The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [77]
In the United States, by contrast, it would not be a good trade. In fact, Daimler had to pay $185 million in fines and disgorgement of profits to the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Yet had Daimler chosen a more subtle technique to influence Turkmenistan’s politics, chances are they would have gotten away with it.
WHAT CULTURE DOES
“Culture”—as in political culture—is a broad concept, deployed to describe all sorts of customs, conventions, and collective behaviors that operate within societies. It includes modes of dress, dancing styles, and music. It includes the stories we use to shape our collective identities. There are the beliefs and the rituals—religious or otherwise. There are the rules—the institutions and the taboos. Culture includes a pierced twentysomething with purple hair banging a guitar onstage. And it includes the norms and institutions that determine how power is exercised and transferred.
A common, and in my view accurate, critique of economists’ worldview is that it often ignores how culture affects our choices—positing people as calculating, self-involved creatures oblivious to any notion of “social good.” Homo economicus is expected to approach life as a string of cost-benefit analyses, evaluating the prices involved in each decision to maximize his individual well-being. Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister known for a fondness for the market that led her to battle labor unions, privatize state-run companies, and slash public spending on social programs, articulated this view succinctly: “There is no such thing as society,” she said. “There are individual men and women, and there are families.”
Thatcher was wrong, of course. Humans are about as social as animals come. We depend on society—on others—for our very survival. For society to emerge we had to subsume some of our self-interest into the collective interests of the tribe. Culture helps us with that. It codifies acceptable forms of behavior. It determines the price lists of penalties and rewards to fit the patterns of conduct sanctioned by the clan. Culture sets our personal cost-benefit analysis within the collective price system of society.
Culture affects the price of parking in front of a fire hydrant, the value of prayer, the risks of tax evasion, and the rewards of corruption. Voting, in a democracy, makes little sense to the individual voter. It costs time and effort and yields nothing, personally. The likelihood of a single vote determining a big election is so small that the act is about as sensible as tipping a taxicab driver one will never see again. It’s the equivalent of throwing money away. Still, we do it. It is a cultural artifact.
In the United States, the daughters of immigrants from more “liberal” countries have been found to be more likely to work than the daughters of immigrants from more “conservative” countries where women stay at home to care for husband and kids. This is regardless of how much they can earn or how much they might need the money.
Collective notions of propriety often determine individual calculations about the price of any given choice. Fines are supposed to be effective deterrents. Who likes losing money? But an experiment at a handful of day-care centers in Israel found that imposing a small fine on parents who picked up their kids late actually worsened tardiness. Before, tardy parents had borne the burden of shame, knowing they had broken the rules. When the day-care center replaced