Abstract
In the centuries since the enlightenment, the world has seen an increase in socioeconomic development, measured as increased life expectancy, education, economic development and democracy. While the co-occurrence of these features among nations is well documented, little is known about their origins or co-evolution. Here, we compare this growth of prosperity in nations to the historical record of cultural values in the twentieth century, derived from global survey data. We find that two cultural factors, secular-rationality and cosmopolitanism, predict future increases in GDP per capita, democratization and secondary education enrollment. The converse is not true, however, which indicates that secular-rationality and cosmopolitanism are among the preconditions for socioeconomic development to emerge.
Highlights
The last 300 years have brought about increases in health [1], economic development [2], democracy [3] and education [4]
Socioeconomic development has been most pronounced among Western nations and, during the same time period, Western nations have adopted an unprecedented set of cultural values that make them anomalous in cross-cultural, historical context [5]
We extend the cultural values recorded in the World and European Values Survey (WEVS) back to the early twentieth century [24] using two observations: firstly, that cultural values form during the first few decades of life [25,26,27,28] and second, that these socialized cultural values are resilient through the rest of life, relative to other birth cohorts [24,29]
Summary
The last 300 years have brought about increases in health [1], economic development [2], democracy [3] and education [4]. For example, are substantially psychologically different from traditional societies in concepts of fairness, economic decision-making, individualism, independence (versus conformity) and moral reasoning [6] This unique set of cultural values broadly consist of secular, self-expression, individualism and emancipation values, which are contrasted with religious, survival, collectivist and traditional royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rsos R. Economic development could not occur until ethnocentrism [14] and strong religious customs [15] were supplanted by a value system based on reason and humanism [8,16,17,18] This question motivates a study of the time-ordering of socioeconomic development—increases in democratization, economic development, education and life expectancy—and associated cultural values in the twentieth century. We extend the cultural values recorded in the WEVS back to the early twentieth century [24] using two observations: firstly, that cultural values form during the first few decades of life [25,26,27,28] and second, that these socialized cultural values are resilient through the rest of life, relative to other birth cohorts [24,29]
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