The Culture Crutch

How lazy social scientists and commentators use the c-word to avoid doing their jobs

I bumped into a conservative acquaintance in the green room at Fox News several years ago. He was obsessed with falling fertility. Knowing that I worked on immigration policy, he said that immigrants assimilate too rapidly to America’s “low-fertility culture” and we have to find a way to slow assimilation to boost the birthrate. I disagreed. “They’re not assimilating to America’s low-fertility culture,” I said. “They’re assimilating to high opportunity cost in the United States, which is the reason why they’re here in the first place.” He asked what I’d do to increase fertility if that were the only outcome I cared about. After clarifying that I don’t support this policy, I suggested a new economic policy that would reduce the opportunity cost of having children. Then the producer came out and hustled me on set.

That conversation has stuck with me because it illustrates a lazy pattern I see in social science and policy commentary on Substack and X. Someone observes a behavioral difference between groups or countries. They can’t immediately identify the mechanism. So, they invoke “culture” as an explanation or, even worse, “the culture.” The word lands with a satisfying thud that sounds like an explanation but isn’t one. It is the terminus of inquiry, not the beginning.

In 1977, economists George Stigler and Gary Becker published a paper that should have inoculated all social scientists and commentators against the culture crutch. In “De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum,” they argued that economists should treat tastes as stable and uniform across people, then search for differences in prices, incomes, and constraints to explain behavioral variation:

The difference between these two viewpoints of tastes is fundamental. On the traditional view, an explanation of economic phenomena that reaches a difference in tastes between people or times is the terminus of the argument: the problem is abandoned at this point to whoever studies and explains tastes (psychologists? anthropologists? phrenologists? sociobiologists?). On our preferred interpretation, one never reaches this impasse: the economist continues to search for differences in prices or incomes to explain any differences or changes in behavior.

Stigler and Becker argue that invoking taste differences is the social science version of quitting. It lets you feel like you’ve explained something when you’ve just inserted a placeholder for a real explanation. The economist’s job is to keep looking for the price or incentive that affects behavior. They admitted the search is often long and frustratingly difficult, but that is the work. Do the hard work of identifying the incentives and tradeoffs. You won’t always find a satisfying answer, but whatever you find will make more sense than substituting the word “culture” for an explanation.

The Definitional Problem

Culture is human behavior that is socially learned and transmitted rather than genetically inherited or individually discovered. In Substack and online debates, culture means whatever the person invoking it needs it to mean. Values. Beliefs. Norms. Attitudes. Customs. Work ethic. Family structure. Trust. Time preference. Cuisine. Music. When someone says “culture explains X,” they’re gesturing at a black box the size of human civilization and calling the gesture a theory.

Keep that definition of culture in mind as I explain how unsatisfying using the word “culture” is as an explanation. You notice a spike in unemployment. Curious what could be causing it, you ask your economist friend why unemployment is rising. He says it’s because of “the economy” and then sits back as if he’s explained something when he has done nothing of the sort. That’s how everybody sounds to me when they say that culture explains a behavior or outcome.

Economists Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales acknowledged the problem directly in a 2006 Journal of Economic Perspectives article. The concept of culture as an independent variable in economics, they wrote, is “so broad and the channels through which it can enter the economic discourse so ubiquitous (and vague) that it is difficult to design testable, refutable hypotheses.” They think econometric advances help. They at least see the problem.

David Oks recently asked why Ghanaians and other sub-Saharan Africans spend fortunes burying their dead? “The standard answer to this is that exorbitant funeral spending is ‘part of the local culture,’ and particularly reflective of a ‘reverence toward elders.’ And indeed that is true. But that only begs the question of why it’s part of the culture.” The cultural explanation redescribes the phenomenon and calls the redescription an answer. He doesn’t fall for that trap.

If you’re going to claim that culture has an effect, you should be able to do four things. First, pinpoint exactly what cultural characteristic you mean. Don’t be vague, be specific by describing the type of behavior. Second, prove that cultural behavior actually exists as a measurable trait. Don’t rely on stereotypes, do the hard work. Third, demonstrate that the cultural behavior differs meaningfully across the groups being compared. Wow, that culture likes food a lot. Which culture doesn’t? Fourth, rule out that the real cultural trait isn’t caused by an exogenous economic force like high real estate prices, rising wages, or different institutions that incentivize behavior. Almost nobody who invokes culture does any of these four things. Culture is endogenous to everything. That’s why you have to do the work to isolate it. That’s also why almost nobody bothers.

The fourth step is the hardest because culture is endogenous to everything. It doesn’t exist outside the institutional, economic, and geographic environment that produces it. The corruption norms in Egypt didn’t fall from the sky. They emerged from decades or centuries of weak rule of law, chaos, and institutional dysfunction. Japanese cooperative norms didn’t spring from the soil of Honshu or grow from their bodies like an appendage. Claiming culture causes an outcome without first ruling out that the outcome’s causes also produced the culture is not an explanation. It is circular reasoning with a dedicated vocabulary.

Not caused by culture.

The cleanest test is the divided-country natural experiment. North Korea and South Korea share a language, ethnicity, history, and culture up to 1945. One is among the richest countries on earth, the other among the poorest. East and West Germany diverged dramatically under different institutions and converged after reunification. Mainland China stagnated under Mao while Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong prospered, all four sharing Chinese culture. In every case, the culture was identical on both sides of the border. The incentives, shaped by the institutions, are what changed. The outcome followed the institution, not the culture. Untangling causality is difficult, sometimes impossible, but that’s no reason to embrace a false explanation like “the culture made them do it.”

At its root, the culture discourse is anti-intellectual. Culture is a faux explanation for social behavior and outcomes that have real explanations. Think harder. Use AI to search the literature if you have to because other researchers have probably already written about the issue you claim is just caused by culture. The cultural explanation is the one you reach for when you’ve decided the search isn’t worth your time. Better to remain quiet if culture is the only explanation you’ve got. Here are some examples.

Fertility Is Not Cultural

Those who want to reverse falling fertility diagnose a cultural disease of secularism, individualism, feminism, and loss of traditional family values. They prescribe cultural medicine that is consistent with their preexisting policy positions, like pronatalist cultural messaging, traditional values campaigns, and more religion. The economic explanation for falling fertility is simpler: Opportunity cost. Women’s wages rose relative to men’s. Entertainment options multiplied. Children became more expensive relative to doomscrolling, flights, restaurants, streaming services, career advancement, sleep, and every other fun activity available to modern couples. The DINK couples on TikTok who occasionally go viral aren’t expressing a cultural stance. They’re reporting where they are in a downward-sloping demand curve.

You don’t need to assume preferences changed. The shadow price of children rose. Immigrants don’t assimilate to a low-fertility culture as my friend thought, they assimilate to high opportunity costs. If it were cultural, pronatalist campaigns would work. They don’t. The policy that works targets prices. The policy that fails targets culture.

Corruption Is Not That Cultural

Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel’s famous 2007 paper found that UN diplomats from corrupt countries accumulated far more parking violations than those from less corrupt countries in New York City when diplomatic immunity meant no enforcement. Their paper was widely cited as proof that a culture of corruption persists across institutional environments, because what else could explain variation like that? But when New York started towing and seizing plates in 2002, violations collapsed by 98 to 99 percent across every nationality. Rutar found that even the residual correlation was fragile with alternative corruption measures, turning non-significant. That’s overwhelmingly just responsiveness to prices. Turns out prices and incentives explained it. Some small differences remained, but nothing to write home about.

Trust Doesn’t Explain Economic Development

Trust is the respectable face of culture-explains-development in economics. The trust literature claims that societies where more people answer “yes” to the survey question “Can most people be trusted?” grow richer, and that this cultural trait causally drives economic development. Andrew Forrester and I identified five problems with this literature: vague definitions, endogeneity, sample bias, unspecified macro models, and a weak relationship between survey trust and actual trusting behavior. We tested whether trust predicts regional U.S. development across nine regions over 45 years and found that it didn’t. If trust doesn’t survive a within-country test, the cross-country correlation likely reflects the institutions that produce both trust and growth.

Japanese Trains Are Not Cultural

Japanese trains are punctual and heavily used. The standard explanation is culture, but the real explanation is policy and incentives. Private, vertically integrated railway companies own real estate, retail, and hospitals along their lines. Combined with high population density, liberal zoning, privatized parking (23 spaces per hectare in Tokyo versus 263 in Los Angeles), toll-funded motorways, and other legal differences, there is nothing cultural to explain Japan’s use of trains.

Funerals and the Kinship Tax

David Oks identified a fascinating puzzle. A modest funeral in Ghana costs $5,000 in a country where the median income is $1,500. A befitting one runs $15,000 to $20,000. And this is common in sub-Saharan Africa. Oks writes:

The standard answer to this is that exorbitant funeral spending is “part of the local culture,” and particularly reflective of a “reverence toward elders.” And indeed that is true. But that only begs the question of why it’s part of the culture—in fact, why it’s part of so many distinct cultures across very different parts of Africa. Why is heavy funeral spending such a pronounced part of life? And if this is merely a reflection of “reverence toward elders,” why do so many elderly Africans complain that far more attention is given to their funeral than to caring for them while they’re alive?

Oks asks the right questions and identifies some real explanations based on incentives created by kinship-based networks. Kinship networks are mutual aid societies you’re born into and can’t leave. Members claim everything above subsistence. Individual wealth threatens the network because a rich member can defect, so the funeral is ritualistic wealth destruction, a public signal of loyalty. The expense is the point. As Oks puts it, “Social modernity, in the end, is really about not having to do what your family tells you to do—marrying whom you want, taking the job you want, and spending your earnings the way you want.” The funeral isn’t a cultural mystery, it’s the result of bad incentives.

The Graveyard of Famous Cultural Explanations

Max Weber’s Protestant ethic is the most famous cultural explanation in social science. Protestantism supposedly instilled a psychological orientation toward capital accumulation that launched modern capitalism. Economist Davide Cantoni tested this with a natural experiment using the 1555 Peace of Augsburg, which assigned Protestantism or Catholicism to German cities based on their ruler’s religion. Protestant regions didn’t develop faster.

Economists Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann identified the actual mechanism that fooled Weber and others into thinking that Protestantism increased economic development. Luther promoted universal literacy so Christians could read the Bible. The economic advantage was human capital, not theology, at least in Prussia. And even the Prussian result is challenged by Kersting and coauthors, who showed that the apparent gap in Prussia disappears once you control for ethnicity. Weber confused a literacy program encouraged by a new religious belief chosen by local rulers that affected some Germans for an exogenous cultural independent variable. Tibor Rutar summarizes it well.

Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel argued that self-expression values, progressive cultural attitudes produced by economic development, cause democratization. But 19th-century Britain, France, and Switzerland didn’t have progressive mass values when they democratized. Once you control for endogeneity, self-expression values don’t predict democratic transitions. The culture follows the institution, not the reverse.

Joel Mokyr won the Nobel Prize for work on the prerequisites for sustained technological progress, partly for arguing that the European Enlightenment’s culture of growth explains the Industrial Revolution. If the culture of growth was Europe-wide, why did only England break out first? Institutions and maybe relative price differences. Property rights, patent law, and parliamentary constraints on the crown. The culture was common, but the institutions were particular. But couldn’t cultural characteristics help modify or select the institutions? Yes!

The dominant ideology thesis holds that workers accept capitalism because ruling-class ideology programs them to. Tibor Rutar rightly calls this a conspiracy theory and it’s easy to see why. Workers don’t stay quiet because of cultural hegemony, but because collective action is costly and the free-rider problem is real. Material incentives explain mysterious actions, not cultural programming.

Why Culture Persists as an Explanation

If a country is poor because of its culture, nobody has to examine the bad incentives facing members of that society. Intellectual laziness explains the rest. Finding the price, the constraint, the institutional mechanism that creates an incentive is hard, but invoking culture as if it’s a magical exogenous decider lets you stop searching. Cultural explanations are cheap to produce, requiring only anecdotes rather than data, prices, or evidence. It feels like an answer because it has the grammatical structure of one. “Japanese people ride trains because of their culture” masquerades as an explanation, but it’s just a tautology.

Culture is endogenous to everything. Claiming culture causes an outcome without first ruling out that the outcome’s causes also produced the culture is circular reasoning. Every cultural explanation must first survive a price, incentive, and institutional audit. Few of them do, but those that do are extraordinary findings, which is perhaps another explanation why so many claim it. Nobody would let economists get away with explaining a recession of high unemployment with the explanation, “It’s the economy.” We shouldn’t let others get away with the equally lazy non-explanation of “it’s the culture.”

These May Be Minor Concessions

The most interesting cases are the ones where culture might genuinely be an exogenous explanatory variable. Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon found that African regions hit hardest by the slave trade still show lower trust centuries later. But the slave trade targeted regions that were already politically fragmented and poor. Poor places were enslaved, so disentangling whether slavery made them poor or poverty made them enslaved is exactly the endogeneity problem this piece is about. The slave trade didn’t just change attitudes. It destroyed political institutions, displaced populations, and created economies designed for extraction. Nunn’s cultural residual may be persistent institutional damage wearing a cultural mask.

The Doctrine of First Effective Settlement holds that the institutions created by a country’s earliest settlers disproportionately shape future institutional change and affect long-run economic development. That sounds like it’s cultural, maybe. I don’t dismiss these findings, but endogeneity haunts every one of them. If someone eventually establishes that culture operates independently of the institutional environment it developed inside, that will be among the most important findings in social science. Until then, we don’t know whether we’re measuring culture or institutional scar tissue. Douglass North wrote that culture is just the partial solution to the frequently encountered problems of the past, like how a taboo against pre-marital sex evolved to prevent paternity disputes and then was rapidly undermined by birth control.

Culture can be more than just another endogenous variable. People have values. Norms vary. Trust differs across populations and those differences are real even if they don’t explain different income levels. Sometimes cultural differences are consequential, especially when the stakes are low. My position is a methodological commitment, not a metaphysical claim. Assuming stable tastes and searching for price-and-constraint explanations produces better social science than assuming taste differences and stopping there. The question is how often, how much, and whether the analyst did the work to rule out everything else first.

The culture-as-explanation discourse is largely anti-intellectual. These are faux explanations for social behavior and outcomes that have real explanations. Think harder. Read the literature on a topic yourself or ask AI to search for you. Other researchers have probably already written about the issue you claim is just caused by culture. Before you write the word “culture” in a causal sentence, search for the price. Search for the institution. Investigate the incentives. Search for the constraints. If you exhaust those and culture is still standing, then maybe you’ve found something. But you probably just didn’t look hard enough.