changes in cultural norms: for example, in the US most tenured full professors continue to be active scholars even though they have no material incentive to work beyond the necessary minimum, but they do so because their professional culture sets high standards regarding what full professors are supposed to do.<sup>7</sup> The relationship between specific values transmitted to children and economic outcomes has been recently tested in the economic literature, thanks to the availability of data from household surveys which ask questions such as “Do you consider it important to encourage children to learn thrift and savings?” (World Values Survey). Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales (2006) conducted a regression analysis combining survey and macroeconomic data across 53 countries and found that “a 10 percentage point increase in the share of people who think thriftiness is a value that should be taught to children is linked to a 1.3 percentage point increase in the national saving rate”. Tabellini (2010) also showed that European regions with a stronger belief in individual effort tend to have higher GDP per capita and GDP growth.

# **3. How much does culture count?**

The role of culture in economic development is not an easy subject to get a handle on. To start with, one faces issues of definition. As with the rule of law, there are thick and there are thin formulations and the more all-encompassing the definition, the less helpful it tends to be in explaining patterns of economic development. If culture consists of values, beliefs, attitudes, practices, symbols, and human relationships, if it is “expressed through religion, language, institutions, and history”<sup>8</sup> then it is intrinsically no different than a nation’s genetic endowment. Since it contains everything, in the end it explains nothing.

Economists tend to narrowly define culture as “those customary beliefs and values that ethnic, religious, and social groups transmit fairly unchanged from generation to generation” (Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales, 2006). As the researchers openly admit, this approach is far from being comprehensive and it is largely dictated by the need to facilitate the identification of causal relationships, by focusing on aspects of culture that are inherited and constant over time.

Not surprisingly, some of the most insightful writing on the subject of culture has been done by anthropologists. Murdock (1965), for instance, argues that a culture consists of habits that are shared by members of a society, whether a primitive tribe or an advanced nation. It is the product of learning, not of heredity. “The cultures of the world are systems of collective habits. The differences observable among them are the cumulative product of mass learning under diverse geographic and social conditions” (Murdock, p. 113-114).<sup>9</sup> Woolcock’s (2014) recent review of the sociological literature on culture and

> 7 We thank Michael Woolcock for this comment and this example.

> 8 Temin, 1997, p. 268.

> 9 In a review of the concept of culture as it has emerged in the anthropology literature Ortner (1984, p.129) argues that “culture is not something locked inside people’s heads, but rather is embodied in public symbols, symbols through which the members of society communicate their worldview, value-orientations,

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