Abstract
Recent literature in the fields of Political Economy, New Institutional Economics and New Cultural Economics has converged in the use of empirical methods, offering a series of consistent quantitative analysis of values. However, an overarching positive methodology for the value-free study of values has not yet precipitated. Building on a mixed systematic-integrative literature review of a pluralistic variety of perspectives from Adam Smith’s ‘Impartial’ Spectator to modern moral philosophy, the current study suggests the Culture-Based Development (CBD) approach for analyzing the economic impact of values on socio-economic development. The CBD approach suggests that the value-free analysis needs: (i) to use positive methods to classify a value as local or universal; (ii) to examine the existence of what is termed the Aristotelian Kuznets curve of values (i.e., to test for the presence of an inflection point in the economic impact from the particular value) and (iii) to account for Platonian cultural relativity (i.e., the cultural embeddedness expressed in the geographic nestedness of the empirical data about values). The paper details the theoretical and methodological cornerstones underpinning the proposed CBD approach for value-free analysis of values.
Highlights
Can economics identify which local cultural attitudes are universally valuable for the economic systems? A system that depends on value judgements cannot be adequately studied without including values as a factor for the operation of the system
The current study suggests these two criteria can be met by following the Culture-Based Development (CBD) approach, which proposes that the universality of a value should be positively analyzed against its objective effect on a socio-economic output of interest
CBD suggests a systematic approach to value-free study of any value in three steps through: (i) establishing whether the value has a universal impact across space, (ii) detecting if its impact exhibits nonlinearities and (iii) explaining through Platonian cultural relativity how the universality of moral values and the presence of diverse local culturally dependent ethics can find a coherent conceptual and empirical explanation
Summary
Can economics identify which local cultural attitudes are universally valuable for the economic systems? A system that depends on value judgements cannot be adequately studied without including values as a factor for the operation of the system. This paper conducts a mixed method of systematic-integrative literature review and outlines several cornerstones in the literature of particular importance to economics as a field and fundamental for the here proposed specific CBD approach for the value-free analysis of values. CBD suggests a systematic approach to value-free study of any value in three steps through: (i) establishing whether the value has a universal impact across space, (ii) detecting if its impact exhibits nonlinearities (such as Aristotle’s golden mean suggests) and (iii) explaining through Platonian cultural relativity how the universality of moral values and the presence of diverse local culturally dependent ethics can find a coherent conceptual and empirical explanation.
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