The same forces that affect property rights systems may, for better or worse, also affect enterprise, invention, and material accumulation. In April 1999, the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies held a three-day symposium on culture and development. The conference's highly readable papers, collected in Culture Matters, offer an intriguing counterpoint to de Soto. If others tell them what to think and believe, the consequence is either a loss of motivation and creativity or a choice between submission or rebellion. However, neither submission nor rebellion generates development.
Submission leaves a society without innovators.
Part of the blame, he argues, falls on the region's political, religious, military, and business elites, under whom governmental corruption flourishes and people operate outside the law. The general point is not that some societies are completely impervious to commercial incentives or international influences such as trade, investment, technology, or even property rights. It is that some cultures accept these ideas more readily than others, and that different cultures often promote commerce and enterprise differently. This was certainly true in Asia, as the Harvard scholar Dwight Perkins notes in another essay in this volume. Close personal relations and family ties there helped foster economic development, he argues.