robert K. Merton, who argued that there was a direct link between Protestantism and the rise of modern science. Indeed, it is fair to say that most historians today

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would look upon the Weber thesis as implausible and unacceptable: It had its moment and it is gone. I do notagree. Not on the empirical level, where records show that Protestant merchants and manufacturers played a leading role in trade, banking, and industry. Nor on the theoretical. The heart of the matter lay indeed in the making of a new man-rational, ordered, diligent, productive. These virtues, while not new, were hardly commonplace. Protestantism generalized them among its adherents, who judged one another by conformity to these standards. Two special characteristicsof the Protestants reflect and confirm thislink. The first wasstress on instruction and literacy, for girls as well as boys. This was a by-product of Bible reading. Good Protestants were expected to read the Holy Scriptures for themselves. (By way of contrast, Catholics were catechized but did not have to read, and they were explicitly discouraged from reading the Bible.) The result: greater literacy from generation to generation. Literate mothers matter. The second was the importance accorded time. Here we have what the to sociologist would call “unobtrusive evidence”: the making and buying of clocks and watches. Even in Catholic areas such as France and Bavaria, most clock makers were Protestant; and the use these instruments of time meaof surement and theirdiffusion to rural areas was far more advanced Britain in and Holland than in Catholic countries. Nothing testifies so much as time sensibility to the “urbanization”of rural society, with all that implies for diffusion of values and tastes. This is not to say that Weber’s “ideal type” of capitalist could be found only among Calvinists and their later sectarian avatars. People of all faiths and no faith can grow up tobe rational, diligent, orderly, productive, clean, and humorless. Nor do they have to be businessmen. One can show and profit by these qualities in all walks of life. Weber’s argument, as I see it, is that in sixteenth- eighteenth-century northern Europe, religion encouraged to the appearance in numbers of a personality type that had been exceptional and adventitious before and that this type created a new economy (a new mode of production) thatwe know as (industrial) capitalism. History tells us that the most successful cures for poverty come from within. Foreign aid can help but, like windfall wealth, can also hurt. It can discourage effort and plant a crippling sense of incapacity. As the African gives. No, saying has it,The hand thatreceives is always under the hand that what countsis work, thrift, honesty, patience, tenacity. To people haunted by misery and hunger, that may add up to selfish indifference. But bottom, no at empowerment is so effective as self-empowerment.

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Almost All the Difference

13

Some o this may sound like a collectionof clichb-the sort of lessons one f used to learn at home and in school when parents and teachers thought they had a mission to rear and elevate their children. Today, we condescend to such verities, dismiss them as platitudes. But why should wisdom be obsolete? To be sure, we are living in a dessert age. We want things to be sweet; too many of us work to live and live to be happy. Nothing wrong with that; it just does not promotehigh productivity. You want high productivity? Then you should live to work andget happiness as a by-product. Not easy. The people who live to work are asmall and fortunate elite. But it is an elite open to newcomers, self-selected, the kind of people who accentuate the positive. In this world, the optimists have it, not because they are always right but because they are positive. Even when wrong, they are positive, and that is the way of achievement, correction, improvement, and success. Educated, eyes-open optimism pays; pessimism only offer the empty can consolation of being right.

2
Attitudes, Values, Beliefs, and the Microeconomics of Prosperity
M I C H A E L E .P O R T E R

Attitudes, values, and beliefs that are sometimes collectively referred to as “culture” play an unquestioned role in human behavior and progress. This is evident to me from working in nations, states, regions, inner cities, and companies at widely varying stages of development. The question is not whether culture has a role but how to understand this role in the context of the broader determinants of prosperity. A large literature has explored the links between culture and human progress from various perspectives. In thischapter, I explore a subset of this broader territory-the role of what might be termed “economic culture” in economic progress. Economic culture is defined as the beliefs, attitudes, and values thatbear on the economic activities of individuals, organizations, and other institutions. Although the role of culture in economic progress is unquestioned, interpreting this role in the contextof other influences and isolating the independent influence of culture is challenging. Treatments of the role of culture in economic prosperity tend to focus on generic cultural attributes that are deemed desirable, such as hard work, initiative, belief in the value of education, as well as factors drawn from macroeconomics, such as a propensity to

Attitudes,Beliefs, Values,the Microeconomics and

o f Prosperity

IS

save and invest. These are surely relevant to prosperity, but none of these generic attributesis unambiguously correlated with economic progress. Hard work is important, but just as important is what guides and directs the type of work done. Initiative is important, but notall initiative is productive. Education is crucial, but so is the type of education sought and what the education is used to accomplish. Saving is good, but only if the savings are deployed in productive ways. Indeed, the same cultural attribute can have vastly different implications for economic progress in different societies, even in the same society difor at ferent times. Frugality, for example, served Japan well until its recent prolonged recession; now it is an obstacle to recovery. The investigation of a wide range of successful nations, including the United States, Japan, Italy, Hong Kong, Singapore, Chile, and Costa Rica, reveals wide and subtle cultural differences associated with improving economic circumstances that further belie a simple connection between culture and prosperity. In this chapter, I will explore the complex links between economic culture and economic progress. The focus here is on prosperity at the level of geographic units such as nations states. Although I will often refer nations, or to in many cases the relevant economic unit can be smaller. There are striking differences in economic prosperity among states and regions within virtually every nation, and some the reasons maybe related to attitudes, values, and of beliefs. Many of the same influences can also be applied to thinking about the economic prosperity of groups that cut across geographic units such as, for example, ethnic Chinese. I will begin by outlining some of the recent learning about the sources of economic prosperity in the modern global economy. I will then draw some of tentative links between these sources and the typesbeliefs, values, and attitudes that reinforce prosperity. Doing so confronts an important question: Why might unproductive cultures arise and persist? I examine this question in the context of prevailing economic thinking and circumstances over the last century. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the scope for cultural differences in the modern economy and on how the influence culof ture may be shifting in light of the economic convergence triggered by the globalization of markets.
THE SOURCES OF PROSPERITY: COMPARATIVE VERSUS COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

A nation’s prosperity,or standardof living, is determined by the productivity with which it uses its human, capital, and natural resources. Productivity sets the level of sustainable wages and returns to capital, the principal determi-

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nants of national income per citizen. Productivity, then,is the basis of “competitiveness.” It depends on the value of products and services produced by firms in a nation, deriving, for example, from quality and uniqueness, as well as on the efficiency with which they are produced. The central issue in economic development is how to create the conditions for rapid and sustained productivity growth. In the modern global economy, productivity depends less on what industries a nation’s firms compete in than on how they compete-that is to say, the nature of their operations and strategies. In today’s global economy, firms in virtually any industry can become more productive through more sophisticated strategies and investments in modern technologies. Modern technologiesoffermajoropportunitiesforupgradinginfieldsasdis

parateas agriculture, small package delivery, or semiconductor production. Similarly, there is scope for more advanced strategies in virtually any field, involving customer segmentation, differentiated products and services, and tailored value chains to deliver products to customers. Hence, the concept of industrial targeting, in which government seeks to favor winning industries, is flawed. There is no good or bad industry in the new “productivity paradigm.” Rather, the question is whether firms are able to employ the best methods, assemble the best skills, and utilize the best techniques to dowhatever they do at an increasingly higher level of productivity. It does not matter if a country has an agricultural economy, a service economy, or a manufacturing economy. What does matter a country’s abilityto is organize itself effectively around the premise that productivity determines prosperity for the individuals of that country. In the productivity paradigm, traditional distinctions between foreign and domestic firms also lose meaning. Prosperity in a nation is a reflection of what both domestic and foreign firms choose to do in that nation. Domestic firms that produce low-quality products using unsophisticated methods hold back national productivity, whereas foreign firms that bring in new technology and advanced methods will boost productivity and local wages. Traditional distinctions between local and traded industries, and the tendency to focus policy attention only on the traded industries, also become problematic. Local industries affect the cost living for citizens and the cost doing of of business for traded industries. Neglecting them, as in the case of Japan, creates serious disadvantages. The productivity paradigm as the basis for prosperity represents a radical shift from previous conceptions of the sources of wealth. A hundred or even fifty years ago, prosperity in a nation was widely seen as resulting from the possession of nztural resources such as land,minerals, or a pool of labor, giving the country acomparative advantage relative to other countries with less

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favorable endowments. In the modern global economy, however, firms can access resources from any location cheaply and efficiently, making resources themselves less valuable. The real value of resources is falling, evidenced by the steadily declining real prices of commodities over the past century. Similarly, cheap labor is ubiquitous, so that possessing a labor pool is not in and of itself a source of advantage. With rapidly declining transportation and communication costs, even favorable geographic location relative markets to or trade routes is less of a source of advantage today than it was the past. in A firm inHong Kong or Chile, despite great distancesfrom markets, canstill be a major trading partner of the United States or Europe. Comparative advantage has given way as the basis of wealth to competitive advantage residing in superior productivity in assembling resources to create valuable products and services. Countries that improve their standard of living are those in which firms are becoming more productive through the development of more sophisticated sources of competitive advantage based on knowledge, investment, insight, and innovation. Ironically, in today’s global economy it is the local things that are increasingly important and decisive in determining why a particular firm is more competitive and productive than one based elsewhere. This is because rapid flows of trade, capital, and information nullify the advantages that a firm gets from inputs sourced from elsewhere. If a firm in one country buys its machines from Germany, so can its competitor. If a firm sources capitalfrom abroad, so can its competitor. If a firm buys raw materials fromAustralia, so can its competitor. All these approaches may be necessary, but they have essentially been neutralized as competitive advantages in today’s global economy. The remaining sources of competitive advantage are increasingly local, including special supplier or customer relationships, unique insights about market needs gleaned from local customers or partners, special access to technology and knowledge from other local institutions, or production flexibility resulting from the use of a nearby supplier.
THE MICROECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS OF PROSPERITY

Since many of the external sources of advantage for a nation’s firms have been nullified by globalization, potential internal sources of advantage must be cultivated if a country wishes to upgrade its economy and create prosperity for its citizens. Attention frequently focusedon the importance buildis of ing a sound macroeconomic, political, and legal environment. However, macroeconomic conditions, while necessary, are not sufficient to ensure a prosperous economy. Indeed, there is less and less discretion about macro-

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economic policies. Unless they are sound, the nation is punished by international capital markets. Prosperity ultimately depends on improving the microeconomic foundations of competition. The microeconomic foundations productivity rest on of two interrelated areas: the sophistication company operations and strategy of and the quality of the microeconomic business environment. Unless companies operating in a nation become more productive, an economy cannot become more productive. Yet the sophistication with which companies compete is strongly influenced by the quality of the national business environment in which they operate. The business environment has much dowith the types to of strategies that are feasible and the efficiency with which firms can operate. For example, operational efficiency is unattainable if regulatory red tape is onerous, logistics are unreliable, or firms cannot get timely supplies of components or high-quality service for their production machines. Capturing the nature of the business environment at the microeconomic level is challenging, giventhe myriad of locational influences on productivity. In The Competitive Advantage of Nations,’ I modeled the effect of location on competition via four interrelated influences: factor (input) conditions, the local context for strategy and rivalry, local demand conditions, and the strength of related and supporting industries. These form the microeconomic business environment in which a nation’s firms compete and from which they draw their sources of competitive advantage. Economic development is the long-term process of building this array of interdependent microeconomic capabilities and incentives to support more advanced forms competition. of Factor conditions refer to the nature and extent of the inputs that firms can draw upon to produce goods or services, including such things as labor, capital, roads, airports and other transportation and communication infrastructure, and natural resources. Factor inputs can be arrayed from basic (e.g., cheap labor, basic roads) to advanced (e.g., multi-modal systems of transportation, high-speed data communication infrastructure, specialized personnel with advanced degrees). The quantity the inputs is not nearly as of important as their quality and specialization. For example, if a country’s infrastructure is tailored to the field in which that country competes, productivity will increase. Similarly, pools of untrained labor are not as valuable as a specially trained workforce with the skills to produce differentiated products and to operate production processes that are more advanced and productive. In general, successful economic development requires sustained improvements in the quality and specializationof a nation’s inputs. The quality of local demand is a second critical determinant of a country’s microeconomic competitiveness. A demanding customer is a powerful tool for raising productivity. The pressures that the local customer places on a

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firm, on an industry, and on the nature competition within local industries of tend to raise productivityby enhancing the quality and value the products, of thereby improving the likelihood that those products will succeed in export markets. Demanding customers educate local firms about how to improve products and services and force themto upgrade these products and services in a way that will translate directly into higher value for customers and higher prices. On the other hand, if local demand is unsophisticated and a firm is simply imitating products developed elsewhere, productivity and international market prices will suffer. The shoe industry in Italy is a good illustration of the importance of demanding clients. Italian women try on dozens of pairs of shoes before makingpurchase. a They carefully scrutinize quality the of leather and workmanship, the shape and size of the heel, the comfort, the fashion, and other qualities. Shoe manufacturers able to survive and prosper in such a local laboratory can feel confident that shoes that are successful in Italy are likely to be successful when exported globally. The context forfirm strategy and rivalry refers therules, incentives, and to norms governing the type and intensity of localrivalry.Less-developed economies tend to have little local rivalry. Moving to an advanced economy requires that vigorous local rivalry develop and shift in character from minimizing costs and imitation to process efficiency and, ultimately, to innovation and differentiation. Healthy rivalry among local firms is fundamental to rapidly increasing productivity. If a firm cannot compete at home, it cannot compete abroad.’ It will never be nimble and improve rapidly enough if it does not face intense local competition from locally based rivals, Anti-monopoly legislation and policies that support entrepreneurship and new business development are examples of tools that a nation can use to foster healthy local rivalry. The final determinant of the strength of a country’s microeconomic business environment is the extent and quality of local suppliers and related industries. Mid-level and advanced development depends on the formation of clusters. A clusteris a geographically concentrated network of industry competitors and their many related and supporting industries and institutions. Examples of strong clusters are Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Hollywood. In fact, there are Hollywoods and Silicon Valleys all over the world, in virtually every advanced economyand in virtually every kindof industry. Clusters are an old phenomenon but one that appears to be increasingly important. The agglomeration of competitors, suppliers, and related businesses and institutions all in the same location occurs and persists because this form of organization is more productive than one that tries to assemble inputs and

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ideas from disparate locations in different parts of the world; also, it supports faster improvement and innovation. Government’s role inthe productivity paradigmis different and more indirect than in other conceptions of competitiveness. Government responsibilities begin with creating a stable and predictable macroeconomic, political, and legal environment in which firms can make the long-term strategic choices required to boost productivity. Beyond this, government must ensure that high-quality factors (inputs) areavailable to firms (e.g., educated human resources, efficient physical infrastructure); establish overall rules and incentives governing competition that encourage productivity growth; facilitate and encourage cluster development; and develop and implement a positive, distinctive, and long-term economic upgrading program for the nation that mobilizes government, business, institutions, and citizens. Government and other institutions such as universities, standards agencies, and industry groups must work together to ensure that the business environment fosters rising productivity. In the productivity paradigm, facilitating cluster development and upgrading is an increasingly important role for both government and the private sector.This approachcontrastssharplywiththehistoricalapproach of industrial policy in which “desirable” industries or sectors were targeted for development by government. Industrial policy focused on domestic companies and was based on intervention by government in competition through protectionist policies, industry promotion, and subsidies. Decisions were highly centralized at the national level, reminiscent of central planning. The cluster concept is very different. It restson the notions that clusters all can contribute to a nation’s prosperity, that both domestic and foreign companies enhance productivity, and that cross-industry linkages and complementarities are essential sources of competitive advantage that need to be encouraged. Although industrial targeting aims to distort competition in a nation’s favor, cluster-based policies seek to enhance competition by fostering externalities and removing constraints to productivity and productivity growth. The cluster approach is also more decentralized, encouraging initiative at the state andlocal levels.
ECONOMIC POLICY AND THE PROCESS OF DEVELOPMENT

Economic progress is a process of successive upgrading, in which the elements of a nation’s business environment evolve to support increasingly sophisticated and productive ways of competing. The imperatives from a business environment perspective vary as a nation moves from low income to

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middle income to high income. In early-stage development, firms compete primarily on cheap labor and natural resources. The fundamental challenge is to escape from that situation. To move beyond poverty, a nation must upgrade its inputs, institutions, and skills to allow more sophisticated forms of competition, resulting in increased productivity. This requires such things as upgrading human capital, improving infrastructure, opening to trade and foreign investment, protecting intellectual property, raising regulatory standards to pressure improvements in product quality and environmental impact, and expanding regional integration. To achieve the middle level of development, a country must focus increasingly on improving the quality its human resources, enhancing the sophisof tication of homedemand,developingitsscientificbase,ensuringlocal rivalry, and developing an advanced information and communications infrastructure. Government must work with the private sector, universities, and other institutions to build strong clusters. To reach the level of an advanced economy, the country must develop innovative capacity at the world technological frontier, on which firms can draw to create unique goods and services that can command high wages for citizens. This involves steps such as increasing investment in basic research, developing a growing pool scientific of and technical personnel, and expanding theavailability of venture capital.
BUILDING PROSPERITY: IMPLICATIONS FOR BELIEFS, ATTITUDES, AND BEHAVIOR

This discussion of the microeconomic foundations of competitiveness reveals some of the beliefs, attitudes, and values that support and promote prosperity. Prevailing beliefs about the basis for prosperity itself are among the most central. The attitudes of individuals and organizations and their economic behavior are strongly affected by what they perceive to be the way to win. Perhaps the most basicbelief undergirding successful economic development is acceptance that prosperity depends on productivity, not on control of resources, scale, government favors, or military power, and that the productivity paradigm is good for society. Without such beliefs, rent seeking and monopoly seeking will be the dominant behavior, a pathology still afflicting many developing countries. Another basic belief that supports prosperity is that the potential for wealth is limitless because itis based on ideas and insights, not fixed because of scarce resources. Wealth canbe expanded for many by improving productivity. This belief supports productivity-enhancing steps in parts of society all that will expand the pie. In contrast, theview that wealth is fixed and not related to effort leads various groups to struggle over the distribution of the

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pie, a preoccupation that almost inevitably saps productivity. This zero-sum worldview is central to the theory of a universal peasant ~ u l t u r e . ~ The productivity paradigm gives rise to a whole series of supportive attitudes and values: Innovation is good, competition is good, accountability is good, high regulatory standards are good, investment in capabilities and technology is a necessity, employees are assets, membership in a cluster is a competitive advantage, collaboration with suppliers and customers is beneficial, connectivity and networks are essential, education and skills are essential to support more productive work, and wages should not rise unless productivity rises, among others. These can be contrasted with unproductive attitudes and values: Monopoly good, power determines rewards, rigid hiis erarchy is needed to maintain control, and self-contahed family relationships should determine partnership. In any nation, there will be differences among groups and individuals in the beliefs and attitudes they hold. One can alsoview economic development as partly shaped by the tug-of-war between productivity-enhancing aspects of economic culture in a nation and productivity-eroding aspects of culture. Especially heavy weightis attached to thebeliefs and attitudes of government leaders and the business elites. A strong government may impose a productive economic culture,at least for a time, but acceptance by business interests must develop or economic progress willbe slow and reversible. Sustained development will requirethat productivebeliefs, attitudes, and values spread to workers, institutions such as churches and universities, and ultimately to civil society. Otherwise, political support willbe lacking for productivity-enhancing policies that challenge vested interests. My work hasrevealed that one of the greatest challenges in enhancing national competitiveness in many respects is to modify economic culture. The policies and behaviors that support competitiveness are becoming better known-the problem is getting true acceptance of them. A big part of the task in economic development, then, is educational because many citizens and even their leaders lack a framework for understanding the modern economy, seeing their role in it, or perceiving their stake in the behavior of other groups in society. Lack of understanding often allows special interests to block changes that will widely benefit the nation’s prosperity.
WHY DO NATIONS HAVE UNPRODUCTIVE CULTURES?

There is growing consensus about what determines prosperity and about the beliefs, attitudes, and values that foster economic progress. Why, then, do we have unproductive economic cultures? Why do these persist in certain soci-

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eties? Do individuals and companies knowingly act in ways that are counter to their economic self-interest? The answers to these questions are complex and present a fruitful area both for research and for practice. Clearly, individual and societal interests can diverge, and short-term horizons can lead to choices and behaviors that work against long-term interests. Let me suggest a number of broader answers, however. First, economic culture in a nation is strongly influenced by the prevailing ideasor paradigm about the economy. There have been numerous alternative theories of prosperity in this century, ranging from central planning to import substitution to factor accumulation.These ideas become deeply rooted in societies the educational system, the influence intellecvia of tuals and government leaders, and countless other means. At the same time, there is often ignorance about the international economy and its workings, even among political leaders. Ignorance creates a vacuum that allows these beliefs to persist. What people believe about what it takes to prosperous has much to do be with how they behave. And beliefs become reflected in attitudes and values. Unproductive economic culture, then, often arises from deeply embedded less societal traits than ignorance or the misfortune of being guided by flawed theories. The acceptance of flawed theories is sometimes a matter of pure ideology, but sometimes it is a convenience related to desired modes of political control. Military regimes often like import substitution and self-sufficiency policies, for example, because they reinforce their power and control over citizens. Nations that are able to avoid flawed ideas, for whatever reason, have benefited in termsof economic prosperity. Second, economic culture appears to be heavily derived from the past and present microeconomic context. True, individuals may in ways that might act hurt the collective interests of the society or national self-interest. But in my experience it is rare thatindividuals knowingly act in unproductive ways that are counter to their individual or company self-interest. The role of cultural attributes, then, is difficult to decouple from the influence of the overall business environment and asociety’s institutions. The way people behave in soa ciety has much to do with the signals and the incentives that are created in the economic system in which they live. For example, one often hears complaints about workers in developing countries as having a poor work ethic. But what if there is no reward for hard work? What if there is no advancement even if one works hard?A nation’s work ethic cannot be understood independently of the overall system of incentives in the economy. Similarly, companies in developing countries often behave opportunistically and not plan do based on longtime horizons. In

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fact, this short-term behavior often can be rational in an environment in which government policies are unstable and unpredictable. Rent seeking by companies, similarly, is usually associated with a political system that rewards it. National characteristics ascribed to culture, then, often have economic roots. Good examples are Japan’s lifetime employment system and its high savings rate. Lifetime employment was far from the norm in pre-World War I1 Japan and was originally instituted to control labor strife in the is early post-World War I1 period. High savings widely recognized as owing much to the memory of wartime deprivation and its aftermath, coupled with relatively early retirement, a poorly developed pension system, and exorbitant costs of home ownership requiring substantial capital accumulation. Thus it is difficult to disentangle culturally derived behaviors from behaviors that have been enhanced or encouraged by the economic system. History, in this sense, places a strong imprint on economic culture, both from experiences during “good times” and those during “badtimes.” This dependence of culture on circumstance is supported by the success of people from poor countries who have moved to a different economic system. The case of some El Salvadorans in the United States who have achieved remarkable success is one of many examples. Third, social policy choices can have a strong influence on economic Culture because they influence the economic context. good example is policies A toward the social safety net. These directly affect attitudes toward work, personal savings behavior, and willingness to invest in self-education while they indirectly influence many other aspects of a nation’s economic policies. Indeed, economic and social policies are inextricably intertwined. Much economic culture, then, is learned directly or indirectly from the economy. Exceptions include those beliefs, attitudes, and values derived not from self-interest or economic interest at all but from purely social or moral choices. Societal attitudes toward older citizens, norms for personal interaction, and religious teachings are examples of social/moral attitudes and Values that can shapeeconomic culture independently. Such attitudes and values also have a large role in establishing a nation’s social policy priorities. Even social and moral choices, however, can bear the imprint past economic cirof cumstances and learning. Religion and philosophy may well reinforce productive-or unproductive-economic culture. These arguments, taken together, suggest great caution in dismissing the economic prospects of any society becauseof culture: “Country X is not successful because workers are lazy and companies are corrupt.” Whatif the society learned different economic beliefs and instituted a different economic

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of Prosperity

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system? Similarly, it is dangerous today, in a global economy with access to advanced technology and knowledge, to rely solelyon sweeping explanations for prosperity such as geography, climate, religion. or All this suggests that economic culture is sticky and hard to change, but perhaps not as sticky asis sometimes supposed. Especially those beliefs, attitudes, and values that are unproductive canbe changed if they are no longer reinforced by prevailing beliefs or by the contextual reality faced by citizens and companies. To be sure, there will be ignorance, suspicion, and inertia before giving up what has been learned. However, the experience of the recent decade suggests that nations can modify economic culture rapidly under the right circumstance^.^ There are reasons to suspect, which I will discuss, that the pace of potential change maybe increasing.
GLOBAL CONVERGENCE AROUND THE CULTURE OF PRODUCTIVITY

Historically, world political and economic circumstances offered scope for wide variations in economic culture. noted, there have been widely As differing economic models that have, in some cases, been pursued in nations for many decades. The persistence of these disparate models, with their resulting imprint on economic actors, reflected the then prevailing circumstances.The international economy was farless globalized over the past seventyto eighty years, so that national economies were less exposed to international competition. Protectionist policies in many countries created an even more self-contained world. Economies could continue unproductive policies and behaviors for decades, even if productivity was not improving. Military force and geopolitics distorted trade patterns, sending more false messages about economic prosperity. The protectionism of the developing world, inturn, taught poorer nations thatthey had to sell natural resources and cheap labor to Europe and the United States, stunting the upgrading of their economies. Global politics, shaped by the Cold War, further insulated nations from the need for economic change. Large amounts of foreign aid went into developing countries, propping up ineffective leaders and obscuring disastrous economic policies. The persistence of unproductive economic cultures was reinforcedby limits of knowledge and limits on theability of poorer countries to improve. Citizens were often isolatedand not exposed to alternate behaviors. The pace of technological change was slow enough that the costs of technological backwardness or late adoption were not as dramatic as they today, which furare therperpetuatedbadpolicies.Therewasrelativelyslowdiffusion of economic and managerial knowledge and much less foreign investment. In-

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ternational dissemination of business knowledge was far more costly less and effective than today. Performance measurement and benchmarking across countries was rare. Old, flawed ideas about prosperity, economic policy, and management survived and in some cases were actively promoted. With many different economic models being implemented, cultural factors could play a large role in the approaches chosen and in the degree a nation’s success. of Today, however, weconfront a radically different economic context. Complacency and tolerance for slow-paced development have given way to an overwhelming sense of urgency to meet the imperatives of the global economy. Theories of development at odds with the productivity paradigm have been discredited, unable to cope with open competition or to contend with the rapid pace of technological and managerial improvement. Differences of opinion about the bases of economic prosperity and the appropriate policy choices are narrowing. Knowledge about the elements of productive economic culture is being rapidly disseminated. Citizens are more exposed to successful behaviors elsewhere. There is, then, an increasing convergence of opinion around theglobe about what it takes to prosperous. be This growing convergence around the productivity paradigm is creating strong pressures on countries that fail to internalize it. Economic policies and behaviors are being increasingly measured and compared across countries. Financial markets penalize countries without sound policies; foreign investment dries up if nations do not provide a productive business environment; workers lose their jobsif they lack a goodwork ethic. Political leadersare increasingly accountableto wider economic forces, evenif not tolocal citizens. The rapid advancement of technology is also raising the cost of being isolated from, or not embracing, international practices, thus amplifying these pressures. The result is that many nations are striving, with differing degrees of success, to embrace the productivity culture. Take Central America. Centuries of of the countries have given nationalistic, inward-looking policies in most way to a process of opening and economic integration through coordinating transportation infrastructure, harmonizing customs practices, and many other steps. All the Central American countries are movingto embrace competition and productivity. The forces of globalization have, led these small countries to puttheir nationalistic interests aside and make large strides in to changing long-standing practices. At the same time that globalizationprovides a powerful discipline on unproductive behaviors; it is rewarding productive aspects of economic culture with unprecedented flows of capital, investment, technology, and economic opportunity. The same global economy is also enabling stunning rates of progress in those nations willing to embrace it. Knowledge and technology

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have become accessibleand available as never before. Modern technology allows goods to be transported efficiently for long distances and commerce to be carried on efficiently in disparate climates. When caught in the comparative advantage mind-set, countries are limited by their endowment. In a world in which productivity, initiative, and learning are the determinants of prosperity, developing countries have unprecedented opportunities to enhance wealth. Indeed, the forces inthe new economy areso strong that itis no overstatement to suggest that economic culture is no longer a matter of choice. The question is, Will a country voluntarily embrace a productive economic culture by changing the oldbeliefs, attitudes, and values that are impeding prosperity, or will the change eventually be forced upon it? It has become a question of when and how fast a country’s economic culture will change, rather than whether itwill change. Although older citizenswho grew up under past economic approaches often resist change, the generations of younger managers in their twenties and thirties have often been trained in the new economic culture, not infrequently at international business schools. Thus there are also forces for change from within the business in many develelite oping countries. In the modern economy, which exerts great pressure on societies to adopt beliefs, attitudes, and values consistent with the productivity paradigm, does culture today have the same influence in the economic sphere that it had under a different economicorder? Historical accounts often include rich discussions of the impact of cultural attributes on societies and their development paths because historically these attributes were persistent exerted considand erable influence on the economic configuration of societies. Yet the convergence of economicideasandthepressures of theglobalmarkethave arguably reduced the scope for cultural variables to influence the economic paths societies choose. What we are witnessing, in many ways, is the emergence of the core of an international economic culture that cuts across traditional cultural divides and will increasingly be shared. A set of beliefs, attitudes, and values that hear on the economy will be common, and the clearly unproductive aspects of culture will fall away under the pressure, and the opportunity, of the global economy. An important role for culture in economic prosperity will remain, but it may well be a more positive one. Those unique aspectsof a society that give rise to unusual needs, skills, values, and modes of work will become the distinctive aspects of economic culture. These productive aspects of culture, such as Costa Rica’s passion for ecology, America’s convenience obsession, and Japan’s passion for games and cartoons, will become critical sources of hard-to-imitate competitive advantage, resulting in new patterns

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of international specialization, as nations increasingly produce those goods and services in which their culturegives them a unique advantage. Thus, although global convergence around the productivity paradigm is increasing, cultural differences will certainly remain. Globalization will not eradicate culture, as some have feared. However, instead of isolating some peoples in their economic disadvantage, these cultural differences can contribute the specialized advantages so important to improving the prosperity of nations in the global economy. In a global economy in which so many things can be easily sourced from anywhere, cultural differences give rise that to distinctive products and services should become more celebrated.

3
Notes on a New Sociology of Economic Development
JEFFREY SACHS

INTRODUCTION: THE GROWTH PUZZLE

The greatest puzzle in economic development is why sustained economic growth is so hard to achieve. Before 1820, there was essentially no such thing as sustained economic growth. Angus Maddison (1995) estimates that world growth of GDP per capita averaged around 0.04 percent per annum from 1500 to 1820. Whereas Western Europe and its colonies in North America and Oceania had pulled ahead of other regions by 1820, the gap between Western Europe and the world’s poorest region (sub-Saharan Africa) was only three to one, according to Maddison’s estimates. All regions of the world experienced arise in per capita income after1820, with world growth rising to 1.21 percent per year between 1820 and 1992, but the growth has been very uneven. The two groups of nations already ahead in 1820, Western Europe and what Maddison terms the Western offshoots (the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) pulled ahead still further, and today they constitute most of the developed world. Among the richest thirty countries in the world as of 1990, twenty-one were in Western Europeor were Western offshoots.Five were inAsia: Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. The other four countries include two

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small oil states (Kuwait and United Arab Emirates), Israel, and Chile. These thirty countries account for about 16 percent of the world’s population. By the 1990s, the gap between the richest region(the Western offshoots) and the poorest (sub-Saharan Africa) rose around twenty to to one. Three broad explanations may help account for the growth puzzle. to Geography: Certain parts of the world are geographically favored. Geographical advantages might include access key natural to resources, access to the coastline andsea-navigable rivers, proximity to other successful economies, advantageous conditions for agriculture, advantageous conditions for human health. Social Systems: Certain social systems have supported modern economic growth, whereas others have not. Precapitalist systems based on serfdom, slavery, inalienable landholdings, and so forth, tended to frustrate modern economic growth. this century, In socialism proved to be a disaster for economic well-being and growth wherever it was attempted. Similarly, colonial rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was generally adverse to high rates of economic growth. Positive Feedback: Positive feedback processes amplified the advantages of early industrialization, thereby widening the gap between rich and poor. First, the early European industrializers exploited the laggard regions through military conquest and colonial rule. Many of the laggard societies collapsed when they were challenged militarily or economically by the richer nations. Second, the technological gap between the advanced and lagging countries has tended to widen rather than narrow time. Technological over innovation operates like a chain reaction in which current innovations provide the fuel for future breakthroughs. Neoclassical economic theory does not answer the growth puzzle because it neglects the roles of geography, social institutions, and positive feedback mechanisms. Even the dynamics of innovation have been under-studied until recently. In neoclassical economics, development is really not much of a challenge. Market institutions are a given. Countries are assumed to save and accumulate capital, whereas technology and capitalis assumed to flow readily across national borders. Since the marginal product of capital is higher in capital-scarce countries than in capital-rich countries, and since the technologically lagging countries can import the technologies of the richer countries, the poorer countries are expected to grow faster than the rich countries.

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Neoclassical economics therefore has an ingrained optimism about the prospects for economic convergence-the tendency for the poor country to grow faster than the country and to narrow the gap inincome levels. Of rich course, classical and neoclassical economists since Adam Smith have recognized that flawed economic institutions may hinder growth, but the optimism of neoclassicaleconomics is sustained by the view thatflawed economic institutions will be swept away by institutional competition or through public choice. Neoclassical economics certainly helps explain variousimportant episodes of rapid economic growth in the modern period. The rise of the East Asian economies in recent decades owes muchto the rapid accumulation of capital and technology in a market-based, capital-scarce region. Similarly, the narrowing of the gap between northern Europe and southern Europe in the postwar period is clearly related to the convergence mechanisms stressed by neoclassical economics, again because the assumptions of the neoclassical framework have applied well in the Western European circumstances. The main problem is that these convergence mechanisms apply only in specific circumstances, not as general processes. This chapter sketches a more extended sociological framework for understanding the uneven nature of world economic growth. I stress that an adequate theory must address physical geography and the evolution of social institutions, both through internal social change and through the interaction of societies across national borders.

THE ROLE OF GEOGRAPHY

If social scientists were to spend more time looking at maps, they would be reminded of the powerful geographical patterns in economic development. Two basic patterns stand out. First, the temperate regions of the world are vastly more developed than the tropics. (In the list of the thirty richest countries, only two, Hong Kong and Singapore-accounting for less than 1 percent of the combined population of the richest thirty countries-are in a tropical zone.) Second, geographically remote regions-either those far from the coasts and navigable rivers or mountainous states withhigh internal and international transport costs-are considerably less developed than societies on coastal plains or navigable rivers. Landlocked states in general face the worst problems. They are both distant from the coast and must cross least at one political border on the way to international trade. Although Europe boasts some rich landlocked economies (especially Austria, Luxembourg, and Switzerland), those countries have the advantage being surrounded by of

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rich coastal economies. In other regions of the world, landlocked countries are almost uniformly poor. The reasons for the widespread impoverishment in the tropics are complex, but the phenomenon is general, occurring in all parts of the world. We don’t really have a North-South division in the world; instead, we have a temperate-tropical division. There are probably three major explanations for the persisting impoverishment of the tropics: agricultural factors, health factors, and factors relating to the mobilization of scientific resources. Tropical agriculture faces several problems that lead to reduced productivity of perennial crops in general and of staple food crops in particular: weak soils and high soil erosion and exhaustion under tropical rain forest conditions; difficulties of water control and risks of drought in the wet-dry tropics; very high incidence of agricultural and veterinary pests; high rateof food spoilage in storage; and reduced rates of net photosynthetic potential in regions with warm nighttime temperatures. The result seems to be an intrinsic limit on food productivity in large regions of the tropics. Exceptions include the alluvial and volcanic soil regions, such as the Nile Delta and Java, and intermontane valleys, where nighttime temperatures are lower. Highly populated tropical highland regions include Central America, the Andes, the Great Lakes and Rift Valley regions of East Africa, and the Himalayan foothills. The burden of infectious disease is similarly higher in the tropics than in the temperate zones. Most infectious diseases in temperate zones are transmitted directly between humans (e.g., tuberculosis, influenza, pneumonia, sexually transmitted diseases). In the tropics, there are also major vectorborne diseases (malaria, yellow fever,schistosomiasis,trypanosomiasis, ochocerciasis, Chagas’ disease, filariasis, among others), in which animals that flourish in the warm climate, such as flies, mosquitoes, and mollusks, play the critical role of intermediate hosts. The combination of poor agricultural productivity and high incidence of infectious disease has had manifold adverse effects: a high proportion of the population in agriculture because of the absence of an agricultural surplus; low degree of urbanization; a high concentration in remote high-altitude regions (e.g., the Andean altiplano and the Great Lakes region of Africa) seeking to escape the problems of the hotter, tropical plains; lower expectancy life and a smaller accumulation of human capital. A third disability may be associated with the tropics. Temperate regions have been more populated than tropical regions for at least 2,000 years. On (1978), the very rough calculation, using the data in McEvedy and Jones tropics have had about one-third of the world’s population during the past two millennia. If productivity growth is related to the size of population and

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if productivity advances in one ecological zone do not easily cross into another zone, then the temperate zone might be advantaged by having a higher share of world population. Both of these assumptions seemrealistic. Productivity growth is spurred by larger demand, and it is facilitated by a larger supply of potential innovators. Similarly, productivity advances in the temperate zone in areas such as agriculture, health, and construction are unlikely to be directly applicable to the very different ecological conditions of the tropics. Thus the higher rate of productivity advance in the temperate zone might not easily diffuseto the tropics. From this perspective, commenting on Hong Kong and Singapore, two small economies in the geographical tropics (though only Singapore is in the ecological tropics), is worthwhile. These are, indeed, exceptions that help prove the rule. Both island city-statesare concentrated in manufacturing and services. They don’t have to grapple with low agricultural productivity or disease-carrying vectors. Another major dimension of geography is the endowment of mineral resources, especially energy resources and precious minerals (e.g., gold, diamonds). In the nineteenthcentury, when transport costs were still very high in comparison to today, coal was a sine qua non of heavy industrialization. The Nordic countries, southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East were disadvantaged in heavy industry relativethe countriesof the coal belt to that stretches from Britain across the North Sea to Belgium, France, Germany, and Poland and into Russia. Of course,other regions could developon the basis of agriculture and light industry, but they could not develop metallurgy, transport, and chemical industries. In the twentieth century, falling transport costs and the useof oil, gas, and hydroelectric power for the generation of energy have relaxed this constraint. Geography is, no doubt, just one part of the puzzle. Several temperatezone regions havenot done well, as leastnot as well as Western Europe, East Asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan), and the Western offshoots. The lagging temperate-zone regions include North Africa and the Middle East, parts of the Southern Hemisphere (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and South Africa), and large parts of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union that until recently were under communist rule. To understand these cases, we need to turn to social theory.
SOCIAL SYSTEMS AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

As an empirical matter, economic growth has been related to political, cultural, and economic factors and has been intimately connected with capitalist social institutions characterized a state subjectto the rule of law, a culture by

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that supports ahigh degree of social mobility, and economic institutions that are market based and support an extensive and complex division of labor. Few societies have displayed this combination of political, cultural, and economic institutions. Moreover, history suggests that there is no strong tendency for societies to develop such institutions through internal evolution. Indeed, so powerful are the barriers evolutionary social change that funto damental institutional change typically results from external shocks rather than internal evolution. Most important in the past two hundred years have been the tumultuous interactions between economically advanced and economically lagging societies. These interactions causeprofound social turmoil in the lagging societies that break the internal social equilibrium. The resulting turmoil may produce a reorientation of social institutions in a way that supports economic growth. Often, though, the result has been economic collapse and even the loss of sovereignty. Max Weber’s monumental sociology was the first to lay out an adequate description of the social institutions of modern capitalism. Weber drew “ideal type’’ distinctions between precapitalist and capitalist societies. In precapitalist societies, political authority is traditional and arbitrary, unbound by legal restraints. Social norms support hierarchical distinctions. Major markets do notexist, and thelesser markets that do are constrained social by or legal barriers. In capitalist societies, the stateis bound by the rule of law. Social mobility is high. And economic exchange is heavily mediated through market institutions. Weber’s sociology was written at the start of the twentieth century. His field of inquiry was the emergence of capitalism in Western Europe and the of reasons for its absence in other parts the Old World. It is timely to update Weber’s sociology at the beginning of the twenty-first century, asking a somewhat different question: Why did capitalism spread unevenly to other parts of the world? Weber’s comparative institutional analysis provides partof the framework for such an inquiry. Weber did not, however, deal adequately with three issues. First, he presented relatively static portraits of capitalist and non-capitalist societies, not the principles that govern their social evolution. Second, he did not deal adequately with intersocietal interactions, including institutional imitation or rejection, colonial rule, and military conflict. Third, he focused on precapitalist and capitalist societies. His sociological maps would have to be extended to atleast three other broad types of social organization: colonial rule, socialist society, and collapsed societies. me offer a brief deLet scription of each. In colonial societies, the essence of politics is exclusionary rule with the state apparatus controlled by the colonial power, the principal objective be-

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ing maintenance of order. Traditional cultural institutions are systematically undermined in the interests of economic exploitation. Economic institutions are designed to ensure the terms of trade of the colonizer. Colonial rule was not a very good “school” for moderncapitalism. In socialist societies, politics is dominated by a repressive single-party organization. Traditional culture, especially religion, is suppressed, as are all private market activity and accumulationof private wealth. With the benefit of hindsight, we can nowsee clearly that socialism was economically destructive almost everywhere, with the possible exception of a few heavily subsidized remote areas within the Soviet empire. There is another frequently occurring social condition, which we might call “social collapse,” in which social institutions cease functioningand society is thrust into a Hobbesian war of all against all. Recreating any form of social order is typically very difficult after suchan internal collapse. Since so much of the developing world has passed through such a state of social collapse, it is worth specifying its main features. With respect to politics, state authority does notexist or is extremely limited, a condition often accompaniedby violence. Cultural mechanisms of social trust break down, as do the market mechanisms of the economy. Black markets appear and monetary transactions maybe replaced by barter. One major goalof a revised sociology wouldbe to explain the movements of society among these states (precapitalist, capitalist, colonial, socialist, and collapsed society). Why did some parts of the world make a relatively smooth transition to capitalism while others were colonized and still others collapsed? In which ways did the colonial experience prepare societies for capitalism, and in which ways did it frustrate the transition even beyond the colonial period itself? We are not yet in a position to answer these questions. The next section merely sketches some hypotheses.

PATTERNS IN THE DIFFUSION OF CAPITALISM

Marx and Engels were prescient in understanding the dynamism of the new capitalist system in Western Europe. They surmised, correctly, that capitalism would eventually spread to the entire world, based on the superiority of its economic productivity. The bourgeoisie,by the rapid improvementof the instruments of production and the immensely expanded means of communication, draws all nations into civilization. The cheap prices capitalism’s commodities are the heavy of artillery with which it batters down all walls and forces the “barbarians”to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of

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production. It compels them introduce “civilization” into their midst, is, to that to become bourgeoisthemselves. It creates a world after own image. its Yet the process was anything but rapid and smooth. We need a better sociological theory of institutional change if we are to understand this long, frequently bitter, and oftenviolent process. Since we don’t have a general theory of social evolution, or even a mapping of how capitalism did or did notdiffuse from Western Europe to therest of the world, I think it most useful to is offer some hypotheses,or atleast informed ‘speculation. Capitalist institutions are generally resisted elites of non-capitalist by societies because of the implications of capitalism for increased social, political, and economic competition. Thus, in virtually every type of society (precapitalist,socialist, colonial), elite actors try to frustrate orlimit the institutionalization of the rule of law, the norms of social mobility, and the introduction of market institutions. Capitalist reforms are least likely progress in highly stratified to societies (e.g., Russia or the OttomanEmpire in the nineteenth century), since social elites are better positionedto resist change. Capitalist reforms tendto be resisted especially fiercely political by elites that have a weak claim on their ownlegitimacy. For example, the fact that nineteenth-century China was ruled a foreign dynasty by with dubious legitimacy (the Manchus) no doubt raised barriers to internal institutional change. Internal reforms in many regions were cut short colonial rule. In by in general, colonial powers did not carry out market reforms the colonized society, since this would have empowered local inhabitants and undermined foreign rule. Thus, the spread of capitalism was short-circuited by the European capitalist powers themselves, often for a century or more. Threatened societies often experienced internal collapse rather than reform, mainly because the outside threat leads to a financial crisis and hence a collapse of political power or because the outside threat delegitimized the internal rulers,or both. Internal collapse can be followed by a bewildering array of outcomes, including chronic chaos ( A la Haiti). Social collapse is often the occasion of revolutionary change. In the wake the financial and of political collapse of the tsarist regime in1917, Lenin was able to seize and consolidate power despite the absence any broad-based of political support. The Soviet system was then spreadthrough military power into Eastern and Central Europe. The adoption of capitalist institutions is strongly favored by certain geographical conditions:

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coastal states rather than hinterland states, states proximate to other capitalist societies, states on major international trade routes, regions with fertile agriculture, which in turn supports a high level of urbanization, Capitalist institutions are favored in societies linked world markets to through cultural connections (e.g., a dominant religion or a minority diaspora with linksto other countries). Modern capitalism began in the North Atlantic societies, especially England and Holland, after centuries of active trade and development in the Mediterranean. It was carried naturally to the lands of new settlement in North America and to Australia and New Zealand. These regions were distinguished by several factors, the most important of which were that they shared the same temperate zone ecological conditions as Britain and that native populations were sparse, even more after decimation by European disso ease. Within Western Europe, capitalist institutions spread from westeast, to carried by Napoleon’s armies, by the Revolution of 1848, and by the example of British industrialization. By 1850, modern capitalism existed in Western Europe and the Western offshoots. The remainder of the Americas deserves a special word. The Caribbean was settled as slave societies, mostly for sugar production. It remained colonized, with the important exceptions of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) until the end the nineteenth century (in the case Cuba) or of of the middle of the twentieth century (in the Lesser Antilles and Jamaica). Most of the region was long characterized by white rule over an impoverished population of former slaves, and environmental degradation dueto exhaustion of the tropical soils. The Spanish colonies varied considerably. Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, in the Southern Hemisphere temperate zone, are most similar to the lands of new settlement in North America and Oceania. Native populations were sparse. The climate was similar that of Spain. Although these to countries were politically unstable in the first decades of independence (from around 1820 to 1870), by 1870 they had become more or less capitalist societies with formal democratic structures, albeit with extremely unequallanddistribution.IntropicalCentralAmericaandtheAndean countries, the situation was very different. Most of these societies had much larger indigenous Amerindian populations. Societies therefore developedwithinequalitiesandsocialstratificationbetweenEurop

ean-descended whites and native inhabitants plus imported slaves. These societies resisted capitalist institutions for much longer, due no doubt to their extreme inequalities.

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The fiercest nineteenth-century battles over economic reform were fought in the Old World, in the great empires of China, Japan, Russia, and the Ottomans. Here the general principles observed earlier seem to be helpful. In three of the four cases (all but Japan), societies proved to be strongly resistant to capitalist reform, even when fundamentally threatened by Western European encroachments. Japan alone experienced a swift “capitalist revolution” after a coup in 1868. This transformation was favoredby Japan’s preexisting commercial society; its cultural homogeneity; its coastal orientation, which allowed export-led growth; and even its coal deposits, which permitted early industrialization. In the other societies, a combination of political and cultural obstacles frustrated attempts at reform. Politics and culture worked in the same direction: Social elites resisted reforms that threatened their favored positions within long-standing social orders. Almost all of the rest of the world-essentially the Old Worldtropics-fell under colonial rule. This wasuniformly true in Africa after the spread of quinine opened the way for European settlement and conquest in malarial subSaharan Africa. North Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia similarly fell under European rule. Japan colonized Korea and Taiwan, and Central Asia was absorbed within the Russian empire. By 1900, there was a discernible if crude tally. Capitalism was prevalent in Western Europe, the Western offshoots, and, with some qualifications, the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay), and Japan. These countries accounted for approximately one-fifth of the world’s population. The New World tropics (the Caribbean, Central America, and South America) were generally highly stratified, white-ruled societies in which much of the population lacked freedom, education, and social mobility. The Old World tropics and the Indian subcontinent were colonized by European powers. The three great empires-the Ottomans, tsarist Russia, and Ch’ing Chinawere all collapsing under the weight of European encroachments, declining legitimacy at home, and growing fiscal burdens from the external challenges. Let me jump ahead sixty-five years-past the Bolshevik revolution, two world wars, and the Great Depression. Socialism had spreadto much of the world. Decolonization was under way in Africa and was completed in the Indian subcontinent and much of Southeast Asia. I wantto stress that little of the world, as late as 1965, was capitalist in orientation. Indeed, we could make the following rough tally: capitalist world: Western Europe, Western offshoots, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore (21 percent of world population);

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socialist world: Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe, North Korea, China, Cuba (32 perceni of world population); highly statist and in some cases one-party socialist rule: Argentina, Chile, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Turkey(23 percent of world population); mixed capitalisdnon-capitalist societies with extreme internal inequalities: tropical Americas, South Africa, Rhodesia(6 percent of world population); others: still colonized, traditional, and so on (18 percent of world population). The general lesson, in summary, is that most of the world in modern history has been governed by non-capitalist institutions. The process of social reform was stymied in four ways: by the resistance of traditional Old World societies (mainly the majorempires-the Ottomans, Russia, and China), by a period of colonial domination, by the adoption of socialism, and by social collapse. As late as 1965, only about one-fifth of the world could be counted as operating accordingto capitalist social institutions.

INCREASING RETURNS TO SCALEAS ANOTHER SOURCE OF WIDENING INEQUALITY

Another likely reason for the growing gap between rich and poor is that a major part of the economic development process-technological innovation-is characterized by increasing returns to scale. In theories of endogenousgrowth,newinnovationsareproduced by thestock of existing technological “blueprints” in society. Ideas beget ideas. The dynamics of innovation may be characterized by increasing returns to scale, in which a kind of chain reaction takes place in response an initial stock of ideas. Societies to that have a critical mass of technological ideas may experience a takeoff into self-sustaining growth, whereas societies that fall short of that critical mass may experience continuing stagnation. The rich get richer because existing ideas are the sourceof new ideas. There is surely some merit in this view. World science is even more unequally distributed than world income. The high-income regions (Western Europe, North America, Japan and the NICs, and Oceania) contain around 16 percent of world population and 58 percent of world GDP but account for around 87 percent of scientific publications and astounding 99 percent an of all European and U.S. patents.

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CULTURE MATTERS SOME ECONOMETRIC EVIDENCE ON THE SOURCES OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

There are sixty-one countries in the world with half or more of the population in temperate plus snow climatic zones. Of these, twenty-four countries were socialist during much of the post-World War I1 period. That leaves thirty-seven non-socialist temperatehow zone countries. Of those, six are landlocked outside of Western Europe (Lesotho, Malawi, Nepal, Paraguay, Zambia, and Zimbabwe). Thus we have thirty-one temperatehow zone economies that were neither landlocked norsocialist. Of these thirty-one, all but seven are developed, if we use the threshold of $10,000 per capita in 1995 purchasing power parity (PPP) adjusted prices. The seven include four countries in North Africa and the Middle East (Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey), and three Southern Hemisphere countries (Argentina, South Africa, and Uruguay). These seven countries are anomalous from a geographical viewpoint. Why have they not achieved economic development? Among culture, politics, economic institutions, which have been the major culprits? The tantalizing possibility from a cultural point view is that the lagging of development of North Africa and the MiddleEast demonstrates a strong cultural component. Is there evidence here that, controlling for climate and geography, these Islamic countries face deeper internal obstacles to economic growth? Note that the cultural obstacles could be internal (e.g., opposition to market-based institutions emanating from within society) or they could be externally imposed (e.g., European discrimination against the region in trade policies). It is not possible at a macroeconomic level to disentangle such interpretations, assuming that eitheror both is actually correct. The case for cultural factors in the other three countries is more dubious. Argentina and Uruguay are largely immigrant countries, sharing the cultural norms mainly of southern Europe. However, since these countries lagfar behind southern Europe, we should suspect that geography and politics rather than culture per se is the predominant explanation of the lagging performance. Indeed, this is made more clear by the fact that Argentina was well above the incomelevel of Italy as of 1929 ($4,367compared with $3,026 in 1990 PPP adjusted dollars, according to the Maddison data). The shortfall in Argentina’s performance occurred during the past half century and is clearly related to changes in domestic politics and economic strategy during and after the Per6n regime. Uruguay’s economic development followed closely upon that of its much larger neighbor. South Africa, finally, must be viewed mainly through the prism of colonial and racial policies rather than culture.

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What about success stories among the tropical countries? Sadly, there are precious few. Only one tropical coulltry (Singapore) plus one former colony now part of China (Hong Kong) rank among the top thirty countries. Suppose we focus our attention on the relative success stories: tropical countries that have a 1995 per capita income level at $6,000 or above. There are, in addition to Singapore and Hong Kong, eight such cases (out of a total of forty-six tropical countries), listed in order of income per capita: Malaysia, Mauritius, Gabon, Panama, Colombia, Costa Rica, Thailand, and Trinidad and Tobago. Two of these countries make the list mainly because of oil resources (Gabon and Trinidad and Tobago). Panama no doubt benefits mainly from its geographical distinctiveness rather than good government or culturaladvantages.Themoreinterestinganomaliesthereforeinclude Malaysia, Mauritius, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Thailand. Again, we should ask whether culture rather than politics has been decisive in the relatively strong performance of these countries. Thailand and Malaysia have benefited strongly from export-led growth in the past thirty years, disproportionately concentrated among the overseas Chinese communities in those countries, and the links that the overseas Chinese communities have made with foreign investors from the United States, Japan, and Europe. More generally, the trade and financial linkages in Asia among the Chinese diaspora communities (especially Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand) and Greater China (Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Mainland) may well constitute a case in which cultural factors have contributed to successful development. (As always, there is an important ambiguity about the role that culture may play here. It may involve intrinsic factors within thebelief systems of the community or it may rather provide a network of trusted economic connections).It is ironic, of course, that Weberian sociology pointed to China as a case of culturally arrested development set in contrast to growth under Protestant cultural norms. The evidence of . the past half century, including China’s own opening to market forces after 1978, strongly suggests that political factors and poor economic institutions, rather than culture per se, lie behind the many centuries of China’s lagging economic development. To summarize these points, the great divisions between rich and poor countries involve geography and politics (especially whether or not the country was socialist in the postwar era). If culture is in fact an important determinant of cross-country experience, it seems play a subsidiary role these to to broader geographical and political/economic dimensions. Nonetheless, there are indeed some hints of culturally mediated phenomena. Two are most apparent: the under-performance of Islamic societies in North Africa and the Middle East and the strong performance of tropical countries in East Asia

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that have an important overseas Chinese community. In each case, thereis a deeper ambiguity of interpretation. Is the cultural signal related to beliefs within the community or rather to the international relations (and therefore trade prospects) of the countries in question? Space limitations preclude a detailed treatment hereof a regression analysis undertaken in 1999 to test these hypotheses. The conclusions: The basic variables are as expected-economic affects policy growth rates, temperatehow zone economies grow faster than tropical countries, regions with falciparum malaria grow less rapidly than regions without the disease, and landlocked countries grow moreslowly than countries with a coastline. The coefficients on Hindu and Muslimsocieties are smalland statistically insignificant. There is, in short, no evidence that Hindu or Muslim populations achieved lower growth rates, controlling for economic policy variables geor ography variables. The same methodology can be used to show that former colonies do not demonstrate any sign of residual adverse effects of the colonial period in the sense that growth during 1965-1990 is not strongly affected by colonial status before 1965. Thus, although the colonial period was probably adverse for economic growth, there is no evidence of a longer-term adverse legacy. Clearly, though, more careful work should be carried out on that important question.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

This chapter has discussed an approach to thesociology of economic development, including the possible role of cultural institutions in economic performance.Ithasarguedthatmoderneconomicgrowth is intimately connected with capitalist institutions and favorable geography. There only is slight evidence that religious categories add explanatory power above those two broad classes of explanation of economic growth. There is some evidence that the Muslim countries of North Africa and the Middle East have under-performed over the long term relative to their favorable geography (temperate zone, specifically Mediterranean climate, and coastal orientation). However, there is no evidence that such under-performance has continued after 1965, and, at least in the past ten years, several Muslim countries have sharply outperformed the world average. The cultural explanations of economic performance may be helpful in some circumstances, especially in accounting for resistance to capitalist reforms in the nineteenth century, but such explanations should also be tested against a framework that allowsfor other dimensions of society (geography, politics, economics) to play their role. Controlling for such variables sharply

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reduces the scope for an important independent role of culture. More broadly, there is considerable historical work remaining to develop a sound framework for measuring and studying the evolution of social institutions and the interactionsof politics, culture, andeconomics in the course of social change. Equally important, we must better understand the role of cross-border factors in social evolution. The weight of international factors in social change has been extremely high for least two centuries, and it is bound to at increase in the future under thepressures of increasing globalization of society, politics, and economics.
REFERENCES

Kornai, Janos. 1992.The Socialist System. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Landes, David. 1998. The Wealthand Poverty of Nations. New York: Norton. Maddison, Angus. 1995.Monitoring the World Economy, 1820-1 992. Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperationand Development. McEvedy, Colin, and Richard Jones. 1978. Atlas of World Population History. New York: Penguin. Weber, Max. 1979. Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Young, Crawford. 1995. The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. New Haven: Yale University Press.

4
A Cultural Typology of Economic Development
M A R I A N 0G R O N D O N A

The process of economic development reaches a crisis when a nation passes from one stage to the next. It is at that moment when temptations arise. If the nation manages to resist these temptations, it will achieve development; otherwise, it will only enjoy a short period of enrichment. When the cycle starting with labor and ending reinvestment has yielded in some fruit and people feel richer, they may be inclined to work less. On the other hand, consumption may rise at a pace that reduces the surplus, so that development turns into enrichment. Furthermore, even if the surplus is increased, a nation may decide not to return it to productive investment. It may instead spend it on those priorities to which nations have often surrendered, such as works that are monuments to leaders, wars of prestige, utopian plans of welfare, or outright corruption. Nationsmay also be tempted to preserve their stage of development through protectionist strategies or policies that discourage entrepreneurship and investment. Every time a crucial temptation appears, a country may either overcome it or fall into it. Thus we may also define the process economic development of as an unending sequence of decisions favorable to investment, competition, and innovation that are made whenever the temptation diverge arises. to A nation must transit the moments temptation in ways favorable ecoof to nomic development. It will do so if certain values prevail. Talcott Parsons

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writes that “value” may be considered an element within a conventional symbolic systemthat serves as a criterionfor selecting among thealternatives available in a given situation.’ Only those nations with a value system favorable to temptation-resisting decisions are capable of sustained, rapid development. There are two categories of values: intrinsic and instrumental. Intrinsic values are those we uphold regardless the benefits or costs. Patriotism, as a of value, demands sacrifices andis sometimes “disadvantageous” as far as individual well-being is concerned. Nevertheless, hundreds of millions of people have died to defend their country throughout the course history. of In contrast, a value is instrumental when we support it because it is directly beneficial to us. Let us assume that a countryis dedicated to economic growth and to this end emphasizes work, productivity, and investment. If decisions favorable to development only answer to instrumental value of an an economic nature, such as increased wealth, the country’s effort will decline as soon as thedegree of wealth is attained. Why should a nation go on acting as if it were poor once it is rich? The revolution of economic development occurs when people go on working, competing, investing, and innovating even when they no longer need doso to to be rich. This is only possible when the values pursued, which promote prosperity, do not vanish as prosperity arrives. Thus the values prevailing at the crucial moments of decisions leading to economic development must be intrinsic and not instrumental, since instrumental values are by definition temporary: Only intrinsic values are inexhaustible. No instrument survives its utility, but an intrinsic value always calls to us from an ever distant summit. All economic values are instrumental.We want to have money as a means to some non-monetary end such as well-being, happiness, freedom, security, religion, or philanthropy. To make development unending, therefore, the accumulation process must not be suffocated by its own success. This means that thevalues driving constant investmentcannot be of an economic nature; otherwise, they would vanish with economic success. When a nationis rich, something other than the pursuit of wealth must be present in its value system so that the wealth generated never suffices. This non-economic “something’’ may be salvation, survival, safety, excellence, prestige, even empire: or any value that will always be wanting. However, the intrinsic values indispensable for sustained development, although non-economic, must not be anti-economic. They must be non-economic and pro-economic at the same time. Being non-economic, they will not be exhausted by economic success; being pro-economic, they will unceasingly push forward the process of accumulation.

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The paradox of economic development is that economic values are not enough to ensure it. Economic development is too important to be entrusted solely to economic values. The values accepted or neglected by a nation fall within the cultural field. We may thus say that economic development is a cultural process. Values fall within that province of culture we call “ethics.” The behavior of someone who acts out of respect for an intrinsic value formerly accepted at will and later incorporated asan inner imperative is called “moral.” A person is moral when answering to intrinsic values. If a country achieves economicdevelopmentwhenresponding to non-economic values that are nevertheless pro-economic, we can conclude that economic development is a moral phenomenon. Without the presence of values favorable to economic development, temptations will prevail. Temptations are the bearers of shortterm expectations, but economic development is a long-term process. In the struggle between short and long term, the formerwill win unless a value intervenes in the decisionmaking process. This is the function of values: to serve as a bridge between short-term and long-term expectations, decisively reinforcing distant goals in their otherwise hopeless struggle against instant gratification. In Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind,2 Lawrence E. Harrison focuses on economic development from a cultural pointof view. To illustrate his thesis, Harrison offers bilateral comparisons: Costa Rica and Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, Barbados and Haiti, Australia and Argentina, the United States and Latin America. The development gap between each pair is explained by cultural factors, whereas a chapter on Spain and Spanish America focuseson the cultural similarities and their consequences. After reading Harrison’s book, I felt inclined to venture beyond bilateral comparisons in orderto produce a cultural typology in which two ideal types of value systems confront each other: one totally favoring economic development and the other totally resisting it. Under the theoretical umbrella of those two ideal types, Harrison’s analysis would provide case studies. Values can be grouped in a consistent pattern that we may call a “value system.” Real value systems are mixed; pure value systems exist only in the mind, as ideal types. It is possible to construct two ideal value systems: one including only valuesthat favor economic development and the other including only values that resist it. A nation is modern as far as it approaches the former system; it is deemed traditional as far as it approaches the latter. Neither of these value systems exists in reality, and no nation falls completely within either of those two value systems. However, some countriesapproach the extreme favorable to economic development, whereas others approach the opposite extreme.

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Real value systemsare moving as well as mixed. they are moving toward If the favorable value-system pole, they improve a nation’s chances developof ing. If they move in the opposite direction, they diminish a nation’s chances of developing. This typology embraces twenty factors that are viewed very differently in cultures that are favorable and those that are resistantdevelopment. These to differences are intimately linked to the economic performance of the contrasting cultures. In choosing a system values closer to either the favorable of or resistant ideal systems, people actually prefer the kind of economy that flows from those systems, and that is what they will have. This leads to a controversial conclusion: In the last analysis, developmentor underdevelopment are not imposed on a society from outside; rather, it is the society itself that has chosen development or underdevelopment.

TWENTY CONTRASTING CULTURAL FACTORS

Religion
Throughout history, religion has been the richest source of values. It was of course Max Weber who identified Protestantism, above all its Calvinist branch, as the root of capitalism. In other words, what initiated economic development was a religious revolution, one in which the treatment of life’s winners (the rich) and losers (the poor) was centrally relevant. Weber labeled the religious (essentially Roman Catholic) current that showed a preference for the poor over the rich “publican,” whereas he termed the current that preferred the rich and successful (essentiallyProtestant) “pharisaic.” Where a publican religionis dominant, economic development will be difficult because the poor will feel justified in their poverty, and the rich will be uncomfortable because they themselves as sinners.By contrast, therich in see pharisaic religions celebrate their success as evidence of God’s blessing, and the poor see their condition as God’s condemnation. Both the rich and the poor have a strong incentive to improve their condition through accumulation and investment. In the context of this typology, publican religions promote values that are resistant to economic development, whereas pharisaic religions promote values that are favorable.

Trust in the Individual
The principal engine of economic development is the work and creativity of individuals. What induces them to strive and invent is a climate of liberty

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that leaves them incontrol of their own destiny. If individuals feel that others are responsible for them, the effort of individuals will ebb.If others tell them what to think and believe, the consequence is either a lossof motivation and creativity or a choice between submissionor rebellion. However, neither submission nor rebellion generates development. Submission leaves a society without innovators, and rebellion diverts energies away from constructive effort toward resistance, throwing up obstacles and destruction. To trust the individual, to have faith in the individual, is one of the elements of a value systemthat favors development. In contrast, mistrust of the individual, reflected in oversight and control, typical of societies that resist is development. Implicit in the trusting society is the willingness to accept the risk that the individual will make choices contrary to the desires of government. If this risk is not accepted and the individual is subjected to a network of controls, the society loses the essential engine of economic development, namely, the aspiration of each of us to live and think as we wish, to be who we are, to transform ourselves into unique beings. Where there are no individuals, only “peoples” and “masses,” development does not occur. What takes place instead is either obedience or uprising.

The Moral Imperative
There are three basic levels of morality. The highest is altruistic and selfdenying-the morality of saints and martyrs. The lowest is criminal-disregard for the rights of others and the law. The intermediate morality is what Raymond Aron calls “a reasonable egoism”-the individual engages in neither saintly nor criminal behavior, reasonably seeking his or her own well-being within the limits social responsibility and the law. of The highest morality is illustrated by Marx’s slogan “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” and by the Roman Catholic Church’s insistence on clerical chastity. Neither is consistent with human nature. In development-favorable cultures, there is widespread compliance with laws and norms that are not totally exigent and are therefore realizable. Moral law and social reality virtually coincide. In development-resistant cultures, on the other hand, there are two worlds that are out of touch with each other. One is the exalted world of the highest standards and the otheris the real world of furtive immorality and generalized hypocrisy. The lawis a remote, utopian ideal that does little more than express what people might in theory prefer, whereas the real world, effectively out of touch with all law, operates under the lawof the jungle, thelaw of the cleverest or the strongest, a world of foxes and lions disguised as lambs.

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Two Conceptsof Wealth
In societies resistantto development, wealth above all consists of what exists; in favorable societies, wealth above consists of what does not yet exist. all In the underdeveloped world, the principal wealth resides in land and what derives from it. In the developed world, the principal wealth resides in the promising processes of i n n ~ v a t i o nIn the resistant society, real value resides, .~ for example, in today’s computer, whereas the favorable society focuses on the generation of computers to come. In the British colonies in North America, uninhabited lands were available to those who would work them. In the Spanish and Portuguese colonies to the south, all lands were claimed by the Crown. From the outset, wealth belonged to those who held power. Wealth thus did not derive from work but from the ability to earn and retain the favor the king. of

Two Viewsof Competition
The necessity of competing to achieve wealth and excellence characterizesthe societies favorable to development, not only in the economybut elsewhere in the society. Competition is central to the success of the enterprise, the politician, the intellectual, the professional. In resistant societies, competition is condemned as a form of aggression. What is supposed to substitute for it is solidarity, loyalty, and cooperation. Competition among enterprises is replaced by corporativism. Politics revolve around the caudillo, and intellectual life has to adjust itself to the established dogma. Only in sports is competition accepted. In resistant societies, negative viewsof competition reflect the legitimation of envy and utopian equality. Although such societies criticize competition and praise cooperation, the latter is often less common in them than in “competitive” societies. In fact, it canbe argued that competition a form of is cooperation in which both competitors benefit from being forced dotheir to best, as in sports. Competition nurtures democracy, capitalism, and dissent.

Two Notionsof Justice
In resistant societies, distributive justice is concerned with those who are alive now-an emphasis on the present that is also reflected in a propensity to consume rather than tosave. The favorable society is likely to define distributive justice as that which also involves the interests of future generations. In such societies, the propensity to consume is often smaller and the propensity to save is often greater.

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The Value of Work
Work is not highly valued in progress-resistant societies, reflecting a philosophical current that goes back to the Greeks. The entrepreneur is suspect but the manual laborer somewhat less so, since he must work to survive. At the top of the prestige ladder are the intellectual, the artist, the politician, the religious leader, the military leader. A similar prestige scale characterized Christendom until the Reformation. However, as Max Weber observed, the Reformation, and particularly the Calvinist interpretation of it, inverted the prestige scale, enshrining this work ethic. It is this same inverted value system that importantly explains the prosperity Western Europe and NorthAmerof ica-and East Asia-and the relative poverty of Latin America and other Third World areas.

The Role of Heresy
With his thesisof free interpretation of the Bible, Martin Luther was thereligious pioneer of intellectual pluralism at a time when dogmatism dominated Christendom. The unpardonable crime the time was notsin but heresy. Yet at the questioning mindis the one that creates innovation, and innovation the is engine of economic development. Orthodox societies, including the former Soviet Union, suppress innovation. The collapse of the Soviet Union had more than a little to do with insistence on Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. its

To Educate Is Not to Brainwash
We have seen that value systems favorable to development nurture the formation of individuals who are innovators, heretics. Education the principal is instrument of this nurturing. However, this must be a form education that of helps the individual discover his or her own truths, not one that dictates what the truth is. In value systems resistant to development, education is a process that transmits dogma, producing conformists and followers.

The Importance of Utility
The developed world eschews unverifiable theory and prefers to pursue that which is practically verifiable and useful. The intellectual traditions in Latin America focus more on grand cosmovisions, which put it at a developmental disadvantage. Ariel, the phenomenally popular book by the Uruguayan JosC Enrique Rod6 that appeared in 1900, draws the distinction by using two characters from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: the comely, spiritual Ariel, rep-

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resenting Latin America, and the ugly, calculating Caliban, representing the United States. However, it was the North Americans, not the Latin Americans, who opened the path to economicdevelopment. At the same time, we must note that utilitarianismsuffers from a troubling lacuna, symbolized by the horrors of Nazi Germany andSoviet Russia.

The Lesser Virtues
Advanced societies esteem a series of lesser virtues that are virtually irrelevant in traditional cultures: a job well done, tidiness, courtesy, punctuality. These contribute to both efficiency and harmoniousness in human relations. They are unimportant in a resistant culture, partly because they impinge on the assertion of the individual’s wishes and partly because they are overwhelmed by the great traditional virtues love, justice, courage, and magnaof nimity. Nevertheless, the lesser virtuesare characteristic of societies in which people are more respectful of the needs of others.

Time Focus
There are four categories time: the past, the present,the immediate future, of and a distant future that merges into the afterlife. The time focus of the advanced societies is the future that is within reach; it is the only time frame that can be controlled or planned for. The characteristic of traditional cultures is the exaltation of the past. To the extent that the traditional culture does focus on the future, itis on the distant, eschatological future.

Rationality
The modern world is characterized by its emphasis on rationality. The rational person derives satisfaction at the end of the day from achievement, and progress is the consequence of a vast sum of small achievements. The premodern culture, by contrast, emphasizes grandiose projects-pyramids, the Aswan Dam, revolutions. Progress-resistant countries are littered with unfinished monuments, roads, industries, and hotels. But it’s not important. Tomorrow a new dream willarise.

Authority
In rational societies, power resides in the law. When the supremacy of the law has been established, the society functions according to the rationality attributed to the cosmos-natural law-by the philosophers of modernity

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(e.g., Locke, Hume, Kant). In resistant societies, the authority of the prince, the caudillo, or the stateis similar to that of an irascible, unpredictable God. People are not expected to adapt themselves to the known, logical, and permanent dictates of the law; rather, they must attempt to divine the arbitrary will of those with power; thus the inherent instability such societies. of

Worldview
In a culture favorable to development, the world is seen as a setting for action. The world awaits the person who wants to do something to change it. In a culture resistant to development, the world is perceived as a vast entity in which irresistible forces manifest themselves. These forces bear various names: God, the devil, a powerful international conspiracy, capitalism, imperialism, Marxism, Zionism. The principal preoccupation of those in a resistant culture is to save themselves, often through utopian crusades. The individual in the resistant society thus tends to oscillate between fanaticism and cynicism.

Life View
In the progressive culture, life is something that I will make happen-I am the protagonist. In the resistant culture, life is something that happens to me-I must be resigned to it.

Salvation from or in the World
In the resistant conception, the goal is to save oneself from the world. According to traditional Catholicism, the world is “a vale of tears.’’ To save oneself from it is to resist temptations in a quest for the other world, the world after death. But for the puritan Protestants, salvation in the other world depends on the success of the individual’s efforts to transform this world. The symbol of the Catholic vision is the monk; that of the Protestant vision, the entrepreneur.

Two Utopias
Both progress-prone and progress-resistant cultures embrace a certain kind of utopianism. In the progressive culture, the world progresses slowly toward a distant utopia through thecreativity and effort of individuals. In the resistant culture, the individual seeks an early utopia that is beyond reach. The consequence is again a kind of fanaticism-or cynicism. The latter utopi-

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anism is suggested by the visit of Pope John Paul I1 to India, where he insisted that all Indians have a right a dignified life free of poverty and at thesame to time rejected birth control.

The Nature of Optimism
In the resistant culture, the optimist is the person who expects that luck, the gods, or the powerful will favor him her. In the culture favorableto develor opment, the optimist is the person who is resolved to do whatever is necessary to assure a satisfactory destiny, convinced that what he she does will or make the difference.

Two Visionsof Democracy
The resistant culture is the heir of the tradition of absolutism, even when it takes the form of Rousseauistic popular democracy, which admits no legal limits or institutional controls. In this vision, the absolute power the king of accrues to the people. The liberal, constitutional democracy of John Locke, Baron de Montesquieu, James Madison, and the Argentine Juan Bautista Alberdi characterizes the vision of democracy in the progressive culture. Political power is dispersed among different sectors and the law is supreme.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

This list of twenty cultural factors, which contrasts a value system favorable to economic development and one that is resistant, is not definitive. It could be amplified by additional contrasts or it could be reduced, seeking only the most important differences. My criterion has been practicality, and these twenty factors are sufficient to obtain some idea of the contrasting visions from which the two value systems flow. It is important to be mindful that neither the “favorable” nor the “resistant” exists in the real world. Rather, as Weber would say, they are ideal types, or mental constrztcts, that facilitate analysis because they offer two poles of reference that help us locate and evaluate a givensociety. The closer a society is to the favorable ideal, the more likely it is to achieve sustained economic development. Conversely, a society that is close to the resistant pole will be less likely to achieve sustained economic development. An imaginary line runs between the resistant and favorable poles on which the real societies can be located. That location is not permanent, however, because no value system is static. There is continuous, albeit slow, movement on the line away from one pole and toward the other. Like two illuminated

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ports that call to the navigator from different directions, the ideal types permit a diagnosis of the course and speed of a given nation toward or away from economic development. Should it come close thereefs of the resistant to pole, it is time to consider what needs to be done to change the course and speed of the culture’s value system enhance the prospects of arriving the to at opposite pole. Similarly, it should be possible to identify those values that, even if not wholly favorableto development, must be conserved because they preserve the identity of the society-so long as they do not block access to development. Whether in the West or the East, development did not really exist before the seventeenth century. This was equally true for Europe and China, for preColumbian America and India. Productivity levels were low around the world because the societies were agrarian. There were good years and bad all years, mostly the result of climatic factors, above all rainfall, but there was no sustained economic development. The reason was cultural. Values that encouraged capital accumulation with a view to increased production and productivity did not exist. The value systems were anti-economic, emphasizing, for example, the salvation of the soul of the Egyptian pharaohs, art and philosophy in ancient Greece, the legal and military organization of the Roman Empire, mastery of traditional philosophy and literature in China, and the renunciation of the world and the quest for eternal salvation-often through war-of the Middle Ages in Europe. It was the Protestant Reformation that first produced economic development in northern Europe and North America. Until the Reformation, the leaders of Europe were France, Spain (allied with Catholic Austria), the north of Italy (the cradleof the Renaissance), and the Vatican. The Protestant cultural revolution changedall that as heretofore second-rank nations-Holland, Switzerland, Great Britain, the Scandinavian countries, Prussia, and the former British colonies inNorth America-took over the reins of leadership. Economic development, in the form of the industrial revolution, brought wealth, prestige, and military power to the new leaders. Furthermore, the non-Protestant nations had to face the reality that their failure to pursue economic development would lead to their domination by the Protestant countries. They had to choose between Protestant hegemony and their traditional “resistant” values-their identity. The responses varied across a spectrum from one non-Protestant country to another. At one extreme was Puerto Rico, which sold its Latin soul for the mess of pottage of economic development. At the other extreme is the Islamic fundamentalism of Iran, which ardently rejects Western-style development as a threat to an ancestral identity whose preservationthe chief goal of those is in power.

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Other nations pursued courses between these two extremes. Imperial China disdained the power of the West until it was subjugated by it. The Maoist communist revolution can be interpreted as China’s first real accommodation to the West, albeit in the form of the Western heresy of Marxism. Deng took a further step in the direction the West by opening the doorsto of capitalism, albeit within an authoritarianpolitical system. Following the visit of the U.S. naval squadron to Tokyo in 1853, when Bay it became apparent to the Japanese that they could not defend themselves against the West, Japan’s new Meiji leadership staked out a different course: They would accept Western technology but not Western culture. Japan then built a formidable war machine that defeated China and Russia but itself was destroyed in World War That trauma was 11. followed by an imposed democratization that has since taken root and a refocusing of Japanese priorities away from warfare toward industry and commerce-with astonishing results. A similar path has been followed by South Korea and Taiwan, both former Japanese colonies. The Catholic countries of Europe have accepted the logicof economic development, particularly since World War 11. As the rate of growth in the Protestant countries has declined, in part because the waning of the earlier of religious energy, France, Belgium, Italy, Ireland, and Spain have crossed the frontier that separates development from underdevelopment. Is Catholic Latin America following the same path? In the 1980s-the “lost decade”-Latin America experienced an economic crisis precipitated by its resistant values. It remains to be seen whether Latin America will in fact achievethe lofty heights of economic development, democratization, and modernization.

5
Culture and the Behavior of Elites in Latin America
C A R L O SA L B E R T 0M O N T A N E R

Latin America has long suffered from manic-depressive cycles with respect to its political perceptions. Thereare times when, in a stateof euphoria, the media announces that the continent has finally reached adulthood. We hear that Colombia is a new “Asian tiger,” that Costa Rica is a surprising SiliconValley in the heart of Latin America, or that Brazil is going to challenge the hemispheric hegemony of the United States. Then come the institutional catastrophes: coup attempts, hyperinflation, the failure of stabilization programs, and capital flight. We lapse into a state of gloomy depression, and foreign capital starts to flee. Depression then turns to despair, and we give up, concluding, “There’s no way out!” Perhaps we should begin to talk about a cyclothymic culture. As the twentieth century ends, we are in the depressive phase the cycle. of It is true that for the first time in history, all Latin American governments, with the exception of that in Cuba, have been elected freely. But there is a justified fear that our democracy is more fragile than we have appreciated. The same authoritarian Venezuelan lieutenant colonel, Hugo Chavez, who tried to take powerby force in 1992, leaving four hundred dead in his wake, governs the country today with strong popular support. Ecuador, whose parliament had to get rid of a president, Abdala Bucaram, accused of “going mad,” is now in the middle of an economic crisis that no one knows how to

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solve. The Brazilian currency losthalf of its purchasing power in three weeks and, with this devaluation, the popularity of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso also plummeted. Mexico at times appears to be moving toward modern democracy, at times away from it. Colombia has been transformed into a series of urban islands precariously connected by airplanes. At least three armies impose their law: the central government army, the communist guerrilla army, and the paramilitary groups’ army. At the same time but in varying degrees, these three armies penetrated by a fourth power, the narare cotraffickers, who buy consciences and weapons and control the actions of hundreds of hired killers. In Paraguay, the vice president, Luis Maria Argaiia, an enemy of the president, R a d Cubas, is murdered by his opponents; the president is then dismissed and escapes together with the putschist General Oviedo. But why belabor thepoint? We are simply in a depressivecycle.
THE ENDLESS DISCUSSION

The debate over the causesof Latin America’s failures relative to the success of Canada and the United States has been a recurrent focus of Latin American intellectuals, and there are enough explanations to suit anyone. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, they put the blame the Iberian inherion tance with its intolerant Catholicism. Around the middle that century, the of shortcomings were attributed the demographic weight an apparentlyinto of dolent native population opposedto progress. At the beginning of the twentieth century, and particularly with the Mexican Revolution in 1910, it was said that poverty and underdevelopment were caused by an unfair distribution of wealth, above all by the peasants’ lack of access to land. Starting in the twenties and accelerating thereafter, “exploitative imperialism,” mainly “Yankee imperialism,” was blamed. During the thirties and forties, the view was espoused that Latin America’s weakness was a consequence of the weakness of its governments, a condition that could only be corrected by turning them into “engines of the economy,’’ converting public officials into businessmen. All these diagnoses and proposals reached the crisis point in the eighties“the lost decade”-when experience demonstrated that all of the arguments were false, although each may have contained a grain truth. The rapid deof velopment of countries that were poorer than theLatin American average in the 1950s-South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan-proved that Latin America had fundamentally misunderstood the keys to prosperity. This inevitably led us back to the eternal question, Who responsible? is One possible, although partial, answer is “the elites”: the groups thatlead and manage the principal sectors of a society; those who act in the name of

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certain values, attitudes, and ideologies which, in the Latin American case, do not favor collective progress. There is no single individual who responis sible; rather, a largenumber-a majority-of those who occupy leading positions in public and private organizations and institutions are the ones chiefly responsible for perpetuating poverty. The idea that traditional culturalvalues and attitudes are a major obstacle to progress has gradually been gaining momentum. But howdo these values and attitudes reflect themselves in the way people behave? In this chapter, I will suggest how they express themselves in the behaviorof six elite groups: the politicians, the military, businessmen, clergy, intellectuals, and leftist groups. I want to stress at the outset that is not fair to it blame only theelites, who are, in largemeasure, a reflection of the broader society. If their behavior strayed radically from the norms the broader society, they wouldbe reof jected. Moreover, within the elites, there are exceptions-people who are striving to change the traditional patterns of behavior that have brought us to where we are.
THE POLITICIANS

Let us begin with the politicians, since they are the most visible. Politicians are so discredited in Latin America today that to be elected, they have to demonstrate thatthey are not politicians at all but something quite different: military officers, beauty queens, technocrats-anything at all except politicians. Why is this so? Largely because public sector corruption with impunity is the norm throughout theregion. It expresses itself in three forms: The classical form, in which government officials receive “commissions” and bribes for each project that won or each is regulation that is violated to benefit someone. The indirect form, in which the corruption benefits someone with whom you areallied, although you yourself may remain clean. Examples are Joaquin Balaguer in the Dominican Republicand Josi Maria Velasco Ibarra in Ecuador. The clientelism form-the most costly-in which public funds are used to buy large groups of voters. It is as if politicians were not public servants elected to obey the laws but rather autocrats who measure theirprestige by the laws they are ableto violate. That is where the definition of true power resides in LatinAmerica-in the ability to operate above the law.

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The truth is that a large percentage of Latin Americans either nurture or tolerate relationships in which personal loyalty rewarded and merit is subis stantially ignored. In Latin American culture loyalty rarely extends beyond the circle of friends and family. Thus the public sector is profoundly mistrusted and the notion of the common good is very weak. Consequently it is inevitable that the most successful politicians are those who payoff their allies and sympathizers. To be sure, these noxious practices are not exclusive to Latin America. What is alarming, however, is the frequency and intensity with which they occur in the region and, above all, the people’s indifference to these practices and the impunity with which wrongdoers engage in them. It is as if Latin Americans did not realize that they themselves are ultimately paying for the corruption and inefficiency that contribute so powerfully to the region’s poverty.
THE MILITARY

The military is comparably culpable for Latin America’s problems. In the advanced democracies, the roleof the military is to protect the nation from foreign threats. In Latin America, the military has often assigneditself the task of saving the nation from thefailures of the politicians, either imposing military visions of social justice by force or simply taking over the government and maintaining public order. In both cases, it has behaved likeoccupying an force in its own country. It has been said that the behavior of the Latin American military reflects the influence of la madre patria, Spain. But the historical truth is that when the Latin American republics were established between 1810 and 1821, the putsches in Spain were exceptional and had little success. The time of the insurrections on the Iberian Peninsula coincided with similar phenomena in Latin America but did not precede them. Rather, the Latin American military caudillos, who provoked innumerable civil wars during the nineteenth century and prolonged dictatorships during the twentieth, seemed be basically to a Latin American historical phenomenon linked to an authoritarian mentality that had norespect for either the lawor democratic values. Although Latin America has known military dictatorships since the first days of independence early in the nineteenth century, in the thirties and forties the military, led by Getulio Vargas in Brazil and Juan Doming0 Per6n in Argentina, concluded that it was designated by Providence to undertake a new mission: to promote state-driven economic development, including the assignment of senior military officers as managers of state enterprises. The

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basic idea, which never really worked in practice, was that in nations with weak and chaotic institutions, as in Latin America, only the armed forces had the size, tradition, and discipline necessary to create large-scale modern industries capable of competing in the complex industrial world the twenof tieth century. This military involvement in state enterprises has cost Latin America dearly. Like politicians, military officers werecorrupt. Their protected enterprises distorted the market, were often excessive in scale, and were vastly overstaffed. The result was inefficiency and obsolescence. Although there have been a few civilian caudillos-for example, Hip6lito Yrigoyen in Argentinaand Arnulfo Arias in Panama-the caudillo tradition in Latin America has been dominated by the military. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, Juan Per6n, Anastasio Somoza, Alfred0 Stroessner, Manuel Antonio Noriega, and Fidel Castro are good examples. The caudillo more than a simple dictais tor who exercises power by force. He is a leader to whom many citizens, and practically the entire power structure, delegate power of decision and confull trol of the instruments of repression. The result is not only antithetical to democratic development but is also extremely costly in an economic sense and inevitably causes confusion public and private property. of
THE BUSINESSMEN

One of the greatest political ironies in Latin Americais the frequent accusation that “savage capitalism” to blame for the povertyof the 50 percent of is all Latin Americans who are distressingly poor and survive in shacks with dirt floors and tin roofs. The real tragedy Latin Americais that capitalis in in limited supply, and a large part of what there is, is not in the hands of real entrepreneurs committed to risk and innovation but in those of cautious speculators who prefer to invest their money in real estate and expect that the vegetative growth of their nations will cause their properties to appreciate in value. These are not modern capitalists but rather landowners in the feudal tradition. But even worse is the mercantilist businessman who seeks his fortune through political influence rather than market Competition.’ The mercantilist shares his profits with corrupt politicians in a vicious circle that produces both increasing profits and corruption. He often buys tariff protection, which results in higher prices and lower quality for the consumer. He may buy a monopoly position under the pretext of the national interest or economies of scale. O r he may also buy tax privileges, subsidies, preferential don’t have to be repaid, and preferential ratesfor the interest rates, loans that purchase of foreign exchange.

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These kinds of cozy relationships between mercantilist, businessmen and corrupt politicians have been particularly shocking with respect the sale of to foreign currency at prime rates to import capital goods for local industries, In countries in which a dollar may have three different exchange rates, those with the appropriate relations canbuy dollars at a prime rate, sell a portion of them secretly at a highly favorable rate, pay for the imported goodsat yet another rate, and see their profits double as if by magic. And the richer they get, the more corrupt they become. These harmful practices are not exclusive to Latin America, but the frequency and intensity with which this kind of corruption occurs in Latin America is very troubling, as is the indifference and impunity that accompanies it. The people don’t seem to realize that the money acquired by mercantilist businessmen through the sale and purchase of influence comes either directly or indirectly from the pockets of taxpayers. Nor do they appreciate that this type of illicit activity increases the overall cost of transactions, substantially raising the cost of goods and services, further impoverishing the poor. The fact is, with few exceptions, Latin America has never experienced the modern capitalism combined with political democracythat has produced the high levels of human well-being that are found in the prosperous nations of the West and increasingly in East Asia.
THE CLERGY

It is painful to have to include the clergy among the elites who are responsible for the misery of the masses. It is painful because those responsible are not all the clergy, only those who preach against market economics and justify anti-democratic actions. It is also painful because those clergy who behave this way do so out of altruism. But it is a quest for social justice that condemns the poorto permanent poverty-a true case of the road tohell being paved with good intentions. In broad outline, since the second half of the nineteenth century the Catholic Church has lost most of its property, other than schools, hospitals, and a few mass media operations. Once the greatest landlord of the Western world, the Church long ago lost major property role in the economic area. its This does not mean that its influence has diminished, however, especially in moral terms. The Church can still legitimate or discredit given valuesand attitudes with profound impact on the prospects the people. of But when the Latin American bishops’ conference or the “theologians of liberation’’ or the Jesuits condemn “savage neoliberalism,” they are propagating an absurdity.’ “Neoliberalism” is nothing more than an array of ad-

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justment measures designed to alleviate the economic crisis in the region: reductions in government spending, reductions in the public sector payroll, privatization of state enterprises, a balanced budget, and a careful control of monetary emission-pure common sense in the wake of an interventionist model that failed to produce widespread progress for the peoples of Latin America during more than half a century. These measures, so strongly criticized by the clergy, are no different from the ones the rich European countries demand of each other to qualify for the Euro. It is simply a matter of implementing a sensible economicpolicy. The bishops, and particularly the liberation theology clergy, are even more destructivewhentheyattacktheprofitmotive,competition,andconsumerism. They lament the poverty of the poor, but at the same time promote the idea that owning property sinful, as is the conduct of people who is succeed in the economy by dint of hard work, saving, and creativity. They preach attitudes that are contrary the psychology of success. to For some liberation theology priests, poverty is inevitable, if for no other reason than the alleged imperialism of the rich countries, above all the United States. And the only way out of poverty is armed violence, which has been urged-and never publicly renounced-by liberation theology leader Gustavo G~tiCrrez.~
THE INTELLECTUALS

There are few cultures in which intellectuals have as much visibility as in Latin America. This may come from the strong French influence on Latin American intellectuals; in France the same thing happens. Once a writer or an artist has achieved fame, he or she becomes an expert on all subjects, including war in the Balkans, the virtues of in vitro fertilization, and the disaster that is caused by privatizing state enterprises. This characteristic of our culture wouldhave no major significance, except for its destructive consequences. This “todo1ogy”-the faculty to talk about our intellectuals everything without modesty or knowledge-practiced by with great enthusiasm has a price: Everything they state and repeat turns into a key element in the creation of a Latin American cosmovision. This characteristic of our culture has serious consequences, since a significant numberof Latin American intellectuals are anti-West, anti-Yankee, and anti-market. Moreover, no matter that their views are contrary to the experience of the twenty nations that are the most developed and prosperous on our planet, they nonetheless profoundly influence the Latin American cosmovision. The effect of their pronouncements is to weaken democracy and impede the development of a reasonable confidence in the future. If the intellectuals pro-

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mote the vision of a frightening revolutionary dawn, we should not be surprised by the flight of capital nor the senseof impermanence that attaches to our political and economic systems. Furthermore, what many intellectuals announce in newspapers, books and magazines, radio and television is repeated in the majority Latin American of universities. Most public Latin American universitiesand many private ones, with some exceptions, are archaic deposits of old Marxist ideas about economy and society. They continue to stress the danger of multinational investments, the damages caused by globalization, and the intrinsic wickedness of an economic model that leaves the allotment of resources to market forces. This message explains the close relationship between the lessons young scholars receive in the university and their link with subversive groups such asSender0LuminosoinPeru,TupamarosinUruguay,Movimientode Izquierda Revolucionaria in Venezuela, the "19 in Colombia, or Sub-Comandante Marcos's picturesquely hooded Zapatistas Mexico. in The weapons these young men carried with them into the jungle, mountains, and city streets were loaded in the lecture rooms the universities. of The Latin American university-with few and honorable exceptions-has failed as an independent creative center and has been a source tireless repof etition of worn-out and dustyideas. But even more startling is the absence of a close relationship between what the students are taught and the real needs of society. It is as if the university were resentfully rebelling against a social model that it detests without any concern for the preparation of qualified professionals who could contribute to real progress. The failure of our universities is particularly appalling when we recognize that the majority uniof versities in Latin America are financed by the national budget-from the contribution of all taxpayers-in spite of the fact that80 or 90 percent of the students belong to the middle and upper classes. This means that resources are transferred from those who have to those who have more. This sacriless fice then helps sustain absurd ideas that contribute to perpetuating the misery of the poorest.
THE

LEFT

The final elite group consists of both labor unions that oppose market economics and private property and that peculiar Latin American category, the revolutionaries. To be sure, there is a responsible labor movement dedicated to the legitimate interests and rights of workers. Sadly, this is often not the one that is dominant. The unions that burden Latin American societies are those that oppose privatization of state enterprises that have been losing money for

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decades while providing defective or nonexistent goods and services; the teacher unions that strikebecause they are opposed to their members taking standard competence tests; and the corrupt union aristocrats who loot retirement funds and health programs for their personal benefit. Some unions fail to appreciate that the modern,competitive enterprise has t o be flexible, capable of adapting to changing circumstances. When the unions make it difficult costly to change staffing levels or when they estabor lish rigid contracts, enterprises lose competitiveness and unemployment increases because businesses reluctant are to hire people under these conditions. The revolutionaries are radicals who are convinced that they possess letters of marque that permit them to violate laws in the name of social justice. Some limit themselvesto preaching revolution without taking any additional action to further the revolutionary cause. Others, for whom Che Guevara is often the patron saint, think that it is legitimate to engage in political violence without considering the consequences of their acts. For them, the state is illegitimate and must be attacked at all costs. Their vehicles are student strikes, street riots, sabotage, kidnapping, bombs, and guerrilla attacks. What have the actions of this indomitable tribe of revolutionaries cost the Latin American nations? The amount is incalculable, but the revolutionary left has to be one of the principal causes of the region’s underdevelopment, not just because of its destruction of existing wealth but because it has also interrupted that long and fragile cycle of savings, investment, profit, and reinvestment that produces the wealth nations. of In conclusion, itis obvious thatthese elite groups do not exhaust the of list those who have kept Latin America in a state of poverty and injustice. But they figure very prominently. My hope is that by describing the behavioral expression of the traditional cultural values that have shaped them, by spotlighting that behavior, and by refuting their arguments, I may contribute to a process of change in Latin America in which these elites become forces for human progress, above all for those most in need: a Latin America where the dispossessed can reasonably hope for a life of freedom, dignity, justice, and prosperity.

6
Does Africa Needa Cultural Adjustment Program?
D A N I E LE T O U N G A - M A N G U E L L E

The indicators of Africa’s plight are staggering: Life expectancy is below sixty years in twenty-eight countries.Life expectancy is below fifty years in eighteen countries.Life expectancy in Sierra Leoneis just thirty-seven years. About half of the more than 600 million people south of the Sahara live in poverty. Half or more of the adult populations of at least thirteen countries are illiterate. Half or more of women are illiterate in at least eighteen countries. Children under five die at rates in excessof 100 per 1,000 in at least twenty-eight countries. In Sierra Leone, the rateis 335 per 1,000. The population growth rateis 2.7 percent annually, almost four times the rate in the high-income countries. Among countries supplying such data rhe World Bank (not all do), to some of the most inequitable income distribution patterns are found in Africa. The most affluent 10 percent account for about 47 percent of income in Kenya, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, and about43 percent in Guinea-Bissau, Senegal,and Sierra Leone.’

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And, obviously, democratic institutions are commonly weak or nonexistent throughout Africa. Even in the face of all this human suffering, I cannot resist citing the story of an African government minister carried away in his remarks: “When we gained power, the country was at the edge of the abyss; since, we havetaken a great step forward!” I cite this anecdote in partbecause we can no longer reasonably blame the colonial powers for our condition. Several decades have passed during which we have been in substantial control of our own destiny. Yet today Africa is more dependent thanever on rich countries, more vulnerable than any other continent to maneuvers aimed at giving with one hand and takingback with the other. The World Bank, usually a great source of funds and advice, is itself short of ideas. Other than structural adjustment programs (whose efficiency has not yet been proven), there is silence. The need to question our culture, theAfrican culture, is evident. But what characterizes the African culture? Is this culture compatible with the demands faced by individuals and nations at the beginning of the twenty-first century? If not, what cultural reorientation necessary so that in the concert is of nations we are no longer playing outof tune? Does Africa need a cultural adjustment program?
WHAT WE ARE

It is never easy to speak of one’s self, to reveal one’s soul, especially when, as is the case with the African soul, many different facets present themselves. There are at least three dangers in this. The first is idealizing and embellishing in order to appear tobe more than we are. Thesecond is to say nothing that exposes the mysterious halo that people from all cultures wear. Finally, who has the qualities and qualifications to speak in the name of us all? An African proverb is correct in saying thathe who looks from the bottomof a well sees only aportion of the sky. As legitimate as these concerns are, they should not prevent us from looking in the mirror. Do we dare to look ourselves in the face, even if it is difficult to recognize ourselves?

Fifty Africas, a Single Culture?
We long ago got into the habit of referring to Africa as a diverse entity, and no one is surprised, in light of the balkanization of the continent, to see works with titles like Les 45 Afriques? or Les 50 Afriques3 because, as

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J. Ki-Zerbo noted in the introduction to the latter, “Africa is palpable. It is also profitable.” The descriptions of African diversity are enoughto make an Olympic skating champion dizzy. First, to better oppose them, we like to emphasize white Africa and black Africa: one north of the Sahara and the other south of it. But how do we then classify the Republic of South Africa and Zimbabwe, each with a powerful white minority? Behind the racial screen, one quickly discovers a far more important source of diversity-language. There is an Arabophone Africa, an Anglophone Africa, a Francophone Africa, a Lusophone Africa, aHispanophone Africa, not tomention the scores languages of that have no relation to the languages of the European colonizers. What can be said if we then dare to transcend frontiers resulting from colonial dismembering of real nationalities such as the Yorubas, Hausas, Peuls, Malinkes, to mention only a few, that straddle several states? To continue the census of African diversity based on the color of the epidermis or on language could lead to several thousand Africas! Next, we must confront the anthropologists. Are there as many cultures in Africa as there are tribes? Does their number coincide with the states as outlined by the colonial powers? Does generalizing about African culture as a whole make any sense at all? I believe that it does. The diversity-the vast number of subcultures-is undeniable. But there is a foundation of shared values, attitudes, and institutions that binds together the nations south of the Sahara, and in many respects those to the north as well. The situation is analogous to that of Great Britain: Despite its Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish subcultures, no one would question the existence a British culture. of The existence of this common base is so real that some anthropologists question whether imported religions-Christianity and Islam-have really affected African ancestral beliefs or given Africans different ways of understanding the contemporary societies in which they live. Modern political power has often assumed the characteristics of traditional religious ritual powers; divination and witchcraft have even made their way into courthouses. Everywhere on the continent, the bond between religion and society remains strong. As Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the late president of the Ivory Coast, told us (and he, as a Roman Catholic, knew what he was talking about): “From African archbishops to the most insignificant Catholic, from the great witch doctor to the most insignificant Moslem, from the pastor to the most insignificant Protestant, we haveall had an animist past.”4 African culture is not easily grasped. It refuses to be packaged and resists attempts at systemization. The followingtypology is not wholly satisfactory, but it gives some sense of what the African cultural realityis.

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Hierarchical Distance
In the view of D. Bollinger and G. Hofstede, hierarchical distance-the degree of verticality-is generally substantial in tropical and Mediterranean climates, where the survival of the group and its growth depend on human less intervention than it does in cold and temperate countrie~.~ countries with In substantial hierarchical distances, the society tends be static and to politically centralized. What little national wealth exists is concentrated in the hands of an elite. The generations pass without significant change in mind-set. It is the reverse in countries with short hierarchical distances. Technological changes happen because the group needs technical progress; the political system deis centralized and based on a representativesystem; the national wealth, which is substantial, is widely distributed; and children learn things that their parents never knew. In the more horizontal cultures, subordinates believe that their superiors are people just like themselves, that all people have equal rights,and that law takes precedence over strength. This leads to the belief that the best way to change a social systemis to redistribute power. In the more vertical societies, Africa among them, subordinates consider their superiors to be differenthaving a right to privilege. Since strength prevails over law, the best way to change a social system to overthrow those whohold power. is To the extent that it covers many aspects of a society (e.g., political systems, religious practices, organization of enterprises), hierarchical distance would virtually suffice to explain underdevelopment. However, as Bollinger and Hofstede note, France, Italy (particularly in the south), and Japan are also countries of high hierarchical distance.

Control over Uncertainty
Some societies condition their members to accept uncertainty about the future, taking each day as it comes. Therelittle enthusiasm for work. Thebeis havior and opinions of others are tolerated because deep down people feel relatively secure inthe status quo. In other societies, people are acculturated to conquer the future. This leads to anxiety, emotionalism, and aggressiveness, which produce institutions oriented toward change and the limitation risks. of Africa, except for the southern tip of the continent, appears to belong entirely to the category of societies with weak controls over uncertainty. To create secure societies, three levers are available: technology, jurisprudence, and religion. We might say that African societies are societies of strong control over uncertainty; unfortunately, the control is exercised only through reli-

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gion. In the final analysis, if Africans immerse themselves in the present and demonstrate a lackof concern for tomorrow, itis less because of the safety of community social structures that envelop them than because their submisof sion to a ubiquitous and implacable divine will. The African, returning to the roots of religion, believes that only God can modify the logic of a world created for eternity. The world and our behavior are an immutable given, bequeathed in a mythical past to our founding ancestors,whosewisdomcontinues to illuminate our life principles. The African remains enslaved by his environment. Nature is his master and sets his destiny. This postulate of a world governed by an immutable divine order in a universe without borders is accompanied by a peculiarly African perception of the notion of space and time.

The Tyranny of Time
The African sees space and time as a single entity. The Nigerians say, “A watch did not invent man.” Africans have always had their own time, and they have often been criticized for it. As an example, Jean-Jacques ServanSchreiber writes: Time in Africa has both a symbolic and cultural value that are very important in the manner in which it is lived and felt. This is frankly both a benefit and a handicap-a benefit to the extentthat it is satisfying for individuals to live during a period at a rhythm that is their own and that they have no desire to give up. But it is also a handicap to the extent that they are in competition with countries that do not have the same work methods and for which competition at the level of productivity, for example, passes through a more rational useof time.6 Servan-Schreiber is right. In traditional African society, which exalts the glorious past of ancestors through tales and fables, nothing is done to prepare for the future. The African, anchored in his ancestral culture, so conis vinced that the past can only repeat itself that he worries only superficially about the future. However, without a dynamic perception the future, there of is no planning, no foresight, no scenario building; in other words, no policy to affect the course of events. There can be no singing of tomorrows so long as our culture does not teach us to question the future, to repeat it mentally, and to bend it to our will. In modern society, everyone must prepare. Otherwise, as Servan-Schreiber reminds us, there will be no more seats on the train, no moremoney at the end of the month, nothing in the refrigerator for

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the dinner hour, and nothing in the granaries in between season^.^ All in all, daily life in Africa!

Indivisible Power and Authority
Over the course of several millennia, societies in the West evolved substantially outside of the influence of religion, leading to the separation of the things of this world from the spiritual world. This evolution also led to the advent of the power of the state, which was certainly still spiritual but detached from supernatural forces that longer intervened inthe governing of no this world. In Africa, however, the forceof religion continues to weigh both on individual and on collective destiny. It is common for African leaders to claim magical powers. It is difficult to explain African passivityother than by the fear inspired by a God hidden in the folds of the clothes of every African chief. If a king or president escapesan attack (even a simulated one), the entire population will deduce that he has supernatural power and is therefore invincible. This propensity to equate all power with divine authority does not concern only the “fathers of the nation”; itaffects everycitizen-even the most ordinaryas soon as heis given any authority whatsoever. Take an African, give him a bit of power, and he will likely become bumptious, arrogant, intolerant, and jealous of his prerogatives. Constantly on his guard and anenemy of competence (not a criterion for electing gods), he is ruthless until an inopportune He to decree designates his successor. ends his career entirely devoted the cult of mediocrity. (It is a well-known fact in our republics thatto end the career of a technocrat or a politician for good, you need only point out his excellence.) The African will not accept changes in social standing: Dominant and dominated remain eternally in the places allocated them, which is why change in social classifications is often condemned. We complain about the difficulties in promoting the private sector in our states. These difficulties are rooted in thejealousy that dominates all interpersonal relations, whichis less the desire to obtain what otherspossess than to prevent any change in social status. In Africa, you must be born dominant; otherwise, you have no right to power except by coup d’itat. The entire social body accepts, as a natural fact, the servitude imposed by the strong manof the moment. It has been argued that the underdeveloped are not thepeople, they are the leaders. Thisis both true and false. If African peoples were not underdeveloped (that is to say, passive, resigned, and cowardly), why would they accept underdeveloped leaders? We forget that every people deservesthe leaders it gets.

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The Community Dominatesthe Individual
If we had to cite a single characteristicof the African culture, the subordination of the individual by the community would surely be the reference point to remember. African thought rejects any view of the individual as an autonomous and responsible being. The African is vertically rooted in his family, in the vital ancestor, if not in God;horizontally, he is linked to his group, to society, to the cosmos. The fruit of a family-individual, society-individual dynamic, all linked to the universe, the African can only develop and bloom through social and family life. How dowe restore the degree autonomy to theindividual that is necesof sary for his affirmation as a political, economic, and social actor, while preserving this sociabilitythat is the essence of the existence of the African? The suppression of the individual, the cardinal way of ensuring equality in traditional societies, is demonstrated in all areas-not only in economic matters, where the ultimate market price is a function of the presumed purchasing power of the buyer, but in cultural matters, where oral traditions have monopolized the transmission of culture. We might even wonder if it wasn’t by design that Africans avoided the written word to assure the suppression of individualism. African thought avoids skepticism, another virus carried by the individual. Consequently, the established belief system remains absolute: As soon as ancestral beliefs are threatened, the only possible choice is between the established order and chaos. The concept of individual responsibility does not exist in our hyper-centralized traditional structures. In Cameroon, the word “responsible” translates as “chief.” Telling peasants that they are all responsible for a group initiative is to tell them therefore that they are all chiefs-which inevitably leads to endless interpersonal conflicts. The death of the individual in our societies explains not only the culture of silence in which menlike President Jerry Rawlings of Ghana rise up but also explains the contempt in which people hold those that occupy an intermeall diate position in the hierarchy. Thus, in an African ministry, it is well understood that the only person who can solve any problem whatsoever, be it the most commonplace, is the minister himself. Supervisors, managers,and other officials are there only for show. Our ministers have no complaints. It is not good to delegate one’s authority at the risk of encouraging the birthof a new political star who may eventually prove to be a competitor. We must be realistic. Tribalism blooms in our countries because of both the negation of the individual and the precariousness of his situation in the absence of an operative set of individual rights and responsibilities. Should we then continue, while dancing and singing, drift collectively toward hell to

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to safeguard a hypothetical social consensus? has the moment come reOr to store all rights to individuals?

Excessive Conviviality and Rejection Open Conflict of
The African works to live but does not live to work. He demonstrates a propensity to feast that suggests that African societies are structured around pleasure. Everything is a pretext for celebration: birth, baptism, marriage, birthday, promotion, election, return from a short or a long trip, mourning, opening or closure of Congress, traditional and religious feasts. Whether one’s salary is considerable or modest, whether one’s granaries are empty or’ full, the feast must be beautiful and must include the maximum possible number of guests. He who receives gives, but he who is received also gives in order to truly participate in the joy or pain of his host. Sociability is the cardinal virtue of all human beings; indeed, the African considers any person he meets a friend it until the contrary is demonstrated. Friendship comes before business; is impolite, in a business discussion, to immediately go to the crux of the matter. The African has an inexhaustible need for communication and prefers interpersonal warmth over content. Thisis the main reason for the inefficiency of African bureaucracies. Each petitioner, instead of writing, seeks to meet in person the official in charge of examining his file, thinking this eliminatesall the coldness of writing letters back and forth. Differences that are the basis for social life elsewhere are not perceived or are ignored to maintain ostensible social cohesion. It is the search for social peace based on a shaky unanimity that pushes the Africanto avoid conflictalthough the continent is surely not free of it. In some African societies, the avoidance of conflict means that justice cannot be rendered in the daytime. In some Bamileke (WestCameroon) villages, the constituted bodies in charge of security and justice are secret and meet at night. Members wear masks to prevent being identified. Conflict is inherent in human groups whatever size, yet we try to sweep of it under the rug-and have been highly unsuccessful in doing so.

Inefficient Homo Economicus
In Africa, what classifies man is his intrinsic value and his birth. If the African is not very thrifty, it is because his visionof the world attributes very little importance-too little-to the financial and economic aspects of life. Other than some social groups like the well-known Bamileke of Cameroon or the Kamba of Kenya, the African is a bad H. economicus. For him, the

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value of man is measured by the “is” and notby the “has.” Furthermore, because of the nature of the rapport that theAfrican maintains with time, saving for the future has a lower priority than immediate consumption. Lest there be any temptation to accumulate wealth, those who receive a regular salary have to finance the studies of brothers, cousins, nephews, and nieces, lodge newcomers, and finance the multitude of ceremonies that fill social life. It should not come as a surprise that the urban embellish these spendelite ing traditions by behaving like nouveaux riches. They, of course, have access to large amounts of money, chiefly in government coffers, to the and relatives and friends who are the beneficiaries of our free-spending habits are added banks in Switzerland, Luxembourg, and the Bahamas. African governments are not, it is evident, any better at economic management than are African individuals, as our frequenteconomic crises confirm.

The High Costs of Irrationalism
A society in which magic and witchcraft flourish today a sick society ruled is by tension, fear, and moral disorder. Sorcery is a costly mechanism for managing conflict and preserving the status quo, which is, importantly, what African culture is about. Therefore, is not witchcraft a mirror reflecting the state of our societies? There is much to suggest this. Witchcraft is both an instrument of social coercion (it helps maintain and perhaps even increase the loyalty of individuals toward the clan) and very convenient political instrua ment to eliminate any opposition that might appear. Witchcraft is for us a psychological refuge in which all our ignorance finds its answers and our wildest fantasies becomerealities. Contrary to what some might be.lieve, the Christian religion, far from putting an end to witchcraft in Africa, has legitimized The existence of Sait. tan is recognized by the Bible and the White Fathers, thus confirming the existence of sorcerers and other evil persons. Sects, usually based on the magical power of the leader or prophet, are proliferating in Africa. In Benin, a particularly religious land thatis the cradle of Haitian and Brazilian voodoo, fifty-eight new sects were born between 1981 and 1986, bringing the total number of denominations in the country to ninety-two. In Kenya, there might as many as1,200 sects; in some rural be districts, there are more churches than schools. Some prophets, their “temples” on the street, become affluent becauseof their ability to detect bad spirits. Others can protect againstdisease. Still others can help you protect your job and enhance your income. An example I particularly likeis that of Kombo, a transporter with afleet of trucks serving the Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso. Kombo believes that to

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European precautions-the regular maintenance of vehicles-it is necessary to add African precautions. What do these include? Well, his witch doctor gives him some porcupine-fish powder that he pours into his tires in orderto prevent punctures. Why, you might ask? Because, when attacked, this thorny fish has the ability to inflate until it doubles in volume. The powder of this fish is therefore perfect for maintaining tire pressure. Sorcery also extends to government. Witch doctors surround African presidents, and nothing that really matters in politics occurs without recourse to witchcraft. Occult counselors, responsible for assuring that authorities keep their power by detecting and neutralizing possible opponents, have power that the most influential Western advisers would envy. The witch doctors often amass fortunes, and they sometimes end up with official designations, enjoying the direct exercise power. of Football, the opiateof Africans, competes with politics with respect to sorcery. The story made the rounds that the Elephants of Abidjan lost their match against Egypt for the African Cup because the captainthe team lost of a magic charm on the field a little before halftime. The entire team searched for it in vain. Everyone believed that the Egyptians had found it and had made it disappear. Thanks to this deceit, they won the match, two goals to one. The fact that Africa is not alone in celebrating irrationalism at the outset of the twenty-first century does not excuse our propensity to delegate to sorcerers and witch doctors the responsibility for solving our problems. JeanFranqois Revel asked, has “Might man be an intelligent being that intelligence does not guide?”*In my view, the African is the intelligent being that uses his intelligence least-so long as he is happy to live life as it comes. In an Africa that refuses to link knowledge and activity, our authentic cultural identity is operating when wesay, as Revel notes, “Give us development in the form of subsidies, so as to spare us the effort of establishing an efficient relationship with real it^."^ That same culture lies behind our claim to the right to inefficiency in production, the right to corruption, and the right to disrespect basic human rights.

Cannibalistic and Totalitarian Societies
What Africans are doing to one another defies credulity. Genocide, bloody civil wars, and rampant violent crime suggest that African societies all soat cial levels are to some extent cannibalistic. Those who write laws and those who are responsible for enforcing them are those who trample on them. Thus, in almost all African countries, the day after gaining independence, in-

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vestment codes designedto attract foreign investment were promulgated. Yet affluent Africans jostle each other at the counters of Swiss, French, Belgian, and English banks, giving the impression that they have no confidence in themselves, in their country, in what they produce. They appear destroy or to with their own hands what they have built. The truth quickly becomes apparent. Seen from the inside, African societies are like a football team in which, as a result of personal rivalries and a lack of team spirit, one player will not pass the ball to another out of fear that the latter might score a goal. How can we hope for victory? In our republics, people outside of the ethnic “cement” (which is actually quite porous when one takes a closer look at it) have so little identification with one another that the mere existence of the state is a miracle-a miracle in part explained by the desire for personal gain. Thereis rarely any vision of a better future for all. At the same time, initiative and dynamism are condemned as signs of personal enrichment. The sorcerer wants equality in misery. There are numerous cases in which someone who has built a house has been told not to reside in it; others who have begun construction have been told to stop the work they value theirlives. if Was African totalitarianism born with independence? Of course not! It was already there, inscribed in the foundationsour tribalcultures. Authorof itarianism permeates our families, our villages, our schools, our churches. It is for us a way of life. Thus, faced with such a powerful, immovable culture, what can we do to change Africa’s destiny? We are condemned eitherto change or toperish.

CULTURE AND CHANGE

Our first objective is to preserve African culture, one of the most-if not the most-humanistic cultures in existence. But it must be regenerated through a process initiated from the inside that would allow Africans to remain themselves while being of their time. We must keep these humanistic values-the solidarity beyond age classification and social status; social interaction; the love of neighbor, whatever the color of his skin; the defense of the environment, and so many others. We must, however, destroy all within us that is opposed to our mastery of our future, a future that must be prosperous and just, a future in which the people of Africa determine their own destiny through participation in the political process. In doing so, we must be mindful that culture is the mother and that institutions are the children. More efficient and just African institutions depend on modifications to our culture.

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The Four Revolutions We MustLead
We need to undertake peaceful cultural revolutions in four sectors: education, politics, economics, and social life.

Education. The traditional education of the African child prepares boys and girls for integration into their tribal community. To the child are transmitted not only the habits customary for his her ageand sex, but all the valuesand or beliefs that are the cultural foundation of the group to which he or she belongs. In a system in which educationis perceived above all as an instrument of socialization, the traditional African child educated by the entire commuis nity. The problem is that this system offers few incentives for children imto prove themselves,to innovate, or to do better than their parents. How then can we reform educational systemsso strongly handicapped by both a conservative culture and a lack of infrastructure and pedagogical facilities? (It is, for example, not unusual for there tobe 125 students in a single classroom.) Verysimply,by assertingtheabsolutepreeminence of education, by suppressing the construction of religious structures and other palaces to the detrimentof schools, and by modifying the content of the curricula, accenting not only science but especially the necessary changes of the African society. This means critical thinking, affirmation of the need for subregional and continental unity, rational development manual aswell as inof tellectual methods of work, and, in general, the qualities that engender progress: imagination, dissent, creativity, professionalism and competence, a sense of responsibility and duty, love for a jobwell done. The African school should henceforth mold future businesspeople, and therefore job creators, not just degree recipients who expect to be offered sinecures. From the time the child is in elementary school, the young African will have to be awakened to time management, notonly in terms of production but especially in terms of maintenance of infrastructure and equipment. The teaching of technological maintenance is surely more important than courses on the role of the one-party system in national integration and the on infallibility of the “Father of the Nation.” But change must not stop there. The role of the African woman-the abused backbone of our societies-in society must also be transformed. Women do not have access to bank accounts, credit, or property. They are not allowed to speak. They produce muchof our food,yet they have little access to agricultural training, credit, technical assistance, and on. so In Africa as elsewhere, the emancipation women is the best gauge of the of political and social progress of a society. Without an African woman who is free and responsible, the African man will be unableto stand onhis own.

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Politics. Once education has been reformed,Africanpoliticalsystems will will change virtuallyby themselves. A new type of citizenship emerge, onethat gives more room to the individual, his worth as a social actor, his ability to adapt to his institutional environment, and the demands that progress puts on his community. African nations need extend the pluralism to that already exists in the diversity their peoplesto the political arena. They must cultivate of tolerance and emphasize merit. Regional integration must replace nationalism. Economics.Torevolutionizeoureconomicculture,wemustunderstand that instead of depending on a world market that we are virtually excluded from, we must first establish integrated markets among ourselves. We must accept profit as the engineof development. We must recognize the indispensable role of individual initiative and the inalienable right of the individual to enjoy the fruitsof his labor. We must understand that there can no real or be lasting economic growth without full employment. The entire African population must be put to work. It is impossible for anyone to be both unemployed and a goodcitizen, especiallyin countries with no social safety net. Social Life. African civil society will not emerge withoutqualitative changes in behavior, first in the relationships among Africans and then with respect to behavior toward foreigners, to whom we generally feel inferior. We must have more self-confidence, more trust in one another, and a commitment to a progress that benefits all. We need more rigor and a systematic approach to the elaboration of strategies-and the implementation of decisions taken-whatever the costs.
CONCLUSION

We are now at a crossroads. Thepersistence and destructiveness of the economic and political crises that have stricken Africa make it necessary for us to act without delay. We must go to the heart of our morals and customs in order to eradicate the layer of mud that prevents our societies from moving into modernism. We must lead this revolution of minds-without which there can be no transfer of technology-on our own. We must place our bets on our intelligence because Africans, if they have capable leaders, are fully able to distance themselves from the jealousy, the blind submission to the irrational, the lethargy that have been their undoing.If Europe, that fragment of earth representing a tiny part of humanity, has been able to impose itself on the planet, dominating it and organizing it for its exclusive profit, it is only because it developed a conquering culture of rigor and work, removed from the influence of invisible forces.We must do the same.

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part two

CULTURE AND POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT

7
Culture and Democracy
R O N A L DI N G L E H A R T

Building on the Weberian tradition, Francis Fukuyama (1995), Lawrence Harrison (1985, 1992, 1997), Samuel Huntington (1996), and Robert Putnam (1993) argue that cultural traditions are remarkably enduring and shape the political and economic behavior of their societies today. But modernization theorists from Karl Marx to Daniel Bell (1973, 1976) and the author of this chapter (1977, 1990, 1997) have argued that the rise of industrial society is linked with coherent cultural shifts away from traditional value systems. This article presents evidence that both claims are true: Development is linked with a syndrome of predictable changes away from absolute social norms, toward increasingly rational, tolerant, trusting, and postmodern values. But culture is path dependent. The fact that a society was historically Protestant or Orthodox or Islamic or Confucian gives rise to cultural zones with highly distinctive value systems persist when we that control for theeffects of economic development. Distinctive cultural zones exist and they have major social and political consequences, helping shape important phenomena from fertility rates to economic behavior and-as this chapter will demonstrate-democratic institutions. One major dimension of cross-cultural variation is especially important to democracy. As we will see, societies vary tremendously in the extent

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to which they emphasize “survival values” or “self-expression values.” Societies that emphasize the latter are far likelier to be democracies than societies that emphasize survival values. Economic development seemsto bring a gradual shift from survival values to self-expression values, which helps explain why richer societies are more likely to be democracies. As we will see below, the correlation between survivauself-expression values and democracy is remarkably strong. Do they go together because self-expression values (which include interpersonal trust, tolerance, and participation decisionmaking) are conducive democracy? in to Or dodemocratic institutions cause these values emerge? Itis always diffito cult to determine causality, but the evidence suggeststhat it is more a matter of culture shaping democracy than the other way around.
MODERNIZATION AND CULTURAL ZONES

Huntington (1993, 1996) argues that the world is divided into eight or nine major civilizations based on enduring cultural differences that have persisted for centuries-and that the conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations. These civilizations were largely shaped by religious traditions that arestill powerful today, despite the forces of modernization. Western Christianity, the Orthodox world, the Islamic world, and the Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist, African, and Latin American regions constitute the major cultural zones. With the end of the Cold War, Huntington argues, political conflict will occur mainly along these cultural divisions, not along ideological or economic lines. In a related argument, Putnam ( 1 9 9 3 ) claims that the regions of Italy where democratic institutions function most successfully today are those in which civil society was relatively well developed centuries before. Harrison (1985, 1992,1997)argues that development is strongly influenced by a society’s basic cultural values. And Fukuyama (1995) argues that asociety’s ability to compete in global markets is conditioned by social trust: “low-trust” societies are at a disadvantage because they are less effective in developing large, complex social institutions. of these analyses reflect the assumption All that contemporary societies are characterized by distinctive cultural traits that have endured over long periods of time-and that these traits have an important impact on the political and economic performance of societies. How accurate is this assumption? Another major body of literature presents a seemingly incompatible view. Modernization theorists, including the author of this chapter, have argued that the world is changing in ways that erode traditional values. Economic

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development almost inevitably brings the decline of religion, parochialism, and cultural differences. Using data from three waves of the World Values Survey (WVS), which now covers sixty-five societies containing 75 percent of the world’s population, this article presents evidence that both claims are true. Economic development seems to be linked with a syndrome of predictable changes away from absolute social norms and toward increasingly rational, tolerant, trusting, and postmodern values. But culture is path dependent. The fact that a society was historically Protestant, Orthodox, Islamic, or Confucian gives rise to cultural zones with highly distinctive value systems that persist when we control for the effects of economic development. These cultural differences are closely linked with a number of important social phenomena, of which we will focus on one: they are strongly linked with the extent to which a society has democratic institutions, as measured by scores on the Freedom House ratings of political rights and civil liberties from 1972 through 1997. Before I demonstrate this point, let us examine the evidence that enduring cross-cultural differences exist, even though economic development tends to bring systematic cultural changes.

TRADITIONAL/RATIONAL-LEGAL AND SURVIVAL/SELF-EXPRESSION VALUES: TWO KEY DIMENSIONS OF CROSS-CULTURAL VARIATION

To compare cultures in a parsimonious fashion requires a major data-reduction effort. Comparing each of the eight or nine civilizations on one variable after another, among the hundreds of values measured in the World Values Surveys (and the thousands that conceivably might be measured), would be an endless process. But any meaningful data-reduction process requires a relatively simple underlying structure of cross-cultural variation-which we Fortunately, such a structure does seem to exist. cannot take for granted. In previous research (Inglehart 1997, chap. 3) the author of this chapter analyzed aggregated national-level data from the forty-three societies included in the 1990-1991 World Values Survey, finding large and coherent cross-cultural differences. The worldviews the peoples of rich societies difof fer systematically from those of low-income societies, across a wide range of political, social, and religious norms and beliefs. Factor analysis revealedtwo main dimensions that tapped scores of variables and explained over half of the cross-cultural variation. These two dimensions reflect cross-national polarization between traditional versus secular-rational orientations toward au-

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thority and survival versus self-expression values. They make it possible to plot each society’s location on a global cultural map. This article builds on these findings by constructing comparable measures of cross-cultural variation that can be used with all three waves of the World Values Surveys, at both the individual level and the national level. This enables us to examine changes over time along these dimensions. The earlier analysis (Inglehart1997) used factor scores based on twenty-two variables in the 1990-1991 surveys. We selected a subset of ten variables that not only had high loadings on these dimensions but had been utilized in the same format in all three waves of the World Values Surveys. This subset was used to minimize problems of missing data (when one variable is missing, an entire nation is lost from the analysis). The factor scores generated by this reduced pool of items are highly correlated with the factor scores generated by the twenty-two items used earlier (Inglehart 1997, 334-335, 388). The traditionalhecular-rational dimension used here is almost perfectly correlated with the factor scores from the comparable dimension based on eleven variables; the same is true of the survivalhelf-expression dimension. We are tapping a robust aspect of crosscultural variation. Each of these two dimensions taps a major axisof cross-cultural variation involving dozens of basic values and orientations. The traditionallsecular-rational dimension reflects, first of all, the contrast between societies in which religion is very important and those in which it is not, but it also taps a rich variety of other concerns. Emphasis on the importance family ties and defof erence to authority (including a relative acceptance of military rule) are major themes, together with avoidance of political conflict and an emphasis on consensus over confrontation. Societiesat the traditional pole emphasize religion, absolute standards, and traditional family values; favor large families; reject divorce; and take a pro-life stance on abortion, euthanasia, and suicide. They emphasize social conformity rather than individualistic achievement, favor consensus rather than open political conflict, support deference to authority, and have high levels of national pride and a nationalistic outlook. Societies with secular-rational values have the opposite preferences on all these topics. These orientations have a strong tendency to go together across the more than sixty societies examined here. This holds true despite the fact that we deliberately selected items covering a wide range topics: we could have seof lected five items referring to religion and obtained an even more tightly correlated cluster, but our goal was to measure broad dimensions of crosscultural variation.

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Adherence to these values seemsto have important consequences in theobjective world. For example, societies that emphasize traditional values have much higher fertility rates than those that emphasize rational-legal values.
SURVIVAL/SELF-EXPRESSION VALUES

The survival/self-expression dimension involves the themes that characterize postindustrial society. One of its central components involves the polarization between materialist and postmaterialist values. Extensive evidence indicates that these values tap an intergenerational shift from emphasis on economic and physical security toward increasing emphasison self-expression,subjectivewell-being,andquality of life (Inglehart 1977, 1990, 1997). This cultural shift found throughout advanced industrialsocieties; is it seems to emerge among birth cohorts that have grown up under conditions in which survival is taken for granted. These values are linked with the emergence of growing emphasis on environmental protection, the women’s movement, and rising demands for participation in decisionmaking in economic and political life. During the past twenty-five years, these values have become increasingly widespread in almost all advanced industrial societies for which extensive time-series evidence is available. But this is only one component of a much broader dimension of cross-cultural variation. Societies that emphasize survival values show relatively low levels of subjective well-being, report relatively poor health, are low on interpersonal trust, are relatively intolerant toward outgroups, are low on support for gender equality, emphasize materialist values, have relatively highlevels of faith in science and technology, are relatively low on environmental activism, and are relatively favorable to authoritarian government. Societies that emphasize self-expression values tend to have the opposite preferences on all these topics. Whether a society emphasizes survival values self-expression values or has important objective consequences. As we will see, societies that emphasize self-expression values are much more likely to be stable democracies than those thatemphasize survival values.
A GLOBAL CULTURAL MAP: 1995-1998

Let us now examine the location each of our sixty-five societieson thetwo of dimensions generated by the factor analysis we have just examined.The vertical axis on our global cultural map (see Fig. 7.1) corresponds to the polarization between traditional authority and secular-rational authority. The horizontal axis depicts the polarization between survival values and well-

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-2.0

-1.5

-1.0

4.5

0

0.5

1.0

1.5

2.0

Survival vs. Self-Expression

FIGURE 7.1 Locations of Sixty-Five Societies on Two Dimensions of Cross-Cultural Variation NOTE: The scaleson each axis indicate the country’s factor scores the give on dimension. SOURCE:The data for the following fifty societies are from the 1995-1998 World Values Survey: U.S., Australia, NewZealand, China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Turkey, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Great Britain, East Germany, West Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Spain, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Slovenia, Croatia, Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, Venezuela.Data for Canada, France, Italy, Portugal, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Northern Ireland, Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Romania are from the1990 World Values Survey. The positions of Colombia and Pakistan are estimated from incomplete data.

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being. The boundaries around groups of countries in Figure 7.1 are drawn using Huntington’s (1993, 1996) cultural zones as a guide. This map is remarkably similar to the one generated from the 1990-1991 surveys (Inglehart 1997, 93). We find distinct and coherent Protestant, Catholic, Latin American, Confucian, African, and Orthodox cultural zones, reflecting the fact that thesocieties within these clusters have relatively similar values. Although these surveys include only a few Islamic societies, they tend to fall into the southwest cornerof the map. Religious traditions seem to have had an enduring impact on the contemporary value systems of sixty-five societies,as Weber, Huntington, and others have argued. But religionis not the only factor shaping cultural zones. A society’s culture reflects its entire historical heritage. One of the most important historical eventsof the twentieth century was the and fall of a communist rise empire that once ruled a third of the world’s population. Communism has left a clear imprint on the value systems of those who lived under it. Despite four decades of communist rule, the former East Germany remains culturally close to what was West Germany, but its value system has been drawn toward the communist zone. And although China is a member of the Confucian zone, it too falls within a broad communist-influenced zone. Similarly Azerbaijan, though part of the Islamic cluster, also falls within the communist super-zone that dominated it for decades. The influence of colonial ries is apparent in theexistence of a Latin American cultural zone adjacent to Spain and Portugal. Former colonial ties also help account for theexistence of an English-speaking zone containing Britain and the other English-speaking societies. All seven of the English-speaking societies included in this study show relatively similar cultural characteristics. Australia and New Zealand were not surveyed until 1995-1998, but they both fall into the English-speaking cultural zonethat the authorof this chapter found with the1990-1991 data. Geographically, they are halfway around the world, but culturally Australia and New Zealand are neighborsof Great Britain and Canada. The impact of colonization seems to be especially strong when reinforced by massive immigration from the colonial society. The fact that Spain, Italy, Uruguay, and Argentina are all relatively close to each other on the border between Catholic Europe and Latin America illustrates the point that though geographically remote from each other, the populations of Uruguay and Argentina are largely descended from immigrants from Spain and Italy. Similarly, Tom Rice and Jan Feldman (1997) find strong correlations between the civic values of various ethnic groups in the United States and the values prevailing in their countries of origin-even two or three generations after their families migrated.

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HOW REAL ARE THE CULTURAL ZONES?

The placement of each societyon Figure 7.1 is objective, determined by a factor analysis of survey data from each country. The boundaries drawn around these societies are subjective, guided by Huntington’s division of the world into several cultural zones. How “real” are these zones? The boundaries could have been drawn in various ways because these societies have been influenced by a variety of factors. Thus, some of the boundaries overlap 0thers-for example, the ex-communist zone overlaps the Protestant, Catholic, Confucian, Orthodox, and Islamic cultural zones. Similarly, Britain is located at the intersection of the English-speaking zone and Protestant Europe. Empirically, Britain is close to all five of the English-speaking societies, and we included it in that zone. But with only slight modification, we could have drawn the borders to put Britain in Protestant Europe, for it also culturally is close to those societies. Reality is complex. Britain is both Protestant and English speaking, and its empirical position reflects both aspectsof reality. Similarly, we have drawn a boundary around the Latin American societies that Huntington postulated were a distinct culturalzone: all ten of them do indeed show relatively similar values in global perspective. But with only minor changes, we could have drawn this border to define a Hispanic cultural zone including Spainand Portugal, which empirically are also relatively close to the Latin American societies.Or we could have drawn a boundary that included Latin America, Catholic Europe, and the Philippines and Ireland in a broad Roman Catholic cultural zone. All of these zones are both conceptually and empirically justifiable. This two-dimensional map is based on similarity of basic values, but it also reflects the relative distances between these societies on many other dimensions, such as religion, colonial influences, the influence of communist rule, social structure, and economic level. The influence of many different historical factors can be summed up remarkably well by the two cultural dimensions on which this map is based. But because these various factors do not always coincide neatly, there are some obvious anomalies. For example, Japan and the former East Germany fall next to each other. This is appropriate in the sense that both societies are highly secular, are relatively wealthy, and have high proportions of industrial workers; but itis inappropriate in that Japan was shaped a Confucian heritage, whereas East Gerby many was shaped by Protestantism. (To be sure, Harrison [1992] has argued that important parallels exist between Confucian and Protestant culture.) Despite such apparent anomalies, societies with a common cultural heritage generally fall into commonclusters. But their positions also reflect their

88

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level of economic development, their occupational structure, their religion, and other major historical influences. Their positions on this two-dimensional space reflect a multi-dimensional reality. The remarkable coherence between these various dimensions seems reflect the factthat a society's culto ture has been shaped by its entire economic and historical heritage, which in turn shapes them. Economic development seems to have a powerful impact on cultural values. The value systems of richer countries differ systematically from those of poorer countries. The overall structure of Figure 7.1 reflects the gradient from low-income countries (located near the lower left quadrant) torich societies (located near the upper right). Figure 7.2 demonstrates this point. A redrawn version of Figure 7.1, it shows the economic zones into which these sixty-five societies fall. nineAll teen societies with annual per capita gross national products over $15,000 rank relatively high on both dimensions and fall into a zone at the upper right-hand corner. This economic zone cuts across the boundaries of the Protestant, ex-communist, Confucian, Catholic, and English-speaking cultural zones. Conversely, all of the societies with per capita GNPs below $2,000 fall into a cluster at the lower left of Figure 7.2, in an economic zone that cuts across theAfrican, South Asian, ex-communist, and Orthodox cultural zones. The evidence suggeststhat economic development tends to move societies in a common direction, regardless of their cultural heritage. Nevertheless, distinctive cultural zones continue to persist two centuries after the industrial revolution was launched. GNPkapita is only one indicator of a society's level of economic development. As Marx argued, the rise of the industrial working class was a key event in modern history. Furthermore, the changing nature the labor force of defines three distinct stages of economic development: agrarian society, industrial society, and postindustrial society (Bell 1973, 1976). Thus still another set of boundaries could be drawn around the societies in Figures 7.1 and 7.2. Thesocieties with a high percentage of the labor force in agriculture are located near the bottom of the map, the societies with a high percentage of industrial workers near the top, and the societies with a high percentage in the service sector nearthe right-hand sideof the map. Modernization theory implies that as societies develop economically, their cultures will tend to shift in a predictable direction, and our data fit the implications of this prediction. Economic differences are linked with large perand vasive cultural differences.Nevertheless,wefindclearevidenceofthe persistence of long-established cultural zones. Using the data from the latest available survey for eachsociety,wecreated dummy variables to reflect whether a given society is predominantly English speaking or not, ex-communist or not, and so on, for eachof the clusters outlinedon Figure 7.1. Empirical

Culture
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Survival vs. Self-Expression

FIGURE 7.2 Economic Level of Sixty-Five Societies Superimposed on Two Dimensions of Cross-Cultural Variation NOTE: All but one of the sixty-five societies shown in Figure 7.1 fit into the economic zones indicated here: only the Dominican Republic is mislocated. SOURCE: Economic levels are based on the World Bank's of purchasing power parity estimates as 1995;see World Development Report, 1997, pp. 214-215. analysis of these variables shows that the cultural locations of given societies are far from random. Eight the nine zones outlinedon Figure 7.1 show staof tistically significant relationships with least oneof the two major dimensions at of cross-cultural variation (the sole exception is the Catholic Europe cluster; it is fairly coherent but has a neutral position on both dimensions). Do these cultural clusters simply reflect economic differences? For example, do the societies of Protestant Europe have similar values simply because they are rich? The answeris no. The impact of a society's historical-cultural heritage persists when one controls for GNPkapita and the structure of the labor force in multiple regression analyses (Inglehart and Baker 2000). To illustrate how coherent these clusters are, us examine oneof the key let variables in the literature on cross-cultural differences: interpersonal trust (a

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0

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FIGURE 7.3 Interpersonal Trust by Cultural Traditionand Level of Economic Development and Religious Tradition Trust by GNPkapita: r = .60 p < .OOO component of thesurvival/self-expressiondimension).JamesColeman (1988, 1990), Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba (1963), Putnam (1993), and Fukuyama (1995) argue that interpersonal trust is essential for building the social structureson which democracy depends and the complex social organizations on which large-scale economic enterprises are based. As Figure 7.3 demonstrates, virtually all historically Protestant societies rank higher on interpersonal trust than virtually all historically Catholic societies. This holds true even when wecontrol for levels of economic development: interpersonal trust is significantly correlated with the society’s level of GNWcapita, but even rich Catholic societies rank lower than equally prosperous historically Protestant societies. A heritage of communist rule also seems to have an impact on this variable, with virtuallyall ex-communist societies ranking relatively Accordlow. ingly, historically Protestant societies that experienced communist rule, such as East Germanyand Latvia, show relatively low levels of interpersonal trust.

Culture and Democracy

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Of the nineteen societies in which more than 35 percent of the public believe that most people can be trusted, fourteen are historically Protestant, three are Confucian influenced, one is predominantly Hindu, and only one (Ireland)is historically Catholic. Of the ten lowest-ranking societies in Figure 7.3, eight are historically Catholic; none is historically Protestant. In passing, we note the striking correlation of these data with the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index addressed in Chapter9, by Seymour Martin Lipset and Gabriel Salman Lenz. Within given societies, Catholics rank about as high on interpersonal trust as do Protestants. It is not a matter of individual personality, but the shared historical experience of given nations that is crucial. As Putnam (1993) has argued, horizontal, locally controlled organizations are conducive to interpersonal trust; rule by large, hierarchical, centralized bureaucracies seems to corrode interpersonal trust. Historically, the Roman Catholic Church was the prototype of a hierarchical, centrally controlled institution; Protestant churches were relatively decentralized and more open to local control. The contrast between local control and dominationby a remote hierarchy seems to have important long-term consequences for interpersonal trust. Clearly, these cross-cultural differences notreflect the contemporary infludo ence of the respective churches. The Catholic Church has changed a great deal in recent decades. Moreover, in many of these countries, especially the Protestant ones, church attendance has dwindled to the point where only a small minority of the population attend church regularly. The majority have little or no contact with the church today, but the impactof living in a society that was historically shaped by once-powerful Catholic or Protestant institutions persists, shaping everyone-Protestant, Catholic, or other-who is socialized into a given nation’s culture. Protestant and Catholic societies seem to display distinctive values today mainly because of the historical impact their respective churches had on the societies as a whole, rather than through the contemporary influence of the churches. This is why we classify Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands as historically Protestant societies (historically, Protestantism shaped them, even though today-as a result of immigration, relatively low Protestant birthrates, and higher Protestant rates of secularization-they may have more practicing Catholics than Protestants.
CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY

The idea that political culture is linked with democracy had great impactfollowing the publication of The Civic Culture (Almond and Verba 1963) but went out of fashion during the 1970s for a variety of reasons. The politicalculture approach raised an important empirical question: Did given societies

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have political cultures that were relatively conducive to democracy? Some critics alleged that this approach was “elitist” in finding that some cultures were more conducive to democracy than others. Any right-minded theory should hold that all societies are equally likely to be democratic. The problem is that tailoring a theory to fit a given ideology may produce a theory that does not fit reality, and consequently predictions will eventually go wrong; the theory will provide misleading guidance to those who are trying to cope with democratization in the real world. By the 1990s, observers from Latin America to Eastern Europe to East Asia were concluding that cultural factors played an important role in the problems they were encountering with democratization. Simply adopting a democratic constitution was not enough. Culturalfactorshavebeenomittedfrommostempiricalanalyses of democracy partly because, until now, we have not had reliable measures of them from more than a handful countries. When cultural factors are taken of into account, as in the work of the author of this chapter (Inglehart 1990, 1997) and Putnam (1993), they to play an important role. seem Economic development leads twotypes of changes that areconducive to to democracy: It tends to transform a society’s social structure, bringing urbanization, mass education, occupational specialization, growing organizational networks, greater income equality, and a variety of associated developments that mobilize mass participation in politics. Rising occupational specialization and rising education lead a to workforce that is independent minded and has specialized skills that enhance its bargaining power against elites. Economic development is also conducive to cultural changes that help stabilize democracy. It tendsto develop interpersonal trust and tolerance, and it leadsto the spread of post-materialist values that place high priority on self-expression and participation in decisionmaking. Insofar as it brings higher levels of well-being, it endows the regime with legitimacy, which can help sustain democratic institutions through difficult times. Legitimacy an asset is to any regime, but it is crucial to democracies. Repressive authoritarian regimes can hold on topower even when they lack mass support, but democracies must have masssupport or they can be voted out of existence. Positive outputs from a political system can generate mass support for political incumbents. In the short term, this support calculated on the basis of is “what have you done for me lately?’’ But if a regime’s outputs are seen as

Culture
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FIGURE 7.4 Self-Expression Values and Democratic Institutions NOTE: Vertical axis is the sum the Freedom House ratings for civil liberties and of political rights from 1981 through 1998. Since these ratings give high scoresfor low 236 levels of democracy, we reversed polarity by subtracting these sums from (China, which had the maximum score of 235, has a scoreof 1 after this transformation). Horizontal axis reflects each country's mean factor score the on survivalhelf-expression dimension: It taps levels of postmaterialist values, trust, tolerance, political activism, and subjective well-being among each public. r=.88 N=63 p=.OOOO SOURCE: Freedom House surveys reported in successive editions Freedom in the of World; survey data from the 1990 and 1995 World Values Surveys. positive over a long time, the regime may develop "diffuse support" (Easton 1963)-the generalized perception that the political system is inherently good, quite apart from its current outputs. This type of support can endure even through difficult times.

94

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The World Values Survey data make it possible to test this thesis on a worldwide scale. As Figure 7.4 demonstrates, a society’s position on the survivauself-expression index is strongly correlated with its level of democracy, as indicated by its scores on the Freedom House ratings of political rights and civil liberties from 1972 through 1998. This relationship is powerful. It is clearly not a methodological artifact or merely a correlation because the two variables are measured at different levels and come from completelydifferent sources. Virtually all of the societies that rank high on survivalkelfexpression values are stable democracies; virtuallyall the societies that rank low have authoritarian governments. We will not attempt to unravel the complex causal linkages in this chapter. For the moment, let us simply note that the powerful linkage shown in Figure 7.4 persists when we control for GNPkapita and spell out the mainpossible interpretations. One interpretation would be that democratic institutions give rise to the self-expression values that are so closely linked with them. In other words, democracy makes people healthy, happy, tolerant,and trusting, and itinstills post-materialist values (at least in the younger generation). This interpretation is extremely appealing. It provides a powerful argument for democracy and implies that we have a quick fix most of the world’s problems: Adopt for democratic institutions and live happily ever after. Unfortunately, the experience of the people of the former Soviet Union does not support this interpretation. Since their dramatic move toward democracy in 1991, they have not become healthier, happier, more trusting, more tolerant, or more post-materialist. For the most part, they have gone in exactly the opposite direction. Latin America’s history of constitutional instability is another example. An alternative interpretationis that economic development gradually leads to social and cultural changes that make democratic institutions increasingly likely to survive and flourish. This would help explain why mass democracy did not emerge until relatively recently in history and why, even now, it is most likelyto be found ineconomically more developedcountries-in particular, those that emphasize self-expression valuesrather than survival values. The latter interpretation has both encouraging and discouraging implications. The bad news is that democracy is not something that can easily atbe tained by simply adopting the rightlaws. It is most likely to flourish in some social and cultural contexts than in others, and the current cultural conditions for democracy seem relatively unfavorable in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Armenia, and Moldova. The good news is that the long-term trend of the past several centuries has been toward economic development, a process that has accelerated and spread around the world during the past few decades. Furthermore, eco-

Culture

9s

nomic development tends to give rise to social and cultural conditions under which democracy becomes increasingly likely to emerge and survive. If the outlook is discouraging concerning much of the former Soviet Union, the evidence in Figure 7.4 suggests that a number of societies may be closer to democracy than is generally suspected. Mexico, for example, seems ripe for the transition to democracy, since its position on the post-modern values axis is roughly comparable to that Argentina, Spain, or Italy. A numof ber of other societies are also in this transition zone, including Turkey, the Philippines, Slovenia, South Korea, Poland, Peru, South Africa, and Croatia. Although China falls farther back on this dimension, it is experiencing rapid economic growth, which, as we have seen, seems to bring a shift toward self-expression values. The ruling Chinese communist elite are clearly committed to maintaining one-party rule, and as long as they retain control of the military they should be able to enforce their preferences. But the Chinese show a predisposition toward democracy that is inconsistent with China’s very low ranking on the Freedom House ratings. In the long run, modernization tends to help spread democratic institutions. Authoritarian rulers of some Asian societies have argued that the distinctive “Asian values” of these societies make unsuitable them for democracy (Lee 1994). Theevidence from the World Values Surveys-not to mention the evolution of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to democracydoes not support this interpretation. It suggests that Confucian societies may be readier for democracy than generally believed. is
CONCLUSION

Economic development seems to bring gradual cultural changes that make mass publics increasingly likely to want democratic institutions and to be more supportive of them once they are in place. This transformation is not easy or automatic. Determined elites who control the army and police can resist pressures for democratization. But development tends to make mass publics more trusting and tolerant and leads them to place an increasingly high priority on autonomy and self-expression inall spheres of life, including politics, and it becomes difficult and costly to repress demands for political liberalization. With rising levels of economic development, cultural patterns emerge that are increasingly supportive of democracy, making mass publics more likely to want democracy and more skillful at getting it. Although rich societies are muchlikelier to be democratic than poor ones, wealth alone does not automatically bring democracy. If that were true, Kuwait and Libya would be model democracies. But the process of modern-

96

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ization tends to bring cultural changes conducive to democracy. In the long run, the only way to avoid the growth of mass demands for democratization would be to reject industrialization. Few ruling elites are willing to do so. Those societies that do move onto the trajectory of industrial society are likely to face growing pressures for democratization. The evidence suggests that culture plays a much more crucial role in democracy than the literature of the past two decades would indicate. The syndrome of trust, tolerance, well-being, and participatory values tapped by the survivalhelf-expression dimension seems particularly crucial. In the long run, democracy is not attained simply by making institutional changes or through elite-level maneuvering. Its survival also depends on the values and beliefs of ordinary citizens.
REFERENCES

Almond, Gabriel, and Sidney Verba. 1963. The Civic Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. . 1990. The Civic Culture Revisited. Boston: Little, Brown. Bell, Daniel. 1973. The Coming of Post-Ifzdustrial Society. New York: Basic. . 1976. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic. Coleman, James S. 1988. “Social Capital in the Creationof Human Capital.” Arnerican Journal of Sociology 94: 95-121. . 1990. Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Diamond, Larry, ed. 1993. Political Culture and Democracy i n Developing Countries. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Diamond, Larry, withJuan Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset. 1995. Politics in Developing Cozrntries. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Easton, David. 1963. The Political System. New York: Wiley. Fukuyama, Francis. 1995. Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. New York: Free Press. Gibson, James L., and Raymond M. Duch. 1992. “The Origins of a Democratic Culture in the Soviet Union: The Acquisition of Democratic Values.” Paper presented at the 1992 annual meetingof the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago. Gibson, James L., with Raymond M. Duch. 1994. “Postmaterialism and the Emerging Soviet Democracy.” Political Research Quarterly 47, no. 1: 5-39. Harrison, Lawrence E. 1985. Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind-The Latin Americarz Case. Cambridge: Harvard Center for International Affairs; Lanham, Md.: Madison Books. . 1992. Who Prospers? How Cultural Values Shape Economic and Political Success. New York: Basic.

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. 1997. The Pan-American Dream: D o Latin America’s Cultural Values Discourage True Partnership? New York: Basic. Huntington, Samuel P. 1993. “The Clashof Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 . . 1996. The Clash o f Civilizations and the Remaking o f World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Ingelhart, Ronald. 1977. The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles in Advanced Industrial Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press. . 1990. Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press. . 1997. Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in Forty-Three Societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Inglehart, Ronald, and Wayne Baker. 2000. “Modernization, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values.”American Sociological Review, February. Lee Kuan Yew and Fareed Zakaria. 1994. “Culture Is Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew.” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2: 109-126. Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1990. “American Exceptionalism Reaffirmed.” Tocqueville Review 10. . 1996. American Exceptionalism. New York: Norton. Putnam, Robert. 1993. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rice, Tom W., and Jan L. Feldman. 1997. “Civic Culture and Democracy from Europe to America.” Journal ofPolitics 59, no. 4: 1143-1172. U.S. Bureau of the Census. World Population Profile:. 1996. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Weber, Max. 1958. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribner’s. Welzel, Christian, and Ronald Inglehart.Forthcoming.“AnalyzingDemocratic Change and Stability: A Human Development Theory of Democracy.”

8 Social Capital
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

Social capital can be defined simply as instantiated set of informal values an or norms shared amongmembers of a group that permits them to cooperate with one another. If members of the group come to expect that others will behave reliably and honestly, then they will come to trust one another. Trust acts like a lubricant that makes any group or organization run more efficiently. Sharing values and norms in itself does not produce social capital because the values may be the wrong ones. Southern Italy, for example, is a region of the world that is almost universally characterized as lacking in social capital and generalized trust, even though strong social norms exist. The sociologist Diego Gambetta tells the following story:
A retired [Mafia] boss recountedthat when he was a young boy, his Mafiosofather made him climb a wall and then invited him to jump, promising to catch him. He at first refused, but his father insisted until finally he jumped-and promptly landed flat on his face. The wisdom his father sought to convey was summed up by these words: “You must learn to distrust even your parents.”’

The Mafia is characterized by an extremely strong internal code of behavior, omerth, and individual Mafiosi are spoken of as “men of honor.” Nonetheless, these norms do not apply outside asmall circle of Mafiosi. For the rest of Sicilian society, the prevailing norms can be described more as

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“take advantage of people outside your immediate family at every occasion because otherwise they will take advantage you first.” And as the example of cited by Gambetta suggests, even families may not be that reliable. Such norms obviously do not promotesocial cooperation, and the negative consequences for both good government and economic development have been documented extensively.2 SouthernItaly, one of the poorest parts of Western Europe, has traditionally been the source of the extensive corruption plaguing the country’s political system. The norms that produce social capital, by contrast, must substantively include virtues like truth telling, meeting obligations, and reciprocity.Not surprisingly, these norms overlap to a significant degree with those Puritan values that MaxWeber found critical to thedevelopment of Western capitalism in his bookThe Protestant Ethic and the Spirit Capitalism. of All societies have some stock of social capital; the real differences among them concern what might be called the “radius of trust.” That is, cooperative norms like honesty and reciprocity can be shared among limited groups of people but not with others in the same society. Families are obviously important sources of social capital everywhere. However, the strength of family bonds differs from society to society; it also varies relative to other types of social obligation. In some cases, there appears to be something of an inverse relationship between the bonds of trust and reciprocity inside and outside the family: when one is very strong, the other tends to be weak. In China and Latin America, families are strong and cohesive, but itis hard to trust strangers, and levels of honesty and cooperation in public life are much lower. A consequence is nepotism and pervasive public corruption. What made the Protestant Reformation important for Weber was not so much that it encouraged honesty, reciprocity, and thrift among individual entrepreneurs, but that these virtues were for the time first widely practiced outside the family. It is perfectly possible to form successful groups in the absence of social capital, using a variety formal coordinationmechanisms like contracts, hiof erarchies, constitutions, legal systems, and the like. But informal norms greatly reduce what economists label “transaction costs”-the costs of monitoring, contracting, adjudicating, and enforcing formal agreements. Under certain circumstances, social capital may also facilitate a higher degree of innovation and group adaptation. Social capital has benefits that go well beyond the economic sphere. It is critical for the creationof a healthy civil society-the groups and associations that fall between the familyand the state. Civil society, which has been the focus of considerable interest in former communist countries since the of the fall Berlin Wall, is said to be critical to the success of democracy. Social capital al-

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lows the different groups within a complex society band together to defend to their interests, which might otherwise disregarded by a powerful ~ t a t e . ~ be Although social capital and civil society have been widely praised as good things to have, it is important to note that they are not always beneficial. Coordination is necessary for all social activity, whether good or bad. The Mafia and the Ku Klux Klan are constituent parts of American civil society; both possess social capital, and both are detrimental to the health of the broader society. In economic life, group coordination is necessary for one form of production, but when technologyor markets change, a different type of coordination with perhaps adifferent set of group members becomes necessary. The bonds of social reciprocity that facilitated production in an earlier time period become obstacles to production in a later time period, as is the case for many Japanese corporations in the 1990s. To continue the economic metaphor, social capital at that point can be said to be obsolete and needs to be depreciated in thesociety’s capital accounts. The fact that social capital can on occasion be used for destructive purposes or can become obsolete does not negate the widely shared presumption that it is generally a good thing for a society to have. Physical capital, after all, is not always a good thing, either. Not only can it become obsolete, but it can be used to produce assault rifles, thalidomide, tasteless entertainment, and a whole range of other social “bads.” But societies have laws to forbid the production of the worst social bads, whether by physical or social capital, so we can presume that most of the uses to which social capital will be put will be no less good from a social standpoint than the productsof physical capital. And so it has been regarded by most people who have employed the concept. The first known use of the term “social capital” was by Lyda Judson Hanifan in 1916 todescribe rural school community center^.^ The term was also used in Jane Jacobs’s classic work The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she explainedthat the dense social networks that existed in older, mixed-use urban neighborhoods constituted a form of social capital that encouraged public a f e t yThe economist Glenn Loury, as well as the ~ .~ sociologist Ivan Light, used the term “social capital” in the 1970s to analyze the problem of inner-city economic development: African Americans lacked the bonds of trust and social connectedness within their own communities that existed for Asian American and other ethnic groups, which went a long way toward explaining the relative lack of black small-business development.6 In the 1980s, the term “social capital” was brought into wider use by the sociologist James Coleman’ and the political scientist Robert Putnam. Putnam stimulated an intense debate over the role of social capital and civil society in Italyand the United States.

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H O W DO WE MEASURE SOCIAL CAPITAL?

Neither sociologists nor economists have been happy with the spreading use of the term “social capital.” Sociologists see it as part of the broader conquest of the social sciences by economics, and economists regard it as a nebulous concept that is difficult if not impossible to measure. And indeed, measurement of the total stock of cooperative social relationships based on norms of honesty and reciprocity is not a trivial task. Robert Putnam has argued in Making Democracy Work that the qualityof governance in the different regions of Italy is correlated with social capital, and that social capital has been in decline in the United States since the 1960s. His work illustrates some of the difficulties involved in the measurement of social capital, for which he uses two types of statistical measures. The firstis information on groups and group memberships, from sports clubs and choral societies to interest groups and political parties, as well as indices of political participation such as voter turnout and newspaper readership. In addition, there are more detailed time-budget surveys and other indicators of how people actually spend their waking hours. The second type of data is survey research such as the General Social Survey (for the United States) or the World Values Survey (for over sixty countries around the world), which ask a series of questions concerning values and behavior. The assertion that American social capital has been declining over the past two generations has been hotly contested. Numerous scholars have pointed to contradictory data showing that groups and group membership have actually been increasing over the past generation while others have argued that the available data simply do not capture thereality of group life in a society as complex as the United States.* Aside from the question of whether it is possible to comprehensively count groups and group memberships, there are at least three further measurement problems with this approach. First, social capital has an important qualitative dimension. Although bowling leagues or garden clubs might be, as Tocqueville suggests, schools cooperation and public spiritedness, they are obfor viously very different institutions from the Marine Corps or the Mormon U.S. Church in termsof the kinds of collective action theyfoster. A bowling league is not, to say the least, capable of storming a beach. An adequate measure of social capital needs to take account of the nature of the collective action of which a group is capable-its inherent difficulty, the value of the group’s output, whether it can be undertaken under adverse circumstances, and on. so The second problem has to do with what an economist would call the “positive externalities” of group membership, or what we might label the “positive radius of trust.” Although all groups require social capital to oper-

I02

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ate, some build bonds of trust (and hence social capital) outside their own membership. As Weber indicated, Puritanism mandated honesty not simply toward other members of one’s religious community but toward all human beings. On the other hand, normsof reciprocity can be shared among only a small subset of a group’s members. In a so-called membershipgroup like the American Association of Retired People (AARP), which has a membership of over 30 million, there is no reason to think that any two given members will trust each other or achieve coordinated action just because they have paid their yearly dues to the same organization. The final problem concerns negative externalities. Some groups actively promote intolerance, hatred, and even violence toward non-members. Although the Ku Klux Klan, Nation of Islam, and Michigan Militia possesssocial capital, a society made up of such groups would not be particularly appealing and might even cease to be a democracy. Such groups have problems cooperating with each other, and the exclusive bonds of community uniting them are likely to make them less adaptive by sealing them off from influences in the surrounding environment. It should be clear that coming up with abelievable number expressing the stock of social capital for a large and complex society like the United States based on a census of groups is next to impossible. We have empirical data, of varying reliability, on only a certain subset of the groups that actually exist, and no consensus means of judging their qualitative difference^.^ Alternatively, insteadof measuring social capital apositive value, it might as be easier to measure the absence of social capital through traditional measures of social dysfunction, such as ratesof crime, family breakdown, druguse, litigation, suicide, tax evasion, and the like. The presumption is that since social capital reflects the existence of cooperative norms, social deviance ipso facto reflects a lack of social capital. Indicators of social dysfunction, although hardly unproblematic, are far more abundant than data on group memberships and are available on a comparativebasis. The National Commission on Civic Renewal hasused this strategy to measure civic disengagement. One very serious problem with using social dysfunction data as a negative measure of social capitalis that they ignore distribution. Just as conventional capital is unevenly distributed within a society (i.e., as measured by wealth and income distribution studies), social capitalis also likelyto be unevenly so distributed-strata of highly socialized, self-organizing people may coexist with pockets of extreme atomization and social pathology.
THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

Social capital is not, as sometimes portrayed, a rare cultural treasure passed down from one generation to the next, which, lost, can never be regained. if

Social Capital
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Hierarchically generated

More formal

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S genera

FIGURE 8.1 A Continuum of Norms

Rather, it is created spontaneously all the time by people going about their daily lives. It was created in traditional societies, and it is generated on a daily basis by individualsand firms in a modern capitalist society. The systematic study of how order, and thus social capital, can emerge a in spontaneous and decentralized fashionis one of the most important intellectual developments of the late twentieth century. Leading the charge have been the economists-not a surprising development, given that the discipline of economics centers around markets, which are themselves prime examples of spontaneous order. It was Friedrich von Hayek who laid out the program of studying what he called “the extended order human cooperation,” that of is, the sum total of all of the rules, norms, values, and shared behaviors that allow individuals to work togetherin a capitalistsociety.lo No one would deny that social order is often created hierarchically. But it is useful to see that order can emerge from a spectrumof sources that extends from hierarchical and centralized types of authority to thecompletely decentralized and spontaneous interactions of individuals. Figure 8.1 illustrates this continuum. Hierarchy can take many forms, from the transcendental (e.g., Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments) to the mundane, as when a CEO announces a new “corporate ethos” that will govern customer relations. Spontaneous order has similarly diverse origins, ranging from the blind interaction of natural forces to highly structured negotiations among lawyers over underground water rights. By and large, the norms created spontaneously tend to be informal-that is, they are not written down and published-whereas norms and rules created by hierarchical sources of authority tend to take the form of written laws, constitutions, regulations, holy texts, or bureaucratic organization charts. In some cases, the boundary between spontaneous and hierarchical order is blurry; in English-speaking countries like Britain and the United States, for example, common law evolves spontaneously through the interactionof a myriad of judges and advocates, but it is also recognized as binding by the formal judicial system. Besides arraying social norms along a continuum from hierarchically generated to spontaneously generated, we can overlay another continuum of norms that are the productof rational choice and norms that are socially in-

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~~

_____

~~~

FIGURE 8.2 The Universe of Norms I herited and a-rational in origin. Combining our two axes produces a fourquadrant matrix of possible types of norms, as illustrated in Figure 8.2. "Rational" as used hererefersonly to the fact that alternative norms are consciously debated and compared ahead of time. Clearly, rational discussion can lead to bad choices that do not serve the true interests of the people making them, whereas a-rational norms can be quite functional, as when religious belief supports social order or economic growth. In many respects, this distinction between rational and a-rational corresponds to the disciplinary boundary between sociology and economics. Sociology is, in the end, a discipline devoted to the study of social norms. Sociologists assume that as human beings grow and mature, they are socialized into a whole series of roles and identities-Catholic, worker, deviant, mother, bureaucrat-defined by a series of complex norms and rules. These norms bind communities together and are tightly enforced by them, sharply limiting the kinds of choices people can make about their lives.
INSIGHTS OF THE ECONOMISTS

Over the past generation, economists have paid increasing attention to the importance of norms and rules in economic life. Ronald Heiner pointed out that as rational human beings we simply cannot make rational decisions at every point in day-to-daylife. Were we to do so, our behavior would be both unpredictable and subject to paralysis as we perpetually calculated whether we should tip the waiter,stiff the cab driver of his fare, or put away adifferent amount of our paycheck every month in our retirement account."In fact, it is rational for people to impose simplifying rules on their own behavior, even if these rules do not always yield correct decisions in every circumstance because decisionmaking is in itself costly and often requires information that is unavailable or faulty,

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The entiresub-discipline within economicsof the “new institutionalism” is built around the observation that rules and norms arecritical to rational economic behavior. What the economic historian Douglass North labels an “institution” is a norm or rule, formal or informal, governing human social interaction.” He points out that norms are critical for reducing transaction costs; if we did not have norms, for example, requiring the respect of property rights, we would have negotiate ownership rules on a case-by-case bato sis, asituationthatwould be conduciveneither tomarket exchange, investment, nor economic growth. Thus economists do not differ from sociologists in stressing the importance of norms. Where they do differ is in their self-perceived ability to give an account of the origins of norms and rules. Sociologists (as well as anthropologists) are, by and large, much better at describing social norms than explaining why they cameto be that way. Many sociological descriptions paint a highly static picture of human society, observing, for example, that lowerclass boys in Italian neighborhoods in New York are socialized by “peer group pressure” to join gangs. But this kind of assertion simply begs the question of where those peer group norms came from in the first place. We can trace them back a generation or two into the historical past, but ultimately we face an absence of evidence for their more distant‘ origins. There was for a time a school of “functionalist” sociology and anthropology that tried to find rational utilitarian reasons for the most bizarre social rules. The Hindu ban on eating cows was ascribed, for example, to the fact that cows were resources that had to be protected for other uses like plowing and dairy farming. What could not be explained why the Muslims in India, who faced the same ecois logical and economic conditions, ate cows with gusto, or why the ban persists when a McDonald’s in New Delhi can import all the beef it wants from Australia or Argentina. Into the breech have stepped economists, who in recent years have not been shy about applying their methodology to ever wider aspects of social behavior. There is a large and well-developed branch of economics-game theory-that seeks to explain how social norms and rules come about. As noted above, economists do not deny that human action is bounded by all sorts of rules and norms: How human beings get to these norms, however,is for them a rational and therefore explicable process. To oversimplify a bit, economic game theory starts from the premise that we are all born into the world as isolated individuals with bundles of selfish desires or preferences, not with lots of social ties and obligations to one another. In many cases, however, we can satisfy those preferences more effectively if we cooperate with other people and therefore end up negotiating cooperative norms to govern social interactions. People can act altruistically

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Rational “Social Engineering” Constitutionalism Formal law Common law b The market

Hierarchically generated Revealed religion

Historical Spontaneously tradition generated Folk religion Incest taboos Biologically grounded norms A-rational

FIGURE 8.3 The Universe of Norms I1

by this account, but only because they have calculated at some level that altruism is of benefit to themselves (presumably because other people will then behave altruistically as well). The mathematics behind game theory simply seeks to understand in a formal way the strategies which people can move by from selfish interests to cooperative outcomes. If we try to locate various types of norms within our previous four-quadrant matrix, we come up with something like Figure 8.3. The rules concerning car pools, for example, belong in the rational, spontaneously generated quadrant. That is, the rules were evolved in a decentralized fashion, but presumably after some discussion and trial and error among the participants. Formal law, whether promulgated by dictatorships or democracies, belongs in the rational hierarchical quadrant, as does constitution writing, social engineering, and all other efforts to guide communities from the top. Commonlaw, on the other hand, generated just like the is car pool rules, spontaneously and rationally. Organized revealed religion usually comes from a hierarchical source-indeed, the ultimate hierarchical authority, God-and the rules it dictates are not adopted with rational debate. Some folk religions (e.g., Taoism and Shintoism in East Asia) and quasi-religious cultural practices may have evolved in a decentralized, a-rational way. These forms of religious norms belong, therefore, in the lower left and lower right quadrants, respectively.Finally, certain norms are

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grounded in biology and belong firmly within the a-rational, spontaneously generated quadrant. The incest taboois in this category. The most recent research indicates that human incest taboos, although conventional, draw upon natural aversions that human beings have to sexual relations between close relatives. It is possible to hypothesize, as many have done, that as societies modernize, norms tend to be created less in the lower than in the upper quadrants, and particularly in the upper left one (i.e., by government authority). The terms that have classically been associated with modernization by theorists like Henry Maine, Max Weber, &mile Durkheim, and Ferdinand Tonniesrationalization, bureaucratization, the shift from status to contract, and gemeinschaft to gesellschaft-all suggest that formal, rationallegal authority, often vested in the state, becomes the chief source of order in modern societies. Yet as anyone who has tried to wade through the thicket unwritten of rules concerning gender relations in a modern American workplace school or knows, informal norms have not disappeared from modern life and are not likely to doso in the future. Since people tend to be more awareof norms issuing from hierarchical authority than from Hayek’s “extended order of human cooperation,” it may be useful to look more closely at the two quadrants on the rightside of Figure 8.2 to begin to understand the extent and limits of spontaneous order. “Self-organization” has become a buzzword not only among economists and biologists but also among information technology gurus, management consultants, and business school professors. Nevertheless, it can come into being only under certain distinct conditions, and it is not a universal formula for achieving coordination in human groups.
RULES FOR POOLS

Over the past generation, the greatest number of theoretical and empirical studies of spontaneous order have come out of economics and related fields like law and economics and public choice. Many early studies in this genre had to do with the origin of norms regarding property rights.13 So-called common pool resources that are shared withincommunities-resources like meadows, fisheries, forests, underground water, and air-constitute especially difficult problems of cooperation because they are subject what Garto rett Hardin referred to as the “tragedy of the commons.yy14 Hardin argued that thetragedy of the commons led to social disaster as seas were overfished and meadows overgrazed. According to him, the problem of sharing common resources could be solved only through hierarchical authority, presumably by a coercive state or even a supranational regulatory body.

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In contrast to thishierarchical approach to norm generation, a numberof economists have suggested more spontaneous approaches. The fountainhead of the entire law and economics field was Ronald Coase’s frequently cited article, “The Problem of Social Cost,” in which he argues that when transaction costs are zero, a change in the formal rules liability will have no effect of on the allocationof resource^.'^ The problem of applying the Coase theorem to real-world situations is, of course, that transaction costs are almostnever zero. It is usually costly for private individuals to work out fair agreements with one another, particularly when one is substantially richer or more powerful than the other. On the other hand, transactioncosts have been low enough in many cases that economists have been able to identify quite a number of intriguing cases of self-organization, whereby social norms have been created through a bottom-up process. Robert Sugden describes the rules for sharing driftwood on English beaches, where first come is first served, but only if a moderate amount is taken.16Robert Ellickson gives numerous examplesof spontaneous economic rules. Nineteenth-century American whalers, for example, often faced potential conflicts when a whale harpooned by one ship would break free and be captured and sold by another ship that hadn’t invested time and an effort hunting it. Whalers developed extensive set of informal rules to regulate such situations and divide the catch equitably.” Much of the spontaneous-order literature tends to be anecdotal and does not give us a good sense how often new norms are actually created de- a of in centralized manner. One exception is the work of Elinor Ostrom, who has collected well over5,000 case studiesof common poolresources, a sufficient number to allow her to begin making empirically grounded generalizations about the phenomenon.ls Her broad conclusion is that human communities in a variety of times and places have found solutions to the tragedy of the commons much more often than commonly predicted. Many of these soluis tions involve neither the privatization of common resources (the solution favored by many economists) nor regulation by the state (the solution often favored by non-economists). Rather, communities have been able to rationally devise informal and sometimes formal rules for sharing common resources in a way that is equitable and does not lead to their premature depletion or exhaustion. These solutions are facilitated by the same condition that makes a two-sided prisoner’s dilemma soluble: iteration. That is, if people know that they have to continue to live with one another in bounded communities in which continued cooperation will be rewarded, they develop an interest in their own reputations, aswell as in the monitoringand punishment of those who violate community rules.

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It is clear from the workof Elinor Ostrom and others that spontaneous order occurs only under certain well-defined conditions and that in many situations it eitherfails to materialize or leads to situations that are not good from the standpoint of society as a whole. Ostrom notes that there are many instances of failed efforts to establish norms for the sharing of common pool resources. Her conditions for self-organization suggest several categories of reasons explaining why societies will not always be able to come up with spontaneous-order solutions. Size. Mancur Olson pointed out that the free-rider problem becomes more severe as group size increases because it becomes increasingly difficult to monitor the behavior of any one individual. Members of a medical practice or partners in a law firm are likelyto know if one of them is not pulling his or her weight; the same is not true in a factory employing 10,000 workers. Furthermore, when groups get larger than this, the system begins to break down. It becomes difficult to associate faces with reputations; monitoring and enforcement become increasingly costly and subject to economies of scale that dictate designating certain members of the group to specialize in these activities. Boundaries. For spontaneous order to occur, it is important to put clear boundaries on group membership. If people can enter and exit the group at will or if it is not clear who is a member (and therefore who has a right to benefit from the common resources of the group), then individuals will have less incentive to worry about their reputation. This explains, among other things, why crime rates tend to be higher and levels of social capital tend to be lower in neighborhoods with a great dealof transience, such as those undergoing rapid economic change those around railroad or bus stations. or Repeated Interaction. Many of the communities studied by Elinor Ostrom that have successfully solved common pool resource problems are traditional ones with virtually no social mobility or contact with the outside world, such as mountain villagers, rice farmers, fishermen, and the like. People worry about their reputation only if they know they will have to continue to deal with one another for an extended period the future. in Prior Norms Establishing a Common Culture. The establishment of cooperative norms often presupposes the existence of a set of prior norms held in common by the individuals making up the group. A culture provides a common vocabulary of not just words but also gestures, facial'expressions, and

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personal habits that serve as signals of intent. Culture helps people distinguish cooperators from cheaters, as well as in transmitting behavioral rules that make action within a community more predictable. People are much more willing to demand the punishmentof people who have broken the rules of their own culture than those of another. Conversely, new cooperative norms are much harder to generate across cultural boundaries.
Power and Justice. Informal social norms can frequently reflect the ability of one group to dominate another through its greater wealth, power, cultural capacity, intellectual ability, or through outright violence and coercion. Certain social norms may be seen as unjust, eventhough they are voluntarily accepted by the communities that practice them. The norms justifying slavery, or those subordinating women to men, are examples. The Persistence of Bad Choices. Even if unjust, inefficient, or counterpro-

ductive norms came into being, one could argue that they would spontaneously disappear precisely because they did not serve the interests of the communities that practiced them. In the law and economics literature, there is often an explicit evolutionary assumption that whatever survives represents fitness in some sense and that thereis therefore over timean “evolution toward efficiency.” Evil, inefficient, or counterproductive norms can persist in a social systemfor generations, however, because the influence of tradiof tion, socialization, and ritual. Social capital can be generated spontaneously in relatively small, stable groups, in which participants number in the hundreds or in some cases thousands. It can also emerge in larger populations in societies where government and the rule of law exist already, and indeed it is an important consequence of a rule of law. But when spontaneous groups get too large, various public goods problems (e.g., who will negotiate the rules, monitor free riders, enforce norms, and the like) become insuperable. Elinor Ostrom’s catalog of rules regarding common pool resources constitute culture with a small csmall rules for small communities that we do not generally associate with large and important cultural systems. The spontaneous-order literature can give no account of norm formation that applies to the largest scale groups: nations, ethno-linguistic groups, or civilizations. Culture with a capital C whether Islamic, Hindu, Confucian, or Christian-does not have spontaneous roots. The four-quadrant matrix Figure 8.2 is only a taxonomic framework for of beginning to think about wheresocial capital actually comes from in contemporary societies. People’s views of where cooperative norms actually come from is highly colored by ideological preferences as to where they ought to

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come from: traditionalist conservatives think they ought to come from religion and other sources of a-rational hierarchy populating the lower left quadrant; liberals worried about the workings of “untrammeled markets” want them to come from the upper (e.g., in the form of a state regulatory left agency); and libertarians of the right andleft hope they will arise from either of the spontaneous-order quadrants on the right side. It should be clear, however, that in contemporary societies each quadrant contains a non-trivial set of cases and that the four sources of social capital all interact with one another in complex ways. Formal laws play an important role in shaping informal norms, as in the case of civil rights legislation in the United States, whereas informal norms make the creationof certain kinds of political institutions moreor less likely. Religion remains an important source of cultural rules, even in apparently secular societies; at the same time, religious rules are subject to a spontaneous evolution as they interact withsociety’s given historical environment. a Understanding these relationships, and providing an empirical map of the sources of actual cultural rules,is a project for the future.

Corruption, Culture, and Markets
S E Y M O U RM A R T I NL I P S E T G A B R I E LS A L M A NL E N 2
AND

Widespread interest in the social requisites of democracy and economic development has stimulated a growing literature on the extent, sources, and consequences of corruption. This chapter seeks to integrate theoretical and empirical analyses of corruption. Following a cross-cultural and transhistorical discussion of corruption, it reports some empirical findings from the research literature. It then seeks to integrate these findings and some original research into two theoretical frameworks: the means-ends schema from Robert Merton’s scholarship and particularistic assumptions derived from Edward Banfield. What is corruption? Students of the subject provide different definitions. As Arnold Heidenheimer writes in Political Corruption, the word “corruption has a history of uniquely different meanings and connotations.”’ Political scientists and philosophers emphasize its presence in politics the state: or efforts tosecure wealth or power through illegal means-private gain at public expense. Corruption has been ubiquitous in complex societies from ancient Egypt, Israel, Rome, and Greece down to the present. Dictatorial and democratic polities;feudal,capitalist, andsocialisteconomies;Christian,Muslim,

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TABLE 9.1 Corruption Perceptions Index1998 23. Botswana 24. Spain 25. Japan 26. Estonia 27. Costa Rica 5. Iceland 28. Belgium 6. Canada 29. Malaysia 7. Singapore 8. Netherlands 30. Namibia 31. Taiwan 9. Norway 10. Switzerland 32. South Africa 11. Australia 33. Hungary 12. Luxembourg 34. Mauritius 13. United Kingdom 35. Tunisia 14. Ireland 36. Greece 15. Germany 37. Czech Rep. 16. Hong Kong 38. Jordan 17. Austria 39. Italy 18. United States 40. Poland 41. Peru 19. Israel 20. Chile 42. Uruguay 43. South Korea 21. France 44. Zimbabwe 22. Portugal 45. Malawi
1. Denmark 2. Finland 3. Sweden 4. New Zealand 46. Brazil 47. Belarus 48. Slovak Rep. 49. Jamaica 50. Morocco 51. El Salvador 52. China 53. Zambia 54. Turkey 55. Ghana 56.Mexico 57. Philippines 58. Senegal 59. Ivory Coast 60. Guatemala 61. Argentina 62. Nicaragua 63. Romania 64. Thailand 65. Yugoslavia 66. Bulgaria 67. Egypt 68. India 69. Bolivia 70. Ukraine 71. Latvia

72.Pakistan 73. Uganda 74. Kenya 75. Vietnam 76. Russia 77. Ecuador 78. Venezuela 79. Colombia 80. Indonesia 81. Nigeria 82. Tanzania 83. Honduras 84. Paraguay 85. Cameroon

Hindu, and Buddhist cultures and religious institutions have all experienced corruption but not, of course, in equal measure. The omnipresence, the persistence, and the recurrent character of corruption suggest that it cannot be treated as a dysfunction reducibleby purposive human action.Research and study should try to explain why there is more corruption in one time, place, or culture than in others. Until recently, empirical research in the field consisted primarily of case studies. In response to the growing needs of multinational companies, however, consulting firms have developed a numberof corruption indices, transforming the study of corruption and allowing social scientists to test a number of hypotheses about both itscauses and its consequences. One of the commonlyused indicators of political corruptionis Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). Table 9.1 is the 1998 listing of eighty-nine countries, ranked from the least to the most corrupt. This index “is a ‘poll of polls’ drawing upon numerous distinct surveysof expert and general public views of the extent of corruption in many countries around the world.”’ The CPI subsumes credible indices of corruption for

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countries in which a minimum of three polls exist; in some cases the index averages as many as twelve. sources use a similar definition of corruption All involving the misuse of public power for private benefits. The CPI averages poll results that attempt todifferentiate between political and administrative corruption and thusclaims to represent the general perception corruption. of The CPI does not deal with the problems commensurability-intersocietal of and intracultural differences in corruption. Nor does it include measures of corruption in private organizations, such as insider trading. CPI’s methodology is subject to controversy, some authors assuming that it deals only with surveys of the attitudes of international executives toward corruption. In reality, however, it includes samples of the populations. The CPI only counts countries in its index for which least one such at population survey is available. In any case, the polls of executives and experts correlate very highly with the population surveys. The CPI is scaled from 0 (least corrupt) to 10 (most corrupt). Ronald Inglehart reports from the 1995 World Values Survey that the responses to a question inquiring about the extent of corruption in the respondents’ countries correlate highly with CPI rankings. The bulk of this chapter focuses on the relationship between values and corruption. The lack of cross-national quantitative data on values and attitudes has long hindered comparative study in the area. However, the World Values Surveys, conducted in 1981-1982,1990-1993, and 1995-1996, provide social scientists with large samples such information on a range of atof titudes and values. The 1995-1996 survey sampled over sixty countries; the data set is unfortunately not yet available for analysis but soon will be. The analysis in this chapter uses the 1990-1993 survey, which was carried out in forty-three countries containing 70 percent of the world’s population. They include nations with per capita incomes as low as U.S.$399 per year to those as high as $30,000 per year. The quality of the samples varies greatly. The surveys carried out in some less developed and former Soviet countries are drawn disproportionately from the urban, literate populations, tend to which have orientations relatively similar those found in industrial societies3 The to findings thus probably underestimate the size of cross-national differences among First, Second, and Third World nations.
ECONOMICS AND CORRUPTION

Hard evidence has documented corruption’s detrimental effect on many aspects of economic development. Research indicates that higher levels of corruption significantly reduce GNP growth rates. Paolo Mauro’s regression analysis found that a 2.4 decline in the corruption index (scaled from 1 to 10) is associated with a four percentage point increase in the per capita

Culture, Corruption,

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growth rate.4 The effect corruption on growth of seems to result in part from reduced levels of investment. The negative impact on investment may derive from the added risk that corruption brings to investors’ calculations. Corruption may also reduce economic growth by reducing public spending on education. A 2.38 drop (one standard deviation) in the corruption index is associated with an increase in government spending on education by around half a percent of GDP.S Why does corruption influence education? Research suggests that governments plagued by corruption spend relatively more money items that facilon itate the exactionof graft.6 Corrupt public bureaucrats mayshift government expenditures to those areas in which they can collect bribes more efficiently. Larger, hard-to-manage projects, such as airports or highways, facilitate fraud. However, in areas such as education, expenditures and their products are more visible and should presumablybe less open to corruption. Other research ties corruption toincome inequality. Cross-national studies have found a strong relationship among corruption, income inequality, and poverty. The lower a country’s score the corruption index, the more on likely it is to have a high Gini coefficient, meaning greater income inequality. A 0.78 increase in thegrowth rate of corruption is linked to a drastic decline in the rate of income growth among thepoor-7.8 percentage points per year.’ The variable most robustly associated with corruption in international comparisons is per capita income.* The wealthy and most economically developed countries are the least politically corrupt. The top twenty, as measured by the Transparency International 1998 Corruption Perceptions Index, have a per capita income in purchasing power of U.S.$17,000 or more (see Table 9.1 for the corruption scores), whereas the twenty most corrupt a have per capita incomeof $4,000 or less. The latter draw largely from theranks of the less developed and formerly communist countries. Only six Western European states fall outside the upper twenty. A number of assumptions may explain the corruption-income relationship. Greater income may reduce corruption by changing the incentive structures of public officials: Increased wealth would seemto reduce the marginal value of expected monetary gains from corruption. At the same time, the cost of penalties-imprisonment, criminal record, embarrassment, loss of future job prospects-probably rises with income. Economic development may also reduce corruption through its important and positive impact on democracy, which, evidence suggests, reduces corrupt i ~ n Additionally, development increaseslevels of education, which may im.~ prove the oddsof catching abuse.’O The degree to which a countryis integrated into the world economy, as measured by international trade, should also be negatively associated with corruption. Incorporation into the global community exposes nations and citizens to the normsof more economically developed

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societies regarding personaland market behavior, and groups like the and EU NAFTA condition membership on the adoption these norms. of
CULTURE AND INSTITUTIONS

Systematic cross-national research into the ways that cultural and political variables affect the potentialities for corruption is largely a recent phenomenon. Quantitative evidence points to a link between corruption andsocial diversity, ethno-linguistic fractionalization, and the proportions of a country’s population adhering to different religious traditions. In a sophisticated comparative study, Daniel Treisman found strong evidence that a number culof tural and institutional factors has reduced levels of corruption. In harmony with studies of factors related to democratization, his analysis suggests that a greater percentage of Protestants and aBritish colonial history are of the two most important factors associated with low levels of national corruptionsecond only to GNP. Possible mechanisms by which Protestantism affects such behavior willbe discussed below. With respect to British colonial origin, Treisman argues that it infused a lasting emphasis on procedure rather than authority. To quote Harry Eckstein, “Procedures, to them [the British], are not merely procedures, but sacred rituals.”” The willingness by judges and public officials to follow the rules, even when doing so threatens authority, would seem to increase the chances of exposing corruption. British heritage may also reduce corruption through its positive relationship to democracy. Two sociological approaches help illuminate the relationships between culture and corruption. The first stems from the work of sociology’s founding figure, Emile Durkheim, as extensively reformulated by Robert K. Merton. In his Social Theory and Social Structure, Merton presents a means-ends schema that can account for variations norm violations.12A second relates in to the family. Political scientist Edward Banfield developed an intriguing analysis of the ways in which a strong familial orientation, as in southern Italy and Sicily, helps explain highlevels of corr~ption.’~ The underlying theory stems from Plato, who pointed out that the inherent relations among family members, especially parents and children, press them to give particularistic preferences (nepotism). Banfield noted that corruptionis linked to the strength of family values involving intense feelings obligation. of
THE MEANS-ENDS SCHEMA

Merton’s theory implies that corruption is motivated behavior stemming from social pressures that result in norm violations. He emphasizes that all

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social systems set cultural goals-objectives-that human actors seek to achieve, as wellas approved means to gain them (i.e., institutionalized norms). Those seeking to secure the goals by socially approved means are conformists, to use Merton’s formulation. However, social systems also press many who have little access to the opportunity structure-whether because of their race, ethnicity, or from a lack of skills, capital, material, and other human resources-to seek the dominant goals from high income to social recognition. Many achievement markets are inherently organized so as to create a large gap between demand (goals and values) and supply (means). Consequently, many, who recognize early on that they have little access to opportunity, will reject the rules the game and try succeed by unconvenof to tional (innovative or criminal) means. Merton notes the ways this analytic framework helps explain variations in deviant behavior between higher and lower classes and among different ethnic groups in America, generalizations documented by Daniel Bell.14 Merton’s theory implies that cultures that stress economic success as an important goal but nevertheless strongly restrict access to opportunities will have higher levels of corruption. This hypothesis finds support in data from the cross-national 1990-1993 World Values Survey, which yield evidence for the hypotheses derived from Merton on the relationship between achievement motivation, as measured by a scale of World Values Survey items, and corruption. The extreme cases conform to the analytic framework. The less affluent countries with high achievement motivation are the most corrupt. For instance, Russia, South Korea, and Turkey have the highest levels of achievement orientation according to the scale. These countries are also among the more corrupt. Conversely, as anticipated by Merton’s framework, countries that are relatively low on achievement motivation and high on access to appropriate means should have relatively low levels of corruption. Denmark, Sweden, and Norway fit the bill best. Surprisingly, they are the least achievement oriented according to our scale and are also the least corrupt. Presumably, the means-ends strain is weak among them. The Scandinavian pattern is produced by the relationship between achievement motivation and structurally differentiated access to opportunity. Surprisingly, the achievement scale is strongly-but negatively-correlated with per capita income. This suggests a conundrum: The richer a country, the lower the level of achievement motivation. These results may appear to counter Weber’s cultural theory. However, in dealing with the impact reliof gious values on economic development, Weber anticipated that the positive relationship with Protestantism would decline once high productivity had been institutionalized. It may be suggested that although today’s wealthy na-

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tions were once among the most achievement motivated before develop(i.e., ment), their citizens, now affluent, are led, as John Adams anticipated, to pursue non-work-related goals-music, art, literature-to become post-materialists, t o use Ronald Inglehart’s termin01ogy.l~ The elites and middle classes of some less developed nations, on the other hand, reacting to an awareness of their inferior economic status, may be incited toward higher levels of achievement motivation. A multiple regression analysis relating the 1990 World Values data to the Corruption Perceptions Index as the dependent variable was undertaken to test the hypothesis. As noted, Merton’s theoretical analysis implies that serious corruption will plague countries with high levels of achievement orientation and low access to means. The actual relationship is reasonably strong and statistically significant at conventional levels. A 1.1change in a country’s achievement index score (one standard deviation, scaled from 1 to 5 ) is associated with almost a half-point change in a country’s corruption score. The model’s goodness-of-fit is high, explaining a good deal of the variation in corruption. The linkage between these two variables remains strong when controlling for other key factors. Many indices of the availability of economic resources and of economic freedom have been developed. primarily use the 1997 Index Economic We of Freedom (IEF) published by the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation. Scaled from 1 (no freedom) to 5 (totally free), the index purports to measure the degree to which a government supports the free market. It includes several factors: freedom to hold property, freedom to earn a living, freedom to operate a business, freedom to invest one’s earnings, freedom to trade internationally, and freedom to participate in a market economy. In a regression analysis, a 0.75 change (one standard deviation) in the Index of Economic Freedom is associated with almost a one and a half point change in a country’scorruption score. Like the IEF, per capita income maybe an indicator of the availability of economic resources and even of the extent to which the bulk the populaof tion is economically satisfied. Thus the fact that per capita income relates so powerfully to corruption further supports the idea that the availability of institutionalized means to achieve desired ends lowers levels of corruption, reinforcing the validity of Merton’s assumptions. This model, combining the 1997 Index of Economic Freedom and per capita income, explains a good dealof the variance in corruption. Achievement’s relationship to corruption remains robust when controlling for variables that relate to corruption-like per capita income and the percentage Protestant and of British national origin-suggesting that this scale captures an important factor.

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AMORAL FAMILISM

The second major cultural framework, one derived from Plato via Banfield, assumes that corruption is in large part an expression of particularism-the felt obligation to help, to give resources to persons to whom one has a personal obligation, to the family above all but also to friends and membership groups. Nepotism is its most visible expression. Loyalty is a particularistic obligation that was very strong in precapitalist, feudal societies. As Weber implied, loyalty and the market are antithetical. The opposite of particularism is universalism, the commitment to treat others according to a similar standard. Market norms express universalism; hence, pure capitalism exhibits and is sustained by such values. Plato contended two and a half millennia ago that family ties, especially those between parents and children, are the chief forces underlying institutionalized social classesand ascription.16He argued that to create an egalitarian society, a communist one, such ties-the family itself-would have to be eliminated. Children would have to be reared from birth in public institutions, not knowing their parents. Plato, of course, could not have believed that a society without parental ties was viable, but his discussion points up the social power he attachedto the family. In trying to understand capitalism’s initial rise in Protestant cultures, Weber noted that the pre-industrial norms in Catholic societies were communitarian, requiring above all that the society, the family, and the dominant strata help the less fortunate. He believed that these values worked against the emergence of a rationally driven market economy. Conversely, a stress on individualism, concern for self, is more conducive to capital accumulation. Calvinism and Protestant sectarianism fostered such behavior. Sectariansbelieve that God helps those who help themselves. Weber pointedout that “the great achievement of . . . the ethical and ascetic sects of Protestantism was to shatter the fetters of the sib [the extended family].”” As Lawrence Harrison notes, “There is evidence that the extended family is an effective institution for survival but an obstacle to development.”1s Solidarity with the extended family and hostility to the outsider who is not a member of family, the village, or perhaps the tribe can produce a self-interested culture. Edward Banfield, studying southern Italy, carried the analysis further with the concept of “amoral familism”: a culture that is deficient in communitarianvaluesbutfostersfamilialties. He writes: “In asociety of amoral familists, no one will further the interest of the group or community except as it is to his private advantage to do There is little loyalty to the larger community or acceptance of behavioral norms that require support of others. Hence, familism is amoral, gives rise to corruption, and fosters deviance

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from norms of universalism and merit. Anything goes that advances the interests of one's self and family. The Mafia is an extreme example of amoral familism. Banfield, in effect, argues that corruption in southern Italy and comparable traditional societies is an expression of forces similar to those that sustain the Mafia. The World Values Survey1990, together with aggregatestatistics from the World Bank, provide data that we employ to create a scale of familism. The first item in the scale deals with unqualified respectfor parents, measured by the percentage of people who agreed that regardless of the qualities and faults of one's parents, a person must always love and respect them. The second item is the percentage of people who think that divorce is unjustifiable. The third, from the World Bank, is the mean numberof children per woman. Those nations thatscore high on this scale tendto be among the more corrupt. Known for their strong familial ties, most Asian nations rank among the more corrupt. On the other hand, Scandinavians are by far the lowest on the familism scale-as noted, these countries are considered the least corrupt. Regression analysis affirmsthe association. The familism scaleand CPI relate strongly. The relationship remains significant when controlling for per capita income. A model that includes the familism scale,the achievement scale, and purchasing power parity explains a great dealthe variation in theCPI. of In short, this analysis affirms theamoral familism thesis. In another model, we added a variable for the percentage of Protestants. Treisman has shown that this measure is powerfully linked to perceptions of corruption. This result suggests that familism is an intervening variable between religion and corruption. In other words, Protestantism reduces corruption, in part because of its association with individualistic, non-familistic relations.
RELIGION, CULTURE, AND CORRUPTION

In the preceding discussion we showed that cultural variables help explain and predict levels of corruption. But what explains culture? Dealing with this complex question is far beyond the limits of this chapter. However, the social science consensus that religion is an important determinant of variations in larger secular cultures offers some helpful suggestions. Countries dominated by Protestants are less corrupt than others. The Protestant religious ethos is more conducive to norm-adhering behavior. Protestants, particularly sectarians, believe that individuals are personally responsible for avoidingsin,whereasotherChristiandenominations,particularlythe Catholic Church, place more emphasis on the inherent weakness of human beings, their inability to escape sin and error, and the need for the church to be forgiving protecting. Catholic, and The Anglican, Orthodox and

Culture,

Corruption,

I2I

Churches tend to be more accepting of human weakness because the clergy have the authority to relieve the individual of some sense of responsibility. Given a more tolerant attitude toward the possibility of “sinning,” acceptance of human frailty and of the assumption that no one canbe a saint are natural consequences. The sectarian ethos and the evangelical ethos, on the other hand, are more likely t o foster adherence to absolute values, especially with respect to morals. They encourage adherents to press hard to attain and institutionalize virtue and to reduce, if not destroy, the influence of evil people and wicked institutions and practices. Politically, they tend to view social and political dramas as morality plays-battles between God and the devil-with compromise virtually unthinkable. Protestants have retained important elements of their evangelical origins. Most denominations expect adherence from children practitioners as a reof sult of a conscious voluntary decisionon reaching adulthood. Some require a conversion experience (rebirth) as a sign of sincere faith. Good standing in these groups has been contingent righteous living in accordance with preon cepts that are sometimes very concrete. In a number of countries, the more ascetic branches of Protestantism have supported measures inhibit or limit to alcoholic beverages and outlaw gambling. Protestantism is strongly linkedto perceptions of corruption. The relationship remains significant when controlling for per capita income but becomes somewhat less so. This suggests that up to a quarter of the relationship between Protestantism and the CPI is linked to higher incomes or more advanced levels of economic development of Protestants. On the other hand, this finding also implies that as much as 75 percent of Protestantism’s relationship to corruptionmay result from cultural factors. An analysis of the relationship between our achievement scale and the percentage of Protestants in a country is congruent with the assumption that Protestants have becomeless achievement oriented. Although Weber stressed that Protestants tend to be more achievement oriented than Catholics or other traditionalists, this may no longer be the case. Now that most Protestant nations are wealthy, the evidence suggests that they have changed their value foci. The achievement scale correlates negatively with the percentage Protestant in a given country, meaning that the more Protestants, the lower the level of achievement motivation. This provides us withanother reason to expect lower corruption levels among Protestant nations as compared to Catholic ones. According to Merton’s logic, the availability of institutionalized means in wealthier societies (in this case the accessibility of economic resources) also implies lower corruption scores in Protestant countries, whichon average are

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more affluent. Catholic governments also tend to be more interventionist, limiting economic freedom, whereas Protest&& countries are more market oriented, with some partial exceptions (e.g., Scandinavia). As expected, the Index of Economic Freedom correlates positively with Protestantism, meaning that the higher the percentage of Protestants, the greater the freedom. Finally, Banfield’s amoral familism thesis provides an even more basic explanation for why Catholic countries may be more corrupt than Protestant ones. According to conventional wisdom, Catholic countries are more communitarian and familistic, whereas Protestants emphasize individualism and self-reliance. The World Values Survey data support these ideas. The familism scale correlates with Protestantism in the expected direction. As discussed above, the analysis suggests that familism, or the lack thereof, is a major intervening variable between Protestantism and corruption.
DEMOCRACY AND CORRUPTION

What can be done to reduce corruption, other than increasing productivity and becoming more “modern”? For answers, we may look Weber’s discusto sion of the effects of a politically open societyon limiting state power-more democracy, individual freedom, and the rule of law. Democracy-which entails political opposition, freedom of the press, and an independent judiciary-fosters potentially powerful corruption-reducing mechanisms. Opposition parties have an interest in exposing corruption in government in order to win elections. In a democracy, a ruling party or government that fails to reform may lose elections. One-party states, on the other hand, lack such incentives. Mikhail Gorbachev, while still a reformist communist, publicly voiced on at least two occasions his misgivings about the potential for abuse inherent in a one-party system. As a communist, of course, he did not advocate a multiparty system. Rather, he urged the Soviet press andintelthe lectuals to fulfill the role of the opposition in exposing norm violations. The 1999 resignation of European Union commissioners over charges of fraud, cronyism, and mismanagement highlights some of the potential cleansing effects of democracy. The democratically chosen European Parliament-a volatile mixture of political parties, national, regional, and sectoral interests-launched an onslaught against unelected the commission’s “Mediterranean [corrupt] practices, stemming from southern, more Catholic Europe.”’O The victory of this representative institution “mark[ed] a radical Commission-to the shift in power from the non-elected bureaucracy-the elected European Parliament.’’21 An analysis of the relationship between corruption and democracy broadly confirms these hypotheses. The data on democracy come from Freedom

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House’s Annual Surveyof Political Rights and Civil Liberties.2z Scaled from 1 (most free)to 7 (least free), the index consists two parts. The first, political of rights, includes responses to the following questions: Are the head(s) of state and legislative representatives electedthrough free and fair elections? Do citizens have the right to form competitive political parties or other organizations? Is there a significant opposition vote or a realistic opportunity for the opposition to increase its support? Thesecond index, civil liberties, includes a measure of freedom and independence in the media, freedomof speech, assembly, equality under the law, access to an independent, non-discriminatory judiciary, and protection from political terror, unjustified imprisonment, and so on. The combined Freedom House index of democracy (averaging both indices), taken overthe lifetime of the index, 1972-1998, correlates highly and inversely with CPI 1998. In a regression analysis, this combined index of democracy remains significant when controllingfor purchasing power parity in per capita terms. However, the unstandardized coefficient loses about half of its value, and when other key factors are entered into the equation, it becomes insignificant. This suggests that about half of the negative correlation between democracy and corruption results from the fact that democracies tend to be wealthier (i.e., provide more accessto opportunity). Although the average Freedom House score may not relate robustly to corruption, Treisman found that the number of consecutive years a country had been a democracy remained related to perceptions of corruption, even when controlling for key factors. Thus, democracy is an important factor in predicting national corruption levels. There is some indication that thecivil liberties indicator, particularly the rule of law enforced by an independent judiciary, is more important thanpolitical rights.
CONCLUSION

The emergence of developed economieswas facilitated by emphases on rationality, small family size, achievement, social mobility, and universalism-elements that characterize modernity as distinct from traditionalism. Ideally, they were marked by the decline of familism, of values that sustain particularistic mutual-help systems, which run counter to those functional for a market economy. Valuesthat sustain and express the logic of the market followed on the breakdown of feudal-type stratification systems that stressed obligation and loyalty. The strong emphasis of Asian countries on group obligation, especially to the family, which is much more powerful inthe most recently feudal country, Japan, than in America or Europe, implies a high level of corruption. The

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Transparency estimates indicate that most large East Asian countries do score highon corruption,well above the median. Japan, course, seemingly of is a major exception. It has an extremely low crime rate. Interpretations of Japan suggest that rules and the law are often violated there because doless ing so disgraces one’s family or other in-groups and shames the malefactor. However, reports of high-level business and political corruption keep surfacing. In Transparency’s 1998 Corruption Perceptions Index, Japan ranks twenty-fifth, lower than Chile, Portugal, Botswana, and Spain, and only slightlyaboveCostaRica, Belgium, Malaysia,Namibia,Taiwan,and Tunisia. The former communist countries, except for Hungary and the Czech Republic, all rank below the median. They share, to various degrees, an amalgam of familism, statist communitarianism, hierarchical religious cultures (Catholicism and Orthodoxy), and party particularism, which produced a high level of corruption under communism. They are also, for the most part, poor. We havefocused on two explanations of corruption, the Mertonian means-ends schema and the Banfield emphasis on familism. The issues that Merton and Banfield identified-inadequate means to attainprescribed goals and particularistic norms inherent in the family-will continue to affect the behavior of nations. If rationally oriented economic values and the rule of law become dominant in less developed and former communist countries, and if they foster development, levels of corruption should fall, as they have in the three now well-to-do and highly market oriented and relatively law abiding Chinese societies:Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore.

part three

THEANTHROPOLOGICAL DEBATE

10
Traditional Beliefs and Practices-Are Some Better than Others?
ROBERT B. EDGERTON

For those of us who are besieged daily by headlines and television reports concerning gang violence, the endangered environment, homelessness, child abuse, the threat of drugs, AIDS, and divisive political partisanship, the idea that some things people do may be harmful to themselves and others is unlikely to seem controversial. More and more surveys rate various cities in the United States in terms of their relative quality of life, and the same thing is being done of foreign countries. Political systems are evaluated as well. Many people would surely troube bled by any relativistic insistence that the political systems of Iraq, Hitler’s Germany, or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia were, or are, as good for the people who live in them or near them as those in Norway, Canada, or Switzerland, for instance. Most people would probably also react with disbelief to the anthropological assertion that there is no scientific basis for the evaluation of another society’s practice of (for instance) human sacrifice, genocide, or judicial torture, except as the people in that particular society themselves evaluate these practices. Nevertheless, that is exactly what many

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proponents of cultural relativism and adaptivism have asserted-and these principles continue to be strongly held, especially in anthropology. These ideas are rooted in the belief that “primitive” societies were far more harmonious than “modern” ones. Misery, fear, loneliness, pain, sickness,and premature death are commonplace in America’s urban ghettos and among its homeless people, just as they in SouthAfrica’s black townships, the starvare ing villages of the Sudan, the slums of Brazil, and the “ethnically cleansed” regions of the Balkans. People in such places are seen to be the hapless victims of various kinds of social, cultural, and environmental pressures, including governmental neglect, racism, corruption, ethnic, religious, and political strife, as well as economic exploitation. However, many prominent scholars in anthropology and other disciplines believe that this sort of misery is not natural to the human condition. They believe that people in smaller, more homogeneous “folk” societies have historically lived in far greater harmony and happiness, and that people in many small societies continue to doso today. The belief that primitive societies are more harmoaious than modern ones, that “savages” were “noble,” that life in the past was moreidyllic than life today, and that human beings once had a sense of community that has been lost is not only reflected in the motion pictures and novels of our popular culture but is deeply engrained in scholarly discourse aswell.
THE HAPPY SAVAGE

In thisview, human misery is the result of divisive social disorganization, ethnic or religious diversity, class conflict, or competing interests that plague large societies, particularly nation-states. Smaller and simpler societies, on the other hand, have developed their cultures in response to the demands of stable environments; therefore, their way of life must have produced far greater harmony and happiness for their populations. Anthropologist Robin Fox, for example, vividly described the upper Paleolithic environment bigof game hunters as one in which “there was a harmony of our evolved attributes as a species, including our intelligence, our imagination, our violence and, our reason and ourpassions-a harmony that has been lost” (1990, 3). When a small society that lacks this kind of harmony is found, social scientists often conclude that this condition must the resultof the disorganizing be effects of culture contact, particularly economic change and urbanization. Like cultural relativism, this idea has been entrenched in Western thought for centuries (Nisbet 1973; Shaw 1985). When Robert Redfield published hisnow well-known folk-urban typology in 1947, he lent the authority of anthropology to this ancient distinction

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(Redfield 1947). The idea that cities were beset by crime, disorder, and human suffering of all sorts while folk societies were harmonious communities goes back to Aristophanes, Tacitus, and the Old Testament. It received renewed support in nineteenth-century thought from such influential figures as Ferdinand Tonnies, Henry Maine, Fustel de Coulanges, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber. Others joined them in creating a consensus that the moral and emotional commitment, personal intimacy, social cohesion, and continuity over time that characterizedfolk societies didnot survive the transition to urban life, in which social disorganization and personal pathology prevailed. During the twentieth century, the contrast between folk “community” and urban “society” became one of the most fundamental ideas in Western thought, taking hold among social philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, psychiatrists, theologians, novelists, poets, and the educated public in general. As a case in point, Kirkpatrick Sale answered criticisms of his recent book The Conquest of Paradise (which examines the European conquest of the native peoplesof America) by insisting that unlike the culturesof Europe, the “primal communities” of preconquest America were markedly more “harmonious, peaceful, benign and content” (Sale 1991). Some folk societies were harmonious, but others were not. There is a pervasive assumption among anthropologists that a population’s traditional beliefs and practices-their culture and their social institutions-must play a positive role in their lives or these beliefs and practices simply would not have persisted. Thus it has often been written that cannibalism, torture, infanticide, feuding, witchcraft, female genital mutilation, ceremonial rape, headhunting, and other practices that may be abhorrent to outsiders must serve some useful function inthe societies in which they aretraditional practices. Impressed by the wisdom of biological evolution in creating suchadaptive miracles as protective coloration or feathers for flight, most scholars have assumed that cultural evolution too has been guided by a process of natural selection that has retained traditional beliefs and practices that meet people’s needs. Therefore, when a society was encountered that appeared to lack a beneficial systemof beliefs or institutions, it was usually assumed that the cause must lie in the baneful influence of other peoples-colonial officials, soldiers, missionaries, or traders-who had almost always been on the scene before anthropologists arrived. The frequency with which traits that may have been maladaptive occurred in small-scale societiesis simply not known because ethnographic accounts so seldom address the possibility that some the beliefs or practices of of the people being described might be anything other than adaptive. If one were to select a substantial number of ethnographic monographs more or less at random, one would probably find, as I did, that no more than a

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handful would contain an analysis of the maladaptive consequences of any particular belief or practice. Instead, if seemingly bizarre, irrational, inefficient, or dangerous beliefs or practices are described at all, they are usually presumed to be adaptive and are treated as if they must serve some useful purpose. For example, even the most extreme forms of penile mutilationslashing open the urethra, scourging it with abrasive stalks grass or other of plants, mutilating the glans or infibulating it-have typically been analyzed in the ethnographic literature (if not the psychiatric) not as irrational, nonadaptive or maladaptive practices, but in terms of their positive social, cultural, or psychological consequences (Cawte, Djagamara, and Barrett 1966; Favazza 1987).
RATIONALIZING ADAPTIVENESS

The cumulative impact of relativistic and adaptivist assumptions has led generations of ethnographers to believe that there simply must be a good social or cultural reason why a long-established belief or practice exists. If it has endured for any length of time, it must be adaptive-or so it has been either implicitly or explicitly assumed by most of the people who have written what we know about thelives of people in small traditional societies. Not everyone has made this assumption, however. Some ecologically oriented ethnographers, for example, have provided descriptions that carefully assess how adaptive a particular population’s beliefs or institutions may be. Walter Goldschmidt’s ethnographyof the Sebei of Uganda is a good example. After analyzing the relatively positive socialand cultural adaptations that the Sebei made during their recent history, he described what he referred to as “disequilibria and maladaptation,” especially “the failure of the Sebei to establish a social order capable maintaining their boundaries, and the failure of to develop a commitment to a relevant set of moral principles” (1976, 353). His analysis went on to specify the changing socioeconomic circumstances that led to these “failures.” Similarly, Klaus-Friedrich Koch, writing about the then unacculturated Jalt, who in the mid-1960s lived in the remote eastern Snow Mountains of Irian Jaya before foreign influence changed their concluded that the lives, disputes and killing thatwere so common and so divisive among them resulted because Jalt methods of conflict management were “very few and very inefficient” (Koch 1974, 159). Others, most notablyC. R. Hallpike, have pointed to similarly maladaptive practices in other societies (1972, 1986). However, even ecologically oriented ethnographers have typically paid scant attention to maladaptation. Instead, the emphasis has been placed on showing the adaptive fit between various economic activities and the environment.

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For the most part, when the costs and benefitsof a particular belief or institutionalized practice are discussed in ethnographic writing, the result is vintage Dr. Pangloss. For example, if it is acknowledged that a certain belief system, such as witchcraft, may have costs for a population, it is quickly asserted that it also has benefits that far outweigh them. When Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorothea Leighton wrote their classic ethnography, The Navaho, they concluded that the traditional Navaho belief in the existence of witches among themengendered fear, led to violence, and sometimes caused innocent people to suffer “tragically.” Even so, they argued that witchcraft beliefs “keep the core of the society solid” by allowing the Navaho to redirect all the hostility they felt toward friends and relatives onto witches. What is more, these beliefs prevented the rich and ceremonially powerful from attaining too much power and, in general, served prevent socially disruptive acto tions (Kluckhohn and Leighton1962,240). Kluckhohn and Leighton did not consider why the Navaho required witchcraft beliefs to achieve these ends with the fear, violence, and tragic suffering that resulted for many people, when less conflicted solutions for the same problems had been found by other societies. They were not alone this. Most ethnographers appearto agree with psyin chologist Donald T. Campbell, who wrote in favor of an assumption of belief or practice adaptiveness becauseno matter how “bizarre” a traditional might seem, once it is understood it will make “adaptive sense” (Campbell 1975, 1104). Others have agreed with Marvin Harris’s declaration that there is no need to assume that beliefs or practices are adaptive because it has already been demonstrated that sociocultural systems are “largely not excluif sively” composed of adaptive traits (1960, 601). Both the assumption that culture must always be adaptive and the assertion that it has already been shown that cultures consist largely or exclusively of adaptive traits fly in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary. With the partial exception of economic practices, there has been no demonstration of such widespread adaptiveness (Edgerton 1992). This issue is not of interest only to anthropologists-a tempest confined to an exotic, “primitive” teacup. The ethnographic recordis important for anyone who has an interest in understanding why human societies, including our own, sometimes do not function as well as they might. It is undeniable that some folk societies have been relatively harmonious and that some still are, but life in smaller and simpler societies has hardly been free of human discontent and suffering. Although there is not enough space here to document my assertion, some small populations have been unableto cope with the demands of their environments, and some have lived in apathy, conflict, fear, hunger, and despair. Others have embraced practices like feuding that led to

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their destruction. Nevertheless, the belief persists that small-scale societies are better adapted to their ecological circumstances than we are. Some may be, but others decidedly are not. Humans in various societies, whether urban or folk, are capable of empathy, kindness, even love,and they can sometimes achieve astounding mastery of the challenges posed by their environments. But they are also capable of maintaining beliefs, values, and social institutions that result in senselesscruelty, needless suffering, and monumental folly in their relations among themselves as well as with other societies and the physical environment in which they live. People are not always wise, and the societies and cultures they create are not ideal adaptive mechanisms, perfectly designed to provide for human needs. It is mistaken to maintain,asmanyscholarsdo,that if a population has held to a traditionalbelief or practice for many years, then it must play a useful role in their lives. Traditional beliefs and practices may be useful, may even serveas important adaptivemechanisms, but they may also be inefficient, harmful, and even deadly.
THE VALUES AND DISVALUES OF CULTURAL RELATIVISM

The principle of cultural relativism is not without historical value. It has helped to counter ethnocentrism and even racism. It has also providediman portant corrective to ideas of unilinear evolution, which presumed that all societies passed through the same stages of “progress” until they eventually reached the near perfection of one or another version of Western European “civilization.” Moreover, the relativists’ insistence on respect for the values of other people may have done more good for human dignity and human rights than it has done harm science. Even the overheated assertions of the to so-called epistemological relativists have been useful, by reminding anyone audacious enough to compare the adequacy of cultures that any sociocultural system is a complex network of meanings that must be understood in context and, as much as possible, as its members understand it (Spiro 1990). They may even be right in arguing that some understandings and emotions are unique to a particular culture, and that the meanings and functions of some practices may remain permanently beyond the comprehension of outside observers of the foreign culture. However, epistemological relativists not only claim that each of these worlds is wholly unique-incommensurable and largely incomprehensible-they assert that the people who inhabit them are said have different to cognitive abilities. In what Dan Sperber has referred t o as “cognitive apartheid” and ErnestGellner has called “cognitive anarchy,” various post-

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modern relativists and interpretivists postulate fundamental differences from one culture to the next in cognitive processes involving logic, causal inference, and information processing (Gellner 1982; Sperber 1982). The existence of such basic cognitive differences has yet to be demonstrated, and if the history of research into human cognition and intersubjectivity is any guide, it willnot be. The historyof cultural relativism or adaptivism is the more remarkablebecause some of the world’s most respected anthropologists, all of whom had earlier endorsed the principle of cultural relativism, eventually published anti-relativistic evaluations of folk societies. For example, in 1948 Alfred Kroeber, then the doyen of American anthropology, not only rejected relativism but declared that as societies “progressed” from simple to more complex, they became more “humane,” and he asserted-in language calculated to make present-day anthropologists’ hair stand on end-that “the mentally unwell in modern advanced cultures tend correspond to thewell and influto ential in ancient and retarded culturesyy (1948, 300). Furthermore, Kroeber continued, “progress,” as he referredto cultural evolution, not only involved advances in technology and science but the abandonmentpractices such as of ritual prostitution, segregating women at parturition or menstruation, torture, sacrifice, and belief in magic or superstition. Two years later, Ralph Linton,anotherleadinganthropologist,whopossessedperhapsthemost encyclopedic understanding of world ethnography of anyone then alive, wrote that there could be universal ethical standards, a position that Clyde Kluckhohn, by then no longer a committed relativist, endorsed three years later (Kluckhohn 1955; Linton 1952). Robert Redfield, famous for his folk-urban comparison, agreed with Kroeber by declaring in 1953 that primitive societies were less “decent” and “humane” than more “advanced civilizations”: “On the whole the human race has come to develop a more decent and humane measure of goodness-there has been a transformation of ethical judgment which makes us look at noncivilized people,not asequals, but aspeople on a different level of human experience” (1953, 163). In 1965, George Peter Murdock, then the world’s leading figure in comparative cultural studies, wrote that Benedict’s relativistic idea that a cultural belief has no meaning except in itscontext was “nonsense” and that Melville Herskovits’s assertion that all cultures must be accorded equal dignity and respect was “not only nonsense but sentimental nonsense” (1965, 146). He added that it was an “absurdity” to assert that cannibalism, slavery, magical therapy, and killing the aged should be accorded the same “dignity” or “validity” as old-age security, scientific medicine, and metal artifacts. people, All Murdock insisted, prefer Western technology and would rather be able to

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feed their children and elderly than kill them (1965, 149). With a very few exceptions, anthropologists not only did not embrace these anti-relativistic views, they held even more strongly to the belief that culture is and must be adaptive.
MALADAPTIVENESS

There are many reasons why some traditional beliefs and practices may become maladaptive. Environmental change is one. Others are more complex, having to do with various aspects of human problem solving. There is ample evidence, for example, that in many societies people can provide no rational reason for clingingto certain beliefs or practices, and that some of their most important decisions-where to hunt, when to raid an enemy, when to fish, what toplant-are based on prophecies, dreams, divination, and other supernatural phenomena. One southern African kingdom was utterly destroyed when its cherished prophets urged that all its cattle be killed and no crops be planted. The result was predicted to be a millennium; instead, it was starvation, as a more rationalbelief system would have predicted (Peires 1989). Even when people attempt to make rational decisions, they often fail. For one thing, no population, especially no folk population, can ever possess all the relevant knowledge it needs to make fully informed decisions about its environment, its neighbors, or even its own social institutions. What more, is there is a large body of research involving human decisionmaking, both under experimental conditions and in naturally occurring situations, showing that individuals frequently make quite poor decisions, especially when it comes to solving novel problems or ones requiring the calculation of the probability of outcomes. These are precisely the kinds of problems that pose the greatest challenges for human adaptation. Most humans are not greatly skilled in assessing risk, especially when the threat is a novel one, and they tend to underestimate the future effects of warfare and technological or economic change. Even when disasters such as droughts, floods, windstorms, or volcanic eruptions recur periodically, people consistently misjudge the consequences (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982; Lumsden and Wilson 1981). Nor do they readily develop new technology, even when environmental stress makes technological change imperative (Cowgill 1975). Western economists employ the concept of “bounded ratio: nality” to refer to people’s limited ability to receive, store, retrieve, and process information, and economic decision theory takes these limitations into account. Because of their cognitive limitations, along with imperfect knowledge of their environment, people inevitably make some imperfect decisions (Kuran 1988).

13 4

C U L T U R E MATTERS

Humans are often non-rational, a point vividly made byDan Sperber, who wrote that “apparently culturalbeliefs are quite remarkable: they do not appear irrationalby slightly departing from common sense, timidly going beor yondwhattheevidenceallows.Theyappear,rather,likedown-right provocations against common sense rationality” (1985, 85). As Sperber and others have pointed out, people in many folk societies are convinced that humans or animals can in two places at the same time, can transform thembe selves into other kinds of creatures or become invisible, and can alter the physical world in various ways through their own beliefs. They also think magically at least some of the time; indeed, it is very likelythat the principles of sympatheticmagicareuniversallypresentbecausethehumanmind evolved to think in these ways (Rozin and Nemeroff 1990). Moreover, all available evidence indicates that humans, especially those who live in folk societies, make their decisions using heuristics that encourage them to develop fixed opinions, eventhough these opinions are based on inadequate or false information. These same heuristics also encourage people to cling to their opinions, even when considerable evidence to the contrary becomes available. As R. A. Shweder has concluded, human thought is “limited to its scientific procedures, unsophisticated in abstract reasoning, and somewhat impervious to the evidence of experience” ( 1 9 8 0 , 7 6 ) .
RATIONALITY AND IRRATIONALITY

None of this should be surprising, really, for no less rational a thinker than Aristotle was convinced that male babies were conceived at times when a strong north wind blew, and despite many generations of secular education, contemporary Americans continue to be less than fully rational. Various surveys have reported that 80 percent of contemporary Americans still believe that God worksmiracles, 50 percent believe in angels, and more than a third believe in a personal devil (Gallup and Castelli 1989; Greeley 1989; Wills 1990). Furthermore, as I mentioned earlier, our ability to identify the risks in our environment is limited. As Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky noted, all populations concentrate on only a few of the dangers that confront them and ignore the remainder, including some that are manifestly dangerous. The Lele of Zaire, for example, faced many serious dangers, including a large array of potentially life-threatening diseases. Still, they concentrated on only three: bronchitis, which is less serious than the pneumonia from which they also suffer; infertility; and being struck by lightning, a hazard that is a good deal less common than thetuberculosis from which they frequently suffer yet largely ignore (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982). According to the Science Advisory Board of the Environmental Protection Agency, Americans do the

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same, worrying most about relatively unimportant environmental threats while largely ignoring potentially much more dangerous risks. Thomas Gilovich has described the cognitive processes that allow even highly educated Americans to hold fervently to demonstrably false beliefs. Noting surveys of American collegestudents that indicate that as many 58 as percent believe that astrological predictions are valid while 50 percent think that the Egyptianpyramidswerebuiltwithextraterrestrialassistance, Gilovich describes the many ways in which contemporary Americans distort reality by their tendency to impute meaning and order to random phenomena, remembering only those instances that confirm their established beliefs while forgetting those that are variance with them (Gilovich1991). at If modern Americans are less than rational calculators-and these examples hardly exhaust the catalog of folly contributed to by those among us who are thought to most rational, such as our engineers, physicians, scienbe tists, and educators-then it is unreasonable to expect people whose cultures are even less secular than ours to be more efficient problem solvers than we are. I am not arguing that people in folk societies makeless than rational decisions or hold maladaptive beliefs because they are cognitively less competent than people in literate, industrialized societies. C . R. Hallpike, among others, has concluded that the thought processes of people in small-scale societies are incapable of comprehending causality, time, realism, space, introspection, and abstraction asutilized in Westernscience (Hallpike 1972). Whether so-called primitive thought is less abstract, more magical, or less able to assess marginal probabilities is an issue that continues to be debated, but its resolution is largely irrelevant to the point I am attempting to make. I am asserting that most people in all societies, including those most familiar with Western science, sometimes make potentially harmful mistakes and tend to maintain them. It is possible that people in small-scale societies make more mistakes this kind, but maladaptive deof cisions are made inall societies.
IDENTIFYING PROBLEMS

For people to optimize the adaptiveness of their beliefs and practices, they must not only think rationally but must be able identify the problems that to need to be solved. This is often difficult. Some problems, like changes in climate or soil erosion, developso gradually thatby the time theycan be identified, no human response is effective. Others, like the encroachment of diseases or the hazards of dietary change, may not be perceived as problems at all. Humans lived with the deadly hazard of malaria for millennia before it was finally understood very late in the nineteenth century that it was trans-

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mitted by mosquitoes. Many populations still do not understand the causes of the deadly diseases that plague them. And still other phenomena may be perceived as problemsbut prove to be insoluble because the society torn by is conflicting values or interest groups. How much energy are people willing to expend to increase their food supply? Will people give up a tasty but unhealthy diet for one that is more nutritious but less flavorful? Will leaders willingly give up some of their privileges to benefit the society as a whole? Will men do so to benefit women? Will elders yield some of their authority and rights to younger men? Will men yield rights to women? This is not to say that people in various societiesdo not worry about what they perceive to be problems; societies with recognized leaders, councils, or bureaucracies often do make decisions that are intended to be solutions. Members of the Hawaiian priesthood and aristocracy abolished their system of food taboos in an effort to resolve what they perceived as a problem, and a Pawnee chief tried to abolish human sacrifice. Among the Sebei of Uganda, a prophet named Matui instituted a new ritual, translated as “passing the law,” in which all men of a parish gathered together and swore not to commit a number of acts (Goldschmidt 1976, 204). Matui’s innovation was probably adaptive for the Sebei because it reduced interclan violence, but such farsighted leadership must have been uncommon inhuman history. The wisdom of various leaders’ decisions over the entire course of human evolution is unknown, but if the written record of history is any guide, few of them led to optimally beneficial outcomes.On the contrary, as Barbara Tuchman pointed outin The March of Folly, a great many were horrifically counterproductive (Tuchman 1984). Marvin Harris, long a leading proponent of the view that virtually all traditional beliefs and practices are adaptive, recently reached the surprising conclusionthat “all major steps cultural evoin lution took place in the absence anyone’s conscious understandingof what of was happening.” And, he adds, “the twentieth centuryseems a veritable cornucopia of unintended, undesirable, and unanticipated changes” (Harris 1989,495). Rational, calculated decisions intended to resolve a people’s problems seldom occur in small societies. Most of the time, how people hunt, fish, farm, conduct rituals, control their children, and enjoy their leisure are not matters for discussion at all or atleast not discussion about how to make these activities more efficient or pleasurable. People complain incessantlyabout various things in their lives. They may sometimes try something new, but only rarely do they attempt any fundamental change in their traditional beliefs or practices. Large changes, if they occur at all, are typically imposedby some external event or circumstances-invasion, epidemic, drought. In the absence of such events, people tend to muddle through by relying on traditional solu-

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tions that arose in response to previous circumstances. Most populations manage to survive without being rational calculators in search optimal soof lutions. It appears, for example, that folk populations typically adopt strategies that assure a life-sustaining but than maximalyield of food, and they less resist changes that entail what they perceive to be risks, even though these new food-providing practices would produce more food. The reluctance of people to change has led some anthropologists to refer to their economic strategies in terms “minimal risk” and “least effort.” of Beliefs and practices tend to persist not because they are optimally beneficial but because they generally work just well enough that changes in them are not self-evidently needed. Given all that we know about the sometimes astoundingly bad judgment of “rational” planners in modern nations, it seems unlikely that people in smaller and simpler societies who lack our scientific and technological sophistication would always make optimally adaptive decisions, even should they try to do so. Furthermore, even if a population somehow managed to devise a nearly perfect adaptation to its environment, it is unlikely that it could maintain it for any length of time. My assertion is not that traditionalbeliefs and practices are never adaptive and that they never contribute to a population’s well-being, and I am not claiming that people never think rationally enough to make effective decisions about meeting the challenges posed by their environments. Nor am I arguing that human behavior is driven solely by the socially disruptive aspects of biological predispositions such as paranoid ideation and selfishness. Humans are often driven by greed, lust, envy, and other attributes that challenge the common good. But people are also predisposed to cooperate, to be kind to one another, and sometimes even to sacrifice their interests for the well-being of others (Edgerton 1978, 1985). However, if maladaptive beliefs and practices are as common as they appear to be, their existence poses a challenge the prevailing adaptivist parato digm. Subsistence activities must be reasonably efficient for a population to survive, but they need not be optimal (in the senseof providing the best possible nutrition for the least expenditure of time and energy). It is highly unlikely that any population has achieved an optimal economic adaptation; indeed, it is not at all clear that any population has even attemptedto do so. Social organization and culture -will be affected by the technology available to a population and by its economic activities, but neither social institutions nor cultural belief systems have commonlyled to anything that could conbe sidered maximally adaptive utilization of the environment. Nor have they unfailingly enhanced the well-being of all members of that population. Just as no population has yet devised an optimal means for exploiting its environment, so it is most unlikely that all members of a population have

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agreed about what an optimal environmental exploitation shouldbe. Moreover, no population yet reported has met the needs all its members to their of own satisfaction. All, including those whose members are healthiest, happiest, and longest-lived, could do better; all could improve health and safety; all could further enhance life satisfaction. There has been no perfect society and no ideal adaptation-only degrees of imperfection. Sometimes knowingly and sometimes not, populations adjust their ways of living in effortsto better their lives, but none has yet created the optimal society. Not only are humans capable of errors and of misjudging the ecological circumstances that they must learn to cope with, but they are given to pursuing their own interests at the expense of others and to preferring the retention of old customs to the development of new ones. Culture may tend to be adaptive, but it is never perfectly so. It should thus not be assumed, as it so commonly is, that any persistent, traditional belief or practice in a surviving society must be adaptive. Instead, it should be assumed that anybelief or practice could fall anywhere along a continuum of adaptive value. It may simply neutral or tolerable,or it may be benefit some members of a society while harming others. Sometimes it may be harmful to all. In closing, I quote British anthropologist Roy Ellen: “Cultural adaptations are seldom the best of all possible solutions and never entirely rational” (1982,251).
REFERENCES

Campbell,D.T. 1975. “On the Conflicts Between Biological and Social Evolution and BetweenPsychology and Moral Tradition.” AmericanPsychologist 30: 1103-1 126. Cawte, J., N. Djagamara, and M. G. Barrett. 1966. “The Meaning of Subincision of the Urethra to Aboriginal Australians.”British Journal of Medical Psychology 39: 245-253. Cowgill, G. L. 1975. “On Causes and Consequencesof Ancient and Modern Population Changes.” American Anthropologist 77: 505-525. Douglas, M., and Wildavsky. 1982. Risk and Culture: A n Essay on theSelection of A. Technological and Environmental Dangers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Edgerton, R. B. 1978. “The Study of Deviance-Marginal Man or Everyman?” In TheMaking of PsychologicalAnthropology, edited by G. D.Spindler,pp. 444-476. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 1985. Rules, Exceptions, and Social Order. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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. 1992. Sick Societies: Challenging the Mythof Primitive Harmony. New York: Free Press. Ellen, R. 1982. Environment, Subsistence, and System: The Ecology of Small-Scale Social Formations. New York: Cambridge University Press. Favazza, A. R., with B. Favazza. 1987. Bodies Under Siege: Self-Mutilation in Culture and Psychiatry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fox, R. 1990. The Violent Imagination. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Gallup, G., Jr., and J. Castelli. 1989. The People’s Religion: American Faith in the Nineties. New York: Macmillan. Gellner, E. 1982. “Relativism and Universals.” In Rationality and Relativism, edited by M. Hollis and S. Lukes, pp. 181-256. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Isn’t Gilovich, T. 1991. How We Know What So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. New York: Free Press. Goldschmidt, W. R. 1976. The Culture and Behavior of the Sebei. Berkeley: University of California Press. Greeley, A. 1989. Religious Change in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. . 1990. The Human Career. Cambridge: Blackwell. Hallpike, C. R. 1972. The Konso o f Ethiopia: A Study of the Values of a Cushitic Society. Oxford: Clarendon. . 1986. The Principles of Social Evolution. Oxford: Clarendon. Harris, M. 1960. “Adaptation in Biological and Cultural Science.” Transactions of the New York Academy of Science 23: 59-65. . 1989. Our Kind: Who WeAre, Where We Came From, and Where We Are Going. New York: Harper & Row. Kluckhohn, C. 1955. “Ethical Relativity: Sic et NoY~.” Journal of Philosophy 52: 663-677. Kluckhohn, C., and D. Leighton. 1962. The Navaho. Rev.ed. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Published in cooperation with the American Museum of Natural History. Koch, K. E 1974. War and Peace in Jale‘mo: The Management of Conflict in Highland New Guinea. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kroeber, A. L. 1948. Anthropology. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Kuran, T. 1988. “The Tenacious Past: Theories of Personal and Collective ConservaJournal of Economic Behavior and Organization 10: 143-171. tion.¶¶ Linton, R. 1952. “Universal Ethical Principles: An Anthropological View.” In Moral Principles of Action: Man% Ethical Imperative, edited by R. N. Anshen. New York: Harper. Lumsden, C. J., and E. 0.Wilson. 1981. Genes, Mind, and Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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. Murdock, G. P 1965. Culture and Society. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Nisbet, R. 1973. The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought. New York: Crowell. Peires, J. B. 1989. The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa CattleKilling Movement o f 1856-6. London: Curry. Redfield, R. 1947. “The Folk Society.” American Journal of Sociology 52: 293-308. . 1953. The Primitive World and Its Transformations. Ithaca: Cornel1 University Press. Rosaldo, R., R. A. Calvert, and G. L. Seligmann. 1982. Chicano: The Evolution of a People. Malabar, Fla.: Krieger. Rozin, P., and C. Nemeroff. 1990. “The Laws of Sympathetic Magic: A Psychological Analysis of Similarityand Contagion.” InCultural Psychology:Essays on Comparative Human Development, edited by J. W. Stigler, R. A. Shweder, and G. Herdt, pp. 205-232. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sale, Kirkpatrick. 1991. Letter to the editor. New York Times, 25 July. Shaw, P 1985. “Civilization and Its Malcontents: Responses to Typee.” New Crite. rion, January, pp. 23-33. Shweder, R. A. 1980. “Rethinking Culture and Personality Theory, Part From Gen3, esis and Typology to Hermeneutics and Dynamics.” Ethos 8: 60-94. Sperber, D. 1982. “Apparently Irrational Beliefs.” In Rationality and Relativism, edited by M. Hollis and S. Lukes, pp. 149-180. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. . 1985. “Anthropology and Psychology: Towards an Epidemiology of Representations.” Man 20: 73-89. Spiro, M. E. 1990. “On theStrange and FamiliarinRecentAnthropological Thought.” In Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development, edited by J. W. Stigler, R. A. Shweder, and G. Herdt, pp. 47-61. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tuchman, B. 1984. The March of Folly. New York: Knopf. Wills, G. 1990. Under God: Religion and American Politics. New York: Simon & Schuster.

11
Culture, Childhood, and Progress in Sub-Saharan Africa
THOMAS S . WEISNER

Every economic system consistsof a world of social beings living out cultural careers, who bring their goals, motives, capacities, and cultural modelsof the world to economic life. Cultures around the world imagine and try to guide children into wonderful and varied cultural careers in hopesproducing the of kinds of social beings they value. Cultural careers start before we are born and are foreshadowed in childhood pathways. Are the cultural careers of children in the less developed world significantly hindering economic market activity or new forms of civil society, and if so, should parenting and child life become a focus for change efforts intended to encourage economic progress? My comments focus on sub-Saharan Africa-the “except-for” continent (Roe 1999)-that part of the world seemingly least economically favored and farthest from the ideal of a pluralist polity. In my view, there is nothing fundamental in the parenting and child care practices in Africa today that would prevent economic development under some version a market model of or a local version of a more pluralist society. Many values and practices in African family life and child care are at least compatible with economic de-

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velopment and political pluralism. These include the shared, socially distributed caretaking of children; the high value placed on combining schooling and shared family work for children; the evidence that parents want their children to show a mix of individual cleverness and compliance to elders; and the advantages of social networks that can mediate between rural and urban settings. Furthermore, parents actively debate how raise children and try out new to practices and family arrangements. Hence, there are children and families potentially ready for a variety of economic and political activities. The task is to put such activities and institutions in place rather than fundamentally change the values and practices African parents and families. There willbe of children and young adults there to engage in those activities once they are in place. Finally, the conception of culture and values as rather inflexible traits that are inculcated early and become part of a national cultural “character” is mostly wrong. Cultural beliefs and practices are tools for adaptation, not simply fixed patterns that determine institutions. Culture is a mix of shared values and beliefs, activities organized in daily routines of life, and interactional experiences that have emotional meaning. Cultures often raise children in ways that cause them problems when become adults that then they have to be solved anew. Western children are taught to be all they can be and to expect reasons for everything. They are offered choices and are expected neto gotiate rules. As adults, they may struggle to compromise and work well in social groups at work, and to realize that no one can perfectly realize every childhood dream. African children learnto be interdependent, to share resources, and to live within family and community authority systems with best covert questionat ing of them. As adults, they may struggleto break away from thosevery beliefs to be autonomous, curious, searching for new alliances. Beliefs, values, activities, and experience are never perfectly integrated during childhoodand across developmental stages. Children acquire cultural knowledge through mostly nonverbal channels of participation and modeling-verbal tuition and language are important but are not the dominant mode any means. These channels for acquiring by culture do not necessarily give consistent information, and in times of change, these levels of cultural experience and modes of acquisition can be quite inconsistent. What all children learn about rheir culture and what parents try to inculcate is always experienced ambivalently, is filled with mixed messages, and is often resisted. Cultures may have a clear central tendency and normative pattern, but they are hardly monolithic and uniform.

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PARENTS, CHILDREN, AND CHANGE IN EAST AFRICA

There certainly are conditions in the political economy of nation-states and the international economy that inhibit economic growth in Africa. Africa is the place where all the plagues of the economically poor nations are exponentially compounded (Landes 1998, 499; UNICEF 1992; Weisner 1994). Development and change are presumably occurring in much of the world, “except-Africa” (Roe 1999). Fertility rates have declined and development proceeds at least somewhat in most places, presumably except for Africa (although the fertility transition is actually under way in many places [Bradley 1997; Robinson 19921). Economic growth exemplars can be found in most every continent, except for Africa (but some exist). Roe characterizes the “except-Africa” trope as part of a “narrative” that itself leads to negativity about development. He suggests a variety of positive “counternarratives” of development that focus on variety, surprise, unpredictability, and the complexity of circumstances on the ground. But concerns over “narrativity” hardly capture the deeply felt and serious economic and social problems Africans face. Daniel Etounga-Manguelle outlines the problems facing African communities in this volume, and I share many of his concerns. He personally experiences the conditions that inhibit the desires for changeand progress for millions in Africa. Etounga-Manguelle sees cultural features as the causeof these negative African institutions: “Culture is the mother and . . . institutions are the children. More efficient and just African institutions depend on modifications to ourculture.” In Africa, as anywhere, culture can be oppressive and destructive. Although I agreethatmanyexperiencetheculturalpatternsEtoungaManguelle describes as harmful, and tens of millions of Africans hope they will change, I think that he is wrong to argue that culture precedes resourcebased, institutional, and politico-economic factors. Rather, these factors are loosely coupled within a complex. Africa is not the except-for case as far as parenting and child development beliefs and practices are concerned, and child care practices can hardly be blamed as among the primary conditions blocking economic and social progress. We should begin instead with the region’s ecological constraints, and with the regional, national, and international institutions restricting and channeling the potential capacities of African children and youth, instead of proposing to change ways children are being raised and the values and goals parents have for their children. My argument is not blindly optimistic in the face of the obvious poverty and problems plaguing so much of sub-Saharan Africa, nor does it absolve

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culture from a role in understanding the past and shaping the future progress of African communities. The absence of conditions in which families and communities can organize a sustainable daily life for themselves is the single most important factor inhibiting children and families from raising their economic level and is a fundamental concern of anthropological studies (Weisner 1997a). Tens of millions of children and parents in Africa and elsewhere around the world do not have the most basic conditions of health, security, and stability; nor do they have opportunities for acquiring literacy and other skills that would put them in a position to engage in a wider civic polity or make much economic progress. With Etounga-Manguelle, I deeply believe that African children deserve these basic material and social goods and the opportunity to find activities and institutions in their societies they can engage in to promote thosegoals. Those who argue that African cultural values and practices are the reasons why these basic materialand social goods arenot available propose changing African cultural values. But the evidence from studies of families and children suggest that such change has been under way for at least two generations and that there is amplevariety and heterogeneity within African communities to provide individuals who are ready for change. Providebasic support for children and then let them and their parents adapt to change, including turning to new child rearing valuesand practices. Some would argue,however, that theevident variationsin values and practices within cultures, although interesting, are irrelevant to the larger argument about relationships between culture and economic progress because so many sub-Saharan African states show slow or declining economic development and slow or no evidence of the emergence of democratic society. Ecological, cultural, and historical circumstances certainly play some role in these comparative differences, but the connections are at best only loosely coupled. Understanding local cultural change and variability is essential for understanding what is really going on among families and children within African societies. How else can we know what to do-how and whether and at what level and in which community to intervene? Only studies real conof temporary cultural circumstances can address that issue. This is a research program that, it seems to me, should be given the highest priority.
CHILD REARING, PARENTAL GOALS, AND ECONOMIC PROGRESS IN THE DEVELOPED WORLD

There is an association between certain core parental beliefs and child care practices, and economic progress in the developed world. Those beliefs and

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practices have not necessarily caused economic progress butare often associated with them in the West. A “pedagogical” developmental model (LeVine et al. 1994) emphasizes stimulation and responsiveness in the service boldof ness, exploration, verbal skills, and literacy. It is characterized by a concern with individual child stimulation and active engagement of the child with others, exploratory behavior, active recognition cognitive and verbal signs of of intelligence, verbal communication, and question-response exchanges. Individualism, autonomy, self-reliance,and self-expression are also encouraged in children. Parents look for signs of precocity in children and openly boast or glow in the admiration of others who remark on such precocity. There might be a steady drumbeat of praise and encouragement: “Good job!” “Way to go!” “Nice try!” “Be all you can be!” “You’re so smart/athletic/ beautiful.” Parents interpret typical developmental milestones as signs of intelligence or unusual abilities. For instance, babies everywhere in the world begin to display a social smile at around three months of age. Many African parents interpret it as a sign physical health. Western parents interpretthis of as an early signof intellectual understanding and intelligence. Along with these parental goals of energetic precocity, however, Western parents may worry over whether the child has sufficient and secure basic trust withinastablesocialnetwork,attachment security, andenough“selfesteem.” There is variation across NorthAmerica and Europe in suchbeliefs, and commitmentto this ideal-typicalset of practices is not uniform (Harkness and Super 1996). However, this model is recognized as among the acceptable, desirable ways to raise children and is not questioned or challenged. There is quite high consensus about desirability and normality. its African parents of course have equivalent hopes and goals for achievement and success for their children. But rather than individual verbal praise, parents are more likely to emphasize integration into a wider family group and show acceptance through providing opportunities for such integration, through giving food and other materialpossessions, and through physical affection and contact with their younger children. Parents encourage children to learn through observation and cooperation with others instead of providing active, adult-child verbal stimulation, and they encourage interdependence skills rather than individualistic autonomy. Robert Serpell (1993) has called this a socially distributed model for socialization children. of Many African parents and children today actually have a much more mixed model of parenting, incorporating pedagogical, autonomy-centered, and sociocentric developmental goals. In addition, individual variation in children (in temperament and other constitutional capacities) and in families inevitably leads to heterogeneity in these patterns, ensuring that there are

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children growing up all the time who are in concord as well as in conflict with traits similar to those of the pedagogical/autonomy models. I do not mean to gloss the obviously wide diversity cultures and families of across the African continent, but these are useful summary patterns for illustrative purposes. These patterns certainly fit, at least in part, child life in many regions of Africa as a central tendency with substantial variations and local differences around those tendencies. I share Etounga-Manguelle’s view that there is of course very significant diversity across Africa, but also “a foundation of shared values, attitudes, and institutions that bind the nations south of the Sahara together, and in many respects those to the north as well.”’ Diversity across Africa around this central cultural pattern strengthens my argument that there are children and families throughout Africa ready to engage in new formsof market activity and civic life.
THERE IS SOME CONTINUITY IN ECONOMIC PROBLEMS

Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries consisted of dynamic and expansionist political economies. Eastern African cultures steadily expanded into new territories, had active trading networks into Arabia and the Middle East (as well as regionally within Africa), and intermarried with neighboring groups. It took savvy and ambition to be socially and economically successful under the very difficult circumstances of that era, just as it still does in the contemporary era. The economic problems that faced parents and children in African communities then are still present now. Allen Johnson and Timothy Earle summarize these as the four universal politico-economic problems of production risks, warfare and raiding (security), inefficient resource use, and resource deficiencies (1987). Such problems remain omnipresent. Communities face the task of finding other solutions in a world of global markets, regionalization, dramatically increased accessto information, and increasing inequality. The task is how to find a better fit between solutions useful in the past that still characterize parenting and child care and new solutions requiring new child care practices and parental goals, rather than the de novo creation of awareness of such problems. This search for new solutions seems to be happening in parenting and family life today. Furthermore, communities need a variety of talents in children, not just narrow economic skills as contemporary Western market economies may define them. When we think about the fit between the need for economic progress, parental goals for children, and child socialization, is not only enit trepreneurial talent, competence in literacy and numeracy, or basic health that matter. Dealing with security, risk, and inefficiency problems requiresin-

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dividuals with varying talents and socialization experiences in a community, not only those with a single-minded preparation for economic innovation or wide social networks with an exclusively cosmopolitan outlook.
MARKET PRICING IS A UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLE OF SOCIAL RELATIONS AND MENTAL LIFE

A market economic calculus may well among a small number of universal be principles available in all societies and learned and used by all children to some degree (Fiske1991,1992). Alan Fiske sets out four suchuniversal principles of social relations: communal sharing (solidarity, unity in a group), authority ranking (status, inequality, hierarchy in social relations), equality matching (egalitarian, peer relations among separate coequals), and market pricing (exchange relationships determined by pricing or utility). These elementary relational structures are likely universal properties of the mind as well as of social organization. of If the four forms are universal properties both mind and society,all humans from childhood are preparedto appraise and relate to others using one or combinations of these four. Market calculus may not be as salient in mind and society as those interested in economic progress might want, but itseems that social beings everywhere learn how to balance among these four kinds of social relationships. Here again, the problem for those interested in economic development is not to create asense of market thinking and social relations de novo in children and their parents but rather to develop and extend what is already available.
CULTURAL VALUES DO NOT DEFINE CULTURES OR THE POTENTIALS FOR CHANGE

Cultural values do not define or constitute a culture, although they are often thought to be the key cultural barrier to economic progress. Clyde Kluckhohn, a founder of the anthropological study of values, described values in abstract terms as "conceptions the desirable"-shared ideas about whatis of good (D'Andrade 1995, 3). Kluckhohn actually opposed culture to "life" and to adaptation, and he did not consider values systems as determinative (Edmonson 1973; see also Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck 1961,21). Life [Kluckhohn] regarded as essentially disorderly and chaotic. Culture involved order imposed on life, and for the human species, was necessary for life to continue. . . . It was clear enough to him that not all individuals are made healthy and happy by their cultures, that in the longrun not all societies are in-

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sured growth or survival by their cultures, and that successful societies do not indefinitely preserve their cultures intact but must change them. (Fischer and Vogt 1973, 8) Barth (1993) argues that we should not reify values by concentrating on their institutional expression but should focus on their uses in socialization. However, values d o affect behavior when they inhere in institutions; cultural values are therefore powerful and should be taken seriously at institutional and social action levels. But they are adaptive tools, subject to negotiation and change; they do not determine or constitute culture. Values matter in how they guide social action. They do so by accounting for the world as it is constructed-making sense of it and why we should even act in it atall in a meaningful way; by providing a guide to attentional appraisal processes (e.g., what should we be attending to?); by providing socially sanctioned rationales for actions that are justified to oneself and others by invoking shared values; and by providing a form of social identification and labeling-the belief that I am a person with spiritual values, for instance, as compared to others who do not share those values (D’Andrade 1991). Values serve different functions for different people. Respect for authority and one’s elders might help children know who to attend to but would not help explain the natureof the contemporary changing world serve as a prior mary social identification. Women may use values concerning respect for authority to know what they haveto attend to, but they may not share with male authority the justificationsand social identificationsthat such valuesimply.

A UNIVERSAL STANDARD FOR ASSESSING CULTURES WITH REGARD TO CHILDHOOD: WELL-BEING AND BASIC SUPPORT LEAD TO THE POTENTIAL FOR SUSTAINABLE CULTURAL LIFE

Cultures should be judged on their ability to provide well-being, basic support, and sustainable dailylives for children and families. I do not have a relativist stance with regardto these features of child life. We can certainly give our advice and ally ourselves with those in a society who share our visions of meaningful goals and cultural practices. But we should leave itthe internal to mechanisms of change and debate within communities as to how, with what specific content, and toward what cultural goals these three conditions should be achieved. Well-being for children is the abilityto engage in the activities deemed desirable by their community, and the positive psychological experiences produced thereby. Resilience and the potential for change depend on such

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engagement by children and their families. Market economic activity or participation in shared civil society depends on such cultural well-being more than on the provision of particular values or beliefs (Weisner 1997b), although the contentof beliefs of course matters as well. Children and parents also require basic support. Support systems for children have certain features recognizable around the world. These include affection, physical comfort, shared solving of problems, provision of food and other resources, protection against harm and violence, and a coherent moral and cultural understanding of who can and should provide support, and the appropriate ways to do so (Weisner 1994). Cultures provide basic support in different ways and mean different things by it. What is important to assess across cultures is whether children have culturally coherent, reasonably predictable support. Tensof millions of children and parents in Africa and elsewhere not have this basic level of supdo port. Well-being and basic support combine to provide a sustainable daily routine of life for children. Sustainable routines family life have some stability of and predictability, have meaning and value with respect to parents' and children's goals, can minimize or balance inevitable conflicts and disagreements within a family and community, and have adequate fit to the available rean sources of the family. If parents and children can create sustainable routines, the cultural basis for change, new competencies, and innovation is present. Without this, no intervention is likely to succeed (Weisner 1997a).
CHANGING PARENTING AND CHILDHOOD SOCIALIZATION IN EAST AFRICA

African family and child care practices differ in emphasis from Western, middle-class parental goals and child care, yet they are not incompatible with versions of market economic activity and change in political life. More importantly, they can promote well-being and sustainable family life through socially distributed parenting and child care, flexible and changing moral debates about family resources and authority, an emphasis on childhood traits combining independence with respect, and expanding family social networks associated with increased modernity and less stress.

Socially Distributed Parenting and Care of Children
Socially distributed support in shared management family systems can be found in many places around the world (Weisner 1997a). Some of the characteristics of this culture complex include the following:

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Child caretaking often occurs as a part indirect chains of support of in which one child assists another, who assists a third. Support is often indirect and delayed, not necessarily organized around exclusive relationships between child and parent. Children look to other children for assistance and support as much or more than to adults. Girls are much more likelyto docaretaking and domestic tasks than boys. Boys clearly provide support, caretaking, and nurturance to other children as well, although more infrequently as they reach late middle childhood. Mothers provide support and nurturance for children as much by ensuring that others will consistently participate in doingso as by doing so directly themselves; fosteringand other formsof sharing children are common. Care often occurs in the context other domestic work doneby of children. Aggression, teasing, and dominance accompany nurturance and support and come from the same people; dominance of these kinds increases with age. Food and material goods are a powerful cultural concern and are used to threaten, control, soothe, and nurture. Verbal exchange and elaborated question-framed discourse rarely accompany support and nurturance for children; verbal negotiations regarding rights and privileges between childrenand dominant caretakers are infrequent. Social and intellectual competence in childrenis judged in part by a child’s competence in managing domestic tasks, demonstrating appropriate social behavior, doing child care,and nurturing and supporting others-as well as through signs of school achievement. Children are socialized within this system through apprenticeship learning of their family rolesand responsibilities. This pattern of African life promotes deference to older siblings and adults, training in sociability and nurturance toward others, jealousy and anger toward these same community members, competitive striving, and some distrust of those outside of one’s home community. Socially distributed support is part of a culture complex-a set of loosely coupled ecological circumstances, beliefs, and practices that interrelate and contribute to each other. It is almost always the case that persistent, stubborn, and hard-to-change features of a culture are that way in part because they are embedded in a culture complex that an emotionally learned, is high-

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consensus, tacit, cultural model of the world. The shared support culture is loosely coupled with features like high fertility; concerns over child health and mortality; expanded, extended, or joint household family patterns; a high maternal workload; and multiple affect and attachment patternsof diffused emotional and social behavior. Analyzing the entire, contextualized culture complex is essential. Change is unlikely to occur by simply pointing to one or another part of a culture complex and expecting it take place in to that particular feature. Socially distributed caretaking certainly might inhibit individualism and autonomy in children, through diffusing affective ties and contributing to a more “sociocentric” sense personhood and self that might limit autonomy. of Early child labor contributions to the family estate can conflict with schooling, time for play, and social development. Control of children’s work effort might conflict with their autonomy and explorations of new kinds of work and learning. Although these characteristics are related, the connections are loose and situational, and they vary across families and individual children. For example, children participating in shared caretaking do a bit better in school. Competence in school abilities does not decline due to either boys’ or girls’ participation in socially distributed caretaking. Child fostering is another practice in which effects are positive or mixed. Fostering reinforces the female social hierarchy as children move from lowerto higher-status households. Effects on the child depend in part on whether the foster mother requested the child (such children seem to do well) or whether a child was forced by circumstances into a move (Castle 1995).

There Is a Varied and Complex Moral Discourse About Parenting and Children
Cultural change is far more difficult when cultural values and practices are so deeply held and tacitly accepted that minds and discourses are closed. But African debate seems quite open. Carolyn Edwards presented an interesthas ing version of open debate over the value of shared support in her story of “Daniel and the School Fees” (Edwards 1997, 50-51). Her informants mix notions of basic “reasonableness” andflexibility in family decisions with values of “respect.” In this moral dilemma, Daniel completes his secondary school education because his brother helps pay his school fees. Daniel then gets a wage job in Nairobi while his wife and children live in the rural community. Eight years later, Daniel’s son is ready to start school and needs fees. Daniel’s parents come to him and say that the brother who paid for Daniel’s school has had

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an accident and the brother’s child (who is the same age as Daniel’s child) now needs school fees, and Daniel should pay them. But Daniel has only enough moneyto pay for one child. His wife says that he should pay for their own son first. What do you thinkDaniel and others should do? Why? Edwards presented this dilemma to “moral leaders” in two Kenya rural communities-individuals recognized as responsible, honest, and available for wise advice. About half were non-schooled and half had some secondary school. She also interviewed secondary school students. Her sample comes from two communities in Kenya: Abaluyia and Kipsigis. She found that all the men-young and old, married and unmarried-shared a common vocabulary for talking about the underlying issues and moral conflicts raised by the dilemmas. The core values respect, harmony, interdependence, and unity were of not only alive and well, they were stressed overand over as the central virtues of family living. . . . The idealof seeking “reasonableness” in one’s thinking and behavior seemed more prominent among the [Abaluyia] men, whereas maintaining “respectful” relations . . . seemed to preoccupy the Kipsigis elders and students. (Edwards 1997, 82) There were clear differences in moral reasoning duegeneration, cultural to community, and religious and cultural background. For example, the bettereducated secondary school students were less likely to use authority criteria in evaluating the moral stories. Those from the Abaluyia, a community that had more education and was influenced by Quaker/Protestant missions, more often mentioned reasonableness. Although arguments regarding what to do about the school fees differed, there was a shared basic moral and values vocabulary sufficient to have a meaningful debate. This common framework meant that arguments pro and con were grasped by everyone. There was flexibility in debates, multiple available scripts for understanding, and an openness to change in people’s use of values justifications to account for different decisions by Daniel or others. Similar kinds of debates occur about economic strategies or the distribution of family resources to children (Super and Harkness 1997). Such moral debates regarding child rearing are going on in Kenyan communities every day. The ambiguities and ambivalence in choosing the “best” strategies about what is “right” can be heard in the moral debates about such matters. Cultural beliefs and moral ideals regarding how to organize family life and child rearing are not based on rigid values.

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Parental Goals for Children’s Behavior
Traits parents desire for their children are also changing. Beatrice Whiting identified eight character traits that mothers prefer their children to have based on community interviews with Kikuyu mothers in Central Kenya. Four-confidence, inquisitiveness, cleverness, and bravery-were selected as character traits that were considered good for success in school by Kikuyu mothers and by students (and perhaps in market economiclife and political participation as well). Four others-good-heartedness, respectfulness, obedience, and generosity-were chosenasexamples of characteristicsthat stressed harmonious interaction in a hierarchical, patrilineal, mixed rural and peri-urban community. Both clusters of traits are considered at least somewhat desirable. The dimension contrasts the relative advantages for schoolingonly, not their overall cultural desirability. Furthermore, these traits are desired for both boys and girls. These parents tryto trainchildren for a mix of traits. Since there is already expectable temperamental and other variation within sibling groups, and since there is variation in modernity across households, there are many children relatively more likely to display one or the other cluster of attributes, as well as many who are quitebalanced in both. Parents were asked which of these traits they could actually train in their children and which were more likely to be innate and inborn. Parents understood that both nature and nurture matter in development, as do parents around the world.Generally, children’s traitsthat are visible in everyday cultural practices-those that are learned through “guided participation’’ or various forms of apprenticeship and informallearning-are more likely to be thought amenable to direct parental influence. Most parents thought that curiosity, good work habits, industriousness, obedience, and respect for adults could all be trained. The reason? Children could learn these traits by being put to work in the household or sent to others for work. Kikuyu parents saidthat they definitely could allow childrento ask questions and learn the answers through tuition at home or in schools. They could encourage curiosity through practices they could establish in their own daily routines. But being clever or brave, generous or good-heartedthese traits are inborn, a part core personality (Whiting 1996,22-25). of Whiting also developed a composite index of modernity, which included parents’ education, mother’s knowledge of Kiswahili and/or English, radio ownership, Christian church membership, and other items. Parents with these characteristics were more likely to value traits in their children such as confidence, inquisitiveness, cleverness, and bravery; they were relatively less

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likely to value being generous, obedient, and respectful. But again, mostparents want bothclusters of traits in their children.

Modernity Is Associated with Increased Social Connectedness and Affiliation with e w Groups N
Finally, more modern attitudes are found among families with ties to both rural and urban communities, rather than to only one or the other. Since 1970, I have followed families from western Kenya who tried to colonize both the cities and other rural areas to achieve economic and social gain (Weisner 1997a). Compared to families living mostly in Nairobi, families that had relatives in multiple locations and moved back and forth between those settings along with their children had lower levels of reported psychophysiological stress and similar levels of overall modernity in their attitudes. The children in cities had higher levels of child-child and parent-child conflict and aggression, and lower levels of sociability and nurturance compared to rural-resident children or rural-urban commuting children. Parental strategies for deploying their children and other kin for survival and security varied. Families and children socially with distributed networks across generations and places were doing as well or better than their counterparts trying to make it in only one location.
CONCLUSION

Let parents and children around the world decide how to innovate and experiment with their cultural practices. If those with the means to do so can provide activities and new institutional contexts encouraging market accumulation or pluralism in politicallife, the evidence suggeststhat we will find many families and children there to engage in those activities. If such new institutions and communityactivities are planned and prepared with local cultural understanding in mind (Klitgaard 1994), they can and will find their place. If market economic activities and new and more positive forms civic of political life become available, there will be children and parents in contemporary African communities sufficiently well fitted to engage in those new activities. Of course, like all cultural ways of life, socially distributed socialization has costs as well as benefits for individuals and for economic development. This is the case, for example, for the continuing gender segregation that restricts the cultural careersof boys and girls and the institutionalized jealousy and fears of neighbors and other cultural groups outside one’s own. Although parents often say that boys and girls are equally likely to have this

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mix of traits (and greater formal education and economic success increases the likelihood that parents say this), the cultural careers of boys and girls keeps gender segregation highly salient, although increasingly fragmented and changing in the direction increased equality. Localbeliefs certainly can of make equitable distributionof wealth and interventions on behalf children of and families difficult and complex (Howard and Millard 1997). Millions of African parents and children are prepared for change, are increasingly cosmopolitan or at least aware of alternatives, and creatively do change their familylife and child care practices.Yet many resist change at the same time. Parents and communities are, of course, ambivalent. They have “the impulse to defend the predictability of life . . . a fundamental and universal principle of human psychology” (Marris 1975,3).Parenting and child care are changing and adapting, but there clearly are powerful, emotionally felt cultural models that make such change both possible yet difficult. Given the cultural importance, personal intimacy, ambivalence that atand tach to parenting and child rearing, why focus on changing the values and practices of children’s cultural careers that families both defend and are struggling to change? Indeed, I have to wonder why those interested in achieving economic development and new forms of civic life displace our attention by focusing on the detailsof how parents shouldraise their children. Families could be helped so much more easily through the provision the of means to establish basic and universally desired social supports and thereby the wherewithal to achieve meaningful daily routines of family life. There is little basis for prescribing interventions and new-values orientations that require specific changes in parental goals or child care practices within the family system, given evidence that changeis already widely occurring and the that there is inherent individual variability built in to the child development process. But there certainlyis reason to provide a foundation thatestablishes any culture’s ability to provide well-being for children: the basic social supports of security, stability, health, and resources that permit families to achieve for their children a sustainable daily routine in their community that meets their goals.That is progress.

REFERENCES

Barth, F 1993. “Are Values Real? TheEnigma of Naturalism in the Anthropological . Imputation of Values.” In The Origin of Values, edited by Michael Hechter, Lynn Nadel, and Richard E. Michod, pp. 3146. New York: Aldine de Gruyter Bradley, C., and T. S. Weisner. 1997. ccIntroduction: Crisis in the African Family.” In African Families and the Crisis o f Social Change, edited by T. S. Weisner, C.

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Bradley, and I.Kilbride, pp. xix-xxxii. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood PresdBergin ? & Garvey. Bradley, C. 1997. “Why Fertility Is Going Down in Maragoli.” In African Families and the Crisis of Social Change, edited by T. S. Weisner, C. Bradley,and P. Kilbride, pp. 227-252. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood PresdBergin Garvey. & Castle, S. E. 1995. “Child Fostering and Children’s Nutritional Outcomes in Rural Mali: The Role of Female Status in Directing Child Transfers.” Social Science and Medicine 40, no. 5: 679-693. D’Andrade, R. 1991. Afterword to Human Motives and Cultural Models, edited by R. D’Andrade and C. Strauss, pp.225-232. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . 1995. The Development of Cognitive Anthropology.New York: Cambridge University Press. Edmonson, M. S. 1973. “The Anthropology of Values.’’ In Culture and Life: Essays in Memory of Clyde Kluckhohn, edited by W. Taylor, J. L. Fischer, and E. Z. Vogt eds., pp. 157-197. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Edwards, C. C. 1997. “Morality and Change: Family Unity and Paternal Authority Among Kipsigis and Abaluyia Elders and Students.” In African Families and the Crisis of Social Change, edited byT. S. Weisner, C. Bradley, and P. Kilbride, pp. 45-85. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press/Bergin& Garvey. Fischer, J. L., and E. Z. Vogt. 1973. Introduction to Culture and Life: Essays in Memory of Clyde Kluckhohn, edited byW. Taylor, J. L. Fischer, and E. Z. Vogt, pp. 1-13. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press Fiske, A. P. 1991. Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Human Relations. New York: Free Press. . 1992. “The Four Elementary Forms of Sociality: Framework for a Unified Theory of Social Relations.” Psychological Review 99: 689-723. Goldschmidt, W. 1990. The Human Career. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Harkness, S., C. M. Super, and R. New, eds. 1996. Parents’ Cultural Belief Systems. New York: Guilford. Howard, M., andA.V. Millard. 1997. Hunger and Shame: Poverty and Child Malnutrition on Mozrnt Kilimanjaro. New York: Routledge. Johnson, A. W., and T. Earle. 1987. The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group toAgrarian State. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Klitgaard, R. 1994. “Taking Culture into Account: From ‘Let’s’to cH~w.”’ Culture In and Development in Africa, edited by I. Serageldin and J. Taboroff, pp. 75-120. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. Proceedings an international conference held of at the World Bank, Washington, D.C. Kluckhohn, F. R., and F. Strodtbeck. 1961. Variations in Value Orientations. L. Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson. Lancy, D. 1996. Playing on the Mother-Ground:Cultural Routines for Children’s Development. New York: Guilford.

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Landes, D. 1998. The Wealth and Poverty o f Nations: W h y Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor. New York: Norton. LeVine, R. 1973. “Patterns of Personality in Africa.” Ethos 1, no. 2: 123-152. LeVine, R., S. Dixon, S. LeVine, A. Richman,P H. Leiderman, C. H. Keefer, and T. B. . Brazelton. 1994. Child Care and Culture: Lessons from Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marris, P. 1975. Loss and Change. New York: Doubleday Anchor. Robinson, W. C. 1992. “Kenya Enters the Fertility Transition.” Population Studies
46: 445-457.

Roe,E. 1999. Except-Africa: Remaking Development, Rethinking Power. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction. Serpell, R. 1993. The Significance of Schooling: Life-Journeys in an African Society. New York: Cambridge University Press. Super, C. M., and S. Harkness. 1997. “Modernization, Family Life, and Child Development in Kokwet.” In African Families and the Crisis of Social Change, edited by T. S. Weisner, C. Bradley, and P. Kilbride, pp. 341-353. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood PressBergin & Garvey. UNICEF. The State of the World’s Children, 1992. New York: UNICEF. Weisner, T. S. 1984. “A Cross-Cultural Perspective: Ecocultural Niches of Middle Childhood.” In The Elementary School Years: Understanding Development During Middle Childhood, edited by Andrew Collins, pp. 335-369. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. . 1994. “The Crisis for Families and Children in Africa: Change and Shared Social Support for Children.” Health Matrix: ]ournu1 of Law-Medicine 4, no. 1:
1-29.

. 1997a. “Support for Children and the African Family Crisis.” In African Families and the Crisis of Social Change, edited by T. S. Weisner, C. Bradley, and P. Kilbride, pp. 20-44. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood PressBergin & Garvey. . 1997b. “The Ecocultural Project of Human Development: Why Ethnography and Its Findings Matter.” Ethos 25, no. 2: 177-190. Weiser, T. S., with C. Bradleyand P. Kilbride, eds. 1997. African Families and the Crisis of Social Change. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood PressBergin & Garvey. Whiting, B. 1996. “The Effect of Social Change on Concepts of the Good Child B. and Good Mothering: A Study of Families in Kenya.” Ethos 24, no. 1: 3-35. Wildavsky, A. 1994. “How Cultural Theory Can Contribute to Understanding and Promoting Democracy, Science, and Development.” In Culture and Development in Africa, edited by I. Serageldin and J. Taboroff, pp. 137-164. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. Proceedings of an international conference held at the World Bank, Washington, D.C., 1994.

I2

Moral Maps, “First World” Conceits, and the New Evangelists
R I C H A R DA .S H W E D E R

ECONOMISTS’ BRAINS: $2.39 A POUND!

Does cannibalism have nutritional value or is it just a form of high cuisine? Although this question is a topic of solemn debate in anthropology, at grand ceremonial occasions anthropologists are known to have a sense of humor. Being an anthropologist, I thought I wouldbegin this chapter with an admittedly baroque variation on an old joke about the market for brains in Papua New Guinea. This guy from the “First World” walks into a gourmet food store in Papua New Guinea. He goes to the meat section, where he sees a bill of fare designated ‘‘assorted Westerners.” It contains two general offerings: evangelical missionaries (religious and secular), who think it is their mission in life to make our world a better place by their moral lights, and romantic relativists, who think whatever is, is okay and actually seem to like it here. He notices many delicacies, all neatly arranged in bins. The first bin has a sign that says “Economists’ Brains from the World Bank: $2.39 a Pound!” The label on the bin reads, “These people want to

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loan us lots of money at very favorable rates (which of course we are never going to pay back), if only we willdo things more likethe way theydo things in the West. They want us to formalize contracts, createan independent judiciary, and prohibit the preferential hiring of members of one’s own ethnic group. And that’s just for starters.’’ The sign on the second bin says “Protestant Ethicists’ Brains: $2.42 a Pound.” The label reads, “These people want us to change our work habits and our ideas about the good life. They want us to stopwasting our time on elaborate rituals for dead ancestors. They want to loan us lots of money at very favorable rates (which course we are never going pay back), if only of to we will start thinking about things the way they think about things in the West (or atleast in the very northern sections of the West). Northern Western folk are convinced that everything is nefarious except the impersonal pursuit of work and that only the rich will be saved. They tell us that ‘sustainable growth’ is the contemporary code word for the adoption of Protestant values. They believe that God blesses men in the sign of their material prosperity, especially their purposefully amassed wealth. They want us to be saved. They want to save us.’’ The sign on the third bin says “Monocultural Feminists’ Brains: $2.49 a Pound.” The label reads, “These people want us to change our family life, gender relations, and reproductive practices. They want us to devalue the womb, which is associated in their minds with ‘bad’ things such as big families, domesticity, and a sexual division of labor. They want us to revalue the clitoris (which is associated in their minds with ‘good’ things such as independence, equality, and hedonic self-stimulation) as the biological essence of female identity, and as the symbol and means of female emancipation from men. And they want NATO to send in a ‘humanitarian’ invasion force unless we promise to join the National Organization of Women and the League of Women Voters.” The sign on the final bin says “Anthropologists’ Brains:$15.00 a Pound.” The label reads, “These people think we should just take the money and run!” Dismayed, our visitor walks over to the guy behind the counter and he says, “What’s this! Haven’t you heard about the moral superiority of the West (or atleast of the northernmost sections of the West)?Don’t you know that the reason we [in the ‘First World’] are better than you [in the ‘Third World’] is that we are humanists who endorse the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Man? Don’t you know that when it comes to brains there is basic oneness to humankind? Don’t you know that the major reason for differences in the world [variations in ‘human capital’] is that people in the southern sections of the globe grow up in impoverished cultures [‘cul-

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tures of poverty’]? That is why they are badly equipped for life on the information highway and in the global fast lane. That why they are untrustworis thy, corrupt, undisciplined, unskilled, and poor. Okay, I can understand a slight difference in price for economists’ brains, Protestant ethicists’ brains, and monocultural feminists’ brains ($2.39 a pound/$2.42 a pound/$2.49 a pound), but $15.00 a pound for anthropologist’s brains? That’s ridiculous! It’s illogical! It’s unfair! It defies ‘transparency’!” The guy behind the counter replies: “DO you know how many anthropologists we had to kill before we could find apound of brains?” So I admit to feeling a bit brainless writing for a volume whose contributors include so many distinguished scholars and evangelists from disciplines other than my own. Lawrence Harrison recruited me to this effort by stating, with characteristic candor, that he wantedme to write as a skeptic and critic because he thought I believed in “culture” but not in “progress.” He said that he was planning to invite other types of skeptics and critics as well, such as those who believe in “progress” but not in “culture.” I do believe in progress, at least in a limited sense (more on that below). And I suspect that the precise sense in which I believe in culture (more on that too) may not seem very helpful (or even sensible) to those who have argued here that “culture matters.”’ What does it mean to say that “culture matters?” It depends on who is speaking. The theme of this volume is expressive of an intellectual stance known as “culturaldevelopmentalism. ” For a cultural developmentalist, the assertion that “culture matters” a way of saying that some cultures are imis poverished or backward, whereas others are enriched or advanced. It means there are good things in life (e.g., health, domestic tranquillity,justice, material prosperity, hedonic self-stimulation, and small families) that all human beings ought to want and have but that their culturekeeps them from wanting and/or having. Here is how you can tell if you are a cultural developmentalist. you like Do to inspect the globe with an ethical microscope and draw “moral maps” of the world? Or, doing what amounts to pretty much the same thing, do you like to construct “quality of life” indicators that can used to rank cultures, be civilizations, and religions from better to worse? If you are a cultural developmentalist, you probably feel deeply disturbed by the staying power and popularity of various (“archaic”) ways of life and (“superstitious’’) systems of belief because you think they are relatively devoid of truth, goodness, beauty, or practical efficiency. You probably want to “enlighten” the residents of the “dark continents” of the world. You probably want to lift them up from error, ignorance, bad habits, immorality, and squalor, and refashion them to be more progressive, more democratic, more scientific, more civic-

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minded, more industrious, more entrepreneurial, more reliable, more rational, and more like (the ideal)us. Culture matters for me too but in a rather different sort of way: If I were ever to refer to a “culture of poverty,” I would probably reserve the expression for ascetic communities in which the renunciation of wealth and the repudiation of worldly goods had been positively valued as objective good. an Furthermore, given my conception of precisely how culture counts, I might even try to find some merit inthat conception of the good. Although the idea of an “impoverished culture” is not exactly an oxymoron, it hasplayed almost no part inmy own field research. To make matters worse, my commitment to the very idea of “culture” has its source in an interest in other cultures as sources of illumination (Shweder 1991, 1993, 1996a, 1996b, 1997; Shweder et al. 1998). I have never put much stock in the view that holds that a good reason for becoming interested in other cultures is that they are impediments therealization of some imagined univerto sal aspiration of all people to be more like northern Europeans. And while I certainly believe in the importance and moral decency our wayof life, I do of not believe in our moral superiorityover all the rest.’ Thus I do not think that northern Europeans have a corner on the market for human progress. I do not believe that cognitive, spiritual, ethical, social, political, and material progress go hand in hand. Societies in command of great wealth and power can be spiritually, ethically, socially, and politically flawed. Many vital, intellectually sophisticated, and admirable cultures, places where philosophers live in mud huts, have evolved in environments with rudimentary technology and relatively little material wealth. Hence, I do notbelieve that either “we” or “they” have implemented the only credible manifestation of the good life. Obviously, I am one of the heretics at this revival meeting and it is not the greatest of feelings. So let me continue my presentation with a coupleof confessions, which will perhaps reduce some my anxiety over being drafted as of a designated skeptic.

CONFESSION 1: I AM AN ANTHROPOLOGIST

My first confession, of course, is that I am an anthropologist. Unfortunately, given all the turmoil in the profession of anthropology these days, this confession is not very informative. It carries no implications (as it would have fifty years ago or even twenty yearsago) for how I mightfeel about the concept of culture, whether I am for or against itor whether it makes me laugh it or cry.3

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For the sake of accuracy in describing the current scene in anthropology, let me note that there was a time in anthropology when such words as “primitive,” “barbarian,” “savage,” or even “underdeveloped” were put in quotation marks, if they were used at all. There was a time when the idea that there is only one way to lead a morally decent and rational life, and it’s our way, would have been seen, quite frankly, as obscene. But things have changed. Monocultural feminism has put an end to any facile relativism in anthropology and hasgiven a new meaning to the idea of “political correctness.” So, along with the international human rights movement and various agencies promoting Western-style globalization (UNICEF, WHO, perhaps even NATO), there are plenty of anthropologists these days who take an interestin other cultures mainly as objectsof scorn. The slogan “It is not cultural, it’s [fill in the blank: criminal, immoral, corrupt, inefficient, barbaric]” (or alternatively, “It is cultural and it’s [fill in the blank: criminal, immoral, corrupt, inefficient, barbaric]”) has become the rallying cry for cultural developmentalists, Western interventionists of all kinds, and some schools of cultural anthropology as well. I regret this ironic turn of events. Cultural anthropology was once a discipline that was proudof its opposition to ethnocentric misunderstanding and moral arrogance as well as its anti-colonial defense of other ways of life. That wasyesteryear. These days there are plenty of anthropologists (the post-culturalists) who want to disown the concept of culture. They think the word “culture” gets used in bad faith to defend authoritarian social arrangements and to allow despots to literally get away with murder. Indeed, as the world of theory in cultural anthropology turns, it seems to be “dCji vu all over again.” Despite a century of objections by anthropological pluralists, relativists, and contextualists such as Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Melville Herskovits, Robert LeVine, Clifford Geertz, and others, an intellectual stance reminiscent of late nineteenth-century “white man’s burden,” cultural developmentalism is back. The self-congratulatory, up-from-barbarism theme of (certain versions of) Western liberalism (including the sensational accusation that African mothers are bad mothers, human rights violators, and mutilators of their daughters) has once againbecome fashionable on the anthropological scene, at least among those anthropologists who are the most politicallyo r r e ~ t . ~ c The current scene within anthropology is sufficiently complex (and perverse) that there areeven anthropologists who think they own the concept of “culture” but do not want anyone, including themselves,to doanything with it. I am not oneof them. Regardless of whether the idea of culture makes me laugh or cry, I like it a lot. I can’t get rid of it. I find we can’t live by ecumenism alone. Membership in some particular tradition of meanings is an es-

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sential condition for personal identity and individual happiness. Inmy view, “thick ethnicity” and cultural diversity both have their place and are part of the natural and moral order of things. I do not think Mother Nature wants everyone to be alike. What do I mean by “culture”? I mean community-specific ideas about what is true, good, beautiful, and efficient. To be “cultural,” those ideas about truth, goodness, beauty, and efficiency must be socially inherited and customary; and they must actually constitutive of different ways of life. be Alternatively stated, culture refers to what Isaiah Berlin called “goals, Values and pictures of the world” that are made manifest in the speech, laws, and routine practices of some self-monitoring group. There is a lot more packed into that definition than I can unpack in a single chapter. There is the notion that actions speak louder than words and that “practices” are a central unit for cultural analysis. That is one reason I don’t much like value questionnaires and find it hard to feel enthusiastic about research based on the analysis of official creeds or on endorsement patterns for abstract stand-alone proposition^.^ Furthermore, one of the things “culture” is certainly not aboutis “national character.” I am not going to have much to say about “national character” studies here, but they went out of fashion about forty years ago, and for good reason. They went out of fashion because it is far better to think about human behavior and motivation the way rational choice theorists or sensible economists do, rather than the way personality theorists do. Rational choice ‘‘agency.” That is theorists think about action as something emanating from to say, action is analyzed as the joint product of ccpreferences” (including goals, values, and “ends” of various sorts) and “constraints” (including “means” of various sorts, such as causalbeliefs, information, skills, and material and non-material resources), mediated by the will of rational beings. all This stands in contrast to the way in which personality theorists think about behavior. Personality theorists think about action as “forced.” They try to explain action as the joint product two types of vectors, one pushing from of “inside,” called “person” (described in terms of generalized motives and “sticky” global traits), and the other pushing from ccoutside,” called “situation. ’’ Looking for types of persons as a way of explaining cultural practices has not proved very useful.If one triesto characterize individuals in terms perof sonality traits or generalized motives, one usually discovers that “individuals within cultures vary much more among themselves than they do from individuals in other cultures” (Kaplan 1954). One also discovers that if there is any modal typeat all (e.g., an “authoritarian personality type” or a personality type with a “need for achievement”), it is typically characteristic of no

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more than about one-third of the population. It has long been recognized among psychological anthropologists and cultural psychologists that (quoting Melford Spiro 1961) “it is possible for different modal personality systems to be associated with similar social systems, and for similar modal personality systems to be associated with different social systems.” Looking for types of personalities to explain differences in cultural practicesis a dead end (see Shweder 1991).
CONFESSION 2: I A M A PLURALIST

My second confession is that I am a culturalpluralist. My version of cultural pluralism begins with a universal truth, which I refer to as the principle of “confusionism.” A “confusionist” believes that the knowable world is incomplete if seen from any one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view at once, and empty if seen from “nowhere in particular.” Given the choice between incompleteness, incoherence, and emptiness, I opt for incompleteness while staying on the move between different ways of seeing and valuing the world. This version of cultural pluralism is not opposed to universalism. Culture theorists do not divide into only two types, those who believe that anything goes (the “radical relativists”) and those who believe that only one thing goes (the “uniformitarian universalists”).I strongly believe in “universalism,” but the type of universalism I believe in is “universalism without the uniformity,” which is what makes me a pluralist. In other words, I believe there are universally binding values but that there arejust too many of them (e.g., justice, beneficence, autonomy, sacrifice, liberty, loyalty, sanctity, duty). I believe that those objectively valuable ends of life are diverse, heterogeneous, irreducible to some common denominator such as “utility” or “pleasure,” and that they are inherently in conflict with each other. believe that all the good things in I life can’t be simultaneously maximized.believe that when it I comes to implementing true values there are always trade-offs, which is why there aredifferent traditions of values (i.e., cultures) and why no one cultural tradition has ever been able to honor everything that is good.6 Cultural pluralism has other implications, some of whicharehighly provocative. For example, there is the claim that the members of the executive board of the American Anthropological Association did the right and courageous thing in 1947 when they decided not to endorse the U.N. Declaration of the Rights of Man onthe grounds that it was an ethnocentric document. In 1947, anthropologists werestill proud of their anti-colonial defense of alternative waysof life (see Shweder 1996b).

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PROGRESS AND PLURALISM: CAN THEY COEXIST?

Pluralism does not imply the rejection of the ideas of progress and decline. Progress means having more and more of something that is “desirable” (i.e., something that should be desired because it is “good”). Decline means having less and less of it. Name a specific “good” (e.g., taking care of parents in old age, eliminating contagious disease), and we can make objective judgments about progress with respect to that “good.” If maximizing the likelihood of child survival during the first nine months after birth is the measure of success, then the United States is objectively more advanced than Africa and India. If maximizing the likelihood of child survival during the first nine months after conception (in the womb)the measure of success, then Africa is and India (where abortion rates are relatively low) are objectively more advanced than the United States (where abortion rates arerelatively high). Of course there is much that is discretionary (i.e., not dictated by either logic or evidence) in any decision about how to name and identify specific “goods” and thusmorally map the world.For example, the sheer quantity of life, or “reproductive fitness,” is the measure used by evolutionary biologists for estimating thesuccess of a population. By that measure of success-the genetic reproductionof one’s tribe or ancestral line-how are weto evaluate the birth control pill, the legalization of abortion, and the reduction family size of in the high-tech societies the First World?Do we narrate a storyof decline? of Or, to select a second example, what type of story should we tell about “quality of life” measures such as life expectancy at birth? Thelonger lived a population, the greater the frequency chronic illness, the greater the likeliof hood of functional impairment, and hence the higher the aggregate amount of pain (a true qualitative measure) experienced by that population. Good things (e.g., more years of life, no physical pain) do not always correlate. A longer life is not unambiguously a better life, or is it? Or, if longevity is a measure of success, then why not also numerousness or sheer population size, with China and Indiaat the top of the list? And why life expectancy at birth? What principle of logic or canon of inductive science dictatesthat standard for drawing moral maps and assessfor ing cultural progress? Why not expectancy at age fortyor, for thatmatter, life at conception? Why not take the more comprehensive life-course perspective of the fetus and not its later viewpoint as a newly born infant? As noted, just if one considers the hazards of the womb theFirst World and former Second World look worse off than many societies in Africa and Asia. Consider how different our life expectancy tables would be if we factored in the 20 to 25 percent abortion rates in the United States and Canada or the 50-plus per-

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cent abortion rates in Russia, as compared to rates as low as2 to 10 percent in India, Tunisia, and some other parts the “underdeveloped” world. of The pro-life/pro-choice debate (I am pro-choice)is not the issue here. The issue is the discretionary aspect of moral mapping and the degrees of freedom one has in deciding whose ideals are going to be selected as the gold standard of the good life. As societies become technologically sophisticated, rates of abortion often rise, thereby lowering the life expectancy rate of the population (assuming that life expectancy is calculated from the point of conception rather than at birth). In some parts of the world, often in those parts of the world where reproductive success and large families are valued, early childhood is a relatively dangerous timeof life. In other places, often in high-tech places where small families are valued and the womb is no longer thought of as a sanctified ground, the real dangers come earlier in life, and if you are an unwantedchild, the womb canbe hazardous to your health. Once a particular “good” is selected and named, objective assessments of advance and decline can be made. That type of value-specific assessment is quite different, however, from any form of triumphal progressivism, which tries to pick out some one cultural tradition as superior all the rest. Things to can be made to seem either better or worse, depending on the criteria of value that you choose to select. When it comes to reviewing all the many potentially good things in life, cultural pluralists believe that there are pluses and minuses to most long-standing cultural traditions (see Shweder et al. 1997).And when it comes constructing narratives about to progress, they believe that there is lots of room for discretion (and ideology) in how one tells the story of who is better and whois worse. It is also possible to make such value-specific judgments about progress without believing in the overall superiority of the present over the past, or that most changes are for the good. It is even possible to make criterionspecific judgments of progress and decline while being a “neo-antiquarian,” that is, someone who rejects the idea that the world woke up,emerged from darkness, and became good for the first time yesterday or three hundred years ago in northern Europe. A “neo-antiquarian” does not think thatnewness is a measure of progress and is quite prepared, in the name of progress, to revalue things from distantplaces and from outof the distant past. Pluralists do make critical judgments. Indeed, the “stance of justification” is so central to my style of cultural analysis that I would define a “genuine” culture, a culture deserving appreciation, as a wayof life that is defensible of in the face of criticism from abroad. Pluralism is the attempt to provide that defense of “others,” and not only as a corrective to the partiality and exaggerations of various modern forms ethnocentrism and chauvinism (includof ing the claim that the West is better than all the rest), although that reason is

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enough. Right now, with the fall of communism and the rise of global capitalism, including the expansion of our Internet, we (in the West) feel full of ourselves. It is at times such as thesethat we might do well to remember that Max Weber, the author of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, did not voice a preference for Protestantism over Catholicism or for the North over the South. He was critical pluralist who put out warnings about a. the “iron cage” of modernity, about the impersonalrules of the bureaucratic state that redefine one’s moral obligations to kith and kin as a form of “corruption,” and about the hazards an unbridled economic rationality. of Throughout history, whoever is wealthiest and the most technologically advanced thinks that their way life is the best, the most natural, the Godof given, the surest means to salvation, or at least the fast lane to well-being in this world. In the sixteenth century, Portuguese missionaries to China believed that their invention of clocks, of which they were very proud, was knock-down proof of the superiority of Catholicism over other world religions (Landes 1998, 336-337). For all I know, their mechanical timepiece may have been counted as an argument in favor of absolute monarchy. Dazzled by our contemporary inventions and toys (e.g., CNN, IBM, Big Mac, blue jeans, the birth controlpill, the credit card) and at home our own way in of life, we are prone to similar illusions and the same type of conceits.
MILLENNIAL PROPHECIES: THREE IMAGES OF THE ”NEW WORLD ORDER”

These are confusing times, especially when one tries to imagine the broad outlines of the “new world order” thatis likely to replace the old capitalist/ communisdunderdeveloped “three worlds” scheme. One reason for the confusion is that the self-congratulatory, “enlightenment” origin story about the ascent of secularism, individualism, and science 1990s and may not be all that useful for predicting has taken its lumps in the the direction of change in the early twenty-first century. Thirty years ago, many social scientists predictedthat, in the modern world, religion would go away and be replaced by science. They predicted that tribes would go away and be replaced by individuals. They were wrong. That has not andwill not happen, either globally or locally. Multiculturalism is a fact of life. The former Second World, once an empire, is now many little worlds. The development of a global world system and the emergenceof local ethnic or cultural revival movements seemto go hand in hand. At thelimit, political succession may even have its rewards for cultural minority groups. The potential rewards include direct receiptof financial aid and military protection from various power centers, and perhaps even a voice the United Nations. at

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Moreover, many of us now live in nation-states composed, as Joseph Raz has put it, “of groups and communities with diverse practices and beliefs, including groups whose beliefs are inconsistent with each other.”We will conreality of global migration and tinue to doso, if for no other reason than the the fact that community and divinity are essential goods and must be acknowledged for the sake of individual identity and human progress. Of course, life in such a world can be hazardous, especially for members of immigrant or minority groups living in multicultural states or for members of different civilizations or cultures who are in geopolitical conflict. In such a world, one hopes that itis not just culture that matters but also a particular pluralistic conception of culture because the right conception of culture can be useful in minimizing some of the risks associated with “difference” and with multicultural life. There is a second reason these are confusing times. It would be nice to have in hand a valid general causal explanationfor the wealth and poverty of peoples, cultures, or nations, but we don’t. If by “causation” we mean what J. S. Mill meant by it-all the necessary conditions that are jointly sufficient to produce an effect-I think we must admit that we do not really know what causes economic growth. Sicily in the fifteenth century, Holland in the sixteenth century, Japan today; social scientists can pick a people, culture,or nation and tell a plausible story about some of the reasons for economicfailure or success, in that case. But that is a far cry from a general causal theory. Try listing all the potential causal conditions for wealth production mentioned by David Landes (1998) in his monumental economic history of the world. Then askyourself this question: Areany of those conditions sufficient to produce economic growth? The answeris no. Are any of those conditions even necessary? Having guns did it here. Having Jews did it there. In this case it was immigration policy; in that case it was having access to quinine. In this case itwas freeing the serfs; in thatcase itwas theavailability of fossil fuel. In this case it was the weather; in that case it was willingness to trade with outsiders. In this case it was having good colonial masters; in that case it was high consumer demand. In this case and that case it was luck. Singaporeis not a liberal democracy, but it is rich. India is the world’s most populous democracy, but it is poor. Sweden in the eighteenth century was a sparsely populated democracy, and it was poor too. People who are religiously orthodox and don’t believe in “gender equality” (e.g., Hasidic Jews) canbe rich. Fully secularized egalitarian societies(e.g., former communist countries in Eastern Europe) may fail to thrive from an economic point of view. In 1950, Japan had “Confucian values” (which at the time didn’t look very “Western”) and was poorer than Brazil. In 1990 Japan had the same “Confucian values,” which

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all of a sudden seemed very “Protestant-like,” as Japan outstripped Brazil. If I were a cynic, I would say that our most able economic historians are really good at identifying some of the unnecessary conditions that might have been jointly sufficient to produce wealth in any particular special case. Less cynically, I think it is fair to say that despite many impressive post hoc historical accounts of the case-specific conditions that have promoted growth, one is entitled to feel confused about the general causes of economic success, if by “causation” we mean what J. S. Mill meant when he defined the term. How then are we to grasp the big changes that are taking place in the “world order”? What is the relationship between “globalization” (the linking of the world’s economies), “westernization” (the adoption of Western ideas, ideals, norms, institutions, and products), and economic growth? If you keep your ear to the ground these days, you can hear many prophecies or speculations about the shape the “new world order.” will conclude by of I mentioning three.

Prophecy I : The WestIs Best and Will Become Global (or at Least I t Should Try to Take Over the World)
The prediction here is that Western-like aspirations will be fired up or freed up by globalization and will be the cause and the concomitant of economic growth. Western-like aspirations include a desire for liberal democracy, the decentralization of power, free enterprise, private property, individual rights, gender equality, and so on, and perhaps even a taste for Western products. With regard to “globalization,” “westernization,” and “economic growth,” this prediction imagines causal effects in all directions. Basically, this is the Western “enlightenment” origin story universalized and projected into the future.

Prophecy 2: Others WillHave a “Piece of the Rock” and Hold On to Their Distinctive Culture Too.
In the early 1970s, I had a Sudanese student who did his Ph.D. on attitudes toward modernization among African students, using a beliefs and values questionnaire. He discovered that the “materialism” factor in his questionnaire was orthogonal to the “individualism” factor; one could value material wealth without giving up the collectivist valuesof the tribe. The Saudi Arabians liked that message so much they hired him to teach in their universities. Perhaps that is why Samuel Huntington’s thesis (1996) that the West is unique but not universal and that other civilizations do not need to become like us to benefit from the technologies of the modern worldis so popular in

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the non-Western world. This prediction imagines globalization and economic growth without deep cultural penetration from the West. Cultures and civilizations are encouraged to remain diverse while everyone gets apiece of the pie.7

Prophecy 3 : A Liberal Ottoman-Style Empire with Two “Castes” (Cosmopolitan Liberals and Local Non-Liberals)
I associate the first prophecy with Francis Fukuyama (1992) and the second with Samuel Huntington (1996). Let me conclude with my own augury. Imagine a world order that is liberal in the classical sense. Its leaders assume a “stance of neutrality” with regardto substantive cultural issues. They don’t condition aid and protection on changes in local gender ideals, forms of authority, kinship structures, or coming of age ceremonies. They don’t try to tell the members of different cultural groupsthat theyhave to live together or love each other or share the same emotional reactions, aesthetic ideals, and religious beliefs. They don’t try to tell them how to run their private lives or that they must have private lives. Imagine that in this world order various sanctioning mechanisms make it possible enforce minimal rules of civility: to exit visas are always available, and no aggression is permitted across territorial boundaries. Imagine thatsuch a world system is set up to support decentralized control over cultural issues and hence to promote local cultural efflorescence. Such an emergent “new world order” might look like a postmodern Ottoman “millet system” on a globalscale. I imagine this system would be two tiered and operating at two levels, global and local. I imagine its personnel will belong to two “castes.” There will be the cosmopolitan liberals, who are trained to appreciate value neutrality and culturaldiversity and who run the global institutions the world of system. And there will be the local non-liberals, who are dedicated to one form or another of thick ethnicity and are inclined to separate themselves from “others,” thereby guaranteeing that thereis enough diversity remaining in the world for the cosmopolitan liberals to appreciate. The global elite (those who are cosmopolitan and liberal) will, of course, come from all nationalities. In the new universal cosmopolitan culture the global tierof the of world system, your ancestry and skin color will be far less important than your education, your values, and your travel plans. It is already the case in the postmodern cosmopolitan world that you don’t have to grow up in the West to be Western any more than you have to grow up in the southern world to adopt an indigenous Third World point of view. Finally, I imagine that it would be possible in this “new world order” forindividuals to switch

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tiers and castes in both directions, moving from global liberalism to local non-liberalism and back, within the courseof a single life. With regard to globalization, westernization, and economic growth, I would hazard this guess. If it should turn out as an empirical generalization that economic growth can be pulled off relying only on the shallow or thin aspects of Western society (e.g., weapons, information technology, Visa cards), then cultures won’t converge, even as they get rich. If economic growth is contingent on accepting the deep or thick aspects of Western culture (e.g., individualism, ideals of femininity, egalitarianism, the Billof Rights), then cultures will not converge and will not develop economically because their senseof identity will supersede their desire material wealth. for
REFERENCES

Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End o f History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Harrison, Lawrence E. 1992. Who Prospers? How Cultural Values Shape Economic and Political Success. New York: Basic. Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. “The West Unique, Not Universal.” Foreign Affairs 75:
28-45.

Kaplan, B. 1954. A Study of Rorschach Responses in Four Cultures. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, 42:2. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Landes, David S. 1998. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some Are So Poor. New York: Norton. Obermeyer, C. M. 1999. “Female Genital Surgeries: The Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 13: 79-106. Obiora, L. A. 1997. “Rethinking Polemics and Intransigencein the Campaign Against Female Circumcision.” Case Western Reserve Law Review 47: 275. Shweder, Richard A. 1991. Thinking Through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. . 1993. “Cultural Psychology: Who Needs It?” Annual Review of Psychology
44: 497-523. . 1996a. “True Ethnography: The Lore, the Law and the Lure.” In Ethnogruphy and Human Development: Context and Meaning in Social Inquiry edited by R. Jessor, A. Colby, and R. A. Shweder. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1996b. “The View from Manywheres.” Anthropology Newsletter 37, no. 9: 1. Shweder, Richard A., ed. 1998. Welcome to Middle Age! (and Other Cultural Fictions). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Shweder, Richard A., with M. Mahapatra and J. G. Miller. 1990. “Culture and Moral Development.” In Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development, edited by J. s. Stigler, R. A. Shweder, and G. Herdt. New York: Cambridge University Press. Shweder, Richard A., with N. C. Much, M. Mahapatra, and L. Park. 1997. “The ‘Big Three’ of Morality (Autonomy, Community, Divinity) and the ‘Big Three’ Explanations of Suffering.” InMorality and Health,edited by P. Rozin andA. Brandt. New York: Routledge. Spiro, M. 1961. “Social Systems, Personality, and Functional Analysis.” In Studying Personality Cross-Culturally, edited by B. Kaplan. New York: Harper & Row. Stolzenberg, N. M. 1997. “A Tale of Two Villages (or, Legal Realism Comes to Town).” In Etbnicity and Group Rights-Nomos X X X I X , edited by I. Shapiro and W. Kymlicka. New York: New York University Press.
1 Richard Shweder’s note (see below) evoked reactions by Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, Carlos Alberto Montaner, and Mariano Grondona. Their comments appear after the footnote, along with a further commentRichard Shweder. by
Among the many fascinating remarks heard at the conference were several “indigenous” testimonials from cosmopolitan intellectuals out of Africa and Latin America. These representatives from the “Third World” played the part of disgruntled “insiders,” bearing witness to the impoverishment of their own native cultures, tellingus how bad things can be in the home country. That role has become increasingly complex, even dubious, in our postmodern world, where the outside is in and the inside is all over the place (think of CNN, VISA, and the Big Mac). For most globe-hopping managers of the world system, including cosmopolitan intellectuals from out of the “Third World,” travel plans now matter more than ancestry. Consequently, onefeels inclined to raise doubts about any claims to authority based on an equation of citizenship (or national origin) with “indigenous” voice. After all, whose voice is more “indigenous”? The voice of a “Western-educated” M.B.A. or Ph.D. from Dakar orDelhi, who looks downon his or her own cultural traditions and looks up to the United States for intellectualand moral guidance and material aid? Or the voice of a “Western” scholar who does years of fieldwork in rural villages in Africa or Asia and understands and sees value in the traditions of “others”?

COMMENTS OF MONTANER, ETOUNGA-MANGUELLE, AND GRONDONA, WITH FURTHER COMMENTS BY SHWEDER Carlos Alberto Montaner

Richard Shweder’s comment is typical of those who expect Third World reactions from Latin Americans. He simply doesn’t understand that Latin America is an extension of the West. I don’t understand why Shweder thinks that we ought resign ourto selves to authoritarian governments and economic modelsthat condemn half of our people to misery when the entire world-beginning with the Japanese-believes that it was admirable when Japan copied the production techniques and social organization of the West. Perhaps the Brazilian favelas, with their infinite, barbaric misery,

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seem picturesque to him. I cannot accept those subhuman conditions. I believe that they must be eradicated and that the people living in them must have a chance for a better, more human life. How do I know what Latin Americans want? It’s very simple: by following migration trends. Surveys demonstrate that half or more of the populations of Mexico, Colombia, and Guatemala, among others, would abandon their countries for the United States. Why? Because the United States offers them what they don’t find in their own countries. What Shweder says of “these representatives from the ‘Third World’ play[ing] the part of disgruntled ‘insiders”’ could also be applied to the Americans who are concerned about improving subhuman conditions in the black and Puerto Rican ghettos. Ifheis to be consistently uncritical of the values and attitudes of a culture, then he onzerta. should have no problem with the Sicilian
Daniel Etounga-Manguelle

As a “disgruntled insider’’ and “cosmopolitan intellectual” from Africa,I appreciate the opportunity to comment on Richard Shweder’s note.I do so with some diffidence. After all, I am responding to a Western scholar who identifies himself as more “indigenous” than I am because he “has done years of fieldwork in rural villages in . . . Asia and understands and sees value in the traditions ‘others,”’ of I have to confess that I failed to receive the “intellectual and moral guidance and material aid’’ I expected at the Harvard symposium, so I am going to tell the truth: We Africans really enjoy living in shantytowns where there isn’t enough food, health care, or education for our children. Furthermore, our corrupt chieftaincy political systems are really marvelous and have permitted countries like Mobutu’s Zaire to earn us international prestige and respect. Moreover, surely it would be terribly boringfree, democratic elections were orgaif nized all over Africa. Were that to happen, we would no longer real Africans, and be by losing our identity-and our authoritarianism, our bloody civil wars, our illiteracy, our forty-five-year life expectancy-we would be letting down not only ourselves but also those Western anthropologists who study us so sympathetically and understand that we can’t be expectedto behave like human beings who seek dignity the eve of on the third millennium.We are Africans, and our identity matters! So let us fight for it with the full support of those Western scholars who have the wisdom and courage to acknowledge Africans belongto a different world. that
Mariano Grondona

There is a methodological difference between Richard Shweder and Latin Americans like Carlos Albert0 Montaner and myself. Shweder’s goal, were he focused on Latin America, would be to understand it. We want to change it. Anthropologists need the societies they study to remain relatively static and predictable, like an entomologist studying bees or ants. Montaner and I, on the other hand, have an existential approach to our region: It is “our” world-where we come from-which we love. Be-

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cause of our commitment to it, we want it to advance to new levels of human fulfillment, closer to those in the developed world. One must ask who represents Latin America better, Shwederand other foreign social scientists or Montaner and myself? We belong to our region. We feel it. The fact that millions of Latin Americans are “voting with their feet” as they migrate to the developed countries and that the overwhelming electoral majorities are supporting progressive governments throughout our region eloquently testifies that our views and concerns are widely shared. To be sure, we travel back and forth between Latin America and developed counthe tries. But these experiences not alienate us from Latin America. Rather, they both indo crease our concern about conditions, particularly for poor people, in Latin America and focus us on what needs be done to change those conditions. Like vast majorityof to the our countrymen, we want our nations to have the democratic stability, justice, opportunity for advancement, and prosperitythat we find in the advanced countries.
Richard A. Shweder’s Reply to Montaner, Etounga-Manguelle, and Grondona

As far as I can tell nothing in note 1 (or in my chapter) recommends authoritarian rule, a life of squalor,or death at anearly age. In authoritarian power orders, those in power act in such a way only their own interests are served, no one can stop that and them from doing so. I think the world would be a far better place if there were no such ordersof power. And nothing suggests that we must be uncritical accepting of or the received ideas, attitudes, and practices of any cultural tradition, including our own. As I state in my chapter, “Pluralists do make critical judgments. Indeed, the that ‘stance of justification’ isso central to my style of cultural analysis I would define a ‘genuine’ culture, a culture deserving of appreciation, as a way that is defensiof life ble in the face of criticism from abroad.” If one truly cares to achieve some appreciation of a cultural tradition, one must usually engage in some participant observation and in a process of sympathetic understanding. One initially tries to bracket all ethnocentric reactions and discover what is of good, true, beautiful, or efficient in the ideas, attitudes, and practices“others.” There is no guarantee that appreciation will be achieved. There is no guarantee that everything thatis, is okayor “genuine.” Ideas, attitudes, and practices that are demonstrably bad, false, ugly, or inefficient should be criticized and perhaps even changed. So much for red herrings and bogeyman of radical relativism. My essay is in fact a critique of the both radical relativism(“whateveris, isokay”) and ethnocentric monism(“there is only one way to lead a morally decent, rational and fulfilling life, and it’s our way”), although by my lightsI did not see many radical relativists the conference. at In a moment I will respond to one or two other points raised by Carlos Albert0 Montaner, Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, and Mariano Grondona. First, however, I want to focus on what was actually said in note 1, namely, that in the postmodern world, one should be skeptical all claims to authority based on the equationof citof izenship (or national origin) with “indigenous” voice.And I want to tell you a story, which illustratesthat point.

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Rabindranath Tagore is modern India’s most acclaimed poet.was a recipientof He the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, a spokesman for the India nationalist movement, and an admirer, interpreter, and literary beneficiary of the classical Sanskrit literatures of India. In 1877, Tagore visited England for the first time. He was sixteen years old. He went thereto study law. In his book India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding, Wilhelm Halbfass quotes Tagore’s impressions:
I had thought that theisland of England was so small and the inhabitantsso dedicated to learning that, before I arrived there, I expected the country from one end to the other would echo andre-echo with the lyrical essays of Tennyson; and I also thought that wherever I might be in this narrow island, I would hear constantly Gladstone’s oratory, the explanation of the Vedas by Max Mueller, the scientific truth of Tindall, the profound thoughts of Carlyle and the philosophy of Bain. I was under the impression that wherever I would go I would find the old and the young drunk with the pleasure of “intellectual” enjoyment. But I have been very disappointed in this.

Apparently, the young Tagore, a political and civic “outsider” British Isles, was to the culturally more English and spoke the English language far better than most Englishmen. His reference to Max Mueller is highly pertinent to note 1 because it was Max Mueller, a German philologist and “orientalist” who taught at Oxford, to whom Hindu Brahmans turned to learn about Sanskrit and their own classical literary traditions. This situation of “outsiders” and “insiders” trading places and keepingeach other’s valuable cultural heritages in play is not unusual, especially in the contemporary world.We live ina world where Afro-Caribbean scholars translate ancient Greek texts, where scholars from Africa, Asia, and Europe write perceptive books the about United States, and wherethe Max Mueller effect is alive well. For example, Gusii and intellectuals from Kenya, some of whom are quite expert inWestern philosophy and science, read Robert LeVine’s work (conducted from the 1950s through 1990s) to learn about the meaning, value, and history of Gusii norms and folkways. The main point of this observation is a simple one: Statements about the prosand cons of a cultural tradition do not gain authorityand should not be granted authority the basis on of claims to ancestry, membership,or national origin. Note 1 was an aside, a parenthetical remark about my fascination with one aspect of the structural organization of the conference. The conference was choreographed in such a way that there was one session in which all the speakers from the “Third World” participated, and they spoke pretty much with one voice, supporting the idea that “Western civilization” is superior to all the rest. Now, of course, this idea is not unpopular in many capitals of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It is especially popular among those Western, westernized, or westernizing elites who tend to view the received beliefs, attitudes, and everyday practices of non-Western peoples, even their own countrymen, as unenlightened, superstitious, magical, authoritarian, corrupt, or otherwise unworthy or embarrassing. But that type of wholesale acceptance of “Western modernity” over non-Western “traditionalisms” of various kinds has never been the only voice in town in either the “West” or the “East,” the “North” or the “South,” the “developed” or the “underdeveloped”

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world. Had there been other types of voices in the session, the voice of “Third World” intellectuals who might speak with pride and admiration about “indigenous” ideas, attitudes, and practices, the session would perhaps have been less fascinating. Perhaps I would not have been led to wonder about the use of “insider” testimonials from the “Third World” to lend authority to the idea that the Protestant “First World” really gotit right. Carlos Alberto Montaner and Mariano Grondona are impressed by migration patterns, by the factthat “millions of Latin Americans are ‘voting with their feet”’ in favor of the “developed” world. The first timeI ever heard the “voting with your feet” argument was in the 1960s, when a famous conservative made the argument that black migration patterns into South Africa far exceeded black migration patterns out of South Africa. He interpreted this as evidence that black Africans were voting with their feet in favor of the apartheid government of South Africa over other African states! I suspect they were not voting or expressing their moral and cultural preferences at all-just going where there were higher-paying jobs. Daniel Etounga-Manguelle seemsto imply that one cannot live a dignified lifeand a life that is distinctively African at the same time. As I stated in my essay, I am not a fan of broad categories suchas “Latin American”or “African” as ways of identifying cultural communities-Bahia is not San Paolo, the Yoruba are not the Masai. Nevertheless, I do believe, as did Edward Sapir, that “the societies in which different societieslive are distinctworlds, not merely the same world with differentlabels attached.” For a pluralist, “distinctness” or “difference” is not a term of disparagement. With complete respect for all three ofmy critics, whose sincerity I never doubted, whose company and conversation I much enjoyed, and whose testimonials and arguments I found fascinating,I fully confessto rejecting the idea that the onlyor very best way to be dignified, decent, rational, and fully human is, live the lifeof a to North American or a northern European.

part four

CULTURE AND GENDER

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Culture, Gender, and Human Rights
B A R B A R AC R O S S E T T E

Overthelastdecade,noothernationshavebeendrawnintosuchcomprehensive and profoundly important debates about cultural identity and human rights as the United States and Canada. In the press, in academia, in ethnic communities, and among major religious organizations, there a palis pable sense of shift in NorthAmerican civilization. It is sometimes welcomed and often feared. That there are apprehensions should not be surprising.N o country in history has voluntarily changed its ethnic profile in such a short time as the United States has.We need only lookat early Hollywood films and the television programs of the 1950s to see the mental image that used to be conjured up by the word “American.” Across most of the United States there were largely two kinds of faces, European and African, and in those heads and hearts people shared, for better or worse, a similar mainstream culture that was more American andless like that of any of their ancestors. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, American faces reflect virtually all the world’s ethnic communities and many minds and hearts are determined not to lose-or if necessary to reinvent-ancestral cultures. Does that fragment us or does it make us the first truly planetary nation? Whatever it does, our changing mix draws us with greater frequency into debates about broader definitions of human rights and their relationship to

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cultural bottom lines. The new environment should also lead into more inus formed, clear-sighted, and judicious considerations of human rights problems abroad. But just as thelinguistic diversityof our ancestorshas not made us a multilingual nation, a variety of cultural backgrounds has yet to make us-the media included-better judges of distant practices, traditions, or causes, which also appear on our shores in the luggage of immigrants. Two imperatives collide:to salvage a core American culture while making way for different modes of life, without always having the necessary information to comprehend them. Reactions to cultural practices may thus be contradictory in different contexts and places-in Africa and Afghanistan, for example, which are approached with inconsistent attitudes. An era of reexamination in the United States coincides with a new age of cultural awareness abroad, at worst spawning the destructive ethnicity (further fueled by economic troubles and political uncertainty) seen in Africa, the Balkans, and Indonesia.Atthesametime,countries in everyregionarealso . feeling the effects of significant social change. The burgeoning assertion of women’s rights will have long-run effectson traditional social practices. The intense pressure of overpopulation in the world’s poorest nations puts the essentials of life-food, water, and air-under greater strain everyyear. The world is belatedly discovering that women and natural resources are not unrelated. In countries like Bangladesh and Indonesia, more authority in female hands has shown that lower birthrates follow, along with rising demands for education, better farming techniques, and more investment in the land and villages. In Africa, UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Fund) found in its State of the World’s Children 1999 report that mothers are beginning to band together to demand schools, seeing themas the key to a better life for their children and often for themselves. In Burkina Faso, where only 9 percent of women over the age of fifteen can read, women have formed twenty-three Pupils’ Mothers Associations to monitor the enrollment and attendance of girls in school. In Pakistanand Egypt, among otherplaces, local communities have found ways train teachers for to village schools. The results are quick to discern: “A 10 percentage-point increase in girls’ primary enrollment can be expected to decrease infant mortality by 4.1 deaths per 1,000, and a similar rise in girls’ secondary enrollment by another 5.6 deaths per 1,000. This would mean concretely in Pakistan, for example, that an extra year of schooling for 1,000 girls would ultimately prevent roughly 60 infant deaths.” But in no small number of traditional societies, listening to women would still be taking a momentous cultural step. With the world in social ferment, intellectual disputes over culture and human rights have become more frequent in recent years, particularly when issues take on international dimensions. Major international human rights

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groups, once considered fringe activist organizations by many governments, have built solid reputations for their legal and investigative work. They have pushed long-dormant international covenants to the center of public debate, lobbied successfully for permanent institutions (e.g., an international criminal court), and generally moved into the foreign policy establishment. They are now consulted by State Department officials, invited to set up university centers, and listened to by the Council on Foreign Relations. But these human rights experts, largely well-trainedlawyeqare almost by nature purists and universalists who are loath to bend principles to fit cultural wrinkles. Moreover, their frequent insistence on the preeminence of civil and political rights defined in concrete ways has brought them into conflict with those who believe that economic and social rights come first or, more broadly, that cultures outside the Western mainstream see politics and civil society differently and must hew to their own values when setting priorities and codifying principles. To add to the mushrooming controversiesover rights and cultures worldwide, those who argue for cultural exceptions to international human rights models are themselves coming under attack from dissenters within their own societies. In Southeast Asia, for example, some well-known promoters of “Asian values” are on the streets battling the forces of reformmi-a situation that not many would have predicted a few years ago. Dissidents, energized as well as outraged by hard economic times, say that they have had enough of the kind of Asian values that brought corruption and cronyism and stifled political growth. In the Muslim world, where militancy once seemed inexorable, a question being heard more often from North Africa through the Middle East and South Asia to the Pacific is, Who speaks for Islam? Pluralism is in the air, and the voices of dissent are both female and male.
THE KEY ROLE OF WOMEN

Some of the most intense efforts to rethink and realign the mix of religion, rights, and culture are indeed being made today Muslim women, but they by are not alone. In the months leading up to the1995 U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women, local and regional meetings in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas were organized to write agendas for Beijing, where both the formal conference and a parallel unofficial gathering of nongovernmental organizations were held. The impassioned speeches and papers presented by regional assemblies from widely different cultural and geographic settings included some astonishingly similar goals. Building on the 1994 Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, women were clarifying and defining a genreof rights universal to them.

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Their demands cut across old sectors, rendering irrelevant some timeworn disputes about civil or economic rights. Women spoke pragmatically of the right to own and inherit property or to start a business, and the need to establish and protect these activities by law-an economic demand coupled with a political call for more women in legislatures. Women also sought changes in family laws to give them rights equal to those of spouses or parents. They demanded the right to say no to unwanted children or unwanted sex, putting control over their own bodies and reproductive lives in the category of fundamental freedoms. “Women’s rights are human rights” became a familiar slogan. In Beijing, a Nepali housewife who raided her small savings account to travel to China could meet farmers from Tanzania, writers from Teheran, and inner-city Americans in a varietyof occupations. Most of these women from diverse backgrounds found that they had more in common than they had expected. Back home, buoyed by their newfound networks, many of these women took a new look at the cultural assumptions surrounding them. For women, the interplay between a prevailing culture or ethos and their daily lives is not a hypothetical topic. Despite great political and economic gains in many places, women around the world still have good reason to be sensitive to how cultures affect them. Indeed, for large numbers of women, cultural sensitivity is not an intellectual exercise or a social attitude taught in seminars by consultants. Cultural shifts and the political use of traditional practices can create intolerable, if not life-threatening, situations for women. Over the last two decades, middle-class women in Iran, Afghanistan,and Algeria have discovered how quickly life can turn upside down and how powerless they can suddenly become inthe face of tumultuous change.
THE DOMINANCE OF MEN

In many societies, the cultural rules are unambiguously made by men who frequently choose, deliberately or otherwise, to use women as the symbolsof their beliefs or policies. When leaders or policies change, so can cultures. Women are told what towear, where to go or not go, how to live. Although the collarless shirt (with a necktie ban) became the male uniform of Islamic piety among Iranians and the Taliban of Afghanistan enforce a regulation length for men’s beards, in both countries-one Shiite, one Sunni-it is the life of women that is most constrained by dress codes and restrictions on work and play. Saudi Arabiafalls into the same category of nations, in which the holiness of men is measured by the degree to which various parts of women are made invisible and their smallest hopes-to drive a car, for example-are denied.

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The phenomenon is not confined to conservative Islamic cultures. Mennonite and Amish girls in Pennsylvania are still told of Biblical strictures against wearing trousers, though few of them may be listening to the warnings and their chances of being physically abusedfor defiance are very slight. In Laos, for many years wearing a sarong work in government to offices was mandatory for women, whereas men dressed pretty much as they liked, apparently without fear of diluting the national character. When the rebel soldiers who overthrew Mobutu Sese SekoenteredKinshasa,theZairian capital, in 1997, they ordered women in jeansoff the streets and brandished their bayonets, at least for a few heady days. Guerrilla armies, various breeds of ideologues, perhaps even fashion designers get into the business of making social or political statements by dressing the female body in one way or another. Women, who are rarely in a position to make the religious or social rules, tend to be swept up into a culture in the broadest sense, which takes in religion, the economy, the arts, the law, and entertainment, as well as the often subtly defined rules of social behavior involving public life, family relationships, and the place of children. A male-dominant cultureis, in short, the atmosphereinwhichmostwomen liveall thetime,withfewerlines of definition between work and home, career and family, than many men in most countries enjoy. Furthermore, any cultural milieu may generate unpredictable, even paradoxical results for women. A free society in political terms does not necessarily mean a better life, as more than 100 million poor, illiterate, and often victimized women in India who are unable to escape the culturalapartheid of caste could demonstrate. Living in a notably tolerant, even egalitarian, culture does not necessarily liberate women either. In countries like Thailand, where women have made considerable gains in the economy and society, and Cambodia, a freewheeling atmosphere can actually make the sexual enslavement of women and girls easier because prostitution on a grand scale, catering to every need and fetish, is not very shocking. The complexity of women’s lives within the context of their varying cultures is only beginning to be understood, as development experts focus more on the centrality of people, not projects, in both the poorer countries of the global South and in pocketsof underdevelopment in the richer industrial nations of the North. What is certain now is that countries ignore the lives of women at their economic and social peril. India, a nation aspiringto rank among the world’s leaders, is in trouble on this point, according to its own development experts. Its population is nearing the 2 billion mark, and it is likely to overtake China as the world’s most populous nation in the first half of the twenty-first century. But the numbers

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of the disadvantaged are huge. Barelyhalf of India’s population is literate, a necessary step by most measures toward a fully productive society; little more than a thirdof its women can read and write. Up a half of births are to not registered, putting millions of children in an official limbo where they may be denied basic services because officially they do not exist. Moreover, development studies report that the broader social indicators in India are pulling the South Asian region down to or below the level of sub-Saharan Africa. The problems are most acute in northern India. In its State of the World’s Childrert 1999, UNICEF reports that no women are literate in many villages in the poor state of Bihar. Nationwide, again led by the northern tier of states, half of India’s children are malnourished, with nearly one in five affected to the point of stunting. Twenty percent children under five years of of age are severely underweight; less than 30 percent of the population has access to sanitation-any kind of toilet, including a rudimentary latrine-and 20 percent of the population lacks clean water. According to UNICEF, the World Bank, and other organizations, unless women are involved in development at the local level, the country’s much publicized middle class will be perched on top of a larger and larger number of disadvantaged people, who already number in the hundreds of millions. As gaps in the living standard grow and resources shrink, social unrest may become inevitable.

FEMALE CIRCUMCISION/MUTILATlON

Precisely how new theories of development that place women at the center translate into pivotal roles for women in defining the dominant culture, whatever it may be, is harder to decide. Nowadays, when neither feminism nor human rights constitutes a monolithic concept with all-purpose formulas applicable worldwide, looking at cultural practices of any kind demands a certain relativism. Furthermore, as women and men do not inevitably see their culture through the same eyes, adding women to the mix only makes the picture more complicated. Men may also control culture by controlling power, from the village police on up to the national government, and they tend to dismiss the complaints of women in the name of tradition. In many places, women make progress only when a prominent man-the village elder, a supreme court judge, a president-has a change of heart. These complexities are reflected in the intellectual battle over what is termed either female circumcision female genital mutilation-the choice of or language reveals the position one takes. To follow the logic of Aziza Hussein, an Egyptian family planning expertand a founderof the Egyptian Societyfor

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the Prevention of Practices Harmful to Women and Children, the evolution of genital cutting is more or less as follows. The first premise is that the practice has long served menby rendering the women they marry uninterested in sex or unappealing and inaccessible to any otherman-a safe, albeit damaged, piece of property. Next comes the rationalizatiodbelief that nogirl or womanwill be marriageable unless she has submitted to this process. Peer group pressure begins to kick in. By this time, women, not,men,may be the enforcersof the practice, enshrining itand validating it within a certain culture. But, says Hussein, that does not erase the basic truth, which is that this is a procedure invented on behalf of men that most women would rather not experience. A doctor in a Cairo children’s hospital told me that it was “pointless, not to mentioncruel and dangerous, to mutilate a woman in the name of destroying desire.” Moreover, she added, “All impulses, including sexual impulses, start in the brain.” When, from a distance, the argument made that thegenital cutting of feis males (which often involves the mutilationof the entire genital area, leading to lifelong and life-threatening infections and incontinence) must be a tradition of worth because people support it, whose voices are we hearing? What people? Hussein argues that, at some point, the cultural argument is no longer valid and societies have to make their decisions based on science and medicine-and perhaps a contemporary understanding of human sexual behavior, since depriving a woman of the possibility of sexual arousal and orgasm is taking away partof her life. In December 1997, Egypt’s highest court agreed. Upholding a ban on the practice in government hospitals imposed in 1996-admittedly only a start in ending the procedure legally-the court dismissed the arguments of some Islamic scholars that there were religious grounds for the tradition. “Circumcision of girls is not an individual right under Shuriu,” the court said. “There is nothing in the Koran that authorizes it.” One of the inconsistencies found in Western responsesto the humanrights of women in the Islamic world that some influential scholarly and cultural is experts who are willing to find validity in genital cutting rites in Africa are absolutely unwilling to give an inch of ground to the Taliban in Afghanistan when these Muslim zealotsbar women from schools and jobs. It not going is too far to say that U.S. Afghan policy rests almost entirely at this point on the issue of how women are treated. Again the question is, Whose voices are we hearing? In this case, the answeris the articulate, middle-class women of Kabul and a few other urban centers. Not men this time, but not village women either. Where is our cultural sensitivity here? Incremental improvements in the lives of Afghan women have been ruled out by feminist absolutism, boldly

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enunciated by Hillary Rodham Clinton andSecretary of State Madeleine Albright: Either the Taliban give in women’s rights or there will be no diploon matic recognition or aid. The Taliban, who have heard the West’s message face-to-facefromanumber of internationalofficials(includingEmma Bonino, speaking for the European Union, and Carol Bellamy, the executive director of UNICEF), have tried to make thecase for assistance in rebuilding Afghanistan’s education system to conform with Islamic principles and their conservative vision of Muslim culture. They want new teacher-training institutes and duplicate schools for boys and girls. In some areas of the country, the Taliban have allowed home schools for girls to operate with minimal or no interference behind the scenes. In some villages, girls have more of a chance of getting a rudimentary education now than they did when a quarrelsome coalition of holy warriors ruled the country and kept it in a state of civil war for nearly a decade. These holy warriors, the mujahedeen who brought down theSoviet army, had Americanand European support.
THE CASE OF BHUTAN

Considering the case of Bhutan reduces the debate over culture and human rights to one of its most esoteric yet instructional cases. This small Buddhist kingdom in the Himalayas, wedged between China and India, last of its is the cultural breed-a Tibetan, Tantric monarchy that once counted Ladakh, Sikkim, and, above all, Tibet, among its ranks. From the mid-1970s, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her intelligence networks undermined Sikkim’s Buddhist monarchy and engineered the country’s collapse and absorption into India, until the late 1980s, when an ethnic Nepali, largely Hindu, fifth column similar to the movement that had delivered up the Sikkimeseseemedpoised todotothesameforBhutan,theBuddhist Bhutanese elite began to panic. They were incapable of policing a long land border with India, over which ethnic Nepali migrants were enteringillegal as immigrants to swell the ranks of the local minority population. Instead,theBhutanesetriedapolicy of cultural enforcement. Tobe Bhutanese meant wearing a prescribed national costume, building homes a in certainstyle,andacceptingtheleadership of theBuddhistmonarchy. Bhutanese Nepalis were justifiably distressed, but before they could make their peace with Bhutan’s king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, not an intolerant man, they were drawn into a larger pro-democracy movement flourishing in Nepal. Bolstered by flying squads of radical students from across Asia, many Bhutanese Nepalis were persuaded to join a revolt against the monarchy. Later, fleeing Bhutan to refugee camps in Nepal by way of India, which initially did nothing to stop the campaign, the Bhutanese Nepalis created a pub-

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lic relations nightmare for Bhutan that continuesto this day. Using questionable data from essentially Nepali sources, organizations like Freedom House consistently rank Bhutan very low in civil and human rights, although in terms of human development, as measured by U.N. agencies, the country is outpacing most of its neighbors. Western human rights organizations were at first convinced that a Himalayan ethnic cleansing was in train. Western nations, unrepresented in the isolated Buddhist kingdom because India insisted on controlling its foreign policy, fell back on diplomats in Katmandu, Nepal’s capital, who were in turn under the influence of Nepali human rights groups or of foreign organizations with branches in Nepal. These organizations, often barred from Bhutan by a short-sighted government, portrayed the situation as a struggle of democratic forces against an absolute tyranny. On their side, the Bhutanese saw it as a last-ditch struggle to preserve an endangered culture. Years passed before major international rights organizations recognized the king of Bhutan’s story as being closer to the truth than the lurid tales toldby his enemies who, incidentally,see in Bhutan a large under-populated stretch of fertile Himalayan land into which the excess population of Nepal might conveniently spill. Inexplicably, the armyof Westerners willing to demonstrate on behalf of the Dalai Lama’s claim to Tibet have been all but silent in the face the cultural annihilationof Bhutan. Theissue of remains unresolved, and many Bhutanese are perplexed and angry. “What exactly do you want fromus?’’ an enraged Bhutanese official once shouted at me as I asked about reports of violence against Nepalis in his district. Good question.

THE TAMIL, EAST TIMOR, AND KASHMIR QUESTIONS

The terrain on which cultural values and human rights interact often conceals land mines. Special interestgroups whose principalgoals are not necessarily the improvement of human rights have learned to manipulate the media and legislatures by championing causes in one-dimensional terms. In an age of information overload, a heart-rending story may not always be checked too carefully. For years, the Sinhalese-led, Buddhist-dominated government of Sri Lanka was on the defensive because of persuasive ethnic Tamil propaganda abroad that a kindof genocide was being carried out against their community. Tamils, both Hindus and Christians, were winning asylum abroad only to use it, the Sri Lankan government said,to raise money and arms for

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a particularly brutal organization known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam-Tamil Eelam being the name of an area they intended to carve out of northeastern Sri Lanka for a homeland. Other Tamils, separated by history and caste, who dominate the island’s tea plantations in the central hills, did not support them. Eventually, the world caught up with the atrocities of the Tamil Tigers, now listed as a terrorist organization in the United States. But for years, sheer ignorance of events in Sri Lanka, despite extensivenewscoverage,allowedWesterners to make cultural assumptions about the country that were often wide the mark or told only part the of of story. The misperception was encouraged by India, which for years helped to arm and train the Tamil guerrillas against the Sri Lankan government-at least until the Tamils turned their guns on Indian peacekeeping troops, who tried to reverse New Delhi’s course and eventually assassinated (or so those in NewDelhi believe) Rajiv Gandhi, the former prime minister, had sent who Indian forces numbering up to 50,000 to the beleaguered island. Prominent Sri Lankans, among them Neelan Tiruchelvam, the leading Tamil moderate and internationally recognized constitutionalist, who was working an auon tonomy plan for the Tamil areas that the Tigers deemed not radical enough, were also ruthlessly murdered. Much of Sri Lanka’s conflict was and is political, economic, or even ideological, not strictly ethnic and not religious. However, culture does play a significant role in both East Timor and Kashmir. In East Timor, a combination of Portuguese-inspired Catholicism and indigenous religious and ethnic differences with Muslim Java, Indonesia’s Javanese-dominated military, and settlersfromotherethniccommunities,particularlythe Bugis of South Sulawesi, pose fundamental problems, even without politically inspired violence. In Kashmir, which has been fought overby Pakistan and India since1947, the people are also ethnically and linguistically separate, and they are not at home in either country. Kashmiris are Muslims, but they have little in common with the Muslims India or large parts of Pakistan, and their problems of in the Kashmir valley, the setting of a decade-long war with Hindu India, are not primarily religious, but rather cultural and political. Both East Timor and Kashmir are considered disputed territories by the United Nations. But the Timorese, with strong support from Catholics and the European-based organizations that supported revolutionary groups in other Portuguese colonies (Mozambique and Angola in particular), have enjoyed a high profile. Indonesia,on the other hand, has been made a pariah in a way that India was not when it marched into Portuguese Goa and annexed it without a hint democratic ritual. of

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CONCLUSION

More recently, the sometimes problematic role of cultural touchstones has been revealed inthe controversy over the of the Guatemalan Nobel laurelife ate Rigoberta Menchu. Scholars and investigative journalists now say that her childhood and youth, although certainly harsh, were not as of deprifull vation and tragedy as first portrayed. It also seems that cultural stereotypes played a large part in creating an irresistible account of a poor Guatemalan Indian girl at the mercy of a heartless “European” military dictatorship. This image made her-and used her as-a cultural icon representing indigenous people across the region. Even now, there are those who argue that this overarching cultural symbolismis more important than mere facts. Scholarship, journalism, the human rights establishment-and historydemand a higher standard. The way Americans deal with complex ethnic conflicts abroad (or political conflicts in ethnic trappings) often seems to indicate that our cultural sensitivity stops at the water’s edge. Ironically, campaigns waged with the best intentions are often shallowor poorly informed, and they are as muchpolitically motivated by their leaders in this country as by their counterparts in distant societies. In the end, there must be a meaningful link between our value system-including the importance we attach to honesty and a truth notcolored by ideology-and our foreignpolicy.Afterall, central elements of that value system, rooted in both Western and Eastern cultures, have acquired a universality through the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.

14
Culture, Institutions, and Gender Inequality in Latin America
MALA H T U N

Gender discrimination has been a remarkably consistent feature most culof tures. Women everywhere have been accorded inferior economic, social, and legal status. The universalityof sex-based inequality and the diversity of national cultures make any simple connection between sex discrimination and cultural attitudes dubious. The important question is whether and what cultural attributes contribute to and sustain progressive changes in gender relations. This chapter analyzes the role played by culture in contemporary changes in the position of women in Latin America. Though traditional models of cultural influences on economic development and democracy are convincing in many ways, they cannot explain the impetus for change in gender relations across countries and cultures. Anglo-Protestant culture, held by some scholars to be particularly conducive to capitalist development and liberal democracy, has historically been compatible with systematic gender discrimination. Major progress in gender relations inthe United States sincethe 1960s is less attributable to culture than to economic transformations, women’s movements, and changing Supreme Court jurisprudence. In Latin America, by

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contrast, the cultural heritage has been deemed hostile to private capital accumulation and liberal democracy. Yet this heritage has not prevented Latin America from making great strides in gender equality over the past twenty years. The second part of the chapter explorestwo ways in which culturalattributes contribute to and sustain changes in gender relations. First, underlying cultural values account for the diverse ways in which different societies conceive of achieving gender equality. Second, cultural attributes related to the performance and efficiency of state institutions affect the sustainability of changes in gender relations. If there is a significant gap between policy and enforcement, a widespread feature of Latin America, advances in women’s rights in politics and the law may prove ephemeral.
CULTURE AND GENDER IN NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA COMPARED

Prominent social and political theorists from Tocquevilleand Weber to many of the distinguished contributors to thisvolume have postulated that culture exerts a decisive influence on people’s economic and political development. a Scholars such as Howard Wiarda and Lawrence Harrison argue that Latin America’s cultural particularities account for the distinctive historical trajectory of the region, characterized by cycles of authoritarian rule and pronounced social inequality. Anglo-Protestant values, by contrast, are deemed responsible for the capacity of Anglo-American societies to generate wealth and support stable democratic institutions. As Harrison argues, “I believe that there is no other satisfactory way to explain the sharply contrasting evolution of the North and the South in the [Western] Hemisphere than culture-the strikingly different values, attitudes, and institutions-that have flowed from the Anglo-Protestant and Ibero-Catholic traditions.”’ My intention is not to evaluate the claim that culture accounts for national variation in economic development and democracy, but merely to urge caution in using cultural arguments explain differences in gender relationsbeto tweentheUnitedStatesandLatinAmerica.Anglo-Protestant culture’s vigorous work ethic, propensity to save, and valorization of individual rights may have contributed to the good things of capitalism and democracy, but they were historically compatible with laws and policies that severely discriminated against women. Major changes in women’s status are relatively recent. Consider the institution of coverture. Long after the founding of the republic, U.S. laws continued to uphold coverture rules that granted a husband legal representation of and exclusive control over the body and the property of his wife. Beginning with Married Women’s Property Acts in the

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mid- to late-nineteenth century, some elements coverture were eradicated, of but male prerogatives in marriageand the family remained firmly entrenched well into the twentieth century. The last remnants of coverture were only abolished by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which held that “women do not lose their constitutionally protected liberty when theymarry.’’2 For centuries, Anglo-Protestant culture in the United States condoned, and the judiciary tolerated, differential and discriminatory treatment of women in the workplace and the exclusion women from certain professions. Prior of to the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the enactment of Title VI1 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, statutes, rules, and regulations that discriminated by gender were widespread in many states and federal agencies. Enforcement of these laws has been instrumental in expanding women’s employment opportunities, although many de facto discriminatory practices have been upheld by courts employing loose standards of scrutiny. Bureaucratic invasion of personal and marital privacy on issues sexuallike ity and reproduction also seems to violate liberal values. Still, only in 1965 did the U.S. Supreme Court rule that a constitutional right to marital privacy prevented states from outlawing the of contraceptives by married couples. use Violence against women is another area in which state action has been relatively recent. The Violence Against Women Act(VAWA),which creates federal penalties for crimes of violence against women and provides funds to states for prevention and treatment programs, was only enacted in 1994. Economic equality, recognition of women’s rights to exercise control over fertility, and official condemnation of violence against women arenot part of the Anglo-Protestant cultural heritage but are relatively recent events provoked by social changes and feminist movements. Adherents of the culture and development schoolbelieve that Latin America’s Ibero-Catholic culture is less conducive to capitalism and democracy than the Anglo-Protestant culture of the United States. As Wiarda puts it, [Latin America’s] economy was and remains mercantilist and state-directed rather than capitalist and individually directed; its social structure was class two rather than multi-class and pluralist; its political institutions were hierarchical and authoritarian rather than democratic; its culture and religion were orthodox, absolutist, and infused with Catholic-Thomist precepts as contrasted with the religiousnonconformity and pluralist precepts of the North American colonies.g When seen in light of the traditional sexism of Roman Catholic ethics and secular ideologies like machismo and marianismo, the authoritarian and hi,

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erarchical features of Ibero-Catholic culture appear to be particularly hostile to women’s advancement.As one scholar has remarked, Latin America’s gender relations are “harsh patriarchal systems whose endurance is rivaled only in the Arab world.”’ Though some data show that Latin American cultural values have remained coherent and stable over time,5 recent changes in gender relations and women’s status have been remarkable. Shifts in society, law, and policy are no less revolutionary than what has happened in the United States since the 1960s. There aresigns of a convergence in women’s position among countries withdifferent cultural heritages, as well as persisting variation among countries within the same cultural zone. In politics, economics, education, and the law, changes in gender relations in Latin America are impressive. In the region today, women represent an average of 15.4 percent of the members of Congress, the second highest regional average in the world and ahead of the 13 percent in the United States (the world average is also 13 percent). In some countries, women’s presence is very high, such as Argentina and Cuba (28 percent); Costa Rica (19 percent); Ecuador, El Salvador, and Mexico (17 percent); and the Dominican Republic (16 percent). Women’s participation in the economy has skyrocketed. Region-wide, women made up 20 percent of the labor force in 1970. By 1995, this had grown to around percent (U.S. women make up45 percent 35 of the labor force). The wage gap between women and men continues to be significant but is not much different from the wage gap registered in industrialized countries. In the early 1 9 9 0 ~ ~ women’s wages were between 20 and 40 percent lower than men’s. However, the wage gap is much smaller for younger women. According to one study, women workers between twenty-five and thirty-four years of age earned 80 to 90 percent of men’s salary. Women have made impressive gains in literacy and in education. Illiteracy among women has dropped substantially, and women make up about half of students in primary, secondary, and post-secondary education. In several countries, women represent more than half of university students. In the United States, women constitute 50 percent of secondary students and55 percent of post-secondary students.6 Latin Americans have made notable progress in implementing legal reforms to grant women formal equality. The constitutions of several Latin American countries recognize the equal rights of women and men: constitutions in Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Paraguay include gender equality as a basic principle. Civil codes have been reformed to eliminate the institution of marital power (potestud marital) and to grant women equality in the management of common property, household decisionmaking, and authority over minor children.

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At least twelve Latin American countries have adopted new laws stipulating penalties for domestic violence and expanding the authority of law enforcement to protect victims. Hundreds of police stations staffed by female law-enforcement officers specially trained in domestic violence and sex crimes have been established throughout the region. Nineteen Latin American countries have ratified the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and Argentina has incorporated CEDAW into its national constitution. In the same year that the U.S. Congress enacted the Violence Against Women members of the Organization Act, of American States adopted the Inter-American Convention on Violence Against Women, subsequently ratified by at least twenty-six OAS member states.’ However, Latin American countries continue to exhibit significant variation regarding women in terms of political representation, economic opportunities, education, and legal position. Although women occupy 28 percent of the seats in Argentina’s Congress, they make up merely 3 percent of Paraguay’s Congress and 6 percent of Brazil’s. Women account for 41 percent of the labor force in Uruguay, but merely 26 percent in Ecuador. In countries likeBolivia, Guatemala, andPeru, in which a substantial portion of the population is indigenous, rural women’s illiteracy is much higher than men’s. In Peru, for example, 46 percent of rural women are illiterate, compared to 10 percent of rural men. The situation of women’s health exhibits tremendous variation across countries. In Costa Rica, the maternal mortality rate is 60 per 100,000 live births; in Bolivia, the rate is 650 per 100,000 live births. Whereas in Uruguay a 1946 civil code reform granted married women full legal agencyand equality in marriage, in Chile old institution of marthe ital power continued to structure the default regimeof property relations between husband -and wife 1999. Costa Rica and Venezuela legalized divorce in in 1886 and 1904, respectively, but pro-divorce reformists only achieved their goals in Brazil in 1977 and in Argentina in 1987. There is also substantial variation in the status women across social class and color within each of country. These examples point to twoconclusions. First, in terms of aggregate participation in the economy, education, and politics, the status of women in Latin America and the United Statesis converging. In spite of cultural differences betweenthe tworegions, there are growing structural similarities in the position of women. Second, there is persistent and marked variation in women’s position among Latin American countries with a similar cultural heritage. There is no simple relationship between culture and gender, for cultural attributes appear to have little explanatory power for shifts in gender relations. The cultural valorization of gender equality seems to be the prod-

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uct, rather than the cause, of changes in the structure of gender relations. When gender relations change, culture moves in response.
CULTURAL FRAMES AND THE SUSTAINABILITY OF WOMEN’S ADVANCEMENT

Although culture cannot be posited as a cause major change in gender reof lations, cultural factors nonetheless profoundly affect the character and the durability of advances in women’s position. Cultural norms and values provide frames within which changes in gender relations are interpreted and determine how different societies conceive of achieving gender equality. In the United States, progressive changes in women’s rightsare strongly marked by our values. Laws on thefamily, divorce, and abortion, for example, reflect an individualist ethos to a much greater extent than laws on the European Continent and in Latin America. Whereas U.S. courts have decided that individual liberty and self-determination are the supreme values to be protected, judges and legislators in continental Europe “are more deeply engaged in an ongoing moral conversation about abortion, divorce, and dependency” and more likely to moderate individual rights with “attention to social context and individual responsibility.”* The United States has gone further than any other Western country in making marriage freely terminableat the will of either party, in casting the issue of abortion as a matter of individual privacy and self-determination until fetal viability, and in articulating a constitutional right to marital privacy. Latin America’s different cultural heritage has meant that changes in women’s rights are less marked by liberal individualism and the principle of non-state intervention than in the United States.On the one hand, this creates hurdles for feminists and liberals aiming to relax existing prohibitions on abortion. Abortion is considered a crime in every Latin American country except Cuba, although the majority of countries permit abortions to be performed to avert a threat to the mother’s life or when the pregnancy results from rape. Clandestineabortion is widespread in the region, but campaigns to legalize abortion have not received widespread public support.Clearly, moral and political pressure from the Roman Catholic bishops is a major factor impeding the liberalization of abortion laws. Yet the absence of a cultural and juridical tradition defending the right to privacy and self-determination also makes it difficult to advance the claim that women’s interest in controlling their reproductive lives trumps the state’s interest in protecting the fetus. O n the other hand,affirmative action to secure women’s presence in public decisionmaking is widespread in Latin America, a policy measure that would be virtually unthinkable in the United States. In the 1990s, nine Latin Ameri-

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can countries-Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Panama, Peru,and Venezuela-passed national laws establishing quotas for women’s participation as candidates in general elections. Quota laws require that 20 to 40 percent of the candidates fielded political parties by be women. After quota laws were enacted, women’s presence in Congress increased from 5 to 28 percent in Argentina, from 7 to 12 percent in Bolivia, from 16 to 19 percent in Costa Rica, and from 10 to 16 percent in the DominicanRepublic.LatinAmerica’scorporatisttradition,inheritedfrom Thomist thought and the social teachings the papal encyclicals, provides a of favorable cultural environment for advancing claims about women’s right to representation as a group. Cultural attributes modulate the movement toward gender equality in different societies, prioritizing some issues over others and casting a distinct toneto national debates on women’s rights.
THE GAP BETWEEN LAW AND BEHAVIOR

Although changes in aggregate statistics and national law and policy are crucial components of the movement toward gender equality, they do not tell the whole story. The sanctioningof laws by democratically elected representatives attests on one level to a cultural endorsement of gender equality. Rhetorical and symbolic changes in law and policy communicate messages about equality throughout society at large. Still, the contradiction between well-intentioned bureaucratic policy and uneven bureaucratic application and enforcement is a widespread feature of Latin American societies. The problem is not gender specific, since tendencies toward corruption, human rights abuses, tax evasion, and arbitrary law enforcement reduce the efficacy of state institutions in many areas. The gap between law and behavior is at least as severe when it comes to gender-related laws, and it thwarts the sustainability of recent advances in women’s rights. On the one hand, laws long abolished continue to influence behavior, such as the “legitimate defense of honor’’ used to acquit men who murder their adulterous wives in Brazil. On the other hand, newly adopted laws, such as recent reforms on sexual and domestic violence in most countries of the Latin American region, are not implemented. Narrowing the gap between law and practice requires cultural adjustments as well as deeper changes within legal institutions.
THE ”LEGITIMATE DEFENSEOF HONOR“ IN BRAZIL

The legitimate defense of honor thesis in Brazil became famous in the late 1980s, when a jury in the southern stateof Parani voted to acquit a man of

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murder on the grounds that he had acted legitimately to defend his honor when he killed his estranged wife and her lover, The state court of appeals upheld the decision, but the Supremo Tribunal da Justiqa, Brazil’s highest court for civil and criminal matters, annulled the jury’s decision in 1991 and ordered a new trial. When the case was retried inParani later that year, another jury acquitted the defendant on the grounds of a legitimate defense of honor. The jury’s decision prompted domestic and international outrage, and a special mission of Human Rights Watch was sent to Brazil to investigate the problem of violence against women. The legitimate defense of honor thesis has no explicit basis in Brazilian law. In the colonial period, the Philippine Ordinances permitted men to kill wives discovered in adulterous acts, as well as their male companions. Later, the criminal code of the Brazilian Empire (adopted in 1830), the penal code of the First Republic (1890), and the current penal code (adopted in 1940) explicitlyprecludedhomicideasasolutionforthecrime of adultery. Nonetheless, the 1940 code introduced the idea of legitimate defense against unjust aggression putting fundamental rights at risk, and some legal doctrines consider “honor” to be a fundamental good or right. The legal doctrine of legitimatedefenseandtheexistence of atacitbasisforthe consideration of honor as a legal good gave wayto a jurisprudential practice that permits men to murder their adulterous wives andbe acquitted. The law’s valorization of honor stems from the importance of reputation in social relations. As a prominent interpretation of the penal codestates: Good reputation is essential for men, constituting the indispensable of their base position and social effectiveness. Good men only surround themselves with men of good names. If anyone acquires a bad name, friends and acquaintances will desert him, and he will no longer be accepted in good social circles. He willbe deprived of the confidence and prestige in which society holds gentlemen. Without a good reputation, moreover, it is impossible to attain or successfully exercise positions of merit, influence, or responsibility, because those with a bad name do not deserve c~nfidence.~

A man with an adulterous wife, known in Brazilian slang as a torno (someone who wears the hornsof a cuckold), stands to lose his good name, social position, and opportunities. The legitimate defense honor is used by of defense lawyers and is accepted by juries because resort to homicide in light of a threat to honor seen as understandable. Jury behavior reveals that the is honor and reputation of men and entire families depends on perceptions of women’s morality and sexual behavior. Killing adulterous wives and their partners allows men to restore their honor in the face society at large. of

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As early as 1955, higher courts inBrazil began to overturn lower court decisions acquitting murders the groundsof a legitimate defenseof honor. In on Brazil's civil law system, however, higher court decisions do not establish a precedent that is formally binding on lower courts. Brazilian appellate courts therefore lack the institutional power to rectify the contradictory jurisprudence that has evolved over the honor defense. Furthermore, trial court judges have not always exercised their prerogative to instruct juries on what theories and defenses are permitted by the law. Instead, they have chosen to defer to the jury's sovereignty, even when thejury's reasoning has no basis in formal law. Use of the honor defense signals a persisting conflict within Brazilian culture over female sexuality and within Brazilian legal institutions over the status of honor and thescope of legitimate defense.
SEXUAL AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

In the 1990s, countries all over Latin America reformed their penal codes to reclassify the crime of rape and introduced new legislation aimed to punish and prevent domestic violence. Rape, historically considered a crime against custom, honesty, or decency, was recast as a crime against individual sexual freedom and dignity. Marital rape was penalized, and hundreds of women's police stations were created throughout the regionto receive and investigate complaints of violence against women. As mentioned earlier, at least twelve countries adopted lawson domestic or intra-family violence that offer judges and law enforcement officials new competencies to resolve violent situations. These new laws and policies are the catalyst for a cultural shift. Violence against women and family members increasingly seen as a violationof huis man rights and therefore as a policy problem, the family no longer being viewed as remaining outside the purview of state power and formal laws. However, the behavior of citizens and law enforcement officers has not kept up with the spiritof the new laws. In the first place, incidents of sexual violence are severely underreported. Estimates from Mexicoand Peru suggestthat merely 10 to 20 percent of rape cases are reported to the police. Second, the rate of investigation, prosecution, and sentencing of violent aggressors is disturbingly low. Data from Brazil show that only one-third of violent incidents in the state of SHo Paulo were followed up with a police investigation, and few investigations actually led to prosecution or conviction. In Mexico, only 15 percent of offenders in one sample of rape cases studied were sentenced. Data from Ecuador show that just 1 percent of the total number of incidents of sexual violence reported to the authorities led to a conviction.1° The reluctance to investigate and prosecute in cases of sexual violence contrasts sharply with the state's

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presumption of guilt and overzealous prosecution of suspects in other areas of criminal law. Low prosecution and sentencing rates of violent aggressors stem from the insensitivity of law enforcement officersto victims of violence, reflecting the widely held sentiment that women victims must have deserved or consented to whatever happened to them. Analysis of court cases shows that judges are more favorable to virgins and frequently blame victims for provoking the rape. Many judges and prosecutors pressure women to reconcile with their partners instead of pressing charges. Rape victims have also complained that medical examiners question them extensively about their sexual history.” On the other hand, victims themselves often fail to cooperate with the investigation or desist from prosecuting the perpetratorsof violence. Some victims reconcile with their partners and therefore see no need to continue. Others fall subject to social pressure from friends and family members. In a 1997 case in Peru, a woman victim of a gang rape was pressured by family members into marrying one of her assailants to defend the family honor; charges against the rapist were dropped. (The penal code loophole that exempted rapists who married their victims was removed in April 1997, after domestic and international outcry.) Although women’s police stations were intended to mitigate some of the problems mentioned above, they suffer from a shortage financial and maof terial resources, lack a standard operating procedure for processing cases or dealing with victims, and are often inconveniently located. Working in women’s police stations is also considered to be of low prestige within the police force as a whole. To sum up, the application and enforcement of existing laws represents the greatest challenge faced women’s rights advocates by in Latin America.
CONCLUSION

Culture is an essential but’insufficient concept understanding the progress for toward and prospects for gender equality in Latin America. Cultural values alone do not explain patternsof change and continuity on gender issues. In spite of long-standing cultural biases against women, women’s capabilities and opportunities relative to men have substantially improved over the past few decades in Latin America. Although there is considerable variation among countries, the enactment egalitarian laws andpolicies by democraof tic governments and legislatures reflects a growing cultural commitment to equal opportunity. However, the persistent gap between law and behavior attests to the resilience of discriminatory practices. Cultural changes did not provoke contemporary advances in women’s status in Latin America, but

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cultural change is indispensable for guaranteeing the implementation and sustainability of these advances over the longer term. What policy strategy points a way out of this dilemma? The exercise of presidential leadership has been an important engine of policy change. In fact, enthusiastic backingby the president and his party was the common denominator for some of the most sweeping changes in law and policy on gender in the 1990s. Presidential commitment also facilitated implementation. Without the executive decrees regulating implementation of Argentina’s quota laws, for example, the quota would not have caused women’s representation in Congressto rise from 5 to 28 percent. The institutional and normative powers in the handsof the president make the exerciseof presidential authority effective for securing gender-related changes, eventhough the president’s ideas about gender are not necessarily shared by everyone. However, by demonstrating a commitment not only to gender-equality rhetoric but also to practice, those at the pinnacle of political power may spearhead the broad transformations necessary to effect more fundamental progress in gender equality throughout Latin America in the twenty-first century.

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part five

CULTURE AND AMERICAN MINORITIES

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Taking Culture Seriously: A Framework and an Afro-American Illustration
O R L A N D OP A T T E R S O N

THE CONTRADICTORY APPROACH TO CULTURE

There is something very odd about how the culture concept is used today. On the one hand, at no other time in the history concept has it been more of the popularly debated or more seriously considered. In academia the relatively new discipline of cultural studies flourishes. And in the American public arena, so-called culture wars have become what Hunter calls “a reality sui generis . . the defining forces of public life.”’ And yet, at the same time, in academic and intellectual circles, including an influential group of professional anthropologists and nearlyall sociologists, there is strong resistance to attempts to explain any aspectof human behavior in cultural terms.z In the humanities and liberal circles generally, a rigid orthodoxy now prevails that can be summarized as follows: Culture is a symbolic system to be interpreted, understood, discussed, delineated, respected, and celebrated as the distinctive product of a particular group of people, of equal worth with all other such products. But it should never be used t o explain anything about the people who produced it. In humanistic terms, culture is often

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likened t o a text t o be read and interpreted. Although explanations of the text are permitted, no claims of objectivity can be made for such explanations. The understanding of culture is wholly subjective and reflects as much about the interpreter as the interpreted. In sociological circles, culture occupies what Mabel Berezin calls a “fissured terrain” in which there “epistemological dissidence” between “scholis ars who privilege the possibility of explanation . . . and those who privilege exegesis or interpretati~n.”~ even those who favor explanation tend to But shun any causal role for culture.Typically, as in the so-called production-ofculture school, culture is the dependent variable, something to be described and, with all due caution, to be explained by organizational, economic, and other such “hard” independent variables. All attempts to reverse this explanatory equation and make culture or elements of culture the independent variable are inherently suspect. Oddly, thisis the very opposite of what prevailed during the first half of this century, when the Parsonian theory of values as ends and normative regulators of action was predominant. However, as Ann Swidler has pointed out, because the general rejectionof the Parsonian approach left sociologists “without an alternative formulation of culture’s causal significance, scholars either avoid causal questions or admit the values paradigm through the back door.”4 Swidler proposedan approach to the problem that has won wide favor. Although is a start in the right it direction, her conception of culture as a “tool kit” from which people selectively draw theirstrategies of action as it suits their purposestoo open-ended and is voluntaristic to offer real explanatory power. Cultural analysis is reduced to a mere supplementof rational choice theory. The hostility to cultural explanations is especially marked in the study of Afro-Americans and the many problems that they face. There are good and bad reasons for this. Too many studies of Afro-American problems up to the late sixties-when the reaction set in-relied on a simplistic or untenable conception of culture that was used in a crudely deterministic way to explain Afro-American social problems. Afro-American culture was seen as an encrusted accretion of the Afro-American past that had become a fixed, explanatory black box invoked to explain anything and everything about the group. Outmoded nineteenth-century views of culture as some kind of “cake of custom” lingered in many writings. Hardly more palatable was the over-determining functionalism and values framework of the Parsonian school.Althoughthemoresophisticatedadvocates of theculture of poverty school such as Oscar Lewis did not commit many the errors that of they are now routinely accused of, in the hands of non-specialists, cultural accounts of the group’s problems were too often circular, reductionist, and static.

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Unfortunately, it was and is still too often the case that cultural explanations are employed by reactionary analysts and public figures who attribute the social problems of the poor to their “values” and thereby wash their hands and the hands of government and the taxpayers of any responsibility for their alleviation. Indeed, perhaps the main reason why cultural explanations are shunned by anthropologists and sociologists-both very liberal disciplines-is the fact that they have been so avidly embraced by reactionaries or simple-minded public figures. Culture as explanation languishes in intellectual exile partly becauseof guilt by association. This lastis only the worst of some very bad reasons therejection of culfor tural explanations. Another of these is the liberal mantra, still frequently chanted, that cultural explanations amount to blaming the victim. This is sheer nonsense and a simple analogy reveals itssilliness. Consider the all too common case of someone who has lowself-esteem and behaves in extremely self-destructive ways as a direct result of having been sexually abused as a child. A sympathetic person might point to the person’s psychological problems and urge him or her to seek therapy. It would be absurd to accuse that person of blaming the victim. Yet this is exactly what happens when a sympathetic analyst is condemned for even hinting that some Afro-American problems may be the tragic consequences of their cultural adaptation to an abusive past. Another bad reason for the censorship of cultural explanations in the study of Afro-Americans is ethnic nationalism and so-called black pride. Ethnic pride, once a necessary corrective centuries of ethnic dishonor and negto ative stereotyping, now has hardened ethnic into glorification and Afro-centrism, both given academic legitimacyby multicultural studies. Any scholar who invokes historico-cultural explanations for social problems is seen as an agent who comes to bury and not to praise, a threat to the feelgood insistence on a “usable past” and a proud, non-problematic culture that can hold itsplace and parade its laurels at the great American multi-cultural powwow. Yet another reason for thesuspicion of cultural explanations is the misunderstanding, especially on thepart of policy specialists and others concerned with correcting social ills, that nothing can be done about culture. Thismisunderstanding springs from the view of culture as something immutable. Closely related to this reason for the rejection of cultural explanations is a conviction held by many that itis a racist viewof a group. Behind this charge is a riot of intellectual ironies. The modern anthropological study of culture of began as an explicitly anti-racist reaction against the racialism social Darwinism, especially under the liberal influence of Franz Boas’s cultural relativism. For the first half of this century, culture was preciselythat which was

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not biological in human development. Cultural relativism, however, has a way of biting its own tail and descending into essentialism, as I pointed out in my critique of its use during the seventies by both ethnic revivalists in America and defenders of the apartheid regime of South A f r i ~ a . ~ M orere cently, the same criticism has been made of the latest wave of ethnic celebrationinAmerica,Walter Benn Michaelsstatingflatlythatthemodern multi-cultural concept of culture and ethnic identity have simply become substitutes racism.6 for Although critics of multi-culturalism as such Michaels condemn the multi-cultural use of culture as racist from a universalist standpoint, many multi-culturalists condemn cultural explanations in equally vehement terms as racist, as the long litany of attacks on Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his report make clear. Thus in 1970 the liberal sociologist Robert Blauner labeled those of his colleagues who emphasized the lower class rather than ethnic distinctiveness of Afro-American life as “neo-racists.’” Incredibly, then, the culture concept has become a term of abuse and has been condemned as racist both universalists and relativistic by multi-culturalists in their quarrels with each other. A deeper irony in the attack on cultural explanations as racist is the fact that critics of the explanatory role of culture all make one quiet, backdoor exception to the causaluse of the concept. The exception its use in the inis tellectual war between environmentalists and genetic determinists. In the socalled Bell Curve Wars a few years ago, when the I Q controversy went through its latestcycle in America, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, although losing the war, grievously injured onethe mainstays of the liberal of defense of the environmental position,namely, that the persistent single standard deviation difference in IQ scores between Afro-Americans and EuroAmericans is to be explained primarily in socioeconomic terms. Herrnstein and Murray drew on the vast body of accumulated evidence to show that this position is no longer tenable. Structural explanations of IQ differences were often vitiated by what Arthur Jensen has called “the sociological fallacy,” namely, the fact that the presumably independent structural variables explaining away the IQ effects were themselves partly the effectsof subjects’

IQs.
I do not intend to rehash the IQ controversy except to note that when here the dust had settled one major point emerged with crystal clarity, and it has both a negativeand a positive aspect. The negative aspect that although geis netic factors can explain only a small part of the differences in social and economic outcomes that exist between Afro-Americansand Euro-Americans, neither can standard socioeconomic variables such as family income. This important point, whichnearly got lost in the heat of the debate, has been reinforced by more recent findings, especially those reported in a work that is

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of far greater scientific integrity than T h e Bell Cztrve, namely, The BlackWhite Test Score Gap, edited by Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips. The general conclusion of this group of scholars is that, first, the test-score gap between Afro-Americans and Euro-Americans is indeed important in explaining later occupational status and income, although what itis measuring is not so much innate intelligence as learnable cognitive and educational skills. Second, this test-score gap is only partly explained by the class or social background of students. The still substantial income difference between Afro-Americans and Euro-Americans explains, at best, about one point of the large ethnic gap in students’ test scores. And when all socioeconomic background factors are considered, such as wealth and occupation, no more than a thirdof the ethnic gapis explained, which is about the same as Herrnstein and Murray estimated.8 If the answer to the skill gap is to be found neither in the g-loadingon IQ scores nor in the socioeconomic differences between the two groups, where is it to be found? Here we come to the positive side of what emerged from the Bell Curve controversy. The answer, in a nutshell, is culture. “Cultural beliefs and practices,” writes psychologist Howard Gardner in his critique of the Bell Curve, “affect the child at least from the moment of birth and perhaps sooner. Even the parents’ expectations of the unborn child and their reactions to the discovery of the child’s sex have an impact. The family, teachers, and other sources of influence in the culture signal what is important to the growing child, and these messages have both short- and longterm impact.”’ Significantly, Meredith Phillips and her collaborators found large effects on children’s test scores resulting from parenting practices, accounting for over 3.5 points of the test gap between Afro-Americans and Euro-Americans. What’s more, their controls strongly indicated that these practices were wholly environmental. Psychological studies bear out these findings. It is remarkable that, barely five years before T h e Bell Curve was published, Arthur Jensen, unquestionably the most sophisticated defender the genetic viewof ethnic differences, of had very nearly thrown in the towel with his concessionthat “the genetic hypothesis will remain untested in any acceptably rigorous manner for some indeterminatelength of time, most likely beyond the life span of any present-day scientists.”1° Psychologist Nathan Brody, in an exhaustive review of the state of knowledge on the subject, concluded that the ‘‘reasons for the differences are probably to be found in the distinctive cultural experiences encountered by black individuals in the United States.”” Responding to Herrnstein and Murray, another distinguished psychologist, Richard Nisbett, arrived at much the same conclusion. Arguing that there “are systematic dif-

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ferences in the socializationof black and white children that begin in the cradle,” he reviewed several studies, one of which concerned children of mixed marriages: Under the assumptionthat mothers are more important than fathers to the intellectual socialization of their children and that socialization practices of whites favor the adoption of skills that result in high scoreson IQ tests, one would expect that the childrenof unions where the mother is white the father is black and would have higher IQs than the children of unions where the mother is black and the father is white. And in fact, this is the case. Children of black-white unions have IQs nine points higher if it is the mother who is white.” Although selection factors could not be discounted, they seemed to work in both directions and cancel themselves out. Nisbett quite reasonably concluded that “the higher IQs of the children born to white mothers would have to be attributed largely to ~ocialization.’”~ There is a profound ironyin the uses and responses to the kindof findings just cited. When used in the IQ debate to defend the liberal, environmental position they are acceptable, even eagerly embraced. But in any other context the use of these same findings would be viewedwith outrage. Why? Because findings like these are anathema to notions of ethnic pride, identity politics, and the prevailing relativism of liberal academic circles. In any other context statements by Phillips and her collaborators that for “parents who want their children to do well on tests (which means almost all parents), middle-class parenting practices seem to work” or that ‘