Abstract

We discuss the two-way link between culture and economic growth. We present a model of endogenous technical change where growth is driven by the innovative activity of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is risky and requires investments that affect the steepness of the lifetime consumption profile. As a consequence, the occupational choice of entrepreneurship hinges on risk tolerance and patience. Parents expecting their children to become entrepreneurs have an incentive to instill these two values in their children. Cultural transmission is Beckerian, i.e. parents are driven by the desire to maximize their children’s happiness. We also consider, in an extension, a paternalistic motive for preference transmission. The growth rate of the economy depends on the fraction of the population choosing an entrepreneurial career. How many entrepreneurs there are in a society hinges, in turn, on parental investments in children’s patience and risk tolerance. There can be multiple balanced growth paths, where in faster-growing countries more people exhibit an “entrepreneurial spirit.” We discuss applications of models of endogenous preferences to the analysis of socio-economic transformations, such as the British Industrial Revolution. We also discuss empirical studies documenting the importance of culture and preference heterogeneity for economic growth.

Keywords

Culture; Entrepreneurship; Innovation; Economic growth; Endogenous preferences; Intergenerational preference transmission

JEL Classification Codes

J24; L26; N30; O10; O32; O33; O43; Z10

1.1 Introduction

The relationship between economic development and culture—broadly defined as the set of preferences, values, and beliefs that are at least partially learned—has attracted increasing attention in the economic literature over the last decade.

The notion that accounting for cultural heterogeneity is important for explaining individual behavior and economic success was a familiar one to classical economists. For instance, Smith (1776) described members of different social classes of his time as distinct types of human beings driven by different motives: “A merchant is accustomed to employ his money chiefly in profitable projects; whereas a mere country gentleman is accustomed to employ it chiefly in expense. The one often sees his money go from him and return to him again with a profit: the other, when once he parts with it, very seldom expects to see any more of it” (p. 432).

A century later, Karl Marx postulated that culture is the effect, rather than the cause, of the structure of production relations. In his view, culture, religion, and ideology (the “superstructure”) are mere reflections of the material interests of the class that controls the means of production. Marx’ materialism was disputed by Max Weber, who argued, that cultural and spiritual factors are independent drivers of socio-economic transformations. For Weber, the emergence of a “spirit of capitalism” with the ensuing emphasis on the virtue of entrepreneurial success was a major engine of the industrial revolution, not just a mere reflection of it. Weber did not fully reverse Marx’ perspective, but rather acknowledged that the causation can run both ways.1 For instance, he held the view that Protestant Asceticism had been an engine of economic transformation, but “was in turn influenced in its development and its character by the totality of social conditions, especially economic” (Weber, 1905, p. 183).

In contrast to the thinking of Smith, Marx, and Weber, the marginalist revolution in economics in the late 19th century sidelined cultural factors. According to the neoclassical paradigm, economics should focus on optimal individual choice and efficient resource allocation, while treating preferences and technology as exogenous primitives. Consistent with this paradigm, until recently economists have regarded preference formation, and culture more broadly, as issues lying outside the realm of economics. Over time, however, as economic imperialism has broken into new territories, exogenous preferences and technology have become straitjackets. The erosion of the neoclassical tenets began from technology. It is by now widely recognized, following the intuition of Schumpeter (1942), that technology cannot be viewed as exogenous if one wants to understand the mechanics of the growth process of industrial as well as developing economies. Rather, the efforts and risk-taking behavior of a particular group of individuals that aims to change the set of technological constraints, namely inventors and entrepreneurs, are the engines of economic growth. This observation motivated the development of the neo-Schumpeterian endogenous technical change paradigm throughout the 1990s (see, e.g. Aghion and Howitt, 1992).

Recently, the paradigm shift has extended to the realm of preferences. The availability of large data sets such as the World Value Survey has revealed that there is a great deal of heterogeneity in values and preferences across both individuals (see, e.g. Guiso and Paiella, 2008; Beauchamp et al. 2011), and world regions (see, e.g. Inglehart et al. 2000). Preference heterogeneity has also become a salient issue in mainstream macroeconomics. For instance, Krusell and Smith (1998), Coen-Pirani (2004), De Nardi (2004), Guvenen (2006), Hendricks (2007), and Cozzi (2011) have argued that individual variation in preferences is necessary for calibrated macroeconomic models with incomplete markets to reproduce the large wealth inequality observed in the data.

Preference heterogeneity as such is not in conflict with the neoclassical paradigm. Traditionally, extra-economic factors have served as the motivations for error terms in regressions and individual or regional fixed effects. However, treating preferences and culture as exogenous factors in growth and development theory is problematic if, on the one hand, cultural factors respond to changes in the economic and institutional environment (see Alesina and Glaeser, 2004; Alesina and Giuliano, 2009), and, on the other hand, culture and preferences have an important feedback on institutions and economic performance (see Greif, 1994; Grosjean, 2013; Guiso et al. 2006; Gorodnichenko and Gerard, 2010; Tabellini, 2010).

Motivated by these observations, a growing number of studies incorporate endogenous cultural change into economic models.2 A particularly important link is the one connecting preferences, culture, and innovation (see Mokyr, 2011). In many recent models of endogenous technical change, innovation and economic growth ultimately are determined by policy and preference parameters, such as the time discount rate and risk aversion. Yet, there is a lack of studies of the joint determination of preferences and technology. A key issue is the extent to which different societies differ in terms of the average propensity of their citizens to carry out entrepreneurial or innovative activities. This is the focus of the investigation of this chapter.

To this aim, we present a model of endogenous technical change where growth is driven by the innovative activity of entrepreneurs. The focal point of the analysis is the occupational choice between being a worker and being an entrepreneur in an economy with capital market imperfections. Entrepreneurs face more risk and make investments that force them to defer consumption. As a consequence, the occupational choice hinges on patience and risk tolerance. These preference traits are distributed heterogeneously in the population and subject to the influence of family upbringing. Cultural transmission is driven by the desire of parents to maximize their children’s happiness, conditional on the expectations they hold about the children’s future occupation. Parents expecting their children to become entrepreneurs have stronger incentives to raise them to be patient and risk tolerant.

At the aggregate level, the growth rate of the economy depends on the fraction of entrepreneurs in the population, since this determines the rate of technological innovation. The theory identifies a self-reinforcing mechanism linking preferences and growth. In a highly entrepreneurial society, a large proportion of the population is patient and risk tolerant. These preferences sustain high human capital investment and risky innovation, leading to a high growth rate and incentives for entrepreneurial preferences to develop in the next generation, too. Societies with identical primitives may end up in different balanced growth paths characterized by different degrees of entrepreneurial culture, innovativeness, and growth. In addition, changes in institutions or policies can feed back into the evolution of culture and preferences, giving rise to potentially long-lasting effects on economic growth and development.

This chapter is organized as follows. Section 1.2 presents a model of endogenous technical change with an occupational...