CULTURE MATTERS
In
the early 1990s, I happened to come across economic data on Ghana and South
Korea in the early1 960s, and I was astonished steoe how similar their economies
were then. These two countries had roughly comparablele vels 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 were receiving 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 haddifferent values. In short, 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 paid to culture xiu 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
culturein the academic community declined dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s.
Then, in the1 980s, interest in culture asa n explanatory
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. Inthe following years,
however, people ianl l these groups began to see elements 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 t hine renaissance of culture. Their successw as
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 MartinLipset,
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 the title. Perhaps the wisest wordos n thep lace of culture
in humana ffairs are those
of Daniel Patrick
Moynihan: “The central conservative truth is 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 fromit self.” 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 developmentI? If they Foreword xu do,
how can cultural obstacles to economic and political development be removed or
changed so as to facilitate progress?
To
wrestle with these questions effectively, 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, social conomic
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;if culture includes everything, it explains
nothing. Hence we
define culturei n purely subjective terms as the values, attitudes, beliefs,
orientations, and underlying assumptions prevalent among people in a society.
This book explores
