The Roots of Cooperation
Americans used to farm a rich variety of crops. Some were very labour intensive, requiring neighbourly cooperation. In these counties, parents were more likely to give their children names that were common. This may indicate a desire for conformity. By contrast, in areas where farmers could be more self-sufficient, they chose names that were more individualistic. And when exogenous shifts propelled farmers into economic autonomy, they became even more self-expressive.
In today’s Substack, I’m digging* into a phenomenal new paper by Martin Fiszbein, Yeonha Jung and Dietrich Vollrath. It yields important insights for the interactions between structural transformation, global cultural diversity, and social change.
*How many agrarian puns can I plough into this blog? We’re already on 4. 😬
OK, let’s start with the descriptive data.
Potatoes required three times the labour as wheat. Cotton needed seven times as much.
Crops in the US South were exceptionally labour intensive. There’s also significant within-state variation - which the authors exploit to disentangle the effects of agriculture and institutions.
Agricultural labour intensity is strongly correlated with individualism. This holds in both the north and south, for both white and black Americans.
But what about endogeneity? Maybe individualists settled and survived in places where they could farm independently? To examine how farming shaped culture, Fiszbein and colleagues consider two agricultural shocks: mechanisation and pests.
Mechanisation
Mechanisation affected the amount of labour each crop required. Hand-cultivating an acre of wheat required 61 hours. Machines meant it could be done in 3. But the precise shifts in labour requirements varied by crop type. Cotton actually remained very labour intensive. In places where mechanisation increased crops’ labour intensity, names became less individualistic.
The boll weevil
Cotton was extremely labour intensive. But after the arrival of the boll weevil insect (1890s-1930s), cotton was decimated and farmers were forced to adopt alternatives. This exogenous shift in labour intensity led to an increase in individualism across the South. Farmers who adopted low labour intensity crops, like wheat or rye, became much more individualistic.
Long-Run Cultural Effects
In counties with high labour intensity in 1900, people are now more likely to search for the term ‘common’ (rather than ‘unique’). They’re also more likely to prefer team sports, support redistributive policies, and vote at high rates. These are all indicators of strong community bonds.
Cultural tightness
Economic interdependence seems to breed cultural conformity and collectivism. These are both examples of what Michele Gelfand calls ‘cultural tightness’. People in tight cultures show more synchrony, stronger prejudice against outsiders and more restrictions on public speech. Outraged by deviants, they tend to impose harsh punishments. In Alabama, for example, it’s illegal to possess, produce or distribute a sex toy. Fiszbein et al do not consider cultural tightness, but it does seem correlated with 19th century labour intensity.
Did agrarian interdependence sow the seeds of cultural tightness, worldwide?
Globally, cultural tightness seems more common in places where farming was once extremely labour intensive and necessarily interdependent. Wet paddy rice required immense coordination. Thomas Talhelm argues that this encouraged East Asian collectivism. Students from rice-growing regions contribute more to public goods and harshly punish free-riders.
I was initially sceptical of the rice theory of culture. What about Confucianism and institutions? Fiszbein et al’s paper enables us to disentangle the two. Even in a totally different institutional environment (i.e. the US), agrarian interdependence nurtures conformity.
Chuño may provide another fertile area of study. This is a freeze-dried potato made by Quecha and Aymara communities in the Andean Altiplano. After harvesting, potatoes are laid out, frozen over night, then exposed to intense sunlight.
This process is extremely laborious. High demand for labour may help explain why nearly all rural Peruvian women work. It may also explain why skeletons from 500 CE showed higher wear and tear if they were from (chuño-growing) highlands rather than lowland plains - indicating labour intensity.
Heightened labour intensity helps explain indigenous institutions. Highland society traditionally comprised ayllu communities with two kinds of reciprocal labour: prestamanos (borrowed hands for harvest) and minga (communal work, like irrigation). Minga comes from the Quechua word minccacuni: ‘asking for help by promising something’. Ayni is another word for reciprocity: ‘today for you, tomorrow for me’. Labour exchange sustained kinship ties of cooperation, fraternity and loyalty.
Today, Peru scores as very collectivist. Homophobia is also extremely high (indicating little tolerance of individual self-expression).
I would be curious to learn how indigenous culture varies between the labour-intensive, chuño-growing highlands and the lowlands. If economic interdependence promoted collectivism in East Asia and the US, perhaps the same applies in Latin America?
Structural transformation and cultural change
The second major implication of Fiszbein et al (2022) is that when people are less dependent on their neighbours’ support and approval, they become much more self-expressive. They focus on American farming, but it’s consistent with a wider body of evidence on structural transformation and cultural change.
In North and Central Italy, extended families used to live and farm together as sharecroppers. With little economic autonomy, young men were compelled to comply with cultural conventions. Once jobs opened up in booming cities, men enjoyed a massive increase in liberty.
Koreans may be ‘culturally tight’, but this too was unravelled by industrialisation. As young adults moved to the cities and earnt independent wages, they increasingly dated before marriage, chose their own partners, then established their own households. They liberated themselves from parental control.
In India, by contrast, only 10% of workers receive a regular monthly wage with social-security benefits. As a result of endemic precarity, most men continue to live with their parents and rely on their jati. This motivates cultural conformity.
Yet when Indians move to the UK and become economically independent, they deviate from tradition. Female employment is very high among British Indians. Over in America, the vast majority of Hindus and Muslims support non-discrimination protections for people who are LGBTQ.
(Assimilation also plays a role. But my point is that whatever the deep roots, culture is incredible malleable).
TLDR
Agrarian interdependence may have reinforced cultural conformity. When farmers were forced to be more economically autonomous, they became much more self-expressive. This echoes a globally even process of structural transformation and cultural individualism.
Agricultural intensity negatively correlated with individuality, you mean.