The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [80]
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.
WHO CAN AFFORD ANIMAL RIGHTS?
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