CULTURE MATTERS

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