Cultural attitudes and economic development

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Why are a few countries of the world (such as the United States, Canada, the countries of western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan) wealthy while the most of the rest of the world is poor? A big part of the answer lies in mentality, the mentality of people, the mentalities associated with different cultures.

See

Formula for Economic Development

Everyone receives a cultural stamp as he grows up

The following is from Thomas Sowell. Race and Culture. pp. 22 - 28. It gives considerable insight into this question.

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CULTURAL ATTITUDES

Cultures differ not only in their accomplishments but also in the attitudes which shape those accomplishments. These attitudes are much more related to economic outcomes, for example, than are such much-touted "objective conditions" as initial wealth or natural resources. Japan has prospered economically, despite being nearly destitute of natural resources, while many Third World nations languish in poverty on fertile land, well endowed with minerals and with potential for hydroelectric power. Argentina once imported wheat, even though it had some of the finest land in the world for growing wheat—as subsequently demonstrated by immigrants from other cultures, who turned Argentina into one of the great wheat-exporting nations of the world.

Among the cultural attitudes which influence economic outcomes are attitudes toward education, toward business, and toward labor, especially so-called "menial" labor.

EDUCATION

Education is one of those things which is almost universally desired, across the most diverse cultures, and yet this deceptive universality conceals large differences between cultures as to what one is prepared to sacrifice in time, effort, and foregone pleasures to acquire what kind of education. In many Third World countries, desperately needed scientific, technological, organizational, and entrepreneurial skills tend to be neglected in favor of education in easier subjects. Culturally different minorities in these countries — the Tamils in Sri Lanka or the Chinese in Malaysia, for example — often supply a disproportionate number, sometimes an absolute majority, of the students in mathematics, science, engineering, or medicine.

Similar patterns are found in Latin America. A mid-twentieth-century study of students at the University of Sao Paulo showed that students of non-Brazilian ethnic origin were more heavily concentrated in engineering, economics, and similar "modern" fields, while those of predominantly Brazilian family backgrounds were in more traditional areas such as law and medicine. Similarly, at the University of Chile, people of German or Italian origin were prominent among the students in physics. In much of Latin America, technical and scientific careers were long regarded with condescension, with the result that a disproportionate amount of the industrialization of the region was done by immigrants and foreigners.

Agricultural science has likewise tended to be neglected, even in predominantly agricultural nations of the Third World. In Nigeria, for example, more than 40 percent of the jobs for senior agricultural researchers were vacant at one time. In Senegal, it was 1979—nearly two decades after independence—before agriculture was even taught at the university level, though the University of Dakar had thousands of liberal arts students.

In Malaysia, the Malay college students have tended to concentrate in the liberal arts—and many, have ended up working for the government after graduation, for they lacked skills that would have a value in the economy. Nor is Malaysia unique in this respect. A Cabinet member in Fiji declared frankly that the "only use" for the Fijian students coming out of their educational system was "in government service, to warm public chairs." In India, three-quarters of the college graduates have gone to work for the government, and a leading authority on Africa described African education as "a machine for producing graduate bureaucrats." Indonesian youth have likewise turned after graduation toward bureaucratic careers, despite the warning of Indonesian novelist Ananta Toer that "we must get rid of the silly idea of wanting to be government clerks." Government employment remains a prime objective and a prime source of intergroup conflict in underdeveloped countries around the world.

Formal education, especially among peoples for whom it is rare or recent, often creates feelings of entitlement to rewards and exemption from many kinds of work. In India, for example, even the rudiments of an education have often been enough to create a reluctance to take any job involving work with one's hands. In the 1960s it was estimated that there were more than a million "educated unemployed" in India, who demonstrated "a remarkable ability to sustain themselves even without gainful work, largely by relying on family assistance and support. Nor is this social phenomenon limited to India. Other Third World nations have shown similar patterns.

Such attitudes affect both the employed and the unemployed. Even those educated as engineers have often preferred desk jobs and tended to recoil from the prospect of physical contact with machines. In short, education can reduce an individual's productivity by the expectations and aversions it creates, as well as increase it by the skills and disciplines it may (or may not) engender. The specific kind of education, the nature of the individual who receives it, and the cultural values of the society itself all determine whether, or to what extent, there are net benefits from more schooling. Blindly processing more people through schools may not promote economic development, and may well increase political instability. A society can be made ungovernable by the impossibility of satisfying those with a passionate sense of entitlement — and without the skills or diligence to create the national wealth from which to redeem these expectations. The role of soft-subject intellectuals — notably professors and schoolteachers — in fomenting internal strife and separatism, from the Basques in Spain to the French in Canada, adds another set of dangers of political instability from schooling without skills.

It is understandable that Third World peoples who have been ruled for generations by colonial bureaucrats sitting behind desks, wearing collar-and-tie and shuffling papers, should seek to imitate that role when they get the chance. But the wealth and power of the imperialist nation that put the colonial bureaucrat there in the first place was not created by sitting behind desks and shuffling papers. The science, the technology, the organization, discipline, and entrepreneurship that produced wealth and power usually did so thousands of miles away, beyond the sight of the colonial peoples — and these fundamentals are not primarily what they seek to imitate.

Both in underdeveloped countries and among lagging groups in industrialized nations, there has developed a taste for easy, self-flattering courses such as Maori Studies in New Zealand, Malay Studies in Singapore, and a variety of ethnic studies in the United States. The claim is often made that the morale-boosting effects of such courses will enhance the students' academic performance in other fields, but this claim remains wholly unsubstantiated. What is clear is that easier courses, whether in ethnic studies or otherwise, prove attractive to students from lagging groups.

Such patterns are found in many countries. For example, college students in India from untouchable caste backgrounds specialize in the easier, less prestigious, and less remunerated subjects. Similarly, just over half of those Soviet Central Asians who reached the higher educational levels specialized in the field of education. A similar pattern of seeking easier subjects and easier institutions has been found among Middle Eastern and North African Jews in Israel, as well as among Hispanics in the United States. Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland likewise show less interest in science and technology than the British Protestants there.

Subsequent generations may begin to move into more difficult fields as their preparation and confidence improve. In the United States those black, Hispanic, and American Indian college students whose parents attended college before them have specialized in mathematical and scientific fields to a much greater extent than other members of their respective groups—and to an extent not very different from that found among other American college students.

OCCUPATIONS

Cultural attitudes toward commerce and industry have varied as much as attitudes toward education. A disdain for commerce and industry has, for example, been common for centuries among the Hispanic elite, both in Spain and in Latin America. Similar attitudes have been prevalent in the Portuguese colonial empire. Even those elites with vast wealth have tended to have that wealth in landholdings, rather than in industry or commerce. The result in much of Latin America has been an over-representation—sometimes an absolute predominance—of non-Hispanic, non-Portuguese, immigrants and their children among the leading commercial and industrial figures of various countries. Twentieth-century studies have shown that more than 40 percent of the business leaders in Mexico had foreign paterna1 grandfathers. Among Argentine businessmen prestigious enough to appear in that country's Who's Who, 46 percent were foreign-born, and many others were the sons of immigrants. In Brazil, a majority of industrial entrepreneurs have been either immigrants or the children of immigrants. Among the heads of large industrial enterprises in Santiago, Chile, about three-quarters were immigrants or the children of immigrants. Even in countries with relatively little immigration, such as Colombia and Peru, immigrants and their children have been heavily represented among industrial entrepreneurs.

The disdain for commerce and industry at the higher social levels of Hispanic and Portuguese societies has been paralleled by an aversion to manual labor and hard work at the lower social levels. Such attitudes are, not simple laziness, but reflect what one scholar writing on seventeenth-century Spain characterized as "a puerile pride in indolence" reflecting an aversion to the "stigma of social dishonor" associated with manual trades. Similar attitudes could be found, centuries later, in Spanish and Portuguese offshoot societies in Latin America. Even intellectual work was viewed with disdain by the Brazilian aristocracy. Paraguayans were bewildered by the unrelenting work of Japanese agricultural colonists who settled in their country. Honduran farmers complained that it was unfair for them to have to compete with German farmers in their country, for the latter worked too hard. Brazilian, Chilean, Argentinean, and Paraguayan governments deliberately sought out non-Iberian immigrants for the hard work and severe living needed to pioneer in opening up virgin wilderness in these countries.

The point here is not that there is something peculiarly "wrong" with Iberian culture. What is peculiar is the extremely high productivity of a relative handful of northwestern European nations and their overseas off-shoots, such as the United States and Australia, and their Asian counterparts who have borrowed and developed Western technology, Japan being the preeminent example. In an international perspective, it is these prosperous countries which are the exceptions rather than the rule. Beyond this small set of nations, output per capita is sharply lower. Why and how just the right combination of the right factors happened to come together in this small group of nations, quite recently as history is reckoned, is a major unanswered question.. Muting these differences with squeamish politeness, or waving them aside with cultural relativism, seems unlikely to uncover any of the answers. Not only Hispanic and Portuguese cultures, but also the cultures of much of the Third World make business and commerce, far less attractive to the educated classes than government employment or work in the professions.

The issue is not one of "ability" in the abstract, or even of concrete skills, nor simply a willingness to engage in economic activities. These activities have their own prerequisites, which are met to varying degrees by different cultures. Clearly these requirements are met less often, or less well, in cultures where there is a cultural resistance to contractual obligations, where there is "a rather plastic sense of the truth," where hypersensitivity to status distinctions makes cooperation difficult to achieve in the workplace, where initiative and responsibility are rare, or where notions of accuracy or of cause-and-effect are hazy.

The whole process of scientific abstraction, which lies at the heart of modern technology, is foreign to the mental habits of much—perhaps most—of the human race. Mental testers in a number of countries have noted the difficulty of getting peoples from some cultures even to take abstract questions seriously. The issue of innate "ability" can hardly even be raised in a context where orientations are so different. Even to test running speed in a foot race, people must first agree to run in the same direction at the same time.

Aversions to "menial" work have likewise varied widely from group to group and from society to society. Japan today is an exception to the common pattern among industrialized nations of importing foreigners to do their "menial" work. Japan has no difficulty in getting its own people to do such work, which carries no such stigma as elsewhere. By contrast, many people in Sri Lanka continue to have extreme aversions to doing any work with their hands, complicating even the simplest economic tasks.

Individuals or groups with values more consonant with the requirements of a modern industrial economy may exist within a given society, or enter it from abroad, but whether or not they will have an enduring effect can still be problematical. Where an indigenous and complacent elite is socially powerful enough to absorb dynamic new rising elements on its own terms—for example, to accept wealthy entrepreneurs only insofar as they abandon business for landownership—this may sterilize these dynamic elements as factors in the general progress of the society. A classic example is the Demidov family, which virtually created the Russian iron and steel industry in the eighteenth century, and supplied half or more of that country's total output for many years, as well as being the leading iron-producing enterprise in all of Europe. The Demidovs were ennobled by the czar and ultimately disappeared from commerce and industry into the landed aristocracy. It was common for rising capitalists in czarist Russia or imperial China to aspire to become landed gentry, or government officials, and a similar process has marked the history of Spain and of Latin America. Much the same pattern existed in eighteenth-century France, where commercial success seldom lasted three generations in a given family, because wealth led to nobility or public office. Predatory and corrupt government policies and practices toward businessmen — regarded as prey rather than assets — often hasten the transition of entrepreneurs to other roles in such societies.

Societies which have historically lacked indigenous entrepreneurship have relied disproportionately on foreign elements who were outside the influence of the social forces which discouraged or diverted indigenous entrepreneurship. This was especially ironic in the case of later imperial and early republican China, whose modern industrial and commercial life were dominated by Europeans and Americans, while a vast overseas Chinese entrepreneurial class flourished elsewhere around the world, unencumbered by the restrictive social patterns of their native land. China was not, however, unique in relying heavily on foreigners for entrepreneurship, trade, and crafts. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain was also heavily dependent on people from other parts of Europe, or from the Islamic world, to fill such occupations, just as Spanish-offshoot societies in Latin America would later be dependent on immigrants from non-Hispanic Europe, Asia, or the Middle East to fill such occupations. A similar pattern of heavy dependence on domestic minorities and on foreigners in many economic activities was characteristic of the Ottoman Empire, as well as many countries in Southeast Asia and parts of Africa.

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Although the Portuguese inhabited and ruled Brazil for hundreds of years, they did little to develop a modern economy there, before the arrival of other European immigrants. In early nineteenth-century Brazil, even such basic items as doors, flour, salt, sugar, furniture, and books were imported. German, Italian, and other immigrants created much of the industry of the country, beginning in the late nineteenth century, and their descendants continued dominant in these industries even in the middle of the twentieth century. During the period from the late nineteenth century until the end of World War II, importers in Sao Paulo were almost invariably immigrants. This was not due to a lack of wealthy Portuguese Brazilians. But those members of the Brazilian plantation-owning elite families who pursued nonagricultural careers tended to go into the professions, rather than into commerce or industry. As late as 1913, only 2 Brazilian-owned firms ranked among the top 15 exporters in the port city of Santos.

Argentina, like Brazil, was profoundly changed by the changing composition of its people, brought on by immigration that was massive, relative to its existing population size. As of 1914, immigrants constituted 30 percent of the total Argentine population—about twice as high as the highest proportions ever reached in the United States during the peak of its mass immigration era. The effect of the immigrants on the Argentine economy was far more than demographic, however. Little economic activity flourished in Argentina, except for cattle raising, before the era of large-scale immigration began. Both industry and agriculture in Argentina were created by immigrants.

In 1873, Germans in Buenos Aires owned 43 import-export businesses, 45 retail establishments, and about 100 artisan craft shops. Italians, who have been the most numerous among Argentina's immigrants—in some years more than half—have been credited with turning the Argentine Pampa into productive agricultural land, both as farmers and as farm laborers. The Italians' economic role was also large in the city, where their skills, muscle, and savings were major factors in the development of many trades. As of 1895, foreigners constituted about three-fifths of Argentina's industrial workers and about four-fifths of the owners of industrial enterprises. As late as the 1920s, it was said of Argentina that "if you want a shoe soled, a lock or kettle mended, a bookcase made, a book bound or a pamphlet printed, a roll of film developed or a camera repaired, you will go to an immigrant or the son of an immigrant." In the middle of the twentieth century, more than three-fourths of all Argentine generals, admirals, and bishops—over a 25-year period—were either immigrants or (mostly) the sons of immigrants.

In Mexico, in the early twentieth century, Yucatan went from being one of the poorest provinces in the country to being one of its most prosperous, as a result of industrial development led by immigrants, who constituted less than one percent of the province's population. In Peru, most of the manufacturing firms not controlled by foreigners were controlled by immigrant families. In Chile, German immigrant farmers turned a virtually barren wilderness into one of the agricultural showplaces of South America, and Germans also established such industrial enterprises as tanneries, saw mills, soap factories, flour mills, distilleries, shoe factories, and shipyards. Immigrants played such a large role in the industrialization of Chile that they and their children still owned three-quarters of the industrial enterprises in Santiago in the second half of the twentieth century.

Seldom were these immigrants simply prosperous foreigners who brought their wealth with them. On the contrary, most of those who became middle class in Argentina were working class in origin. The pioneering German farmers in Brazil and Paraguay were typically of peasant origins, and faced harrowing experiences in their early years, when it was a struggle merely to survive. Italian farm laborers were initially poverty-stricken and brutally treated. To an even greater degree, so were the Chinese and Japanese indentured laborers brought into Peru, though their descendants went on to become prominent among Peruvian retail store owners. What all those groups brought was not wealth but the ability to create wealth—whether on a modest scale or a grand scale, whether through specific skills or just hard work. They did not share the Spanish and Portuguese settlers' disdain for manual labor, or for commerce and industry, or for thrift.

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18 July 2024