Geek Heresy (29 page)

With hindsight, it seems clear that the cause of economic growth is not Protestantism or Hinduism or Confucianism as such. There’s something in the human organism that compels us to aspire beyond survival and security when conditions are right. People have intrinsic aspirations for productivity and self-expression.

Financial incentives undoubtedly play a role, but, as Weber was careful to point out, aspirations are not strictly about economic gain. Weber felt that there was something else: “It is an obligation towards the content of his professional activity, no matter in what it consists.”
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This earnestness infused my taxi driver. Narasimha seemed particularly eager to please his customers. If I had any luggage, he would rush to relieve me of it. He was always sure to ask whether I wanted air conditioning when I got in his car. And if I asked for music, he was ready with a rack of hand-labeled CDs ranging from South Indian Carnatic music and Bollywood hits to American rock-and-roll and European
techno-pop. If more than a few weeks went by between trips, he would call me to ask whether he could be of service.

In 2009 I told him that I was moving back to the United States and that it might be a while before I would be back. When we arrived at the airport, I tried to pay him the fare as well as a bonus for his years of reliable service, but he initially refused both. With tears in his eyes, he said he just wanted me to call him the next time I was in town. I finally had to stuff an envelope of cash in his shirt pocket and run off promising that I would. A similar scene repeated itself six months later when I returned to Bangalore for a brief trip. Narasimha again refused payment until I insisted that it was important for his business. Weber was right: There was a sense of purpose in Narasimha’s hard work that went beyond profit.

Multiplied by the billion-plus population of India, these changes are manifested countrywide as budding entrepreneurship, increasing consumption, expanding political empowerment, and heightening national pride. Middle-class India is undergoing rapid change. Each year, fewer young people are interested in a stable job at a large corporation, and want instead to make their name through a start-up. Political activism has crescendoed, with a younger generation eager to uproot government corruption. Meanwhile, hordes of people now throng to India’s malls. When I arrived in Bangalore in 2004, there were two malls in the city; when I left five years later, there were more than ten, all bursting at the seams with a brand-new generation of shoppers. And on September 24, 2014, the Indian Space Research Organisation announced that it had put a spacecraft, the
Mangalyaan
, into orbit around Mars. National newspapers quoted the prime minister proclaiming, “This is [the] first time in the world. History has been created today.”
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Evolving Mass Values

India’s changes recapitulate elements of developed-world history. Like India today, the United States was buoyed by an entrepreneurial spirit. A battle against America’s rent-seeking political corruption was fought effectively in the nineteenth century.
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Consumer culture, now
burgeoning in India, was all but invented in the United States circa 1920. And Indian pride in their Mars orbiter echoes American sentiment toward Apollo 11, the world’s first moon landing.

Despite huge differences in culture and history, there is no denying the commonalities among societies that experience socioeconomic growth. I grew up partly in Japan and partly in America. Despite the differences between the two countries, the repeating patterns of modernization were evident: Infrastructure tends to improve, technology to proliferate, government to become more efficient, parents to have fewer children, industrial employment to overtake agriculture, and gender disparities to shrink.
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When I landed in India, I felt a sense of déjà vu. There was something of the mid-twentieth-century Japan that my parents and grandparents had spoken of. City streets bustled with an energetic commotion. Individual aspirations – like Narasimha’s – were woven tightly into the country’s development. Ads for financial services urged people to “Invest in your family, invest in India!” There was a sense of national mission.

To believe in progress doesn’t mean that any country has arrived at the final destination, or even that there is agreement about a single destination. For example, any claim that contemporary Western society is the apex of human civilization is unwarranted – America, to take one case, could surely do better than a 15 percent rate of poverty, a government captured by moneyed interests, a stubborn resistance to addressing climate change, and reality TV. But just because progress is hard or variously defined shouldn’t mean we should scrap all hope of it.

Consider the change in women’s status in so many countries in just the past half-century. In 1977, two-thirds of Americans believed that women should not work outside of the home; by 2012, less than one-third of Americans thought so.
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In the 1970s, women’s median full-time earnings were 60 percent of men’s; by 2011, they had risen to 77 percent.
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In 1970, women held 11 of 535 seats in Congress – just 2 percent; in 2014 women took 100 seats for the first time, nearly 20 percent.
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We still have a long way to go, but advances have been steady, self-sustaining, and large-scale.

To even the casual observer, it should be clear that these kinds of transformations didn’t happen through packaged interventions. Some argue that household appliances and contraceptive technologies revolutionized the role of women in society. But these inventions, as with Amazon’s effect on the book industry, were accelerators and amplifiers, not primary causes.
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The pill was approved for use in America in 1960, but US women’s movements go back to at least the mid-1800s. Women’s suffrage was achieved in 1920. The Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963. And all through these milestones was the constant fight for equality, fought on the frontlines by women themselves and supported by national shifts in attitudes among both sexes – all forces that are difficult to measure and difficult to package.

Other countries have followed a similar course. In the late 1960s, my mother was 1 of only 5 women at Keio University’s School of Medicine in a class of 95, so women made up only about 5 percent of the total. Today, there are about 90 women in each class of about 450, making it 20 percent. That’s progress – even if, again, there is more to do. The United Nations Development Programme finds that, between 2000 and 2013, 96 percent of countries tracked saw reductions in overall gender disparities based on indicators of health, education, political representation, and employment.
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So, it seems that individual intrinsic growth piles up and manifests as large-scale societal development. But is there hard evidence?

Remarkable data comes from Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan.
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Inglehart is the founder and former president of the World Values Survey, a series of large-scale surveys of national values that he and his colleagues had the foresight to begin in the early 1980s. It spans four decades, all six inhabited continents, 97 countries, and 400,000 respondents. The survey asks about people’s values, beliefs, and aspirations. It considers work, family, religion, happiness, government, and environment.
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Over the years, Inglehart and his colleagues have dug deep into this mountain of data and found striking patterns. They found, for example, that mass individual aspirations correlate with modernization,
economic development, and democratization. Here is the heart of their conclusions, excerpted from the World Values Survey website:

       
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Much of the variation in human values between societies boils down to two broad dimensions: a first dimension of “traditional vs. secular-rational values” and a second dimension of “survival vs. self-expression values.”

       
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Traditional values emphasize religiosity, national pride, respect for authority, obedience, and marriage. Secular-rational values emphasize the opposite on each of these accounts.

       
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Survival values involve a priority of security over liberty, non-acceptance of homosexuality, abstinence from political action, distrust in outsiders, and a weak sense of happiness. Self-expression values imply the opposite on all these accounts.

       
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People’s priorities shift from traditional to secular-rational values as their sense of existential security increases. The largest increase in existential security occurs with the transition from agrarian to industrial societies. Consequently, the largest shift from traditional toward secular-rational values happens in this phase.

       
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People’s priorities shift from survival to self-expression values as their sense of individual agency increases. The largest increase in individual agency occurs with the transition from industrial to knowledge societies. Consequently, the largest shift from survival to self-expression values happens in this phase.
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In other words, changes in individual aspirations are connected to the visible aspects of national modernization. These transitions have obvious correlations with Maslow’s hierarchy. Traditional values would be expected of people in subsistence agriculture or servitude, who might habitually live on the edge of unfulfilled physiological needs. If caprices
of nature or human authority sway outcomes far more than individual effort, it seems only natural that people would fail to develop any sense of their own ability to control outcomes.

The slack generated from greater agricultural productivity, though, sets the stage for industrialization and the spread of secular-rational values.
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Factories and other forms of formal work reinforce secular-rational values by providing day-to-day regularity and the beginnings of a meritocracy. Industrialization, however dehumanizing, is a reprieve from the much harsher whip of luck, weather, and subsistence living.
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This transition from traditional to secular-rational happens while survival values and security aspirations remain strong, but it also leads to an appreciation of goal-directed hard work, achievement, and esteem.

When stable jobs have secured material well-being, people seek more autonomy, independence, and self-expression. These trends grow a larger class whose main aim is self-actualization. Inglehart and his colleague Pippa Norris found that these “long-term cultural shifts are important in bringing greater equality between women and men.”
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And with colleague Christian Welzel, Inglehart showed how democracies depend on a critical mass of self-expression values within the population. In other words, aspirations for self-expression support an egalitarian view of gender as well as a strong democracy.

Inglehart and Welzel themselves cited Maslow: “Aspirations for choice and self-expression are universal human aspirations: attaining them brings feelings of self-fulfillment, as Abraham Maslow pointed out long ago.”
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To explain how self-expression values lead to more democratic societies, they invoked Maslow’s terminology: “As individual safety and autonomy reduce egocentrism, they increase homocentrism” – the concern for all humankind that Maslow saw in self-actualizing and self-transcendent people.
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“What happens to [people’s] desires when there is plenty of bread?” Maslow asked. “At once other (and higher) needs emerge.”
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Inglehart and Welzel agreed: “Experiential factors, such as whether people feel that survival is secure or insecure, are at least equally important in shaping people’s worldviews.”
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Of course, this is a broad-brush explanation for the relationship between intrinsic growth and national change.
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Reality isn’t so pat, and there are any number of factors that affect individual nations. Nevertheless, the data show that on average and at large scale, changes in mass values correlate with national development. Ultimately, Inglehart and his colleagues have shown that something like Maslovian growth, some mass shift in aspirations, is tightly linked with modernization.

India’s Tech-Sector Secret

In 2006 I visited Microsoft’s sales office in Karachi. As I traveled around the city, I couldn’t help but notice the contrast between Pakistan and India. In urban India, litter was everywhere, and migrant families crammed every inch of available space. In Karachi, the alleys between high-rise apartments were empty, and there were large tracts of open land without squatters. It seemed clean and orderly.

But looks can be deceiving. The people I met there saw things differently. They were envious of India’s high-tech economy. They knew I had helped build a small part of it in Bangalore, so they all wanted to know: What was the secret to India’s IT sector?

I was used to this question. In Brazil they wondered how India – historically much poorer than their country – was doing so well. In Kenya they asked what it would take to replicate India’s success. In Sri Lanka they talked about leapfrogging, like India, from an agricultural economy directly to a service economy, with no industrial phase in between. These questions didn’t always take into account the whole context of India, but they were insistent enough that I looked for answers.

Indian professionals explain their technology success in several ways. Many people point to 1991, when Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao and his finance minister, future prime minister Manmohan Singh, opened up the country to foreign investment. The reforms they put in place unleashed the country’s economic boom. Others note how Indian technology companies got a boost from the Y2K scare. Corporations worldwide worried that their computer systems would reach the year ’00 and mistake it for 1900, not 2000. The fix – to upgrade to four-digit
years – was technically straightforward but tedious. Indian companies filled the demand with low-cost engineering. Still others mention that educated Indians – unlike their Chinese peers – speak English, and so they can readily communicate with American firms.