Value-Free Analysis of Values: A Culture-Based Development Approach

Abstract

Recent literature in the fields of Political Economy, New Institutional Economics and New Cultural Economics has converged in the use of empirical methods, offering a series of consistent quantitative analysis of values. However, an overarching positive methodology for the value-free study of values has not yet precipitated. Building on a mixed systematic-integrative literature review of a pluralistic variety of perspectives from Adam Smith’s ‘Impartial’ Spectator to modern moral philosophy, the current study suggests the Culture-Based Development (CBD) approach for analyzing the economic impact of values on socio-economic development. The CBD approach suggests that the value-free analysis needs: (i) to use positive methods to classify a value as local or universal; (ii) to examine the existence of what is termed the Aristotelian Kuznets curve of values (i.e., to test for the presence of an inflection point in the economic impact from the particular value) and (iii) to account for Platonian cultural relativity (i.e., the cultural embeddedness expressed in the geographic nestedness of the empirical data about values). The paper details the theoretical and methodological cornerstones underpinning the proposed CBD approach for value-free analysis of values.

Culture and mental health resilience in times of COVID-19

“…This is so because culture embodies a tailor-made set of socially affirmed immaterial beliefs and values, which do not have an intrinsic value but are socially constructed. Yet, boundedly, people prefer to believe in them as if they are intrinsic, in order for this set of rules to serve as a psychological tool for handling uncertainty (Delton et al 2011 ; Tubadji 2020c ). Namely, having a “certain” cultural compass of heuristics serves for an illusionary alleviation of our fear of the unknown and the lack of clear uncertainty avoidance strategy (Kahneman et al 1991 ; Akerlof and Shiller 2010 ).…”

“…Finally, there is available aggregate data from Google Trends regarding searches in Google about the validated positive psychology word “anxiety,” which stands for the mental health state of the searching individual, as well as the self-explained word “death.” This study uses this linguistic signifier of meaning and mental health on aggregate level and links it to indicators of socio-economic development (in this case public spending on cultural services). This follows the linguistic narrative economics of meaning CBD approach (see Tubadji 2020a , b , c , d , e for more details on this approach). This approach has been applied in its full extent elsewhere—addressing on the aggregate level the study of mental health and public policy during the pandemic periods across different countries (Tubadji et al 2020a ).…”

“…This entity is embodied in norms and beliefs and material goods and services. CBD also draws a temporal divide between past culture (of both material and immaterial kind), termed cultural heritage, and present norms and beliefs and their related goods and services, termed living culture (see Tubadji 2012 , 2013 , 2020a , b , c ; Tubadji and Montalto 2020 ). 1 This study adopts the CBD definition of culture.…”

Voting with your feet or voting for Brexit: The tale of those stuck behind

“…The fourth robustness check compares alternative population change hypotheses that may shed further insight on the results about our Tiebout–‐Hirschman–‐Rothschild model and its social‐closure based trigger. Our original hypothesis has its roots in the sociological notion of social closure (see Tubadji, 2020; Weber, 1922), where one group compares itself to people in the same place with a different identity, who are perceived as a competing group and whose prosperity triggers feelings of relative deprivation with the first group. The prosperity of the competing group is approximated in our study through size of between‐group‐mobility differences which is hypothesized by our Tiebout–‐Hirschman–‐Rothschild model to be the trigger of pro‐Brexit voting behaviour.…”

Cultural relativity in consumers' rates of adoption of artificial intelligence

“…The CBD theoretical model builds on Adam Smith's ideas of the Impartial Spectator, that is, an internal code of what is right and good. CBD theory expects that there exist cultural deviations in local ethics that create locally specific perceptions of the Impartial Spectator (Tubadji, 2020). Hence, people from different cultural backgrounds may experience the same attitude but with a different level of affect.…”