From an op-ed I published in the Star Tribune (Minneapolis–St. Paul) this past weekend:
Not only is Tanzania a relatively corrupt country, but researchers also note extensive corruption in the hunting sector. It is for that reason that Tanzania’s minister for natural resources and tourism issued a stern warning to the Tanzania Safari Outfitters Association at a meeting in Dar es Salaam last fall, noting that corruption usually began with wealthy hunters bribing officials so that they would turn a blind eye to illegal behavior.
Instead of lobbying against placing the African lion on the endangered species list, Tanzania should seek to reform its institutions. Not only would this help protect the country’s big-game reserves, it is also a crucial step toward the sustainable development of the Tanzanian economy. A persistent finding in development economics is that dysfunctional institutions, of which corruption is a symptom, are an important cause of underdevelopment.
Is Culture Useless as an Explanation for Behavior?
Economists are generally suspicious of explanations for behavior relying on culture. This likely stems from the fact that individual rationality, whose twin assumptions of completeness and transitivity constitute the cornerstone of economics and of much of modern social science, are not context-dependent.
The typical economist’s skepticism regarding culture as an explanation for behavior also stems from the fact that most economists fundamentally believe a human being is a human being the world over, and only economic circumstances change to provide a different set of incentives, which themselves explain variations in behavior. It is in that sense that no matter what its critics might say, economics remains very much a humanistic discipline.
Not only is invoking culture as an explanation for behavior the hallmark of lazy thinking, it is also unscientific. A few weeks ago, Frances Woolley wrote: