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The main problem here is twofold
Firstly, not everyone means the same thing when they say culture, because the term is not very well defined.
Secondly, Whitedog appears to think that any judgement of a country is racist. Some countries work better than others. I don't think anyone denies that. The reasons for that are manifold, in some cases those reasons are government institutions, but in some cases the reasons are deeply-rooted societal problems that would still be a problem even if the surface government would be changed. Like widespread corruption or clan-based economics.
Now, these societal problems are sometimes called culture, mostly because there is no other good short word to describe them. Sadly, culture also means a lot of other things, like music, theater, and even language from time to time. Which is where the main problem in this discussion comes from. Can we just agree that culture sometimes means different things, and when someone say "the culture of greece hinders their economic development" they obviously don't mean the parthenon or the greek language or their song or anything like that, they mean "societal stuff that is not the direct government influence".
Last but not least, countries are not races. If i say every danishmen is a lazy fuck, i am a nationalist asshole, but i am not racist, because danes are not a race (The definition of race is problematic too and tends to be racist in itself rather often, since there is no such thing as objective distinguished races in the human species, but i don't think even the most racist people would argue that the average dane is a different race than the average german)
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
this is quite distracting. neither side is denying the importance of the set of behavioral and value facts described by 'culture.' it's a discussion about the act of seeing culture as a feature of a 'people.'
there's certainly legitimate uses of the word culture but one can also see quite easily how thinking culture as essential property of a certain group of people can be racist.
but such a trial isn't very interesting. the basic argument without the racist angle is simply this:
how much do certain social facts matter in the current situation,
what is the mechanism producing such features, and how can its direction be changed.
seeing clan based society as a fixed property of 'southern europe' is just analytically shallow and lazy. familial organized society such as korea has high degree of 'competitiveness,' and government corruption and association with industry isn't a death sentence to places like china. the basic mechanism producing the current crisis is simply the currency and trade balance.
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On April 22 2015 03:25 WhiteDog wrote:Show nested quote +On April 22 2015 02:57 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On April 22 2015 02:02 WhiteDog wrote:On April 22 2015 01:25 JonnyBNoHo wrote:NPR had a great podcast episode on southern Italy and how culture holds back its economy not too long ago: Episode 400: What Two Pasta Factories Tell Us About The Italian Economy
A decade ago, the Barilla pasta factory in Foggia, Italy, had a big problem with people skipping work. The absentee rate was around 10 percent.
People called in sick all the time, typically on Mondays, or on days when there was a big soccer game.
Foggia is in southern Italy. Barilla's big factory in northern Italy had a much lower absentee rate. This is not surprising; there's a huge economic gap between southern and northern Italy. It's like two different countries.
Barilla execs told Nicola Calandrea, the manager of the Foggia plant, that they would close the factory unless he brought the absenteeism rate down.
Calandrea decided that to save the factory, he had to change the culture. On today's show, we visit the factory and hear how Calandrea made it work. Link Explain me why the south has a different culture than the north of Italy ? They get into it in the podcast. IIRC, history lead to a distrust of authority. Are you implying the south of italy is closer to Greece from a cultural standpoint than from the north of Italy ? No. Corruption has a lot to do with lack of a fiable justice system, a lack of public infrastructure and poverty problems - it becomes a culture afterwards, as a response to a situation crystallized in repeated practices. Why do you think that corruption and drug appeared in Harlem in the 80s and 90s ? Do you think it is a cultural problem ? Cultural interpretations are always racist. lol Yep I reiterate, it's racist. + Show Spoiler +In 1920-1930, thousands of Italian migrants came to East Harlem. They came from southern italy, fleeing poverty and war. Politicians at that time used to say that they had "african origin" (in opposition to northern italian who lived in "german" neighborhoods). That's the same analysis as you gave more or less, and it's a hundred years old.
Then in 1930-1940 the portoricans came to east harlem, and the same exact thing happened : portoricans were described as carriers of various tropical diseases due to their lack of hygiene and they were less intelligent and lazy workers, even compared to the Italian.
It's just easy, of course a population that has no public education is going to be less "intelligent", and of course a population that lives in such poverty will carry more disease... How is that culture ? How is it culture that the southern italy does not trust authority ? Just pointing out "culture" is a way to essentialize and reify certain behaviors and put aside the global superstructure that explain the behaviors.
The crisis in europe is linked to its institutions, and the way it reacted to the crisis, and not to some vague behaviors commonly shared by "the south", behaviors that are "culturally" reproduced from generations to generations outside of any economical and social context. Culture, the magic word.
Just to use a number, unemployment in europe was the same as unemployment in the US before 2007. Now it has 5 % more, can you all culturalists explain me how corruption and culture evolved so much in the last 8 years that we have now so much more unemployment now ?
Nucor expanded and US Steel failed, in part because of cultural differences between the companies. This is not a racist statement.
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its just the usual, its to hard to think about all the complex things that influence our lifes, lets break it down to something nice and easy we can blame.
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I really seem to have opened Pandora's box, haven't I?
WhiteDog, I would appreciate it, however, if you would refrain from ad hominems, implied or explicit, and from putting words in my mouth. Nowhere do I recall having said that Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal are the same culture. I merely said that they share certain traits. It is incredibly frustrating to spend time trying to make a coherent post only to have you cherrypick it and interpret it as you see fit.
Nothing I said would be considered racist by anyone who ever read a book or two about culture and its effect on human behaviour in different places around the world. If you want to broaden your knowledge, I'd suggest the following literature:
Beyond Culture, by Edward T. Hall (Achor Books, 1976)
Wired for Culture, by Mark Pagel (Penguin Books, 2012)
Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, by Francis Fukuyama (Hamish Hamilton London, 1995)
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It's sad that you always quote shitty books maartendq (talking about Fukuyama of course). I understand that you are very litterate and argue intelligently, but your core points are always flawed. I'm sorry, even if you consider that spain italy greece and portugal have different culture but share certain traits, your comments are still quite problematic.
Also, I've read work on culture, and the main biggest point about culture is the problem of definition : Clyde Kluckhon famously note that there are above a hundred definitions (128 if I reckon ?) in a number of article that he reviewed, and Clifford Geertz (in his famous article The thick description) note that there are as much as 12 different definitions of culture in Kluckhon's book about culture (Mirror for Man). What does it mean ? It's a flawed concept. It doesn't work, and social scientists who try to explain macrosocial mecanism by using this concept (outside of any anthropological and empirical work) are not only stupid, but also bigots.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
that's a bit too far even from your past posts. i believe you only objected to essentialized culture associated with ethnic/geographic groups.
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Culture is a pretty vague word but most people here have used it as in ' parts of social structure which influence economical development' which is concrete enough to use it in a discussion I guess.
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On April 22 2015 04:19 oneofthem wrote:
that's a bit too far even from your past posts. i believe you only objected to essentialized culture associated with ethnic/geographic groups.
I don't necessarily object using the word culture to define a group. But I think it's wrong to use "culture" outside of any ground work, culture outside of any context - the "italian culture" outside of the current economic context for exemple.
My problem is when you "reifiate" culture if you will.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
well those contexts can be vague and perhaps necessarily so. if someone makes a statement like 'greece culture of clientelism politics' it could mean a range of things,
the relation between culture and its associated group is pretty rich. one could be very austere in drawing this relationship and only mean by it a simple statement that at this particular point in time, disregarding any discussion about causes, certain values and practices exist. it is also easy to see this statement made in a derogatory way against 'greece' as a civilization, people etc, a very essentialized entity with no regard for processes of development.
it does not help matters when the sort of cultural features discussed here involves power, and are self-producing results of social power and institutions.
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On April 22 2015 03:21 cLutZ wrote:Show nested quote +
Are you joking right? Italy tried to live like the french in 2010 when it had th economy of the french in 1950? You make me laugh just as much as those people who think the main export of southern countries is agricolture.
Italy, Greece, Ireland, etc were much less economically developed than England/France in 1998 (2000). In fact, so was Germany to a large extent (we shouldn't forget that a significant portion of that populace, not half, but a lot, was living under terribly repressive social and economic conditions a decade prior).
In 1991 Italy had the 4th biggest economy in the world after surpassing both England and France. How is that "much less economically developed?" It's not, and why did you bring Ireland into this? I thought you were talking about "southern states". You pissed out of the bucket. Stop generalizing.
When the EU gave them the ability to access credit at favorable interest rates (why do you think many of them lied to get into the EU?) they had many options of what to do with that credit. You can simply refuse to take on debt, this is smart if you don't know what to do with it. You can take on debt and invest with it, this is smart if you know what you are doing and get a return on investment. You can also take on debt and use it to purchase things that improve your quality of life immediately, this can be smart if its a good that is going to last a long while, and you have access to other revenue streams that will continue to yield returns to repay the debt.
The problem lies in that they took the debt, used it on immediate life improvements but either didn't have, or vastly overestimated the other revenue streams. The creditors, of course, also are to blame for not recognizing this. But this isn't a flaw of the Eurozone (many countries, like Germany) have used the capital to improve their QOL and underlying economy at rates that would probably have not occurred without the monetary union.
Italy lied to join the EU? Oh, I didn't know about it...
Ah, of course, it was Italy that used the funds "wrong". It was not the fault of all of the german products swarming our market and killing our local producers, it was not the fault of the EU for putting stupid regulations that pretty much killed some of our industries (for example Eridania). It was our fault for asking money to keep the stuff that we built through sacrifice alive. God damn, how did we dare?
This is ONLY a fault of the Eurozone. Stop acting like corruption didn't exist before the 2000s and stop acting like Germany and other "northern states" are some kind of geniuses when it comes to economics.
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On April 22 2015 04:44 oneofthem wrote:
well those contexts can be vague and perhaps necessarily so. if someone makes a statement like 'greece culture of clientelism politics' it could mean a range of things,
the relation between culture and its associated group is pretty rich. one could be very austere in drawing this relationship and only mean by it a simple statement that at this particular point in time, disregarding any discussion about causes, certain values and practices exist. it is also easy to see this statement made in a derogatory way against 'greece' as a civilization, people etc, a very essentialized entity with no regard for processes of development.
it does not help matters when the sort of cultural features discussed here involves power, and are self-producing results of social power and institutions.
If you state that greek have "a culture of clientelism", and don't point out the lack of public infrastructure, the weakness of the state at a certain time, and most of all the reality of the life of the greeks, then you basically state that its a cultural habit inscribed in the mind of the greek that produce reality (which is exactly Nyxisto definition of culture in his previous post), when in fact it's a relation, and exchange, some kind of back and forth between on one side a set of institutions, customs, habits, and on the other side the social and economical context (like you describe in your post).
And yes the term "context" is impossible to "saturate" (or vague as you say) but it is always historical - that is the epistemological destiny of social sciences.
And I agree that using culture as a concept can be rich, but concepts in social sciences only have value in the context in which they are used. Everything equal, culture doesn't mean much.
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Having lived in the UK, Portugal and Denmark, I think culture is a pretty shitty way to describe the difference in economic development between northern Europe and southern Europe. In my opinion, and in line with the work on development economics from Acemoglu, among others, is that it's all about institutions. The one thing in common with Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece is that their democracies are all much younger than northern European democracies. Industrialization and public education began much earlier in northern Europe. There are many and varied explanations for all these factors from the Protestantism to geography.
Point is, institutions can change. Today, tax evasion in Portugal is among the lowest in Europe. Attitudes towards corruption are much stronger than before and misuse of public funds is today much harder than it was before. At the same time, situations where semi-public and private companies had corrupt extractive arrangements with the Governments have been greatly reduced with the privatizations and better governance and oversight.
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On April 22 2015 04:55 warding wrote:
Having lived in the UK, Portugal and Denmark, I think culture is a pretty shitty way to describe the difference in economic development between northern Europe and southern Europe. In my opinion, and in line with the work on development economics from Acemoglu, among others, is that it's all about institutions. The one thing in common with Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece is that their democracies are all much younger than northern European democracies. Industrialization and public education began much earlier in northern Europe. There are many and varied explanations for all these factors from the Protestantism to geography.
Point is, institutions can change. Today, tax evasion in Portugal is among the lowest in Europe. Attitudes towards corruption are much stronger than before and misuse of public funds is today much harder than it was before. At the same time, situations where semi-public and private companies had corrupt extractive arrangements with the Governments have been greatly reduced with the privatizations and better governance and oversight.
This doesn't make any sense.
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warding -> cultures can change too, so I don't see why that makes it a terrible word to describe things.
blitzer -> you're coming off very unjustifiably vehement from my point of view. it sounds like an anti-euro rant instead of a sound argument.
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On April 22 2015 04:58 zlefin wrote:
cultures can change too, so I don't see why that makes it a terrible word to describe things.
blitzer -> you're coming off very unjustifiably vehement from my point of view.
And you're shocked considering what has been said previously about his country ?
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Whitedog, most of the stuff previously said about his country in THIS THREAD has been quite reasonable; and there are still ongoing debates about them, so asserting to the contrary is you just being nonsensical.
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On April 22 2015 04:49 WhiteDog wrote:
then you basically state that its a cultural habit inscribed in the mind of the greek that produce reality (which is exactly Nyxisto definition of culture in his previous post), when in fact it's a relation, and exchange, some kind of back and forth between on one side a set of institutions, customs, habits, and on the other side the social and economical context, that create, almost everyday, what we call "culture".
So are you completely denying that this is possible? Because right now there are many states in which certain ideologies or aspects of their culture, for example extreme forms of religion, are so dominant that they have made the development of education and a modern economy impossible and pretty much defined how any other aspect of society looks, economy included.
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On April 22 2015 04:58 zlefin wrote:
cultures can change too, so I don't see why that makes it a terrible word to describe things.
blitzer -> you're coming off very unjustifiably vehement from my point of view.
Unjustifiably? Every single day I hear people like this clutz who look down to my country, its people and what they achieved. I'm tired ot people who say stuff like "Italy was much less economically developed than France/England". I'm TIRED of people thinking we are a bunch of savages who live through agricolture products when in reality it's not even in the top 10 exports of my country. I'm tired of people acting like WE are the bad guys and that WE are the only one that did stuff wrong. I'm TIRED of generalization and disgusting propaganda.
Pretty much all of the work that my Dad or my Grandpa did is either getting destroyed (literally), or being permanently scarred by these kinds of statements people make. How would you feel? Tell me.
I think you should be more concerned about people making false statements about a country.
I'm lucky. I live in one of the richest regions in Italy/Europe (better than 99% probably) and probably even one of the richest regions in the world. But what about the other people in my country? Not so lucky.
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EPT
