The Price of Everything (26 page)

But though economists are wrong to ignore the influence of culture on the prices that steer us this way and that, they are right that this very culture is more of an economic artifact than those who criticize economics’ narrow assumptions would have us believe. Sociologists and anthropologists like to portray culture as an ad hoc complement to our economic motivations. Something that comes from somewhere else, beyond the dimension of costs and benefits. But this representation does little to help understand human behavior. Why does culture exist?

Culture divides the world into two spheres. Outside the boundaries, our inner economic man can run rampant, focusing exclusively on our individual benefit. Inside, within the domain of the clan, we are expected to sacrifice individual urges to a collective need for cohesion. Within the group, taboos and cultural conventions reconfigure the price system, steering individuals’ choices to build trust and solidarity. The dances and ritual songs, the purple hair and the pants at half-mast—these are culture’s borders. They are totems around which to build common purpose, separating the inside from out.

Cultural institutions do not descend fully formed upon societies. They are shaped by the transactions within each and its interactions with the outside environment. Culture’s institutions are determined by the choices the group has taken over the course of its existence. Culture embodies the prices that have determined the communal choices. It is society’s collective price system.

Trust, for instance, is essential to economic transactions. It encourages trade, and is related to investment in physical and human capital. Researchers have found that trusting people are more optimistic and take lots of risks. Though they are cheated more often, they are essential for economic growth. Untrusting people take fewer risks and miss opportunities for profit. Trusting societies tend to be more stable and prosperous. Sixty-eight percent of Swedes and 59 percent of Finns say that most people can be trusted. In Rwanda and Turkey, only 5 percent agree.

Trust could not have developed in a world exclusively populated by the selfish. It could only emerge within boundaries where norms tempered self-interest in favor of the common good. The boundaries needed to be clear to all.

In the late 1990s I lived in São Paulo, Brazil, where I edited a business magazine. My apartment in the neighborhood of Jardins was near an Orthodox synagogue. Every now and then I would see Orthodox Jewish families out for a stroll. I recall my bewilderment as they walked down the street in the summer heat, decked out in long black overcoats and enormous fur hats that would have served a more useful purpose during a Polish winter.

Only later did I understand the purpose of such incongruous dress: it was a sacrifice. The hot winter coat signaled to every other Hasidic Jew that the wearer was one of them—a member of a tight-knit group that provided spiritual and material comfort to its members. The coat helped bond São Paulo’s Orthodox Jews into a community. The discomfort, whether acknowledged or not, represented the sacrifice demanded by the group on its members, a necessary barrier to keep interlopers out and thus protect the group from external forces of change.

 

 

AS IT SETS
the boundaries, culture codifies the price system that operates inside them. The Mursi, nomadic herders in southern Ethiopia, disfigure the lower lips of fifteen-year-old girls, cutting them and inserting progressively larger clay plates that stretch out the lip. Anthropologists describe the plates as markers of adulthood and reproductive potential. This provides no clue as to why such a painful marker was chosen. Economics suggests disfigurement may have arisen as a strategy to make Mursi women less attractive to slave traders. The practice persisted after the slave trade died out because parents tend to pass what they are taught on to their children, providing norms with momentum. But it was originally viewed as a trade-off: big lips were the price of freedom.

The supposedly universal human propensity to fairness has different modalities around the world—depending on individual societies’ calculations of costs and benefits. They can be measured using an experiment called the Ultimatum Game.

In this game, player A is given money and instructed to share it however she wants with player B. If B refuses, they both walk away empty-handed. If A behaved according to the dicta of economics, she would offer as little as possible and B would accept, on the grounds that it’s better than nothing. Both would end up better off. But people rarely exhibit this kind of behavior. In a series of experiments performed around the world, a group of social scientists encountered a wide array of strategies, reflecting different cultural attributes that seemed shaped to mesh with their specific societies.

In the tropical forests of southern Perú, Machiguenga villagers playing the Ultimatum Game offered only 26 percent of their money, on average. But the Paraguayan Aché sometimes went to the extreme of offering all their money. And the vast majority of Lamalera whalers from Indonesia offered at least half. The researchers suggested that specific strategies used by each group fit each group’s social dynamics. In groups that trade little outside the family unit, like the Machiguenga, people are likely to feel little social pressure to share—so it’s cheaper to be selfish. The Lamalera in Indonesia, by contrast, hunt collectively. They have elaborate rules to share entire whales. Social stigma is more costly.

Culture not only sets collective prices, it surrounds them in a ritual, narrative envelope. In the winter of 1984-1985, very few caribou returned to the hunting grounds of the Chisasibi Cree of James Bay in northern Quebec. The hunt had been heavy the year before. Many caribou had been killed. The village elders told the young hunters a tale: in the 1910s, there was a gruesome hunt. Indians newly armed with repeating rifles butchered thousands of caribou. Food was wasted. The river was polluted with rotten carcasses. For many years after that, the caribou stayed away.

The point of the story was that the caribou would return to the Chisasibi’s hunting grounds only if hunters behaved responsibly. It was effective. In the winter of 1985-1986 each of the approximately four hundred Chisasibi families took only about two caribou apiece. The imperative of resource management—the price of overhunting—was conveyed by invoking the caribou’s presumed will.

The different beliefs that we take to be markers of deep cultural distinctions arise as adaptations to different environments. Nigerians and Ugandans are much more likely to agree on values than Nigerians and Japanese. Egyptians and Jordanians agree more readily than Danes and Pakistanis. A Dane disagrees with a Swede 33.8 percent of the time but disagrees with a Tanzanian 56.3 percent of the time. This is not merely about race or geography. The more two countries trade with each other, the smaller the gap between their values.

In the former Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe, four decades of government control over all production and distribution instilled a worldview that is quite different from opinions common in the West. East Germans are more likely to say that success is the product of external social circumstances, while West Germans attribute it to individual effort. In 1997, nearly a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, “Ossies” were much more likely than “Wessies” to say government should provide for people’s financial security. But views are changing along with economic realities. Researchers suggest that the differences in preferences between East and West are likely to disappear entirely within the next twenty years.

We choose cultural traits we can afford. Large families are the so-called cultural norm in countries where many kids die before the age of five and those who survive are needed for their labor. Richer countries where child mortality is lower and children don’t work have fostered a culture in which fewer kids are the norm and parents invest more in each of them.

Cultural mores about sex in the West are all about setting prices. Sexual permissiveness was enabled by access to contraception and abortion, which reduced the cost of becoming sexually entangled. More than two thirds of all criminal cases in New Haven, Connecticut, between 1710 and 1750 were for premarital sex. In 1900 still only 6 percent of American women under the age of nineteen had engaged in premarital sex. Today, women rarely marry before nineteen, yet three out of four women have had sex by then, and the stigma has faded away.

People in industrial nations are more promiscuous than those in the developing world, indulging in more sexual partners and having more sex. In rich countries, about 70 percent of unmarried women told pollsters they had had sex in the last month, according to one survey. By comparison, in East and South Africa just over 25 percent of unmarried women reported having sexual relations in that time. Men reported similar patterns. The findings came as a surprise to many observers who assumed Africans’ high rates of infection with HIV meant they had more sex. But this was a misreading of reality. In poorer countries with shoddier health care and higher rates of deadly sexually transmitted diseases, the price of having sex is higher. It is natural that people would have less.

Consider English cooking. It is surely one of the world’s most perplexing cultural artifacts, alongside yodeling, Bhutan’s Langthab, and the binding of baby girls’ feet. I still remember my encounter with steak-and-kidney pie, though it happened a long time ago. When I went to college in London in the 1980s, I couldn’t fathom why the only way one could eat cod was deep-fried.

There may be an explanation. Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize- winning economist, once suggested that English food was so awful because early industrialization moved the English off the land and into cities, far from natural ingredients, before there were good technologies to mass-produce fresh food cheaply, store it, and transport it over long distances. Victorian London had more than a million people, yet got its food by horse-drawn barge. So Londoners had to rely on food that would keep for long periods of time: preserved vegetables and meats, or roots that didn’t require refrigeration. By the time technology allowed Londoners to be decently fed with fresher foods, they had become used to their Victorian diet. So bad food became an integral part of English culture.

 

 

THE PRICE OF
subsistence offers an unvarnished perspective on how cultural mores follow the uneven path of economic progress and opportunity around the world. A family in Azerbaijan must spend almost three quarters of its total budget on food. In Brazil it must devote a little over a fifth. At the top of the heap, an American family spends less than a tenth of its income on eating.

The fact that food occupies a smaller place in the budget of the typical American household also means the typical American cares less about its price. The United States Department of Agriculture estimates that if the price of meat were to rise 10 percent, an American family would eat 0.9 percent less. A Mexican family, by contrast, would slash its meat consumption by over 5 percent.

That alone can explain why animal welfare movements are much more popular in the United States than in places like the Congo or Mexico. It is more expensive to kill a steer in a humane sort of way. More Americans can afford that. A 2005 study by economists at Utah State University and Appalachian State University found consumers in the United States would be willing to pay 9 percent more to ensure the beef in their sandwich came from humanely treated animals.

In Mexico, this decision would change people’s diets: this range of price increases would lead families to cut their meat consumption by almost 5 percent. The price an American would pay to ensure the burgers hewed to the moral code would lead the typical Congolese family to eat 6 percent less meat. So perhaps one shouldn’t be surprised that Americans are more likely than Mexicans or Congolese to belong to an animal rights organization.