1. Invoking "culture" is an unexplanatory stopping point. If you're going to explain some behavior in terms of culture, you need to say something about why the culture is that way.
2. When you do that further explanation of why "culture" is the way it is, what you do ends up looking like economics, price theory, etc.
I definitely agree with 1, but 2 strikes me as a bit strong. Take stuff like food, or art. Why do Indians like spicier food than Swedes? Or why does Indian music use different scales from Western music?
While I don't think "culture" is a satisfying explanation here, I also suspect that when you dig deeper, the answers won't look all that much like econ/price theory. Sure, maybe a bit--maybe spicy peppers were easier to grow in India--but that still doesnt tell you why Indian immigrants to the US eat spicier food than their American born neighbors. My guess is that the best cases for broadly cultural explanations are things where there's just a ton of contingency/path dependence, which strikes me as a plausible thing to think about paradigmstically "cultural" fields like art.
Thank you for that. I'm less sure about the art differences, your point is strong there I think, but food may be a clearer case for prices, given the relative price differences. Spices are pretty cheap now, and taste preferences across countries are converging over time if Michael Krondl is correct in The Taste of Conquest. Tastes in Sweden are probably more Indian than 50 years ago. Of course, the short run can last a long time before we reach a new equilibrium.
A good case against my position is relative inelasticities. Culture may explain why I'd be more likely to cut curry from my diet if the price doubled than my Indian neighbors would. That difference in demand elasticity is real, but it's still a response to price. Culture shifts the slope of the curve.
But then focus on people with different backgrounds living in the same society. The hard "no culture" view would say they're no longer in different climates, they no longer face different tradeoffs, so no reason why they should eat differently. But that's not what we expect. Rather, we expect people to keep eating the sort of food they grew up with. That's the kind of role for culture I'm talking about.
I remember visiting the statistical office in Japan and being shown a graph of steep fertility decline beginning in the 1950s. I asked if that is when ‘the pill’ came to Japan. Not so…. "The Japanese government legalized abortion in 1948 but did not approve the pill until 1999." (Abortion before Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction in Postwar Japan, by Tiana Norgren, http://press.princeton.edu/titles/ 7180.html)
I don't see how the fact that UN diplomats from corrupt countries violated parking rules more when enforcement was lax, but not when enforcement was strict, disproves the culture explanation.
Surely what this shows is that culture does determine behaviour but this can be overridden by strict rule enforcement. Which is why Dubai can have mass, unselective immigration which does not increase crime, but Sweden can't.
Amazing piece, very well articulated. I buy your claim that we should search for non-cultural indicators _before_ ascribing things to culture per se.
However, in the space of all accurate models describing social behavior, shouldn't we expect cultural practices to play a role _even if_ said cultural practice has its own, non-cultural cause?
That is, suppose something like "level of trust" in a cultural has a non-cultural explanation (e.g., large number of hostile neighboring countries). Even if we know the original cause for the cultural trait (level of trust), that cultural trait itself should then go on to play a role in various other outcomes, like willingness to cooperate in business ventures.
Is your core thesis that we should only be building models that look like:
Thank you for writing this. It was both helpful and enjoyable.
I'm spitballing this before running so I apologize in advance for stumbling over my words. I thought culture was accepted as a living dynamic wave that represents the aggregate of the learned preferences / nostalgic experiences of the individuals within a group? The "why" they gained their preferences may differ or change (institutions, incentives, genetics, economics, changes in the environment, someone popular doing something that drew attraction or sympathy), but that their preferences were always caused by something and subject to change was a given, the question was explaining why.
Like, I thought culture was a description of a state of being, not a thing. Am I conceptualizing this correctly?
What is the economic explanation for why US Americans, and indeed Americans further south (but not so much north in Canada) kill each other at several times the rate in most other parts of the world? I have lazily ascribed to a long term historical preference for the individual sorting out its problems tied to a high level sensitivity to perceived slights derived from peoples escaping the heirarchic rules and requirements of Europe.
One of the weirder but real explanations is that the south does worse on just about every metric, across all demographics, and… it’s just heat and humidity.
High heat (especially without AC) lowers at-the-moment cognitive ability, increases disease rates, slows verbal ability, forces people outside more depending on housing quality, etc..
The literature on how large an impact AC makes on productivity and cognitive processing is wild.
Slave societies were just more structurally violent. The whole point of the society is to coerce a section of it (sometimes the majority) into doing free labour and being treated like property.
This is a pretty simplistic article that shows little awareness of actual good work that incorporates culture. But his target seems to be "a lazy pattern I see in social science and policy commentary on Substack and X" as stated early on in the article. So he's not looking at actual good work on culture. In fact, most lefty social scientists avoid culture like the plague, looking for "structural" causes like discrimination or capitalist forces. Libertarians, like this Cato Institute author, often don't like culture either because they stick to a rather simplistic model of economist behavior, which has well-known weaknesses. This author thinks institutions are better causal factors than cultural factors. But where do institutions come from? A long historical process, that yes, involves culture. The author is right that people are often lazy about fingering culture (at least on substack and X, where he looks). But take a look at people like Joseph Henrich, whose Harvard Lab fingers precise cultural mechanisms that have created the "great divergence" between the West and the rest. There are also cultural sociologists who do good work on culture (though many sociologists avoid culture out of political reason). I go could on here ad nauseum, but please dig into the literature.
Thank you! I find especially the low trust arguments maddening, because for trust to exist, people first should be trustworthy! But that is, in itself, a matter of incentives. If the supply of plumbers is so low that they don't care about getting good references, then yes they will be scammy. If it is so high that they actually compete, then don't.
Isn’t the choice to see family planning decisions in economics terms is culture in itself? It is a very western way of seeing things because human effort is measured in dollars more easily in western societies. Here you can even hire a surrogate mother, which theoretically can be analyzed as a fair value measure of childbirth without family attachments. In some societies it is a taboo. In some societies having a kid is a requirement even if you have nothing. Economic decisions are not made the way westerners think across many societies. Where is that piece on African funerals that has been circulating recently?
One niche area that is poorly served by the culture-based explanation is military science- you can often find different "ways of war" ostensibly linked to irreducible cultural factors. I think the poster child for this is the "Why Arabs Lose Wars" essay and of course the interminable stream of "PLA reads Sun Tzu because of their Chinese-ness."
Distinguish two claims:
1. Invoking "culture" is an unexplanatory stopping point. If you're going to explain some behavior in terms of culture, you need to say something about why the culture is that way.
2. When you do that further explanation of why "culture" is the way it is, what you do ends up looking like economics, price theory, etc.
I definitely agree with 1, but 2 strikes me as a bit strong. Take stuff like food, or art. Why do Indians like spicier food than Swedes? Or why does Indian music use different scales from Western music?
While I don't think "culture" is a satisfying explanation here, I also suspect that when you dig deeper, the answers won't look all that much like econ/price theory. Sure, maybe a bit--maybe spicy peppers were easier to grow in India--but that still doesnt tell you why Indian immigrants to the US eat spicier food than their American born neighbors. My guess is that the best cases for broadly cultural explanations are things where there's just a ton of contingency/path dependence, which strikes me as a plausible thing to think about paradigmstically "cultural" fields like art.
Thank you for that. I'm less sure about the art differences, your point is strong there I think, but food may be a clearer case for prices, given the relative price differences. Spices are pretty cheap now, and taste preferences across countries are converging over time if Michael Krondl is correct in The Taste of Conquest. Tastes in Sweden are probably more Indian than 50 years ago. Of course, the short run can last a long time before we reach a new equilibrium.
A good case against my position is relative inelasticities. Culture may explain why I'd be more likely to cut curry from my diet if the price doubled than my Indian neighbors would. That difference in demand elasticity is real, but it's still a response to price. Culture shifts the slope of the curve.
Spices have the ability to inhibit and kill bacteria. Their use in cooking correlates to warmer climates where food spoils faster.
Billing J, Sherman PW. Antimicrobial functions of spices: why some like it hot. Q Rev Biol. 1998 Mar;73(1):3-49. doi: 10.1086/420058. PMID: 9586227.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9586227/
But then focus on people with different backgrounds living in the same society. The hard "no culture" view would say they're no longer in different climates, they no longer face different tradeoffs, so no reason why they should eat differently. But that's not what we expect. Rather, we expect people to keep eating the sort of food they grew up with. That's the kind of role for culture I'm talking about.
I remember visiting the statistical office in Japan and being shown a graph of steep fertility decline beginning in the 1950s. I asked if that is when ‘the pill’ came to Japan. Not so…. "The Japanese government legalized abortion in 1948 but did not approve the pill until 1999." (Abortion before Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction in Postwar Japan, by Tiana Norgren, http://press.princeton.edu/titles/ 7180.html)
@adultingprof writes about the introduction of the pill from a more personal perspective here: https://raffigrinberg.substack.com/p/the-most-dangerous-invention-ever
Yep. Lazy diagnosis.
I don't see how the fact that UN diplomats from corrupt countries violated parking rules more when enforcement was lax, but not when enforcement was strict, disproves the culture explanation.
Surely what this shows is that culture does determine behaviour but this can be overridden by strict rule enforcement. Which is why Dubai can have mass, unselective immigration which does not increase crime, but Sweden can't.
Amazing piece, very well articulated. I buy your claim that we should search for non-cultural indicators _before_ ascribing things to culture per se.
However, in the space of all accurate models describing social behavior, shouldn't we expect cultural practices to play a role _even if_ said cultural practice has its own, non-cultural cause?
That is, suppose something like "level of trust" in a cultural has a non-cultural explanation (e.g., large number of hostile neighboring countries). Even if we know the original cause for the cultural trait (level of trust), that cultural trait itself should then go on to play a role in various other outcomes, like willingness to cooperate in business ventures.
Is your core thesis that we should only be building models that look like:
[non-cultural variable] -> [outcome]
or is it still ok to build models that look like:
[non-cultural variable] -> [cultural trait] -> [outcome]
?
Thank you for writing this. It was both helpful and enjoyable.
I'm spitballing this before running so I apologize in advance for stumbling over my words. I thought culture was accepted as a living dynamic wave that represents the aggregate of the learned preferences / nostalgic experiences of the individuals within a group? The "why" they gained their preferences may differ or change (institutions, incentives, genetics, economics, changes in the environment, someone popular doing something that drew attraction or sympathy), but that their preferences were always caused by something and subject to change was a given, the question was explaining why.
Like, I thought culture was a description of a state of being, not a thing. Am I conceptualizing this correctly?
What is the economic explanation for why US Americans, and indeed Americans further south (but not so much north in Canada) kill each other at several times the rate in most other parts of the world? I have lazily ascribed to a long term historical preference for the individual sorting out its problems tied to a high level sensitivity to perceived slights derived from peoples escaping the heirarchic rules and requirements of Europe.
One of the weirder but real explanations is that the south does worse on just about every metric, across all demographics, and… it’s just heat and humidity.
High heat (especially without AC) lowers at-the-moment cognitive ability, increases disease rates, slows verbal ability, forces people outside more depending on housing quality, etc..
The literature on how large an impact AC makes on productivity and cognitive processing is wild.
Slave societies were just more structurally violent. The whole point of the society is to coerce a section of it (sometimes the majority) into doing free labour and being treated like property.
The penalties tend to be much harsher than in other developed nations.
Sometimes it's over territory or resources but mostly not.
Availability of weapons?
US retains a death penalty; few other comparator countries do.
Longer jail sentences too. True life terms are rare here in the UK.
This is a pretty simplistic article that shows little awareness of actual good work that incorporates culture. But his target seems to be "a lazy pattern I see in social science and policy commentary on Substack and X" as stated early on in the article. So he's not looking at actual good work on culture. In fact, most lefty social scientists avoid culture like the plague, looking for "structural" causes like discrimination or capitalist forces. Libertarians, like this Cato Institute author, often don't like culture either because they stick to a rather simplistic model of economist behavior, which has well-known weaknesses. This author thinks institutions are better causal factors than cultural factors. But where do institutions come from? A long historical process, that yes, involves culture. The author is right that people are often lazy about fingering culture (at least on substack and X, where he looks). But take a look at people like Joseph Henrich, whose Harvard Lab fingers precise cultural mechanisms that have created the "great divergence" between the West and the rest. There are also cultural sociologists who do good work on culture (though many sociologists avoid culture out of political reason). I go could on here ad nauseum, but please dig into the literature.
Thank you! I find especially the low trust arguments maddening, because for trust to exist, people first should be trustworthy! But that is, in itself, a matter of incentives. If the supply of plumbers is so low that they don't care about getting good references, then yes they will be scammy. If it is so high that they actually compete, then don't.
Isn’t the choice to see family planning decisions in economics terms is culture in itself? It is a very western way of seeing things because human effort is measured in dollars more easily in western societies. Here you can even hire a surrogate mother, which theoretically can be analyzed as a fair value measure of childbirth without family attachments. In some societies it is a taboo. In some societies having a kid is a requirement even if you have nothing. Economic decisions are not made the way westerners think across many societies. Where is that piece on African funerals that has been circulating recently?
One niche area that is poorly served by the culture-based explanation is military science- you can often find different "ways of war" ostensibly linked to irreducible cultural factors. I think the poster child for this is the "Why Arabs Lose Wars" essay and of course the interminable stream of "PLA reads Sun Tzu because of their Chinese-ness."
So, what's your proposal to increase fertility?