Synopsis
What lies behind America's economic and social decline? Can racism explain the ghetto tragedy if two-thirds of America's blacks have made it into the middle class? Why have Chinese, Japanese, and Korean immigrants done so much better than Mexicans? According to Lawrence E. Harrison, the key to answering these and other questions is culture—the values of a people with respect to work, education, frugality, community, fair play, and progress.
Reviews
Why do some nations and ethnic groups prosper while others stagnate? Harrison, a former director of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, finds the answer in a culture's values. In his diagnosis, Brazil's hard-working, family-oriented European and Japanese immigrants spurred that nation's dynamic growth, whereas Mexico's economic disaster and failure to build solid democratic institutions are due to its "Hispanic value system" promoting passivity, mistrust of outsiders and an overemphasis on family. The U.S. black underclass's plight, he maintains, is due not primarily to racism but rather to "a set of values and attitudes, strongly influenced by the slavery experience" and perpetuated by the ghetto. Featuring success stories such as Japan, Spain, Korea and Taiwan, this study verges on blaming the victim and slights political factors as well as the West's domination and molding of Third World markets and regimes to serve its own needs. Harrison ends with a jeremiad blaming U.S. decline on the erosion of education and the work ethic, TV, a quick-fix mentality and welfare programs. First serial to the National Interest.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Harrison, a sometime director of development programs for the US Agency for International Development, argues that the extent to which countries are economically and politically ``successful'' is principally determined by cultural factors. Why are some countries prosperous and democratic while others poor and politically oppressed? According to Harrison, the main reason is a country's values and attitudes. He finds that four factors are especially important: the ``radius of trust,'' or degree to which the members of a society identify with one another; the ``rigor'' of the ethical system; the way authority is exercised; and attitudes about work, innovation, saving, and profit. Harrison's thesis is advertised by his publishers as ``myth-shattering,'' but his conclusion surely comes as no surprise--that the most successful cultures, according to his criteria, have been those most influenced by the Protestant work ethic and Western values of democracy and individual rights. This view does become controversial, although no less predictable, in the chapters that analyze in cultural terms the relative performance of Asian-, Mexican-, and Afro-Americans, and in the closing essay about the danger of overall decline in the US. The argument that the recent success of countries like Japan, Taiwan, and Korea can be traced to their Confucian traditions is less familiar and more interesting in the light of the common Western assumption that progress depends on individualism. On the whole, Harrison has no trouble showing the general importance of culture as a factor of national success, and he provides many pertinent examples. But his stronger claim that culture is the principal determinant of success is never substantiated. His method is to pile up evidence favoring his view while doing little to confront or even record possible counterarguments. A compendium of useful information that delivers less than it claims as a social-scientific argument. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Coming at a time of national and international concern about the persistence of poverty, Who Prospers? focuses on the part that individuals' basic values play in advancing prosperity. For Harrison, both national and ethnic advancement are tied to cultures that value work, frugality, planning for the future, ties to the community as a whole, and education--the traditional ethic lauded by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930). Expanding the ethic to include the Confucianism of Asia and the post-Franco energy of Spain, Harrison, a former director of development programs in Latin America for the U.S. Agency for International Development, reviews the postwar economic "miracles" of Brazil, Spain, Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. He then examines the experience of Asians, Mexicans, and African Americans in the United States and each group's success or failure at integration into the American economic mainstream. In all cases, Harrison finds the presence or absence of the basic values he has identified to be the decisive factor in development. Harrison concludes with thoughtful recommendations for reform that are refreshing in their lack of dogmatism and their optimism. Recommended for most libraries.
- Mary Jane Ballou, Ford Fdn. Lib., New York
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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