Economics

Bohatství a kultura národů

Sep 28, 2007 Gregory Clark

Moderní ekonomové udělali z Adama Smitha proroka, stejně jako komunistické režimy kdysi zbožštily Karla Marxe. Ústřední princip, který Smithovi přisuzují – totiž že dobré podněty bez ohledu na kulturu přinášejí dobré výsledky – se stal velkým ekonomickým přikázáním. Přesto je tento názor pomýlenou interpretací dějin (a pravděpodobně i pomýleným výkladem Smitha).

Novodobý růst nevzešel z lepších podnětů, nýbrž z vytvoření nové ekonomické kultury ve společnostech, jako byla anglická a skotská. Abychom přiměli chudé společnosti k růstu, potřebujeme změnit nejen jejich instituce a s nimi spojené podněty, ale i jejich kulturu, což vyžaduje vystavit více lidí v těchto společnostech životu v pokročilých ekonomikách.

Navzdory téměř všeobecné víře ekonomů v prvotní roli podnětů existují tři charakteristiky světových dějin, které demonstrují převládající roli kultury.

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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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