A terrible thing happened in my neighborhood. Someone took all the books out of several Little Libraries, the ornate wooden boxes that people put in front of their houses to facilitate reading.
As I was in a somber mood already because of the election, this heinous act made me wonder about the foundations of our society, including those of the culture and institutions on which our prosperity is based.
Yes, I am engaging in metaphoric hyperbole, to say the least. The theft of a hundred or so used books is probably the act of a couple of teenagers and not the opening swell of a crime wave. Perhaps I am bothered by symbol rather than substance. But symbols are important. The cooperative impulses that lead people to erect little libraries in front of their homes are vital to a healthy society.
Moreover, though economists themselves often shy away from cultural issues, such cooperation also is important to an economy. Thwart such generous, trusting initiatives too often and our economy as well as our society may begin to crumple from within.
The idea of the vitality of cooperation within community is not new. Indeed, it was famously expressed by two 18th-century British thinkers.
Edmund Burke asserted that, “To love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind.”
Adam Smith, almost Burke’s exact contemporary, is most famous for his book “The Wealth of Nations,” the publication of which marked the separation of economics from philosophy. But Smith himself thought that his earlier work on “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” was more important. I agree. In it, Smith examines how individual conscience and collective societal values arise from iterative social interactions. These values, in turn, are key to just and prosperous societies.
Many champions of Smith trumpet his arguments on the importance of competition to economic efficiency, but ignore his exposition of the importance of shared societal values. That is unfortunate — one complements the other and we cannot understand his ideas on markets without the rest of his ideas. His work antedated Jean-Jacques Rosseau’s “The Social Contract” by more than a decade, but the implications of the two are very parallel.
Smith’s work captures the yin and yang of successful economies. Competition between different producers for customers leads to innovation and efficient use of resources. Stifling competition through restrictions on commerce can make society worse off. But cooperation also is vital and an economy needs shared cultural values that favor productive use of resources and fairness in distribution. It needs what recent thinkers like Richard John Neuhaus and Peter Berger call “mediating structures,” non-commercial associations or groups to fill needs that for-profit businesses cannot.
Absent such structures, which may include churches, garden clubs, scout troops, library associations and even bowling leagues, communication and trust begin to erode. Not only does society suffer from the lack of needed organizations, but also from the honesty and trust that must underpin free market exchange.
Francis Fukuyama is best known for his 1992 writing on “The End of History” and is often mocked for having been wrong. That is a mistake. He poses important questions, even though his immediate answers don’t always turn out fully right. That is true of his 1995 book, “Trust: Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperity,” on how the levels of trust in a society influence national economic outcomes. Higher trust levels, he argues, foster more fruitful commerce and more investment in future productivity. Low trust saps these.
Fukuyama, an American of Japanese ancestry, contrasted societies with different levels of trust embodied in their cultures. He saw a high level of trust in Japanese culture and a lower one in that of China. He wrote that just as the Japanese economy was getting into a multi-decade slump and the Chinese economy was taking off. Some see that as a reason to scorn his thesis. Defenders note that output per person in Japan is still many times greater than in China and Japan is a far more just society. But he gave many other examples, and I personally think his core arguments are sound.
Diasporic peoples often thrive economically. These include Jews in many times and places, Syrian-Lebanese in South America since 1880, ethnic Japanese in Brazil and Chinese in the Andean countries, ethnic Chinese expatriates all over Southeast Asia, and Indians in East Africa. One advantage they have is that the internal kinship ties fostered by being an outcast group, often one discriminated against, lead to better interchanges of information needed for commerce and to higher levels of trust needed for finance and trade. All of this often works across political borders. And such groups may have cultural values related to education, hard work, innovation, risk-taking and saving that put them at an advantage compared to the majority groups among which they live. Think of this when contemplating the various East African and East Asian communities now growing in the Twin Cities.
This leads us into a minefield, however. Bigoted characterizations of ethnic, religious or national groups was once common and usually wrong. Discussing cultural differences today invites condemnation on the grounds of bias, and people increasingly avoid it, especially in academia.
That doesn’t mean that culture and institutions don’t matter or that acknowledging differences inherently implies that one culture or group is superior to another. The culture of Sao Paulo, Brazil, is not “superior” to that of the northeastern state of Alagoas, but the economic productivity of the first has been far higher than the second for more than a century, and culture is part of that. Milan is different from Naples, and Medellin and Arequipa are different from other cities in Colombia and Peru respectively.
Yes, sometimes such differences are passing. A century ago, people contrasted the southern, French-speaking, Catholic, industrialized part of Belgium with the northern, Flemish, Protestant and agrarian north. The south was more prosperous. At the end of World War II, others contrasted richer Lutheran industrial northern Germany with poorer Catholic and agricultural Bavaria. Now in both nations, the positions are reversed and not due to sudden changes in culture. But culture always plays some role.
So what does this have to do with stolen books?
Minnesota is rich in terms of “associational activities,” Herbert Hoover’s term for “mediating structures.” Our state’s culture long has valued education, diversity, tolerance, saving, innovation and enterprise. There is a high level of trust. These are particularly true in my neighborhood of St. Anthony Park, which has the advantage of relatively high average incomes. There are all sorts of associations from the pioneering block nurse program to the “sustainable food group.”
And there are lots of little libraries. These make our lives better, regardless of income, but they also make our state, city and neighborhood more economically productive. Trust is a vital part of that, but, as Rousseau pointed out, if someone’s selfish actions undermine that trust, the social contract breaks down. If books get stolen from little libraries often enough, eventually no one will contribute books and nobody will install one in their lawn. And we will be worse off.
How do we collectively and reciprocally appeal to “the better angels of our natures,” in Abraham Lincoln’s phrase? There is the rub. Identifying the role of cultural values such as trust is not hard, but fostering them is.