Gee’s Reviews > Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress > Status Update

The norms that produce social capital, by contrast, must substantively in- clude virtues like truth telling, meeting obligations, and reciprocity. Not sur- prisingly, these norms overlap to a significant degree with those Puritan values that Max Weber found critical to the development of Western capital- ism in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Fukuyama: Social capital can be defined simply as an instantiated set of informal values or norms shared among members of a group that permits them to cooperate with one another. If members of the group come to expect that others will behave reliably and honestly, then they will come to trust one another. Trust acts like a lubricant that makes any group or organization run more efficiently.

Work is not highly valued in progress-resistant societies, reflecting a philo- sophical current that goes back to the Greeks. The entrepreneur is suspect but the manual laborer somewhat less so, since he must work to survive. At the top of the prestige ladder are the intellectual, the artist, the politician, the religious leader, the military leader.

JEFFREY SACHS : Three broad explanations may help to account for the growth puzzle - Geography, Social Systems, Positive Feedback.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”