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Economics

民族的财富和文化

Sep 28, 2007 Gregory Clark

就像共产党政权曾经把卡尔·马克思奉为神明一样，现代经济学家已经把亚当·斯密（Adam Smith）尊为先知。他们总结斯密的核心原则——即无论在何种文化条件下，好的激励机制就会产生好的结果—— 这已经成了经济学的信条。但这种观点是对历史的误解（也许也是对斯密本意的误解）。

带来现代经济发展的不是好的激励机制，而是在英格兰和苏格兰这样的社会中创造新的经济文化。要想让贫困社会快速发展，我们就不仅要改变它们的制度和相应的激励机制，更要改变它们的文化。这就要让更多社会民众了解经济发达国家的生活。

尽管几乎所有的经济学家都相信激励机制的重要作用，世界历史的三大特征显示出文化的主导作用。

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 3 Comments on this article

Eli Levine Apr 8, 2014

I agree with the premise that you need to define wealth effectively and that you should have a need or desire to improve your material wealth if you're ever going to succeed on the economic level.

But, how are you going to change cultures that do not budge easily, especially when brought on by external and alien peoples, and, so what if some people define wealth differently or take a different attitude towards business? After all, Western civilization is about to collapse under its current economic logic and culture that puts the false need of money and financial capital over the goods and services that meet human needs and wants. What good is financial wealth or profit if it's going to kill you or ruin your society through its production? Where is the limit to how much wealth (financial and material) that any given individual should be accepted and tolerated to have (especially if the methods they use to get that wealth is eroding their position within society and the environment)?

Perhaps it is we who should be looking at our own culture for changes rather than making judgements about other people's cultures?

What a concept that Western culture has never really appreciated or realized!
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Mounik Lahiri Apr 7, 2014

Unfortunately, contrary to what the author seems to suggest, culture and institutional incentives are not really disjointed, mutually exclusive or causally disconnected concepts. Very often good institutional incentives or structural aspects of behaviour impact cultures. That is not to say that cultures don't matter or that they are resistant to institutional changes and progress, but when they are resistant to change, the reason mostly also is structural aspects of historical incentives and psychological reactions to it over a long period of time. Therefore to improve situations, whether to use institutional incentives or to use migrants exposed to a different culture is a false concern, both will have its limited success unless the situation is not perceived more holistically, as one needing intervention on both counts, especially since cultures evolve, perhaps a tad slowly but surely nevertheless to the right incentives.
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Stamatis Kavvadias Aug 19, 2013

Writing this before the global financial crisis, makes sense. Today, the west needs to first fix the broken paradigm of capitalistic society growth, and then try to attract people that would be interested in communicating the western paradigm back to their own countries.

Further, the west needs to, eventually, outreach the appropriation of a fatherly role to the rest of the world, or at least the problematic side of it, trying to make their "proteges" to "change their culture". The west's prototype of perpetual growth and global rules fit to markets and not to societies, which worked for a while, has reached its limits, proving that the west never had the right to think so highly of its approach to progress and wealth. Today, it is obvious that all that wealth was made on the expense of next generations and the planet, i.e., was based on debt, borrowing from the future, and preconditioning the obligation of future generations in perpetually exponential competitiveness! This paradigm is now broken for good.
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