It is not the culture that makes the difference in the end, but rather the behaviors it has encouraged

I read a lot about economic development (personal and national, micro and macro). We are slowly making progress in untangling what leads to success (broadly defined) and what leads to failure. It is indisputably a complex field and we are still mostly at the stage of hypotheses with supporting evidence, rather than iron-clad laws.

That said, one of the things that has struck about the discussions in books, articles and editorials, has been the deep reluctance to engage with culture. That is changing. There have always been some who have seen culture as a linchpin in the economic development process and there are more and more all the time. But speaking of culture as a causative factor in either national economic development or individual personal outcomes is still frowned upon in many quarters and leads, in my view, to highly unproductive circular discussions. I have always set this down to the knee-jerk instinct that talking about culture was in some ways either 1) blaming the victim, or 2) fatalistic given the slowness and general imperviousness of culture to change.

I wonder if this isn't a matter of abridging definitions. For some people culture perhaps is too close a kin to nationalism which is too close to ethnicism which is too close to racism. I also wonder, on the other side, whether we are being lazy about using culture as a catchall when what we actually mean is that different cultures have a propensity to cultivate or suppress different behaviors and that it is those behaviors which are determinative of outcomes rather than culture per se.

Self-control, self-discipline, perseverance, temporal discounting, future orientation, and other behavioral attributes are measurably deterministic of outcomes. While IQ, SES, or situational context, may set the absolute boundaries on outcomes, the behavioral attributes are deterministic of the relative outcomes. I.e. hard work beats talent if talent won't work hard.

We are still figuring out the exact behavioral attributes that contribute to positive outcomes and their relative weight in the outcomes, but we are getting there. And while it is useful to observe that some cultures observably reward and encourage particular behavioral attributes associated with positive outcomes more than others, it is not the culture that makes the difference in the end, but rather the behaviors it has encouraged in the individual.

Perhaps this is a distinction without a difference but it does get us away from the explosive issue of relative ranking of different cultures, one to the other, and shifts the focus to individual accountability for behaviors and outcomes. Some people will still object because they fundamentally are ill-disposed to individual accountability, but it at least removes a distraction. The important thing isn't whether one culture is better than another. The important thing is what portfolio of values and behaviors are most conducive to desirable outcomes (longevity, morbidity, productivity, security, education attainment, etc.)

We still are in an environment that is markedly sympathetic towards ascribing outcomes, not to personal actions and behaviors, but to context, circumstances, institutions, and most popularly, luck. But the evidence continues to grow that while those issues are pertinent and are determinative of absolute outcomes, it is behaviors that make the relative difference.