Culture is just the error term

"Culture" is a useful catchall term that encapsulates values, beliefs, and norms for human interaction and cooperation within a specific group. When people say "Chinese culture rewards hard work," we know what the word "culture" includes. We can assume it covers parenting styles, social rewards for success, and the moral weight attached to hard work in China. But when it comes to the role of culture in political and policy discussions, things get murky.

Take the policies of the CCP or the economic incentives within Chinese corporations. Are these cultural forces? It's hard to say because we usually use "culture" to explain forces that can't be clearly categorized as political or economic. Some argue that culture refers to low-level interactions and bottom-up processes that would occur naturally without external or top-down institutional forces. But this dichotomy seems off.

Consider the zero-covid policies in China. They're clearly instituted by the CCP in an authoritarian, top-down fashion. But doesn't culture - defined as what people believe and how they interact - affect everything, including the norms within the CCP and the behavior of its individuals? These institutions might not perfectly represent the general populace, but almost everything in a society can be captured by culture at different levels of aggregation.

I'm not trying to police the use of the word "culture." In normal conversation, we almost always know what we mean by it. However, in politics and meta-politics discussions, deferring to "culture" as an explanatory variable is almost always a cop-out. Take the pro-natalist policy debate. Every time tangible solutions like financial incentives are discussed by someone like

Robin Hanson

, you can bet that some people on Twitter will chime in with, "But we have to change culture." This is supremely unhelpful. For one, as

Regan Arntz-Gray

points out in this piece, culture can be acted upon by a variety of forces, and it’s unclear why financial incentives can’t be one of them.

It's fine to claim, as people have done with the fertility debate, that financial incentives won't make a dent based on past evidence. But attributing issues to "culture" without further explanation adds nothing other than saying it's tied to some undefined dimension of human belief and behavior. If you want to use culture as an error term that captures unexplained variance, fine. But to make a contribution, you have to explain what dimensions of culture are worth honing in on. Otherwise, "But we have to change culture" is just begging the question. Of course, we need to change the culture. The question is how? What are the specific beliefs and norms making the problem worse, and how can we intervene?

I'm not demanding that public intellectuals approach every issue with a policy mindset. In fact, writers, bloggers and podcasters are all best poised to influence culture. The interesting question is how we should influence culture. If we want to get meta about this, we can discuss the cost and benefits of making some arguments versus others, or talk about what people other than public intellectuals should do - education, art, etc. But again, the demon of specifics will haunt you. How should we change our education system? What should we be teaching kids about population growth? What narratives should our art be countering?

If we want to make progress on complex issues, we need to move beyond vague invocations of culture and focus on identifying and targeting the specific beliefs, norms, and dimensions of culture that matter. Anything else is just a cop-out.