When I hear the word culture … aw, hell with it

I don’t know how anyone could give Goldberg’s post a fair-minded read and conclude that he was saying “Culture is Destiny”.

Nor do I see why you would believe he making a point so trivial and uncontroversial as to go without saying. He is clearly taking a position somewhere between the two is saying that certain features of national cultures are very important (or essential) factors in fostering an environment in which a European style welfare system is possible, and that America is lacking those cultural features.

I think the significance of culture (the set of phenomena that can be reasonably categorized as “culture”) in politics is highly exaggerated. Yeah, the French drink wine, and Germans prefer beer, and Turks smoke water pipes – that’s culture; but the idea of welfare society is universal. See the 1944 economic bill of rights, for example. It took a decade of McCarthyism – pretty much an equivalent of Stalinist purges – to bury that idea.

The reason people call Goldberg stupid is that he constantly makes, as Henry puts it, “sweeping, half assed claims” and then getting called instantly on them. Henry charitably didn’t mention this zinger:

There are plenty of African and Latin American welfare states that are indistinguishable on paper from their European cousins and yet we don’t see Swedens and Denmarks all over the place.

Really, Jonah? Name one.

Goldberg’s not entirely without use. Had he not been granted a weekly column in the L.A. Times, I’d have had to sacrifice other possibly recyclable materials cleaning up after my brother’s dogs visits, which might have been an even more deplorable waste.

John is right about the ubiquity of that rhetorical device — see, for instance, abb1’s claim upthread that McCarthyism was “pretty much” the equivalent of Stalinism. Since McCarthyism didn’t lead to mass imprisonments and executions, I’m guessing the “pretty much” is what allows for the transition to weaker version. And I agree this move needs a name, but isn’t it a species of equivocation?

Aeon J. Skoble:

And of course, this “species of equivocation” will also include the way you mention Goldberg’s tactic and abb1’s tactic in the same breath, even if they’re arguably different tactics.

I’m with ginger yellow. what latin american or african countries is he talking about?

bi: no, they’re essentially the same – the strong version of the comparison is attention-getting and dramatic, and surely unreasonable, but there’s a weaker interpretation which is true but far less interesting. BTW, I wasn’t really impugning abb1’s character, it just seemed like an ironically-well-timed example of how common this two-step is. functional: good call.

How about The Argument of the Diluted Middle?

Well, Tyler is pretty open that he is being simplistic, and offers the thought as a kind of model for discussion. I don’t think what he says is stupid at all. It focusses our attention on th structure of american government institutions and asks us to be sensitive to their (in my opinion, and his apparently, pretty awful, and distinctive) flaws when making demands. He doesn’t mention culture, which is irrelevant to his simplified thesis. He also has an extraordinary record of intellectually serious accomplishment. If he’d written something as stupid as Goldberg did I’d have spent a good deal of time looking for the kernel of interestingness and smartness in it.

Wouldn’t have found it, of course. But then he wouldn’t have written it.

thomas, don’t be daft. Here’s what Cowen said:

Europe is better at producing (many) public goods through the public sector. Europe has more homogeneous nations with more urbanization, higher levels of social cohesion, and a more even distribution of ability. America is better at resource mobility, private sector innovation and catering to elites.

He gives specific, concrete variables to explain what he thinks causes European governments to “work better.” Social cohesion, urbanization, and even ability of distrubution aren’t “culture,” they’re specific, measurable sociological/democraphic factors. The rest of the post discusses how people percieve government in light of that performance difference. I certainly don’t agree with all of it, but it’s a very different species of even a charitable read of Goldberg’s argument.

Unsympathetic Jonah’s intellect may be, but it’s hardly vast. Nor cool. You guys need a new tag for Intellects Tiny and Annoying.

I don’t have a tactic.

Also, McCarthyism was not a domestic political dispute, but a government/corporate persecution of ideological deviants – yes, pretty much the same as the Stalinist purges, whether they did “lead to mass imprisonments and executions” or not; that’s irrelevant.

Stalinist purges meant people losing their party membership and their jobs, unsanctioned political activity suppressed, dissidents intimidated. Where’s the difference?

I didn’t like Henry’s response to the Goldberg piece, because I thought he was mis-reading the thesis. But you’re spot on that Goldberg is so vague about the point he’s making that it’s impossible to refute. By the same token, it’s impossible to do anything with it except nod and say “Hm, that’s very interesting” and move on. He’s not so much making a statement as insinuating a general attitude.

Maybe that should be called Not-a-Thesis. Anyway, it may not be intentionally deceptive in all cases, but where it’s not, it’s simply so intellectually weak that we should expect better from college freshmen, let alone someone writing for public consumption.

sg,

I’m a pretty strong anti-imperialist – I’d like to see us bring ALL of the troops home, from ALL foreign bases, massively cut our military, dismantle the national security state, and pursue a policy of pretty strict isolationism. And I’d love to see the current crew tried as war criminals, convicted, and suffer the ultimate fate.

But as bad as things are, equating the current situation here with Stalinism is so absurd that it seriously undermines any critique of the current policies of the United States. i.e., you are not helping.

abb1,

You say “whether they did “lead to mass imprisonments and executions” or not; that’s irrelevant.”

Pretty much self refuting. I’ve been following your posts long enough that I think you are sincere, but sometimes you really sound like a right winger trying to parody an insane anti-US extremist. As with sg, you’re not helping.

Functional – I just made a similar point to Cowen on the other Goldberg thread. While I agree with you that Cowen is wrong to suggest that culture can’t be measured or observed, he invokes a very important analytic distinction between the structure of social relations and the meanings actors attach to them, i.e., their cultural content. In any given context, form and content are mutually constitutive of one another–they produce on another. But we can still compare whether some mechanism like “social cohesion” explains aspects of welfare states independent of the cultural dimensions/sources of high levels of social cohesion.

What people seem to be missing is that Goldberg’s basic point is right on: A lot of discussions of health care policy and the like (at least on lefty blogs) takes the form:

“France does it and Sweden does it. Therefore if the United States just adopted their system, we’d all save money and be healthier at the same time!”

But this ignores cultural factors, such as the oft-noted clash between welfare statism and diversity, the fact that Americans are fatter and unhealthier than Europeans, the fact that Americans may be more likely to resent any limitations on hugely expensive end-of-life care, and so forth. All of which suggests that it’s not quite so simplistic as transplanting France’s system to America and then we’ll all have ponies.

People around here seem to alternate between: 1) being too dense even to comprehend that culture matters; and 2) claiming that the point is so obvious that Goldberg was wasting everyone’s time in making it.

harry, I agree with functional in 28, so I think Tyler is talking about “culture” in some sense. I also think that Tyler’s conclusion (“Policy is not an exogenous or all-determining variable”)doesn’t in fact focus us on the structure of American government institutions.

If you’ve never seen lefty blogs that discuss France’s health care system in the simplistic terms I describe, use http://blogsearch.google.com. I could come up with a hundred examples, but I have better things to do.

John, I think you’re misunderstanding the argument, and you’re missing functional’s point. Building on 33, the structure of the liberal policy-entrepreneur’s argument includes the unstated premise that there are no relevant cultural differences between France and Sweden and the US. Pointing out that this is a premise, and that in many cases it’s a premise that isn’t true, doesn’t commit one to a particular view of whether it is or isn’t true in any particular instance. It’s an argument about the argument, and only tangentially about the underlying issue.

Daniel, you say “France demonstrates that a country can have superior health care without the kind of hybrid system we have here, i.e., it refutes claims made that socialized medicine is necessarily inferior to market-based health care.” But that’s not really the issue. What Ezra and others are claiming is that if the US were to adopt a French-style system, it would get results approximating French results. (If they’re not claiming that, then what’s the point of the argument?) That’s the reason I pointed to Tyler’s post, and his claim that “American liberals look at Europe and see (sometimes) better results per dollar spent. They then conclude that America should be more like Europe, whereas in reality America would end up spending more to get more bad American government.”

Let me join Daniel and others. Functional and Thomas, would you please engage serious examples rather than your generic “lefty blog” or “liberal policy-entrepreneur”?

#33 reproduces Goldberg’s false dichotomy.

Well, all Ezra claimed is that much of the difference between Scandanvian economic performance and French economic performance can be explained through public policies rather than the supposed failings of some monolithic thing call the welfare state. I haven’t read Cohn’s article–I don’t subscribe to TNR–so you may be correct there.

But the question is whether they’re naively omitting putative *cultural* differences that would significantly change their interpretation of the comparative evidence.

Goldberg’s “riff” doesn’t even come close to making this case, although your and other commentators have, in my humble opinion, done a better job of specifying differences, some of which relate to “national culture,” that might matter.

Well, thomas, based on past experience I don’t think Goldberg has any intellectual credibility and mostly just wants to score points while insulating himself from any real engagement with theory or research. (Based on your own previous contributions around here, I have much the same view of you, as well.) So John’s diagnosis of his rhetorical strategy is correct. Saying “France and Denmark can handle the systems they have because they have long traditions of sucking-up to the state and throne” and then immediately backing away from it when pushed is just so much B.S.

On the other hand, if I unwisely give you the benefit of the doubt, and take you seriously on the difficulty of importing models developed in one place to somewhere else, then I think you’re actually on the right track when it comes to the importance of culture. I agree with you that it’s wrong to think that culture is either solely some abstract set of values or some non-observable, easily-dispensed-with fluff.

Heard of the New Republic? Check out the 6th and 7th paragraphs here — it offers all the usual tropes about how countries with universal health care have better health and spend less money.

Ezra Klein has done this often. For example, here, where he says, “They do it for less money, while providing universal coverage, etc, etc. We’re spending twice as much as anyone else, leaving 45 million of our countrymen uninsured, and getting outcomes that are comparable or a bit worse.”

Granted, these examples don’t literally promise that if only America adopted the French model, we’d all be twice as healthy for half the cost. But as seems to be almost universally true (in the world of liberal bloggery), they do their damndest to leave that implication. And they never acknowledge even the possibility that there might be any cultural factor whatsoever that might lead to higher costs and worse health in America.

You need to do better, Functional. You have the whole internet out there, an ocean of sloppy logic and hasty blog-posts, and so far you can’t find anyone articulating the argument you accuse “lefty blogs” of making routinely.

The writings you cite make arguments that health-care resources are being used wastefully in the United States. Money in, health-care services out. Maybe the comparisons are badly-drawn. Maybe we should be willing to put up with wasteful use of resources to have more freedom. But making a cross-national comparison is not tantamount to assuming that institutions could be transferred intact.

bi: “when you say “they’re essentially the same” is that supposed to be interpreted as a strong comparison or a weak comparison? :)”
:-) Actually, though, I wasn’t using “essentially” in a weasly way, but was trying to make a claim that that the essence of both was the same rheotorical device.

Up until recently, the primary argument against government run health insurance was that it was *intrinsically* ineffiecent. Citing contrary evidence from other countries is a perfectly acceptable response to that claim.

As for the claim that American culture precludes government run health insurance (or as some of the more strident pro-Iraq-war folks would have it, the claim that Americans are too stupid to have a sensible health care system), I suggest consulting comparative satisfaction levels of Americans in private health insurance programs vs. Americans in government run health insurance programs. I believe you can find the numbers on Ezra’s site.

rm:

Aye; it’s in Kenneth Burke’s Grammar of Motives, and it’s called the “rhetoric of substance” (not sure whether that’s his own term).

“We may even go a step further and note that one may say ‘it is substantially true’ precisely at a time when on the basis of the evidence, it would be much more accurate to say, ‘it is not true’.”

ABB1:

“Stalin’s purge of the 1930s made returning to the NEP institutionally impossible. No politician or government official or intellectual could advocate it and remain relevant.”

Well, that’s one way of putting it. Another would be to say that no politician could advocate it and remain -alive-.

Well, if we simply imported the French health system into the US, all the doctors would be speaking French. So in that sense, Goldberg is perfectly correct–it wouldn’t work here, for cultural reasons.

Let us not exaggerate, Julian: he could very well remain alive; but anyhow, Julian, seriously now, to the rest of us, to 250 or 300 million people – what difference does it make whether this hypothetical politician or intellectual has been executed or imprisoned or expelled or ‘only’ completely ridiculed, bullied, shut out of the mainstream public discourse and left to be published in some Zmag that no one ever reads? Isn’t result the same? From the big picture point of view, wouldn’t you agree that the exact fate of that particular individual is largely irrelevant?
Thanks.

What do you disagree with, Soru, and why?

If Goldberg had argued that Swedish welfare or French health system will not have the same effects because more regressive taxation is accepted in Sweden or dietary habits are far different in France, respectively, he would have a plausible cultural argument. But that’s not what he said, as Nexon has pointed out.

That the French health system might not travel well to the US (or Italy or Canada, where people’s reported satisfaction with their health system is far lower or only modestly higher, respectively, than in the US is unlikely to be due primarily to cultural variables, however broadly defined.

Larry M, I am not trying to help. The deaths of all those Vietnamese and Laotians who were carpet bombed to oblivion for dubious political gains count for something, in my book, and whether a country starved its own people or bombed someone elses, in the end it is still a tyrannical and evil nation. Whether your gulag includes 250 people or 250,000 or 250 million is irrelevant – it’s still a crime.

Of course it’s easy to pretend that your nation is still the beacon of freedom that in fact it never was (remember slavery anyone?) if you insist on reinterpreting Stalins purges as only ever ending in death, and ignore your own blighted history wherever it suits (or, heaven forbid, your current actions). But only a neo-conservative would engage in such sleight of hand, eh? Certainly not a “pretty strong anti-imperialist.”

Thanks, Bi – indeed, culture has been used to mean everything from “all aspects of behaviour that have to be learned” to “specific art forms characteristic of the ruling class.” I’d be interested to see Goldberg’s definition.

I have to say, I like Luis’ example, however – I haven’t come across a cultural metric before: that is, culture offered as an analytical tool, rather than as an object to be admired or a bit of vigourous hand-waving in lieu of explanation. Of course, I’ve got some caveats straight off (IQ testing has its critics, I’d need to look at the study’s definitions of class and other possible environmental factors that could lead to consistent distinctions, and sample size is critical) but this still looks intriguing, and highly unusual.

For Jonah Goldberg, “culture” is something that prevents US from adopting changes in political institutions that he doesn’t like,

OTOH, “culture” doesn’t matter if it means forcing Iraq at a barrel of a gun to accept changes in its poitical institutions that he happens to like.

Not really following the comment thread anymore, but I thought I’d make this point: if applied by a European commentator to the US, the kind of sentiments that Goldberg is stating, and the way in which he is stating them would immediately and vociferously be denounced as “anti-American”. I dislike this criticism, since it is lazy and is used mainly for shutting someone up without explaining why they should up-shut, but sauce for the goose and gander and all that – Goldberg, by these standards, is anti-European and anti-Canadian and therefore anything he says can immediately be ignored.

Soru – the argument, as I understand it, is that many IQ tests require specific knowledge that people in certain cultures are more likely to have than those in others. For many involved in the formulation of IQ tests, this may have been a feature rather than a bug. Or it may have stemmed from their own cultural blindness. Regardless, this is really an apples and oranges comparison.

Why would that follow?

What Daniel said. And I’m glad we’ve established that it was Kurt Vonnegut who was screwing up U.S. healthcare.

Mr. Abb1,

One would expect that culture (however defined, and whatever elements are pertinent to a particular question) has some strong if not exclusive relation to ethnicity. The interesting thing is that a very wide range of measurable performance phenomena are associated with ethnicity. This seems to me to be undeniable. Why is this so ?

Perhaps the elements of behavior or mental programming that have a bearing on material success are common to the broader culture of several ethnicities, in spite of the otherwise great differences between them – say Chinese, Armenians and Jews. We certainly don’t know what these elements are yet (maybe it is shoe size, who knows), but there is obviously something there.

Is this important ? I think it is extremely important. If a way can be found to remove the obstacles that seem to prevent some peoples from managing the material success that seems to be reliably achievable by other groups it would be a massive achievement. If Filipinos can be taught to succeed like Chinese the country would go from the third to the first world in a couple of decades, ending a great deal of misery. How about making Yemenis succeed like Jews ? Consider the possibilities.

Mr. Abb1,

I don’t know. Nobody knows I think. Whats clear to me (and to a great many people by now) is that they have something other groups don’t, and whatever it is is very valuable. More research is needed.

And its not just the Chinese. It seems to me that there is some sort of cultural dividing line (or maybe its biological, give that side its due) running through East Asia – the Japanese, Koreans, Chinese and probably the Vietnamese (based on their US immigrant performance) on one side, and the Cambodians, Laotians, Thai (maybe), Malays, Filipinos, Indonesians on the other.

Thats just East Asia as an example.

Mr. Abb1,

And as for speaking to toddlers, I have my doubts about the conclusions in that bit of research, beyond the sample size. The talking part could easily be an irrelevant (to success) element of behavior that smart, educated people do more often than others, and not a mechanism for programming achievement. With a larger and culturally broader sample they may have come to very different conclusions.

There are some other such studies that have come to other odd conclusions in studying child-rearing behavior. Some have asserted that the success model is a non-authoritarian, relaxed style of parenting. This does not square with what I know of Chinese parenting.

A lot more research is needed.

Mr. Abb1,

The Chinese (in China) have indeed had their IQ’s tested, in statistically significant numbers and with some rigor in sampling, and the resulting average IQ’s are indeed high. I think we can conclude that the average IQ of the 1.3 billion Chinese is higher than the world average.

But the Chinese we are talking about (Amy Chua’s people and my old classmates) are for the most part overseas Chinese, maybe 50 million people counting Taiwan. These did not come straight from China, they have typically been at least one generation removed. Their ancestors made the migration and were perhaps filtered in their first country (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, etc.), and their children and grandchildren continue to succeed there, and in any third country they move to, like the US. We are not talking about a filtered set of smart, ambitious people, we are talking about a self-perpetuating population of these, there are no more filters.

Their ancestors are also almost purely of exceedingly humble origins in China, people who effectively sold themselves into slavery. I don’t think that was a filter that selected an upper cut of the population.

Mr. Abb1,

On the origins of the overseas Chinese – from an interview with Lee Kwan Yew, on a conversation he had with Deng Xiaoping –

“We are the descendants of the landless peasants of south China. You have the mandarins, the writers, the thinkers and all the bright people. You can do better.” He looked at me, but said nothing. In November 1992, during his famous tour of the southern provinces, he said, “Learn from Singapore,” and “Do better than them.”

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,501051212-1137705,00.html

Mr. Abb1,

You took this as ethnic nationalism ? It seems to me that LKY was just stating facts.

I don’t have the slightest bit of Chinese ancestry (that I know of) btw.

Red-state/Blue state… actually ‘ethnic’ or cultural in origin.

This is an interesting question, but partly because it begs a further question: when does a trait become ‘cultural’ (as opposed to political, free-willed, a choice or indulgence)? Given the allegedly firm divisions in American society now, and the alleged unlikeliness of any individual changing their allegiance between red and blue, I’d say the 2 classifications mark 2 cultural camps: they may only be 50, 20 or 5 years old, but they seem to be self-reproducing (or dialectically reproducing).

My impression (and I can’t back this up in a thesis) is that distinctions tend to start out political, or habitual, or in any arbitrary way: when they’ve been reproduced for some years they grow the label ‘cultural,’ and when they’ve ben reproduced longer than anyone can remember (which also may not be many years) they grow the label ‘ethnic.’

I don’t want to get into debates on the overseas Chinese: there’s an enormous literature on them, which uniformally concludes that they enjoy repeatable success as a community for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious. Whether this is because of any specifically Chinese trait, or because they constitute a marginal trade diaspora, or whether any credence can be given to ‘rational stranger’ arguments, or whether they have ‘commercial confidence’ like Weberian protestants, or whether it’s the lingering ghost of Zheng He (aka Sampo Kong) watching over them remains entirely unclear. I think it’s at least as plausible as the other (quite earnestly supported) arguments above, that they acquired a reputation and a group identity, across Southeast Asian and European colonial communities, as useful brokers for manufactured goods that could not be had elsewhere – a reputation that rested as much on the reluctance of Chinese governments to engage in wholesale trade of these items as on any special entrepreneurship on the part of the overseas communities – and that this reputation became a reproducing and portable element of their culture, capable of being slipped over both the high- and low-class new immigrants that poured out of Hokkien and Fukien, in much the same way that alleged American entrepreneurialism was slipped over successive waves of European and other immigrants in the US. This hypothesis is completely unprovable, but the comparison to the US does at least suggest that biological arguments are complete bunk (as does the very extensive intermarriage between Chinese elites and other, native and non-native groups in places like, for instance, Thailand, producing a hybrid, often “Chinese” but as often “national” elite that possesses much the same characteristics in those nations).

Damn. I said I didn’t want to get into these debates. Too late, maybe.

Another form of the two-step is the the two-step of terrific technicality, in which on the plain meaning of your words readers understand it in some sort of metaphorical sense, with the associations of the usual words, but in the context of the work you insist you are using the words technically and that they have precise, scientific meanings. This is the game Chomsky knocked B. F. Skinner for and David Stove knocks a bunch of people for in The Plato Cult.

I don’t know what “unwise” means.
The US is becoming more “European” as Europe is becoming more “American.” We’ll end up with a national health system sooner than Goldberg wants or hopes. But his critics responses are being no more empirically based than his.