Korea's favourite Neo-Keynesian economist/Cambridge professor Ha-joon Chang spoke at SOAS a couple of days ago and while I had problems with a lot of what he said, I must admit that he is a very entertaining speaker. The subject of his talk was 'Lazy Japanese and thieving Germans - does culture matter for economic development?', and was apparently based on a chapter in his forthcoming book, the title of which I can't remember. Actually, the first part of his talk was the best - he put up on the OHP a battery of quotations from British travel writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries going on about how terribly lazy, untrustworthy, unproductive, irrational, emotional and bad at timekeeping the Germans and Japanese were. His point was to (quite rightly) rubbish the currently resurgent ideas in mainstream economics about the importance of 'culture' to development. He didn't deny the possible importance of 'culture' but tried to show that the ideas that cultures were fixed or that certain cultures were inferior to others were wrong. He made rather a good, lighthearted comparison of Confucianism and Islam to show, conclusively, that Islam provided a far better culture for development, in fact, quite definitely the best culture possible for capitalist development (I think his argument rested largely on the fact that the Prophet was a merchant).
