Mitt Romney has explained that his comments abroad were simply truth-telling. “I tend to tell people what I actually believe,” he said. With regard to one much-debated comment — on the cultural differences between Israelis and Palestinians — many agree with him. The Wall Street Journal editorial page and columnists including Marc A. Thiessen and John Podhoretz all applauded. Podhoretz wrote: “Anyone who publicizes his remark is helping Romney win the election.”
“Culture makes all the difference,” Romney said
at a fundraiser in Israel, comparing the country’s economic vitality to
Palestinian poverty. Certainly there is a pedigree for this idea.
Romney cited David Landes,
an economics historian. He could have cited Max Weber, the great German
scholar who first made this claim 100 years ago in his book “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” which argued that Protestant values were the most important fuel for economic progress.
The problem is that Weber singled out two cultures as being
particularly prone to poverty and stagnation, those of China and Japan.
But these have been the world’s fastest-growing large economies over
the past five decades. Over the past two decades, the other powerhouse
has been India, which was also described for years as having a culture
incompatible with economic success — hence the phrase “the Hindu rate of
growth,” to describe the country’s once-moribund state.
China was
stagnant for centuries and then suddenly and seemingly miraculously, in
the 1980s, began to industrialize three times faster than the West.
What changed was not China’s culture, which presumably was the same in
the 1970s as it was in the 1980s. What changed, starting in 1979, were
China’s economic policies.
The same is true for Japan and India.
Had Romney spent more time reading Milton Friedman, he would have
realized that historically the key driver for economic growth has been
the adoption of capitalism and its related institutions and policies
across diverse cultures.
The link between economic policies and
performance can be seen even in the country on which Romney was
lavishing praise. Israel had many admirable traits in its early decades,
but no one would have called it an economic miracle. Its economy was
highly statist. Things changed in the 1990s with market-oriented reforms
— initiated by Benyamin Netanyahu — and sound monetary policies. As a
result, Israel’s economy grew much faster than it had in the 1980s. The
miracle Romney was praising had to do with new policies rather than deep
culture.
Ironically, the argument that culture is central to a
country’s success has been used most frequently by Asian strongmen to
argue that their countries need not adopt Western-style democracy.
Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew
has made this case passionately for decades. It is an odd claim,
because Singapore’s own success would seem to contradict it. It is not
so different from neighboring Malaysia. The crucial difference is that
Singapore had extremely good leadership that pursued good economic
policies with relentless discipline.
Despite all this evidence,
most people still believe that two cultures in particular, African and
Islamic, inhibit economic development. But the two countries that will
next achieve a gross domestic product of $1 trillion are both Muslim
democracies — Turkey and Indonesia. Of the 10 fastest-growing economies
in the world today, seven are African. The world is changing, and
holding on to fixed views of culture means you will miss its changing
dynamics.
When societies or people succeed, we search in their
cultures for seeds of success. Culture being a large grab bag, you can
usually find what you want. We observe the success of Jewish, Lebanese,
Chinese and Indian people in various societies and attribute it to
culture. But it may really stem from the traits of diaspora populations —
small groups of entrepreneurial immigrants forced to live by their wits
in alien cultures. Interestingly, Palestinians have a reputation around
the Middle East for being savvy merchants and traders and have been
successful in the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Culture
is important. It is the shared historical experience of people that is
reflected in institutions and practices. But culture changes. German
culture in 1935 was different from 1955. Europe was once a hotbed of
violent nationalism; today it is postmodern and almost pacifist. The
United States was once an isolationist, agrarian republic with a deep
suspicion of a standing army. Today it has half of the world’s military
power.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan once observed: “The central
conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines
the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can
change culture and save it from itself.” That remains the wisest
statement made about this complicated problem, probably too wise to ever
be uttered in an American political campaign.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fareed-zakaria-capitalism-not-culture-drives-economies/2012/08/01/gJQAKtH9PX_story.html
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