The answer, in all cases, is culture, according to a growing number of scholars who have come to believe that social attitudes are more important than politics and economics in determining why some societies are richer than others. For starters, it challenges the assumptions of market economists and liberal and Marxist thinkers, who share an assumption that political and economic programs are of primary importance and that social values and attitudes follow their lead. Even more controversial are the political implications. The book, edited by two Harvard professors, Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, argues that there are striking correlations between economic and democratic development, income level and religion. Thus New Zealand has more in common with distant Canada than neighboring Indonesia, he argues, and Argentina with its history of heavy Italian immigration has more in common with Italy than with some nearby South American societies.
Many scholars find such judgments disturbing.
Certainly, the culture matters thesis tends to polarize people into opposing camps. Conservatives tend to see it as evidence that the solution to poverty is not government aid but internal cultural change among the poor, while liberals see it as proof that poverty is not intractable but subject to structural, political and economic solutions. At the beginning of the 20th century, at the height of Western imperialism and an earlier form of globalization, Weber tried to identify the factors that led to Northern Europe's sudden rise in the modern era and wrote that the emphasis on individual responsibility in the Protestant Reformation had provided the inner motor of the capitalist revolution. But later scholars found the idea to be too sweeping as well as smacking of a spirit of Western superiority. One reason is the end of the cold war, which transformed the global order as well as thinking about how the world works.