Michele Wucker, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York City, is the author of Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola. She has written extensively on Latin American economic issues.

A review of Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress Edited by Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington Basic Books, 348 pages, $35

Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress

In the early 1960s, the economies of South Korea and Ghana both relied on primary exports; they were virtually the same size and received the same amount of aid. Over the nearly 40 years since, South Korea has industrialized itself to become the world's 14th-largest economy. Its per-capita gross national product is now 15 times that of Ghana.

What explains this difference? "In short, cultures count," is the explanation Samuel P. Huntington offers in his foreword to Culture Matters, a collection of essays on the relationship between economic development and cultural influences. The book takes a considerable amount of effort to plow through, but is well worth it -- despite its frequent swings from insightful territory into bizarre logic.

Huntington, the godfather of the realist school of political science, attributes South Korea's success to "thrift, investment, hard work, education, organization, and discipline." Ghanaians, by his account, had "different values." Odd, doesn't it seem, that this facile leap does not mention North Korea and the role of "culture" in its differences from South Korea?

Huntington defines culture as the values, attitudes, beliefs, orientations and underlying assumptions prevalent among people in society. This definition is so broad that it confounds this book's central line of inquiry: How do cultural factors shape economic and political development, and how can we change cultural obstacles to development?

A far more important question is the inverse: How do political and economic development shape culture, and how do their failures impede human progress? Thankfully, many of the book's distinguished contributors treat this question seriously and thoughtfully.

Cultural considerations

Michael Fairbanks set out to find out why Colombian handbags could not compete in the U.S. market. He interviewed Colombian manufacturers, who blamed the tanneries (for poor quality leather), who blamed the slaughterhouses (for damaging hides), who blamed the ranchers (for overbranding the cows), who blamed the cows (for being stupid). This passing of the buck impedes prosperity. But Fairbanks rightly points to many explanations and possible solutions: economic policy, business strategy, development, resources, sociological. Any of these can be considered part of culture.

Of course, culture matters. But drawing lines between "good" and "bad" cultures misses the point: the chicken-and-egg relationship between culture and economic progress.

In many examples in this book, behaviors attributed to "culture" are instead the product of perfectly logical reactions to untenable situations.

In one chapter, the sociologist Orlando Patterson interprets the high level of male abandonment of families and children in African-American families as an ingrained response to the days of slavery, which made it impossible to maintain a nuclear family.

The political economist Dwight Perkins points out that many Asian societies built systems of corruption and nepotism as a way to establish trust because there was no rule of law; today's "cronyism" was born not from an inherent cultural flaw but instead from a legal flaw.

This is not to say that these realities help the communities that adopted them as a way of surviving. Nor do they always fully impede economic development. South Korea, Huntington's example of progress, happens to rank among the world's most corrupt countries, as another chapter in this book points out.

Culture is hardly the only factor in the differences between the South Koreas and Ghanas of the world. The Harvard development guru Jeffrey Sachs raises geography -- and the health and economic issues related to it -- as a major limiting factor in economic development. Geography has not been kind to Africa.

Nor do "cultural" virtues always create economic growth. In Japan, for example, the once-lauded high national savings rate now gets widespread blame for preventing the country from spending itself out of recession.

Just what is culture, anyway?

So what does contribute to progress? Many of this book's authors pay tribute to the sociologist Max Weber, who argued that the Protestant work ethic helped lay the groundwork for an ethic of everyday behavior that nurtured economic success. It created the social institutions of modern capitalism: the rule of law, high social mobility and market institutions as the mechanism of economic exchange. These Western institutions get credited again and again as the source of progress, but they are only fragments of what can make societies develop.

What traits lead to behavior that helps a country develop? Often the answer boils down to survival vs. progress. Nations must grow to a certain level before their people can afford to invest in creating social capital and institutions that support sustainable development. Today, the nations that can afford to do so are gaining ground while those that cannot are falling further behind; this has to do with technology, education and resources as much as with culture.

The very word "culture" is loaded, and especially dangerous when it falls into the wrong hands. Co-editor Lawrence Harrison rightly blasts the American Anthropological Association for refusing in 1947 to endorse the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights because it was "ethnocentric." Some values do, or should, apply universally. But it is also a mistake to think we can measure "good" culture against some global benchmark.

The business consultant Stace Lindsay sums up the problem with the idea of culture, and whether it isuseful as a leaping-off point for further debate. "The relevant discussion is not a discussion about culture per se; it is about the distribution of individual belief systems as they relate to the relevant dimensions of change. Marshaling efforts to identify and understand how specific mental models limit the wealth-creating process is a significant step in the right direction to ensure human progress," he writes.

Culture Matters gets these efforts off to a start. If only it had gotten "culture" out of the way sooner.