Geek Heresy (45 page)

Yet another attack on the validity of nurture comes from those who say that immutable conditions like genetics have more influence. Judith Harris (2009) made this argument for parenting versus other environmental factors. More recently, Bryan Caplan (2012) suggested that parenting mattered little. The problem with these conclusions is that they are looking at a relatively narrow band of human context. Go to a poor rural village in Bihar, and it’s trivially obvious that nurture, education, and culture have a tremendous impact on what kind of adults people become.

In any case, what I’m arguing for is that in the context of large-scale social change, it’s worth working on the internal determinants of behavior, even if they are a small contribution to any given outcome. To the extent that they are slow-changing and self-propagating, their impact will eventually be cumulative and large.

46
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The quotations are taken from the
New York Times
(2012) transcript of the debate.

Chapter 9: “Gross National Wisdom”

Societal Development and Mass Intrinsic Growth

1
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One negative consequence of labeling is “stereotype threat,” in which people perform worse at tasks when they are anxious about confirming a
negative stereotype. Steele and Aronson (1995) were the first to demonstrate this phenomenon. Nothing I say is intended to recommend stereotyping – my whole point is that both individuals and societies can change, and the hierarchy of aspirations specifically outlines how. Stereotypes, to the extent that they color some people as being a particular fixed way, implicitly deny the possibility of change.

2
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See Shoda et al. (1990) and Mischel and Shoda (1995).

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If an adult’s self-control is strongly dependent on his self-control as a child, and if child self-control cannot be entirely blamed on the child, then at least some of an adult’s self-control is due to causes beyond his or her agency. In short, at least some portion of a person’s intrinsic development, even as an adult, is due to forces beyond his or her control.

Philosophers such as Galen Strawson (2010) use a stronger version of the argument put forth here to conclude that no aspect of a person is ultimately decided by that individual, and therefore that free will is an illusion. Everything a person does is ultimately determined by outside forces. I believe this explanation makes perfect sense in theory, and as a description of reality, it seems correct. (Philosophically, the real problem with free will is that the notion of a “self” that acts, and that most of us take for granted, is flawed, as Buddhism and some Western philosophers, such as David Hume (1740 [2011]) and Derek Parfit (1984), have argued. Otherwise, we must either posit a decision-making entity that is independent of physical forces – which is the same as assuming supernatural entities such as “souls” – or intentionally circumscribe some portion of our minds as being an internal force that we artificially consider separate from the rest of the universe.)

In any case, blame and attribution remain useful as social forces. Even in a world that is fully determined, blame can serve as an external social force that encourages people to act positively. This conclusion differs from some of the confused thinking about blame as put forth by philosophers such as Barbara Fried (2013) and Strawson, who suggest that because all behavior is externally influenced, no one should ever be blamed for anything. The commonsense notion that adults are more blameworthy than children is socially valuable; yet we also have to keep in mind that they are not
entirely
blameworthy. (Mischel himself argues that self-control is both predictive and malleable.) That’s the basis from which I proceed in this section and elsewhere.

4
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See, for example, Kraus et al. (2010), Piff et al. (2010), and Piff et al. (2012).

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The question of whether external conditions or individual actions matter more is unanswerable outside of specific contexts. It’s easy to imagine two
individuals with such different temperaments that they would act differently under just about any circumstance. That example would suggest that individual actions matter more than external conditions. Yet it’s also possible to imagine two individuals who were raised under such different external conditions that one becomes a serial killer and another a saintly hero. That example suggests that external conditions matter more than individual actions. The fact is that both matter, and trying to help either change in a positive direction is worthwhile.

6
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In autocratic societies, some decisions are made by individuals, but even then, a leader rules with some complicity of the people. Even under the most extreme conditions, people – especially collectively – have a choice, even if it is an improbably difficult choice. There’s always the stark option, as they say in New Hampshire, to “Live free or die.”

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Actually, although he never visited India or China himself, Weber devoted a book each to their religions. He found both inexpedient as cultural foundations for economic growth, because neither provided a moral backing for entrepreneurial effort. Confucianism stressed individuals’ harmony with their social context (Weber 1915 [1951]), and Indian religions stressed the “unalterability of the world order” (Weber 1916 [1958], p. 326). Weber could be forgiven for coming to these conclusions because this was in the early 1900s when neither China nor India were the economic powerhouses they are today. In any case, his errors suggest that what matters is not a fixed aspect of culture, but something mutable.

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Weber (1904 [1976]).

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Hindu
(2014). In 2008 there were similar levels of excitement for the
Chandrayaan
, which made India only the fifth country in the world to reach the moon (Indian Space Research Organization 2008).

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Wallis (2006) distinguishes between “systematic corruption” – where politicians bend government and tyranny is the dominant fear – from “venal corruption” – where money bends government. Wallis’s research finds that systematic corruption was all but eliminated in the United States by the 1890s and that today’s corruption worries are almost entirely of the venal type. Many developing-world countries today, however, continue to contend with systematic corruption.

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Common patterns of progress do not mean that cultures lose their tremendous diversity – today’s Japan is a very different place from today’s United States, and again different from today’s India. But many things about the way modern-day Japan differs from the Japan of a hundred years ago are similar to the ways that the United States differs from the United States circa 1900, or to how
rich, urban India differs from poor, rural Hindustan. A rich set of qualitative characteristics tend to change together, if not in lockstep.

In fact, archaeologists and anthropologists often use other stage typologies to discuss societies across a larger timescale: For example, Elman Service’s (1962 [1968]) well-used typology classifies human societies into bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and nation-states. Critics of such theories have paroxysms at any mention that there could be commonalities in the histories of divergent civilizations. But if overgeneralization is a bad habit of some disciplines, undergeneralization is as bad a habit of others. Unless one is wearing the blinders of certain academic ideologies, it’s hard to miss historical commonalities across nations as they develop.

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Coontz (2014).

13
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Hegewisch and Williams (2013).

14
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Center for American Women and Politics (2014).

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Economic contrarian Ha-Joon Chang (2010), p. 35, writes, “The emergence of household appliances, as well as electricity, piped water and piped gas, has totally transformed the way women, and consequently men, live. They have made it possible for far more women to join the labour market.” This interpretation assumes that household chores should be a women’s job. The real question isn’t whether some technology liberated women from household work, but how changing social norms have changed the ways in which we think about gender and work. (To be fair to Chang, he doesn’t deny the importance of other social causes. He also cuts the impact of the Internet down to size in comparison to home appliances.)

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United Nations Development Programme (2013). Ninety-six percent represents 80 out of 83 countries for which there was data in both years. A similar report by the World Economic Forum (2013) tracked global gender disparities with respect to economic participation, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. Between 2006 and 2013, it found increasing overall gender equality in 95 out of 110 countries (86 percent).

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Inglehart has overseen the collection of what is undoubtedly the world’s most comprehensive and rigorously collected data set of subjective values. The analysis he and his colleagues did drives toward a unifying theory that bridges individual psychology and societal change. As influential as Inglehart is in some circles, his work deserves to be much more widely known. Space does not allow me to do his work justice. A superb introduction to his work is Inglehart and Welzel (2005).

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The World Values Survey maintains an active website with all of its surveys, data, and a lot of academic analysis (
www.worldvaluessurvey.org
). For example, questions from the 2005–2006 wave of the World Values Survey (2005) ask
on a ten-point scale, from “not at all” to “a great deal,” how much freedom of choice or control subjects feel they have over their lives. Another series of questions asks respondents to rate family, friends, leisure time, politics, work, and religion on a scale of “not important at all” to “very important.”

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The bulleted points are excerpted from World Values Survey (n.d.) and slightly edited for readability. Also on the site is the Inglehart-Welzel cultural map, which shows how culturally similar countries cluster on their two dimensions. The map is explained fully in Inglehart and Welzel (2005).

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There is no consensus explanation for what causes national development, but it’s widely accepted that civilization itself is predicated on agriculture, since it requires a military class, which leads to ruling and leisure classes. And in more recent history, there is considerable evidence that some threshold of agricultural productivity is a strong predictor of future economic development. See, for example, Sachs (2005), pp. 69–70.

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It’s easy to romanticize agrarian life, lived as it is in the beautiful countryside and at the pace of the seasons. But the poor smallholder farmers I have met – as opposed to wealthy people who can afford other lifestyles, but think owning a farm is fun – all voice a desire to have a less taxing, more predictable type of work. There are over 50,000 rural-to-urban migrants in India per day (Indian Institute for Human Settlements 2012). The world crossed a milestone in 2009, when, for the first time in history, more people lived in cities than not (United Nations 2010).

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Inglehart and Norris (2003), p. 159.

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Inglehart and Welzel (2005), p. 139.

24
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Ibid., p. 33.

25
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Maslow (1954 [1987]), p. 17.

26
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Inglehart and Welzel (2005), p. 37.

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Maslow’s hierarchy maps roughly not only to Inglehart’s values scheme, but also to various progressions in other social sciences. There is probably a single psycho-sociological theory that underlies them all, much the way that the biology of blooming flowers can explain the changing colors of a meadow in spring. A correspondence map of various staged theories of human development is provided below. The bottom four are individual; the top four are societal. The theories don’t have a one-to-one correspondence, so the matching is approximate and indicated by a similar horizontal position. Brackets indicate rephrasings of the original term. Italics indicate stages I added to complete each spectrum. References are Rostow (1960); Bell (1999); Florida (2002); Inglehart and Welzel (2005); Fowler (1981); Kohlberg et al. (1983); Fiske (1993) – “Rational Legal” is Pinker’s (2011) rephrasing of what Fiske called “Market Pricing”; and Maslow (1943, 1954 [1987]).