Who Prospers: How Cultural Values Shape Economic And Political Success

by Lawrence E Harrison

Overview

What lies behind America's economic and social decline? Can racism explain the ghetto tragedy if two-thirds of America's blacks have made it into the middle class? Why have Chinese, Japanese, and Korean immigrants done so much better than Mexicans? According to Lawrence E. Harrison, the key to answering these and other questions is culture—the values of a people with respect to work, education, frugality, community, fair play, and progress.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465091676
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	07/21/1993
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)
Lexile:	1500L (what's this?)

About the Author

Lawrence E. Harrison directed USAID missions in five Latin American countries between 1965 and 1981. He is the author of Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind: The Latin American Case, and was the U.S. member on the Haiti crisis mission of the Organization of American States in 1991 and 1992.

Editorial Reviews

Why do some nations and ethnic groups prosper while others stagnate? Harrison, a former director of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, finds the answer in a culture's values. In his diagnosis, Brazil's hard-working, family-oriented European and Japanese immigrants spurred that nation's dynamic growth, whereas Mexico's economic disaster and failure to build solid democratic institutions are due to its ``Hispanic value system'' promoting passivity, mistrust of outsiders and an overemphasis on family. The U.S. black underclass's plight, he maintains, is due not primarily to racism but rather to ``a set of values and attitudes, strongly influenced by the slavery experience'' and perpetuated by the ghetto. Featuring success stories such as Japan, Spain, Korea and Taiwan, this study verges on blaming the victim and slights political factors as well as the West's domination and molding of Third World markets and regimes to serve its own needs. Harrison ends with a jeremiad blaming U.S. decline on the erosion of education and the work ethic, TV, a quick-fix mentality and welfare programs. First serial to the National Interest. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Coming at a time of national and international concern about the persistence of poverty, Who Prospers? focuses on the part that individuals' basic values play in advancing prosperity. For Harrison, both national and ethnic advancement are tied to cultures that value work, frugality, planning for the future, ties to the community as a whole, and education--the traditional ethic lauded by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930). Expanding the ethic to include the Confucianism of Asia and the post-Franco energy of Spain, Harrison, a former director of development programs in Latin America for the U.S. Agency for International Development, reviews the postwar economic ``miracles'' of Brazil, Spain, Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. He then examines the experience of Asians, Mexicans, and African Americans in the United States and each group's success or failure at integration into the American economic mainstream. In all cases, Harrison finds the presence or absence of the basic values he has identified to be the decisive factor in development. Harrison concludes with thoughtful recommendations for reform that are refreshing in their lack of dogmatism and their optimism. Recommended for most libraries.-- Mary Jane Ballou, Ford Fdn. Lib., New York

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