0521517877 cambridge university press climate affluence and culture dec 2008

Everyone, everyday, everywhere has to use money to cope with climatic cold or heat to satisfy survival needs.. Evert Van de Vliert discovered survival cultures in poor countries with dem

Everyone, everyday, everywhere has to use money to cope with climatic cold or heat to satisfy survival needs This point of departure led to a decade

of innovative research based on the tenet that climate and affluence ence each other’s impact on culture Evert Van de Vliert discovered survival cultures in poor countries with demanding cold or hot climates, self- expression cultures in rich countries with demanding cold or hot climates, and easygoing cultures in poor and rich countries with temperate climates These findings have implications for the cultural consequences of global warming and local poverty Climate protection and poverty reduction are used in combination to sketch four scenarios for shaping cultures, from which the world community has to make a principal and principled choice soon.

influ-Evert Van de Vliert received his PhD from the Free University in dam in 1973 and held teacher and researcher positions at the same univer- sity, at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and at the Royal Military Academy in the Netherlands He served as chairman of the Dutch Research Association of Social and Organizational Psychologists (1984–1989) and as research director of the Kurt Lewin Institute (1993–1996) He has published more than 200 journal articles, chapters, and books including Complex Interpersonal Conflict Behaviour: Theoretical Frontiers (1997) In 2005, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Association for Conflict Management At present, he is professor emeritus of organiza- tional and applied social psychology at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands and research professor of work and organizational psychology

Amster-at the University of Bergen in Norway His current research concentrAmster-ates

on cross-national comparisons, with an emphasis on the impact of cold, temperate, and hot climates on national and organizational cultures.

Series Editor: David Matsumoto, San Francisco State University

As an increasing number of social scientists come to recognize the pervasive influence of culture on individual human behavior, it has become imper- ative for culture to be included as an important variable in all aspects of psychological research, theory, and practice Culture and Psychology is an evolving series of works that brings the study of culture and psychology into a single, unified concept.

Ute Scho¨npflug, Cultural Transmission

Evert Van de Vliert, Climate, Affluence, and Culture

Climate, Affluence, and Culture

Evert Van de Vliert

University of Groningen and University of Bergen

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

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ISBN-13 978-0-521-51787-4

ISBN-13 978-0-511-46378-5

© Evert Van de Vliert 2009

2008

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v i i

Others are the motor of personal progress In 1995, I gave an opening address at the combined annual conferences of the International Associa- tion for Conflict Management and the Ethnic Studies Network The pre- dominantly critical reactions to my presentation, entitled ‘‘Temperature, Culture, and Domestic Political Violence Worldwide,’’ encouraged me to start what became a never-ending scientific expedition Since then, a wide array of people have helped me to shape my ideas on a wide array of topics covering climate, affluence, and culture Special thanks go to those col- leagues who co-authored my publications on research conducted to crack climate-culture codes, to wit, Serge Daan, Sta˚le Einarsen, Martin Euwema, Geert Hofstede, Xu Huang, Sipke Huismans, Onne Janssen, Esther Kluwer, Robert Levine, Richard Lynn, Philip Parker, Shalom Schwartz, John Simister, Peter Smith, Henk Thierry, Gerben Van der Vegt, and Nico Van Yperen.

I am enormously grateful to Martin Euwema, Patricia Goldrick, Onne Janssen, David Matsumoto, and Evy De Koning for having taken the trou- ble to read the entire manuscript and to make many suggestions to improve

it Portions of the book have further benefited from the comments of Serge Daan, Douwe Draaisma, Xu Huang, Lourdes Munduate, Ab Van de Vliert, and Huadong Yang Last but not least, related to Cambridge University Press, Patterson Lamb, David Matsumoto, Regina Paleski, Eric Schwartz, and two anonymous reviewers of my work were indispensably helpful in bringing this publication project to fruition The finishing touches are all theirs to be proud of.

i x

INTRODUCTION

Creators of Culture

We shape our environment, and then our environment shapes us

Winston Churchill, undated

Animals face a variety of problems In addition to attacks by ators, they often have to survive harsh climates and shortages of foodand drink They react instinctively with a corresponding variety ofsolutions Salient responses to bitter winters, scorching summers,and lack of food and drink include winter sleep, summer sleep, andmigration Although humans face the same survival problems, theyhave not evolved these particular reaction patterns In common withmost animals, humans living near the poles do not sleep all day indark winters, and those living near the equator do not to sleep all day

pred-in blisterpred-ing-hot summers And almost all humans are reluctant tomigrate permanently or to follow flocks of birds in spring and fall

on their way to more comfortable places for the oncoming winter

or summer Indeed, unlike our distant ancestors in hunting andgathering societies, we tend to stay where we are, and that seemsconvenient But in a hardening climate we are in danger

In harsh climates, humans must ceaselessly solve problems ofextreme cold or heat, shrinking food and drink supplies, and lurkingdiseases In response, they have invented a tool no animal action evercan compete with Its miraculous power can solve a fantastic variety

of climatic, nutritional, and health problems What’s more, its drous achievements are in no way tied to a specific ethnic group, a

won-particular geographic area, or a certain period in time That tool ismoney As a rule, money can buy all the necessities of life, includingheat and cold, food and drink, cure and care Slowly but surely, theavailability of money resources has become the essential solution forthe basic problem of human survival Indeed, we have come to usemoney as a kind of life preserver, and that seems convenient But inpoverty-stricken circumstances we are in danger.

Both climate and cash, therefore, are of vital importance asresources in supporting survival and a desirable quality of life.Temperate climates offer the best of all worlds, with comfortableoutdoor temperatures, thriving plants and animals as living resour-ces of enormous benefit, and relatively healthy living conditions.Cold or hot climates, lacking the climatic resources of temperateareas, endanger our lives and frustrate us Money resources, how-ever, can compensate for the lack of climatic resources, enabling us

to also survive and live happily in harsh climates These ecologicalmatters of life and death are relevant to a proper understanding

of what we collectively value, believe, seek, avoid, and do: that is,our culture

Each society gives birth to a culture that includes everything thathas contributed to survival in the recent or remote past – tools such

as money, practices such as work, goals such as cooperation,constructions such as organizations And climate and cash rockthe cradle of culture This should not be taken literally, of course.Climate and cash are inanimate things; only we can bring them tolife Or, to paraphrase Winston Churchill’s pointed piece of wisdom,

‘‘We shape our environment and, through it, we shape our culture.’’This is an immense project It takes a long time, multiple trials anderrors, and much competition and coordination to build andrebuild culture in response to climate and cash Hence, a crucialpart of this culture-building process is that we pass on what we havelearned from generation to generation in a nongenetic way (for athorough overview of how this works, see Whiten et al.,2003)

In short, we create our climatic and economic contexts, and thesecontexts then create our cultures On this two-way street betweencontexts and cultures, a vast array of scholars moves from culturestoward climates and economies My drive is in the opposite direc-tion, from climates and economies toward cultures I aim to con-tribute to a body of knowledge about the fit between givencombinations of climate and cash and the cultures created inresponse to them In this introductory chapter, the points of depar-ture are sketched under the headings ‘‘Culture and Survival’’ and

‘‘Culture in Context.’’ The chapter is summarized in a diagram Incombination with the propositions at the end of each of Chapters 2

to 7, this diagram forms the groundwork for an outline of severalbird’s-eye views of culture presented in Chapter 8 One of the viewsprovided in that final chapter, a strategic view of the context-culturelinks found, sheds novel light on two huge threats humanity facestoday: global warming and local poverty If we can create globalwarming and local poverty, we can create cultures

culture and survivalBorrowing from leading cross-cultural psychologists (Hofstede,

2001; Schwartz, 2004; Smith et al., 2006; Triandis, 1995), I definesocietal culture as a rich complex of values and practices passed

on and changed from generation to generation Complex syndromes

of culture have many origins and are developed further in numerousways (Boyd & Richerson,2005; Buss,2004; Diamond,2005; Nolan &Lenski, 1999) But the most fundamental explanations of culturehave been rooted in two clearly distinguishable types of survival:genetic survival over time and climatic survival in a particular place

On the one hand, culture has been traced back to humanreproduction represented by, for example, the ‘‘selfish gene’’(Dawkins,1989), menstruation (Knight,1991), son-daughter prefer-ences (Kanazawa,2006), and parental investment (Buss,2004) On

the other hand, through the ages, Hippocrates, Ibn Khaldun,Montesquieu, Quetelet, and Huntington, to mention but a handful

of classic scientists, have all tried in vain to relate culture to climate

At the beginning of the 20th century, the proponents of the so-calledgeographical school also argued that climate matters for all sorts ofpsychosocial phenomena (for an overview, see Sorokin, 1928) Butthe geographical school, too, failed to demonstrate and clarify con-vincingly how climatic effects come about and link up to values andpractices As a result, genetic roots of culture have received muchmore attention than climatic roots of culture, which is unfortunatebecause climatic survival is more basic than genetic survival Geneticsurvival is simply impossible without climatic survival

This state of the science is unfortunate also because cold and heatare potentially important origins of culture for descriptive, explana-tory, and strategic reasons The descriptive reason is that thermalclimates relate distinct cultures to stable differences in latitude andaltitude Scientifically, climate-based culture maps have to be taken asseriously as geographic maps and astronomic charts The explanatoryreason is that thermal climates relate distinct cultures to unobtrusivedifferences in atmospheric contexts Climate is a more fundamentaland more stable antecedent condition of culture than more proximatecorrelates of values and practices such as subsistence technology,urbanization, and democracy The strategic reason is that knowledgeabout climatic anchors of culture may keep us from attempting toimplement infeasible policies and procedures as a result of aiming toreach beyond contextual limits to globalization and planned culturalchange (for details, see Van de Vliert, Einarsen, et al.,2008)

culture in contextAnimals instinctively select and change a specific natural environ-ment as their habitat Analogously, humans create a specific culturethat optimizes successful existence in a given context Perhaps it is

better to talk about several contexts First are the climatic and nomic contexts In addition, the contexts of water and marineorganisms, terrestrial flora and fauna, oil reserves and mineraldeposits, and risks of flooding and earthquakes are easily recogniz-able Increasingly, alas, animals and humans alike have to cope withpolluted air and water, toxic and chemical waste, and deadly viruses.All of these and similar life-controlling contexts together form theniche in which a society builds and rebuilds a fitting culture Forexample, it makes perfect sense that Icelanders, Norwegians, andJapanese value and practice whale fishing, that Californians andCypriots grow wines, and that Chinese and South Africans engage

eco-in terrestrial meco-ineco-ing

The reasons for focusing on the climatic and economic istics of niches of culture in concert are straightforward Climaticdemands and money resources are basic living conditions experienced

character-by nearly every member of every society on earth on a daily basis.Nonetheless, both contextual conditions vary considerably from onesociety to another As a consequence, they have shaped the history ofevery country on all of our inhabited continents An extra reason tohighlight climate and cash is that they are interdependent factors andform integrated climato-economic niches Harsher climates makemoney resources more useful; money resources make harsher cli-mates less threatening Below, the climatic context, the economiccontext, and the climato-economic niches are introduced further,

in this order, and are visually related to culture inFigure 1.1

Climatic Context

My first publication on the consequences of climate for culture(Van de Vliert & Van Yperen,1996) turned out to be a finger exercisefor my later work It made no clear distinctions between weather andclimate; between temperature and precipitation; and between thecultural consequences of cold, temperate, and hot climates These

inaccuracies call for clarification because similar dilemmas anderrors have plagued scholars ever since Hippocrates (460B.C.) notedthat climate generally shapes physiological needs, psychological well-being, and cultural mores.

Weather versus climate Whereas weather indicates what is pening to the atmosphere at any given time, climate refers tothe generalized weather of an area over at least a 30-year period.Weather changes continuously; climate has been extraordinarily sta-ble for the last 10,000 years Weather tends to have immediate phys-iological and psychological effects at the individual and group levels;climate tends to have psychological and sociological effects in the longerrun and at the societal and global levels of human functioning None-theless, an overview of the extant literature on temperature effects onhumans (Parker,1995), which lists 807 physiological studies, 458 psy-chological studies and 830 sociological studies, shows no distinctionwhatsoever between weather and climate The studies reported heretranscend weather by highlighting the psychosocial consequences ofclimate in the long run and at the societal level of functioning

hap-Climato–economic niche

Culture

Economic context Climatic context

Climatic temperature versus climatic precipitation Climates aremade up of temperature, precipitation, wind, humidity, pressure,and so on To reduce complexity, they are often classified using acombination of the two most important factors: average temperature(frigid, temperate, torrid) and average precipitation (arid, semi-arid,subhumid, humid, wet) In addition, multiple temperature-precip-itation combinations within nations are usually averaged to repre-sent the climate of whole nations in a unitary way (the problem ofwithin-nation variation in climate will be addressed in Chapter 2).For example, in a climate-culture study under the acronym GLOBE(House et al., 2004), an international consortium of approximately

170 scholars used the following seven major clusters of climates:tropical humid (Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, India, Indonesia,Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore), savanna (El Salvador, Guatemala,Nigeria, Thailand, Venezuela, Zambia, Zimbabwe), desert (Egypt,Iran, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Mexico, Namibia, Qatar, SouthAfrica, Turkey), subtropical humid (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, HongKong, Taiwan), mediterranean (Albania, Greece, Italy, Morocco,Portugal, Slovenia, Spain), maritime (Britain, Denmark, France,Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland), andcontinental (Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Finland, Georgia, Hun-gary, Japan, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Sweden, United States).Using such a typological approach to investigate climate-culturelinks has the advantage that climate is correctly treated as a whole ofintegrated components But it also has the disadvantage that theimpact of climate cannot be accurately attributed to temperature orprecipitation Take GLOBE’s finding that the cultural value ofuncertainty avoidance by relying on social norms, rules, and proce-dures is distinctively stronger in tropical and subtropical climates than

in maritime and continental climates (Sully de Luque & Javidan,

2004) Should we explain this finding in terms of climatic ture or climatic precipitation? Or does a combination of climatictemperature and climatic precipitation account for it? And would

we come to the same conclusion if we used the 58 countries listedinstead of the 7 clusters of countries as our unit of analysis? Toprevent the occurrence of such queries as much as possible, climatictemperature and climatic precipitation are construed here as country-level dimensions with influences on culture that can be separatelyassessed.

Splitting up climatic temperature and climatic precipitation isdefensible also because it makes sense to assume that temperaturehas an even more important cultural impact than precipitation, forthe following reasons In general, leaving disasters aside, winters andsummers seem to be more critical than wet and dry seasons.Whereas bitter winters and scorching summers endanger thermalcomfort, crops, and health, very wet and very dry seasons endangercrops in particular Furthermore, whereas harsh winters and harshsummers are seldom a godsend, much precipitation can be eitherbad luck resulting from snowfall during already ice-cold winters orgood luck resulting from rainfall during otherwise sweltering hotsummers Similarly, clear skies can be either good luck during bitterwinters or bad luck during scorching summers

Last, increasing temperatures tend to increase evaporation,which leads to more precipitation rather than the other way round.According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(Houghton et al.,2001), as average global temperatures have risen,average global precipitation, especially land-surface precipitation,has also increased For all of those reasons, a thermal climate seems

to call for more coping and cultural adaptation than a tional climate, mostly in and of itself, and partly in conjunction with

precipita-a precipitprecipita-ationprecipita-al climprecipita-ate In this work, therefore, I hprecipita-ave restricted myinvestigations to temperature as the predominant dimension ofclimate and predictor of culture while taking into account thepotentially confounding impact of precipitation

At first blush, climate as the average level of temperature acrossall seasons is an unambiguous contextual variable On second

thought, it can be viewed in two different ways: through a cold-hotlens, with warmer climates seen as more comfortable, and through acold-temperate-hot lens, with temperate climates seen as more com-fortable than both cold and hot climates Cold-hot contexts rangefrom cold at latitudes closer to the icecaps to hot at latitudes closer

to the equator Cold-temperate-hot contexts range from able at intermediate latitudes to harsh at latitudes closer to either theicecaps or the equator Both conceptualizations of climatic contextshave been related to culture elsewhere, and both are discussed andcriticized here

comfort-Cold-hot context of culture The simplest research approach is tosearch for cold-hot relations between the mean level of climatictemperature and some dimension of culture As a case in point,Esther Kluwer, Richard Lynn, and I (Van de Vliert, Kluwer, & Lynn,

2000) observed an unmistakable country-level link between ing temperature and increasing citizen competitiveness Men andwomen in warmer countries appear to try harder when they are incompetition with other people, finding winning more important

increas-in both work and games We speculated that increas-in former times lifewas more arduous for families in cold than in hot climates, requiringmore cooperation or at least noncompetitiveness to survive Inessence, we hypothesized that remnants of less competitiveness incooler climates and more competitiveness in hotter climates can

be observed in modern-day men and women

Similarly, Hofstede (2001) showed that decreases in geographiclatitude as a global indicator of a country’s warmer climate go hand

in hand with greater differences in power between individuals orgroups The cold-hot difference in climate is at the beginning of acausal chain, his argument ran, because warmer environments areless problematic and easier to cope with In the relatively cold cli-mates of, for example, North America and Scandinavia, survival andpopulation growth are more dependent on human intervention innature, with the complicating effects of more need for technology,

more technological momentum for change, more reciprocal ing, and more questioning of authority By contrast, in the relativelyhot climates of, for example, Central America and South-East Asia,there is less need for human intervention and for technology, leading

teach-to a more static society in which teachers are omniscient, teaching isone-way, and authorities are obeyed rather than questioned

A different illustration of how the cold-hot model has beenemployed to explain culture relates to predominantly illiteratesocieties Fought et al (2004) compared the languages used by 21societies in cooler climates and 39 societies in hotter climates (fortheir research method and for a rival explanation of their findings,see the box ‘‘The airco of language’’) They proposed that people

in cooler climates who have to speak in sheltered and indoorsettings can easily make themselves heard even if they use wordsthat contain many consonants (such as b, g, k, p, t), fricatives (such

as f, h, s, v, z), and nasal sonorants (such as m and n) By contrast,

in hotter climates, where people spend more time outdoors, theyneed to communicate over longer distances in noisier environ-ments, with the consequence that they need words with moresonorous phonetic segments in the form of vowels (such as a, o,

e, u, i) and semivowels (such as w and j) In line with this argument,languages spoken in cooler climates appeared to contain morewords with complex combinations of consonants, fricatives, andnasal sonorants (Gdan´sk, Saskatchewan, Vladivostok), whereaslanguages spoken in hotter climates were found to contain morerelatively simple words with vowels and semivowels (Dahomey,Kuala Lumpur, Paramaribo)

Cold-temperate-hot context of culture Like all warm-bloodedspecies, humans have to maintain constant levels of high bodytemperature As a rule of thumb, they will be unconscious at internalbody temperatures below 30oC and above 40oC, and dead below

20o

C and above 45oC For that reason, humans have a characteristicrelation between ambient temperature and physiology, represented

The airco of language

To maintain your internal temperature at around 37oC, heattransfer into your body and heat generation within your body must

be balanced by heat outputs from your body The best controllabletool of thermoregulation through heat output is your mouth.Keeping your mouth shut in cold environments and open in hotenvironments is both comfortable and functional (do as the dogsdo!) Over many generations, this may well have led to culturaladaptations such as northerners being less talkative than south-erners It is equally conceivable that cold-climate humans retainheat better and that hot-climate humans release heat better byusing their breath channel as an air conditioner when they talk.This airco view builds a theoretical bridge between climate andlanguage in general and between climate and the articulation ofwords in particular

Words consist of vowels and consonants In the articulation ofvowels, the oral part of the breath channel is exposed to the air, withheat release as a result By contrast, the articulation of consonants ischaracterized by constriction or closure at one or more points in thebreath channel, with heat preservation as a result Hence, it wouldserve human thermoregulation if words with many consonants(such as f, p, d, th, ch) evolved in cooler climates whereas wordswith many vowels (such as a, o, u, ie, ee) evolved in hotter climates.Also, there would be evolutionary advantage in higher frequencies

of constricted vowels (such as i, e, e, u) in cooler climates and higherfrequencies of open vowels (such as a, o, a´, o´) in hotter climates.That is exactly what anthropologists have found, although theyprovide a completely different explanation in terms of requiredcarrying power of speech sounds in indoor settings versus outdoorsettings

Fought and colleagues (2004) investigated approximately 45,000discrete word sounds in a geographically stratified sample of 60indigenous societies chosen to represent the 60 macrocultural areas

in the so-called Scholander curve (Scholander et al., 1950) Thiscurve describes the U-shaped dependence of body heat production

or rates of metabolism on ambient temperature In an intermediaterange of ambient temperatures, the thermoneutral zone, the meta-bolic rate required for the body to maintain a core temperature

of approximately 37oC is both minimal and independent ofthe ambient temperature Below the thermoneutral zone, metabo-lism increases to generate enough heat (e.g., by shivering) for thebody to survive Likewise, above the thermoneutral zone, metab-olism increases to support active cooling (e.g., by sweating orpanting) Thus, the biological costs of keeping body and soultogether increase on both sides of the thermoneutral zone As aconsequence, humans thrive in temperate climates and must takeprotective measures if they are living in colder or hotter regions ofthe world

In addition to thermal comfort, temperate climates offer abundantfood resources owing to the rich flora and fauna and negligible risks

of unhealthy weather conditions Both colder and hotter climates

of the world Each word sound (118 word sounds per language onaverage) was scored on a carefully constructed 14-point scale ofclasses of sounds, ranging from voiceless stop consonant to lowvowel The resulting sonority score per society was then related tothe degree of climatic cold versus climatic heat In support of thethermoregulatory explanation, the languages manifested moreconsonant and less vowel usage in colder areas (tchkash, vrazbrod,etc.), but more vowel and less consonant usage in hotter areas(maraki, tawani, etc.) This finding was robust across the 14 classes

of sounds and across six major culture regions (Africa, Mediterranean, East Eurasia, Insular Pacific, North America, andSouth America)

Circum-The airco of language gives cold words and warm words a newmeaning

require more and better protective devices such as clothing, shelterstructures, and heating or cooling systems Work circumstances, workregulations, and work activities have to be adjusted, too Increasinglycolder or hotter climates also require increasing investments of timeand effort in the pursuit of food and drink and increasing concernabout the climate-dictated composition of nutrients in the diet.Finally, more and more measures have to be taken in increasinglycolder and hotter climates to safeguard the health of oneself and one’sfamily, especially in the tropics with its plagues of disease-producingsubstances, germs, bacteria, and insects In short, it makes sense tosearch for U-shaped rather than monotonic relations between meantemperature and culture.

As a case in point, a 53-nation study has provided evidence formore inequality of gender roles in temperate climates than in colderand hotter climates (Van de Vliert, Schwartz, et al.,1999) The inter-pretation of this finding, a hybrid cross between a speculation and anexplanation, ran something like this In countries with temperateclimates, including Japan and Italy, where adaptational investmentsare less critical, men are supposed to be more assertive, tough, andfocused on material success whereas women are supposed to be moremodest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life By contrast, thegreater joint investments of males and females in adapting to moreextreme climates have led to the development of cultural customscharacterized by sacrifice, delay of gratification, and cooperation byboth genders As a consequence, in countries with relatively low tem-peratures (e.g., Norway and Sweden) or relatively high temperatures(e.g., Indonesia and Thailand), both men and women are supposed to

be rather modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life.This idea of greater gender equality at the icy poles and theboiling equator fires the imagination It is also unconvincing Strik-ingly contrasting evidence exists that gender role differentiation isrooted in the sexual division of labor, and that the work to beperformed in dangerously cold or hot climates drives male and

female roles apart While the men fight the climate outdoors, thewomen run the household indoors, with the result that there isgender equality rather than inequality in temperate climates andgender inequality rather than equality in harsher climates.

Criticism The cold-hot and cold-temperate-hot studies cussed above straightforwardly relate average annual levels of cli-matic temperature in various populated areas to the content ofculture in these areas All such climate-culture studies share twoserious weaknesses First, they overlook the cultural impact ofseasonal variations in climatic cold and heat, even though seasonalrhythms in the physiology of man are well documented (Aschoff,

dis-1981) In Chapter 2, a climate index based on winter and summertemperatures is proposed for improving the analysis of the culturalimpact of thermal climate Second, such studies ignore the obviousfact that the cultural impact of the climatic context is dependent

on how much money a society has available to cope with a tratingly cold or hot climate My view, put forward in Chapters 3

frus-to 8, is that money resources influence the impact of climate onculture

Economic ContextLike languages and religions, economic systems for creating incomeand consumption through trade, industry, and provision of servicesare diversifications of culture Yet economies perform entirely differ-ent functions In a more straightforward way than languages andreligions, property-based operations such as owning, exchanging,earning, saving, cashing, buying, and selling can help prevent anddispel discomfort, hunger, thirst, and illness There is no mistakingthe cultural nature of these property-based operations At the sametime, their relevance to survival itself places them at the root of keycausal chains in the further development of cultures To clarify howthe term cash is used here, I first pay attention to the origins and

functions of money and to the distinction between ready andunready money.

Origins of money No thing, whether alive or lifeless, is insensitive

to extreme temperatures, but warm-blooded animals and humansare sensitive in special ways In response to cold and heat, theycontinuously have to satisfy the survival needs of themselves andtheir offspring It is in this way that humans have drawn away fromall other warm-blooded species by inventing property and money tohelp them overcome threats to survival

Early humans lived more or less like animals, as hunters andgatherers The gradual transition from a nomadic lifestyle to a sed-entary lifestyle resulted in the development of media of exchange –first grains and shells, then metals and metallic currencies, andfinally cheques, credit card printouts, and electronic acknowledg-ments of debt Unlike animals, humans have evolved from huntersand gatherers into traders who now hunt for bargains and savemoney Today’s bargain hunters demonstrate that hunting hasevolved into using money as a means of exchange and as a standard

of value reflected in the rate of exchange And today’s savers plify that gathering has evolved into using money as a store of value,

exem-as an exchangeable resource kept for rainy days These functions ofmoney as a means of exchange, as a standard of value, and as thebasis of capital savings are discussed in more detail below

Money as a means of exchange Only a few self-supporting eties in polar and desert regions have not yet developed a full-fledgedsystem of shops and markets and still hunt, gather, and exchangenonfinancial goods to meet their survival needs Everywhere else,fully developed cash economies are in place to facilitate processes ofsatisfying basic needs for thermal comfort, nutrition, and health Inthese economies, money has a purchasing power that exists inde-pendently of the goods it can buy ‘‘Money is either itself anexchangeable commodity (for example, gold coin), or it is a directsymbol of such a commodity (convertible note), or it may be the

symbolic representation (nume´raire) of a commodity standard –cow, barrel of oil, value of a ‘basket’ of commodities’’ (Ingham,

of supply and demand at individual, national, and global levels

An often consumed homeostatic good elegantly illustrates this

adjustment to local circumstances of supply and demand The price

of exactly the same hamburger converted into U.S dollars differswidely in McDonald’s restaurants around the globe In January

2006, a standard Big Mac cost $1.30 in China, $1.60 in Russia andEgypt, $2.09 in Poland, $2.66 in Mexico, $3.15 in the United States,

$4.28 in Sweden, and $4.93 in Switzerland (The Economist, January

14, 2006, p 102)

Ready versus unready money Ready money is anything acceptedand used as a medium of exchange including coin, banknote, token,check, and coupon Unready money or capital, also traveling underthe name of wealth, is the financial value of a stock of accumulatedpossessions such as financial assets, real estate, consumer durables,and livestock Although ready money can be converted into frozen

or invested money, and the other way round, so that both are highlycorrelated in practice, the two constructs are quite different intheory As this book is directed at daily uses of spendable income,

it is about the flow of cash a society or household receives orretrieves from capital

Almost everything we know about the relation between thenational economic context and national culture is based on researchinto the cultural impact of income per head The most pronouncedcash-culture conclusions were drawn on the basis of the WorldValues Surveys (e.g., Inglehart et al., 1998,2004; Inglehart & Baker,

2000), a still ongoing series of multiple-nation studies Drawing on amassive body of evidence covering more than 80 countries, theresearch team demonstrated that increases in income per head giverise to cultural changes that make individual autonomy, genderequality, and democratic institutions increasingly likely In parallel,economic progress brings distinctive changes in levels of obedience

to authority Traditional obedience to sacred authorities is followedfirst by the secularization of authority and then by emancipationfrom authority (for the impact of economic growth on establishedworld religions, see the box‘‘Belief beyond belief’’)

Belief beyond beliefThe major religions actively seek to convert unbelievers and ‘‘falsebelievers’’ into true believers Christianity, Islam, and Buddhismattacked rival philosophies of life so successfully that they now havemore than 3 billion followers European crusaders and colonizers aswell as Muslim armies brutally killed their rivals Recently, BuddhistSinhalese fought Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka On a much larger scale,soft attacks took place through conversion by missionaries, traders,and migrants The greatest champions of the true belief were faithfulrulers, including Asoka, the emperor of India, who converted toBuddhism around 261B.C., and the Roman emperor Constantine,who converted to Christianity in 313.

In a triumphant procession, Christianity spread from today’sIsrael to North-West Asia and Europe, and later to North America,South America, and Australia Similarly, Islam overran the MiddleEast, the Balkan Peninsula, Northern Africa, Indonesia, and thesouthern Philippines And Buddhism spread from Nepal to South-East Asia, merging with regional religions in Tibet, China, Korea,and Japan In times to come, Christians, Muslims, and Buddhistswill no doubt continue to try to convert one another Sooner orlater, however, they may have to direct all scattered and oppositeforces in pursuit of the unified purpose of beating a common enemythat will otherwise destroy or fatally injure all religions with amonopoly on wisdom

The odds are that the next worldwide frontier of religious strifewill be between institutionalized religions, on the one hand, andeconomic progress, on the other In present-day Turkey and Egypt,for example, struggles between Islamic fundamentalists and seculargroups are well underway The reasons are complex, but economicgrowth certainly plays a part Ever since 1975, both populations haveexperienced gradual increases in income per head, life expectancy,and educational attainment These developments have increased thematerial, psychosomatic, and cognitive resources of the Turks and

Many findings of the World Values Surveys are nothing short ofexciting Whoever would have thought that the amount of money inour pockets is indirectly related to our active participation in peti-tions, strikes, boycotts, and uprisings? And if this had crossed yourmind, would you have correctly predicted that richer peoples aremore instead of less protest prone than poorer peoples? Inglehartand Welzel (2005) suggest the following explanations for this coun-terintuitive finding For a start, higher income levels increase themeans to make protests effective Additionally, higher incomesstrengthen self-expression values among the population, thusincreasing the size of the pool of potential dissidents and activists

as well as the chances that protesters can mobilize large segments of

Egyptians, making them financially, medically, and intellectuallyless and less dependent on the favors of a deity A similar patternholds in most religious societies with upward economic develop-ment trends In short, the future enemy of the institutionalizedreligions is further economic growth

This is not to say that there will be no religious revivals andradicalizations in prosperous countries, nor that sacral and spiritualbeliefs will become extinct There will always be beliefs in place ofthe current religious convictions Humankind will continue to seekanswers to such questions as Why do we exist? Where are we going?What will happen to us after death? The World Values Surveys haveshown that economic development and rising existential securitylead to a fork in our collective path A decline in the prevalence ofestablished religious institutions is accompanied by a rise of looselystructured systems of personalized religiosity and spirituality (e.g.,New Age ideals in the past and the holy well of environmentalismmore recently) The long-term shift will be from institutionally fixedforms of dogmatic beliefs to individually flexible forms of spiritualbeliefs For religions, at least, there is life after death

the public for mass campaigns This broader oppositional platformalso gives reformers within the ruling elite a more viable allianceoption, strengthening their case against the defenders of the statusquo The reformer camp can convince the defender camp that con-cessions must be made, as happened during the transitions fromdictatorial to democratic regimes in Chile and Spain.

Economic growth has the unmistakable tendency to propel bothmen and women in the direction of secularization and self-actualiza-tion as well as education and economic and political participation.But I couldn’t help raising my eyebrows when reading the claim made

by some members of the research team of the World Values Surveysthat ‘‘the only clear predictor of a country’s position on the culturalmap appears to be its economic development’’ (Halman et al.,2005,

p 129) What about climatic temperature as a predictor of related values and practices? The studies reported in Chapters 3 to 6,

survival-in which the culture measures of the World Values Surveys were used,repeatedly show that the observed cross-national link between cashand culture depends on the country’s cold, temperate, or hot climate

Climato-Economic NichesThe presumption that harsh climates shape the homeostatic utility

of a wide variety of purchasable goods echoes earlier work by tesquieu (1748) His key breakthrough is the insight that peoplepredominantly exchange money for goods and services that satisfyclimate-related necessities of life Cash can indeed protect us againstthe continuous weather attacks of the climate Hence, a valid analysis

Mon-of cultural adaptation to climate should take into account the ability of money resources to cope with cold winters, hot summers,

avail-or both Put another way, a valid analysis of cultural adaptation toincome per head should take into account the harshness of climate

as a dual indicator of the seriousness of survival problems and theusefulness of money resources Both formulations highlight the

shortcomings of separate analyses of the climatic and economicroots of culture This is an important point, given broader attention

in the form of a mental experiment leading to three hypotheses.Mental experiment Consider a fictional sample of people from allover the world who emigrate to Austria Imagine that we are inter-ested in how well they are adapting to the Austrian context Do theseimmigrants choose to hold on to their home cultures and at thesame time seek daily interaction with members of the host culture(integration), or seek daily interaction with members of the hostculture and give up their home culture (assimilation), or maybe hold

on to their home culture and avoid contact with members of thehost culture (separation)? One year after arrival in Austria, and againafter two years, we ask each of these immigrants to complete aquestionnaire to assess the extent to which the person is trying tointegrate both cultures

Imagine further that integration in Austria is least problematicfor people from countries with harsh climates and high incomelevels similar to Austria’s (e.g., Canada and the Czech Republic),moderately problematic for people from countries with temperateclimates irrespective of their income levels (e.g., South Africa andUruguay), and most problematic for people from countries withharsh climates similar to Austria’s but with much lower incomelevels than Austria (e.g., Armenia and Kazakhstan) This pattern

of immigrant data leads to different conclusions depending onwhether they are examined through a climatic lens, an economiclens, or a climato-economic lens

In a purely climatic analysis, no home-country effect on gration in Austria surfaces because there are no differences forhome countries with temperate climates and high-income versuslow-income levels, whereas the mutually opposing tendencies forhome countries with harsh climates and high-income versus low-income levels balance each other out In a purely economic anal-ysis, no differences in integration surface for home countries with

temperate versus harsh climates, whereas home countries withhigher income levels appear to be related to better integration.Only an integrated climato-economic analysis would accuratelyreveal that climate and income levels in the home country are bothrelevant because they have an interactive impact on cultural inte-gration in Austria.

This story makes it abundantly clear that Montesquieu had apoint when he advanced the thesis that we use money to cope withclimate Following in his footsteps, presuming that climate and cashinfluence each other’s impact, I sought, therefore, to achieve a betterunderstanding of cultural adaptations to climato-economic niches.The research model consisted of a set of three cumulative hypotheses –

a context hypothesis, an impact hypothesis, and a niche hypothesis.The ins and outs of this framework are visualized in Figure 1.1 onpage 8 The context hypothesis, represented by rectangles connected

by dotted lines, focuses on the existence of relations between theclimatic context, the economic context, and culture The impacthypothesis, represented by arrows and a listing of correspondingchapters, specifies the proposed causal directions of the context-cul-ture relations And the niche hypothesis, represented by the boldercentral part of the picture, emphasizes the interactive nature of thejoint impact of climate and cash on culture The three hypotheses arediscussed separately below

Context hypothesis Each culture is viewed here as a complexadaptation to numerous contexts, including latitude, elevation,water and soil resources, flora and fauna, mineral resources, andthe strategic importance of the society’s physical location Beingrealistic about what can be accomplished at any one time in aninquiry, I restricted my investigations to climate and cash as twobright stars in the night sky of the environmental firmament Thefoundation of the research model inFigure 1.1is the crude assump-tion that the climatic context and the economic context are related

to culture

Impact hypothesis Current investigations into human-made els of atmosphere-warming greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxideand methane serve to remind us that climate is influenced by cul-ture Analogously, the global competitiveness reports of the WorldEconomic Forum in Geneva remind us that income per head is influ-enced by cultural customs such as favoritism in decisions of govern-ment officials, ethical behavior of firms, hiring and firing practices, andwillingness to delegate authority Recognizing thatFigure 1.1contains achicken-and-egg problem, I started from the axiom that the contextscome first and are followed by culture The resulting impact hypothesisposits that climate and cash influence culture.

lev-Niche hypothesis The title of this book, Climate, Affluence, andCulture, is unclear as it leaves open the question of whether climateand cash have independent or interdependent impacts on culture.The mention of animals in this chapter brought clarity to this ques-tion Animals do not live in multiple contexts but in a single con-glomerate of contexts known as their habitat Higher animals likehumans are no exception to this rule that one has to adapt to a singleniche of interrelated contexts Self-evidently, our societies may adapt

to the climatic context, the economic context, or both in a parallelfashion But a more accurate understanding of culture may unfoldwhen we consider these contexts to be an integrated climato-economic habitat requiring integrated cultural responses Hence

my emphasis on the hypothesis that the interaction of climaticand economic contexts matters most to culture (seeFigure 1.1).The niche hypothesis in its most stringent interpretation has anumber of interesting implications First, if a society does its utmost

to keep the climatic conditions and income positions constant, ture doesn’t change much Perhaps the best-known illustration is theexample of the Amish people, who originally lived in Alsace, a smallpart of France near the German-Swiss border Thousands of Amishmigrated to America between 1815 and 1860, settling in rural areas withclimatic and agricultural conditions similar to those prevailing in

Alsace: Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, New York, Ontario, Ohio, and sylvania Totally opposed to the American dream of large profitsand innovation, they explicitly sought a farming life with climato-economic and techno-economic stability As a consequence, eventoday, they continue to cling to their traditional values and practicesincluding the use of horsepower and natural fertilizers, growing androtating a variety of crops, and raising livestock in small numbers.Second, if a society in a stable climate faces economic collapse, aswas the case with the Soviet successor states in 1990–1991, suddencultural change occurs (Inglehart & Baker,2000) Conversely, dras-tic cultural change in opposite directions occurs in cases of rocketingeconomic growth such as in China at the beginning of this millen-nium Third, if a large group of migrants moves to a differentclimato-economic niche, cultural adaptations are bound to follow.For example, the British settlers in Australia adopted practices ofweaker uncertainty avoidance (relying on social norms, rules, andprocedures) Additionally, they developed more humane orienta-tions (being fair, altruistic, generous, caring, and kind to others).Finally, they reduced the power distances among all members ofsociety (House et al.,2004).

Penn-Fourth, the view of most theorists that cultures are extremelypersistent over time may be an artifact of the stability of theclimato-economic niches investigated In the stable Scandinavianniche of a harsh cold climate and high income levels, culture ispersistently characterized by caring and sharing rather than fighting

as is evident in male-female and leader-follower relationships But

in the 8th to 10th centuries, the ancestors of the Norwegians, Swedes,and Danes – the Vikings – who lived in the same demanding climatebut in extreme poverty, were pirates engaging in plundering, raping,kidnapping, and occupying parts of Europe The lesson to be learnedfrom this reversal in values and practices is that historical explan-ations of culture make sense only if changes in the climato-economicniches are taken into account as well

Finally, the research model inFigure 1.1implies that any culturaladaptation to a climato-economic niche is inextricably connectedwith a given time period A particular context-culture link may thusnot be generalizable to points in time well beyond its recent past ornear future In consequence, it is important to know that the tests ofthe model reported in Chapters 2 to 7 cover the period 1980 to 2005.These studies are best viewed as snapshots taken from the never-ending film of how we warm-blooded creatures create life satisfac-tion, work, cooperation, organization, and a jumble of othercomponents of culture.