Alex Nowrasteh's The Culture Crutch (Laissez-Faire, Laissez-Passer w/ Alex Nowrasteh & David Bier Substack) felt important enough to pass along.
Culture and the problem defined:
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.
I do not claim to be well read in economics, so this problem is new to me. However, it makes me wonder about the other social sciences.
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.
I never did anything with my BS in Political Science besides as a springboard to law school. What sticks in my head is more than methods than substance. Maybe anthropology avoids the problem outlined above by keeping cultures sealed off from one another.
But what of Political Science? It might be saved by its reliance on surveys and empirical data, right? Supposedly, data fuels Economics.
Sociology becomes problematic to me for what it extracts from data is related to culture.
I think of Economics as a form of history - it looks backward and tries to project forward. Economics' reliance on numbers seemed to put its ability to project forward on a more stable foundation than history. However, history has for a long time recognized that human behavior has its consistencies but that the expression of human nature escapes predictability.
Not I can let History off the hook here. I recall reading about the German idea of Kultur. Not that I can recall enough to give a detailed explanation; apart from that, it was a generalized explanation. Perhaps Economics imported the concept without understanding what they were doing.
Bottom line, generalized explanations do not really explain everything; we need to be skeptical of culture as explaining everything.
sch 4/27
