How a Country’s Culture Drives Its Development

For many people, culture is typically something that sets a country apart, such as its food, dress, architecture, and traditions. But according to Professor Jean-Paul Faguet, Co-Convenor on the Economic and Political Development in Developing Countries online certificate course from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), culture can be so much more than that. It can also be a powerful driver of development.

Transcript

Certain beliefs and values arise in different places over time and these give certain populations economic advantages that, in turn, explain differences in the wealth of nations.

Some of these beliefs and ideas are non-verifiable, like punishments or rewards follow death; heaven perhaps, or not heaven. We’ll never know because people die and they can’t come back and tell us, so it’s just a belief.

Other ideas are verifiable and false, like racist ideas or antisemitism, about how certain groups of people are intrinsically better or more or less valued. Other ideas are self-fulfilling. The belief that your neighbours won’t cooperate in any collective action leads you not to cooperate either, in, for example, building a park for children for a neighbourhood or cleaning the streets or a neighbourhood safety watch.

You might do it individually and your neighbour might be willing to do it individually, but the belief of each of you that the other won’t, leaves everyone not to do it, and so it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. When such ideas and beliefs are highly pervasive and persistent in a group of people they’re called culture.

A contribution by David Landes in 1998, who argues that some people and some countries are just better than others because their habits are better attuned to hard work, thrift, double-entry bookkeeping and timeliness.

Such people are also rational, meaning they’re non-superstitious and open-minded, meaning they’re not given to bigotry, population expulsions, for example, of Jews or Muslims at various points in the last few hundred years, et cetera.

And so they’re more given over to the sorts of behaviours that tend to lead to more investment and to capitalist growth than other regions and other countries that don’t have those beliefs and those habits.

Some 800 years ago or more, certain Italian communities in the north developed horizontal social bonds amongst urban free men. While, in the deep south, vertical relations of dependency predominated between patrons and peasants. The horizontal bonds led to trust and cooperation, which then led to social structures to solve collective action problems and, hence, drive forward development and economic growth.

In the south, meanwhile, vertical bonds between lords and peasants led to dependency, instead of trust and cooperation, and, hence, institutional forums to solve collective action problems never emerged, and so the region stayed poor and remains poor to this day.

So, let me leave you with this thought: if it’s true that culture, values, and beliefs are intimately linked to development, as drivers of development, then what do we do?

How do we promote development amongst countries and peoples that have, in effect, the wrong beliefs and the wrong cultures? Who is going to change those beliefs? How do you do that? And are we right as outsiders, as Westerners or as development professionals, to change what somebody believes, to change another people’s culture in order to get some sort of development effect?