A Perfectible Culture

by James Fallows

WHO PROSPERS? How Cultural Values Shape Economic and Political Success by Lawrence E. Harrison. Basic Books, $22.00.

MANY DISAGREEMENTS about public policy boil down to one great disagreement between the anthropologist’s and the economist’s view of life. From the anthropologist’s perspective, events are mainly determined by people’s habits, tastes, and biases, which by their nature are irrational. Serbs and Croats would both be better off if they did not hate each other; nonetheless, they do. To the economist, the world is a matrix of incentives and stimuli to which people respond in predictable ways. Why did the caste system persist in India and the Jim Crow system in the American South? The economist would say that bigotry was less important than the economic advantages the systems created for those on top. An anthropologist looks at gang violence in Chicago or Los Angeles and sees broken families as a cause: young men grow up without fathers and find a substitute sense of kinship in gangs. An economist sees the same broken families as a result—of the perverse incentives of the welfare system, of discrimination, of the loss of big-city manufacturing jobs. One approach emphasizes culture and how it shapes behavior; the other emphasizes political and economic systems and how they shape a culture.

Ideally, we would be able to think both ways all the time. Do Americans use so much gasoline because of the “I gotta be me” spirit that came from settling the frontier and now makes us want our own cars? Or is the explanation that government policies have kept gasoline so cheap for so long? Yes and yes. The effects of culture and of systemic incentives often become mixed in a chicken-and-egg way. The rules of Japanese corporate life discourage employees from changing from one company to another in mid-career. Just as the U.S. Army does not go head-hunting to hire people from the U.S. Navy, Toshiba does not take on people who decide they’ve grown tired of Mitsubishi. These rules compel employees to feel a long-term commitment to their organizations. But employees might not put up with the rules if the surrounding culture, in Japan as a whole and in the military subculture of America, did not stress the importance of loyalty.

Because there is usually some truth to both the culture and the system perspective, it’s easy and satisfying to rebut those who make excessive claims for either side. Lawrence Harrison’s previous book, Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind: The Latin American Case, published in 1985, illustrated the advantages of the counterpuncher’s position. When he wrote the book, Harrison had worked in Latin America for more than a dozen years, administering foreign-aid projects for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Throughout this period he had heard the intelligentsia of Latin America harp on the theme of dependency. This was the quasi-Leninist argument that the Third World was poor because Europe and America were rich. A worldwide system of neocolonialism and rigged “terms of trade” forced Latin Americans to grow sugarcane and coffee beans while Europeans and Americans kept all the good jobs. Third World poverty, in this view, did not represent the failure of the world trading system—it was the inevitable and intended result. Anyone who dealt with university economics departments in those days, before dependency-style thinking had been demolished by the British economist P. T. Bauer and the French writer René Dumont, knows how much the theory was taken for granted.

Clearly, the international trading system can create problems for countries that fall behind technologically, as the United States is now discovering. But, as Harrison pointed out in his first book, dependency had become an excuse for ignoring the many problems Latin America created for itself. If neocolonialism really was the cause of world poverty, why did some Third World nations cope with it so much better than others? Why did so many Latin American governments make their country’s problems worse, by stealing or squandering money rather than investing it in factories or schools? Why were the patterns of economic failure so similar in much of Latin America, and so different from those of East Asia, which had the same neocolonialist system to contend with?

Harrison answered by examining the cultural factors that retard political and economic development throughout Latin America. For example, since the days of the Spaniards the main sources of both wealth and prestige have been landed estates and government-guaranteed monopolies in trade, such as the franchise to distribute certain imported goods. Neither is likely to create an entrepreneurial bourgeoisie.

None of the cultural factors by itself can explain the whole Latin American situation—after all, many economies, including Japan’s, were once based on landed estates, and many others, including Korea’s, still have government monopolies. But since he was in the rebutter’s role, Harrison could gracefully allow for complications like these and still argue that the dependency theorists were wrong. He presented a subtle and convincing view of how culture affects economic and political development and how cultural patterns are themselves changed by historical events. In one memorable chapter Harrison contrasted the two societies that share the island of Hispaniola—Haiti, influenced by French colonialism and its own eighteenthand nineteenthcentury slave revolts, and the Dominican Republic, more strongly influenced by both Spain and the United States. In their racial makeup the two societies are similar, Harrison said, but in their behavior and values they vary dramatically. For instance, Harrison explained, voodoo, far from being some colorful bit of exotica, poses enormous practical problems for Haiti (it never gained even a foothold in the Dominican Republic). Voodoo teaches people that the important decisions about this world are made by spirits, often malicious, in another world. If a hospital worker has a chance to steal a jug of milk, he should not hold back: if the spirits hadn’t meant it to be stolen, they would have left it in a guarded place.

In his new book Harrison has extended the argument about culture to cover much more of the world and to explain economic success as well as failure. “Climate, resource endowment, geographic location and size, policy choices, and sheer luck are among the relevant factors” in determining a society’s stability and success, he says.

But it is values and attitudes—culture— that differentiate ethnic groups and are mainly responsible for such phenomena as Latin America’s persistent instability and inequity, Taiwan’s and Korea’s economic “miracles,” and the achievements of the Japanese—in Japan, in Brazil, and in America.

In broadening his discussion Harrison has taken a risk, with mixed results. His argument should matter to a broader group of American readers than did his previous book, because he has looked for similarities in cultures around the world and then applied their lessons to the United States. The book will play a part in American debates about school reform, black-Asian relations in the cities, the assimilation of Hispanic immigrants, and U.S. civic culture in general. But Harrison has put himself on the more treacherous side of the argumentative slope. Rather than play defense and point out the flaws in someone else’s sweeping theory, he advances a grand theory of his own. The result is provocative but itself inevitably flawed: this book had me saying “Yes, but . . .”on almost every page.

IN HIS FIRST book Harrison concentrated on a part of the world he had been living in and thinking about for years. Whenever he wanted to make a point, he could pull out exactly the right illustrations—from daily life, from novels he’d read, from conversations. His arguments had the unmistakable and highly desirable feeling of having come out of his experience.

Two of the case studies in this new book involve turf that is more or less familiar to Harrison—Spain and Brazil— and they are the most nuanced and convincing parts of the book. Each country, he says, has managed to change some of the self-limiting traits in its culture. To that extent both have prospered, but each still holds itself back in other ways.

The tone of the other case studies is less subtle. These discussions cover the economic “miracles” in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan; the success of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese immigrants in America; the difficulties of many Mexicanand African-Americans; and the erosion of the American productive culture, especially relative to Japan. Most are presented as clear-cut specimens of success or failure.

No one could understand all these subjects as deeply as Harrison understood Latin America. Harrison has dutifully and impressively investigated each of them, for instance making a research trip to Asia and covering the main literature in the fields of immigration and black culture. But the roles of evidence and conclusion seem reversed. This time it seems as if he figured out his theory—that culture is the crucial variable in economic success— and then went looking for illustrations.

This is different from saying that Harrison has slanted the evidence, which is not what I believe. He is an intelligent and hardworking researcher, and he always notes the facts that don’t fit his scheme. The problem is one of sophistication. Very little in this book seems technically inaccurate, at least in the areas I know about, but quite a lot seems survey-coursish or even platitudinous. (“Like many others, white and black, I am profoundly troubled by the current state of race relations and the disunity in our society.” “I am particularly troubled by the political polarization and rhetorical stridency of the past few decades.”) Much of the book sounds like a very competent report rather than a deeply original discussion, which he achieved before.

Because Harrison is not as masterly with evidence concerning Asia, or American blacks, as he is with that from Latin America, his reasoning often seems circular. When he was living in Latin America, he could observe exactly how a cultural force like voodoo affected daily life. But he went on his tour of East Asia after he had already concluded that the cultures there equipped them for success. The resulting syllogism seems to run this way: everyone knows that the Japanese and Koreans are successful; I have observed the Japanese and Koreans doing X and Y; therefore X and Y must be ingredients of success.

In some cases the behavior he observes does seem to be connected to economic success. For instance, many Confucian-based societies place great emphasis on training bureaucrats, today’s descendants of the mandarins. Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese civil servants are, on average, better educated and much better respected than their counterparts in the United States. This probably makes it easier for those governments to coordinate business activity. Smarter bureaucrats will come up with better plans, and because of their prestige and power businesses must listen. The same bureaucratic tradition can also lead to a kind of tyranny. The major ministries of the Japanese government are not really controlled by politicians or the courts, and are balanced only by one another.

But suppose someone had tricked Harrison. Suppose someone had given him a catalogue of Japanese or Korean behavior patterns, but with GNP figures from Mali. Then it would have been easy to identify the cultural traits that explained economic and political failure. The men tend to get drunk each night. Most fathers are physically and, it seems, emotionally distant from their children. Politicians are corrupt. Universities are weak. There is little tradition of free speech or individual rights.

Harrison doesn’t really explain why these factors matter so little and the “good” East Asian traits, such as an emphasis on frugality and on study, have prevailed. Similarly, Harrison knows that America has economic problems, and he works through a list of cultural causes—bad schools, disrupted families, and so on. Anyone who lives in this country knows what he is talking about. But what are we supposed to make of the America that Mark Twain described in The Gilded Age, or Upton Sinclair in The Jungle, or Jacob Riis in his exposés of downtrodden, depraved immigrant life? Many of the traits that, according to Harrison, account for our decline also showed up then—disdain for politicians, the search for the quick buck, a higher level of violence and a larger untutored mass than in most other developed countries. But in those days the country was manifestly on the way up.

Making the case for a cultural interpretation, then, requires greater nuance than Harrison generally shows in this book. It requires answering the “Yes, but” objections at each step of the way. Yes, some Hispanic ideologues have endorsed Spanish-language separatism, which would be a catastrophe for the country. But German-American ideologues were endorsing something similar a century ago, and the economic incentive for immigrants’ children to learn English seems at least as strong today. (Yes, there is a Spanish-speaking motherland right next to the United States, and the Germans were never in any comparable situation. But if you don’t speak English, you can’t go to college or work for a large organization, both of which opportunities matter more than they did a century ago.) Yes, various aspects of Japan’s culture have been an economic advantage, especially the sense of national unity and the high savings rate. But these “cultural” traits are connected to deliberate, decadeslong government campaigns to steer behavior in the right direction. In the late nineteenth century the Meiji leaders propagated the idea that all Japanese people were united by a racial bond, and people have been exhorted to save throughout the twentieth century by laws, public-relations campaigns, and business practices. The best counterpart in America’s peacetime experience is the sustained twentieth-century effort to convince Americans that they should and can own their homes. The government gave tax breaks for mortgages and created the savings-andloans; comic strips and TV shows reinforced the idea that “normal” families lived in single-family homes. Japan was shaped into a small-home, high-savings culture, America into a culture of big houses and big loans.

Harrison’s real purpose in writing this book, I suspect, is to focus Americans’ attention on the parts of their culture that can be changed. The freshest and most useful theme running through his case studies is that societies can deliberately correct destructive trends— Spain by beginning to open itself to Western liberalism in the late stages of Franco’s regime, Korea by climbing out of feudal stagnation after the Korean War, Japan by rousing itself to avoid colonization in the mid-nineteenth century.

Harrison ends the book with an unsurprising but sensible survey of ways to encourage civil virtues such as savings, investment in children, and fellow feeling among people of different races and classes. American readers may fear that anything written about our cultural failings will have a despairing tone. This book is meant to offer hope.