Cultural prerequisites of socioeconomic development

Abstract

In the centuries since the enlightenment, the world has seen an increase in socioeconomic development, measured as increased life expectancy, education, economic development and democracy. While the co-occurrence of these features among nations is well documented, little is known about their origins or co-evolution. Here, we compare this growth of prosperity in nations to the historical record of cultural values in the twentieth century, derived from global survey data. We find that two cultural factors, secular-rationality and cosmopolitanism, predict future increases in GDP per capita , democratization and secondary education enrollment. The converse is not true, however, which indicates that secular-rationality and cosmopolitanism are among the preconditions for socioeconomic development to emerge.

Cultural values predict national COVID-19 death rates

“…deaths and ought to facilitate government action, this value has been declining for decades in many countries [13]. Cultural values of cosmopolitanism and openness, which underlie the economic prosperity and democracy of nations in the long term [21,13,14,15] Table 1 are derived from the same 64 questions in the five waves of these surveys at 5-year intervals since 1990, administered to 476,583 participants from 109 different nations. These data were compressed into multivariate factors in two steps.…”

Cultural values predict national COVID-19 death rates

“…Since culture is the context for behavior (Gelfand et al 2020 ; Muthukrishna 2020 ; Zhang and Centola 2019 )—social scientists maintain that culture fundamentally determines behavior, values, beliefs, and even perceived reality in a society (Cronk 1999 ; Durkheim 1915 ; Henrich 2015 )—effectiveness of intervention on COVID-19 by national governments ought to reflect cultural values among the people of those countries. As cultural values vary substantially across the world (Aksoy et al 2020 ; Inglehart and Welzel 2005 ; Ruck et al 2020a ), there is a motivation to ascertain whether cultural values predict national COVID-19 rates.…”

“…Recent studies have used socioeconomic and public health variables to explain COVID-19 variation within the United States (Desmet and Wacziarg 2020 ) and also globally (de Oliveira et al 2020 ). In the context of the literature on the effect of socioeconomic factors on COVID-19 (Aksoy et al 2020 ; Bedford et al 2020 ; Chowell and Mizumoto 2020 ; Frey et al 2020 ; Funk et al 2010 ; Guiteras et al 2015 ; Hale et al 2020 ; Maharaj and Kleczkowski 2012 ; Munster et al 2020 ; Zhang and Centola 2019 ; Zhang and Qian 2020 ), we use unique measures of national-scale cultural values, derived from multivariate study of decades of World Values Survey results (Ruck et al 2018 , 2020a , b ). We examine these cultural effects in concert with known risks such as obesity and advanced age, together with variables describing government efficiency and public trust in institutions.…”

“…The national-scale cultural factors are derived from recent work, applying a two-stage factor analysis to World and European Values Survey data (WVS 2020 , EVS 2011 ) in 109 countries (Ruck et al 2020a , b ). The cultural factors we consider here are secular-rationality (RAT), cosmopolitanism (COS) and institutional trust (INST).…”

“…We expect institutional trust (INST) within a population, which is likely to help government efforts to mitigate a pandemic (Aksoy et al 2020 ), may exhibit effects in concert with the government efficiency variable. Secular-rationality (RAT) is correlated with secularism, political engagement (and critique), and respect for individual rights, but also low prosociality (Ruck et al 2020a ). We hypothesize that RAT would predict higher epidemic spread (and hence more deaths) among people who are more individualistic and perhaps more heterogeneous in how they follow guidelines.…”