Anu (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} azooey) wrote,@ 2006-08-20 13:24:00 |
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Today's Sunday Times carries a guest column by David Brooks (original NYT article). Whether you get a parking ticket or not, would depend on a gazillion real life factors. Time, traffic, a fight with your spouse, a lost sock, vehicle malfuntion or whatever-god-wills. It might sound be unfair, even far-fetched to caliberate my cultural standing, and hence predict my economic growth, on the scale of parking tickets. But the numbers don't lie. Infact, the truth rings in, not uncharacteristically I might add, with a few racially charged conclusions.
Only last night, dad and I were talking about how cultural values can affect workplace policies and production strategies. "The Japanese need no incentives. Its a sin not to work," he pointed out. It comes as no surprise that they went from a comprehensively defeated nation to an industrial giant, in time that spanned a little over half of India's independent life. Germany, Israel and Britain are also relevant in a similar context. It would, however, be a spurious claim that their recovery was economically inspired.
The reason there are such wide variations in ticket rates is that human beings are not merely products of economics. The diplomats paid no cost for parking illegally, thanks to diplomatic immunity. But human beings are also shaped by cultural and moral norms. If you’re Swedish and you have a chance to pull up in front of a fire hydrant, you still don’t do it. You’re Swedish. That’s who you are.
People need the coherence their culture provides and value it even more than easy parking.
Writing about poverty or war on terror (does that suggest a bias or an insight?) , it is not clear which, he feels that cultural change can’t be imposed from the outside, except in rare circumstances. It has to be led by people who recognize and accept responsibility for their own culture’s problems and selectively reinterpret their own traditions to encourage modernization.
Brooks himself takes it a step further - Muslim men in Britain might decide to renounce freedom and prosperity for midair martyrdom. They are driven by a deep cultural need for meaning. But it is also foolish to think we can address the root causes of their toxic desires. We’ll just have to fight the symptoms of a disease we can neither cure nor understand.
But slightly more relevant to us in India, are the economic offshoots of cultural stagnation. Amartya Sen might continue to eulogise about Hinduism, but these papers suggest that religion can determine the level of corruption in a society. That's probably too simplisticly put and lacks authority. But if you've battled with Statistics (as I am hopelessly doing now), the application of regression analysis to predict the "systematic deviation" requires the most parsimonious model i.e. determining only the independent variables that most affect the dependent variable, not all possible (possibly interdependent) variables that try to establish "too perfect a fit" for the data.
Right, and this is where i run out of gas. No puns intended.
