Almost half of the world's population lives on less than two dollars a day. As the national and global gaps between the rich and poor expand, some scholars are questioning the role culture plays in economic and social development.
This week I spoke with Lawrence Harrison, the director of the Cultural Change Institute at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Harrison has written extensively about global development; he led the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) missions in the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Haiti and Nicaragua for almost 20 years.
Jamie Bologna: How come some societies flourish and others do not?
Lawrence Harrison: There are a lot of factors that can go into this very complicated equation, but the one factor that I have concluded is perhaps the most important is culture. When I say culture, I mean cultural values, beliefs and attitudes. ...
I [have directed] USAID programs in five Latin American countries. I started with the assumption that Latin America was in trouble because we had neglected it, which was the prevailing view of the Kennedy people.
I had subscribed to the idea that Latin America was poor only because we exploited it. But after I got in the field and started living in the Latin American reality, I came to the conclusion that the principal obstacle to Latin American progress was a culture that discourages entrepreneurship.
JB: Is global poverty here to stay?
LH: No, because culture changes; it isn't in the genes. There [have been] several economic miracles in the last 40 years.
The best-known ones are in East Asia, at least in Taiwan, Hong Kong and now China itself. [These were] preceded, of course, in the 19th century by Japan, which has also been profoundly influenced by Confucian values, which in most respects are highly progressive. We've had the transformation in Spain and Portugal, Ireland, the province of Quebec.
[But] what we've had is a lot of disappointment and frustration in the cases of Africa and Latin America, excluding Chile. I believe that cultural [obstacles] to progress are importantly involved in the explanation of why the frustration and disappointment is so prominent.
JB: What is it about the cultures of countries that flourish?
LH: If we're focused on the economic side of it, there are several cultural factors that are highly developed in some societies, particularly Protestant societies, Confucian societies, Jewish societies and others. [In these societies], work is a good thing, [and] they emphasize education and saving. Those values work in different geographic places like Korea, Israel, Spain or Quebec.
JB: Do impoverished countries need to accomplish cultural and economic development by themselves or can this progress be brought in from the outside?
LH: It can't be brought to them. There has to be an internal consensus that the traditional values, or at least some of them, are getting in the way of what the society wants to achieve. Once that consensus is reached then it becomes possible for the external sources of aid to focus on ways of promoting [change].
JB: Can countries still maintain their traditional cultures while they move towards development?
LH: They've got to change some of the elements of their culture. A good example of this is Turkey. After the First World War, Turkey was on its last legs; it was really just the remnants of the Ottoman Empire that had been devastated by the war.
It almost was absorbed by Greece after the war. Through the forward military leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Turks were able to defend themselves and consolidate their country.
What followed was a cultural revolution lead by Mustafa Kemal that involved the strong suppression of most of the elements of Islam, the secularization of society, a shift from Arabic to the Turkish language, from the Arabic alphabet to the Latin alphabet.
It was really a monumental example of cultural revolution - one that seems to have worked not entirely, but Turkey is today an enigma [in] the Islamic world, [largely] because of Ataturk's reforms.
JB: Is something like fundamentalist Islam essentially against the type of development we are discussing?
LH: In [Fletcher's] Culture Matters Research Project we look at a series of performance indicators in 117 countries that are grouped by predominant religion. The performance of the Islamic countries is very poor, at least when compared to the Confucian countries and the Protestant countries of Western Europe, the United States, Australia and so forth.
There's a whole range of reasons. The most obvious part of it is reflected in the [failure to adequately educate] women in most Islamic countries. It's also in the very, very strong indisposition to democratic political institutions, [and] low levels of creativity [and] entrepreneurship.
And this is in striking contrast to what Islam was a thousand years ago, when it was the beacon and the lighthouse of progress for the rest of the world. There are a number of prominent Muslims calling for reform, something along the lines of the reformation of Christianity that took place in the 15th century.
