Unintended Consequences

Unintended Consequences is an accessible, inter-disciplinary account of the role of culture in shaping economic performance. There are two major themes that run through the book. One is the interaction of factor; culture and politics in explaining modern intensive growth in the west. The other is the role of individualism, an inadvertent legacy of the medieval Catholic church, in promoting this growth, and the strange metamorphoses in the west’s cosmological belief and the interaction between ‘the west and the rest’. The topics addressed include: a possible clash of future civilizations, the role of values in the East Asian miracle, cultural versus economic causes for social decay in the west, and whether modernization leads to westernization. The book also examines how the world’s two most ancient contemporary civilizations–India and China–have responded to the rise of the west. An appendix shows how the various stories can be described as four formal economic models. Lal takes into account the relevant literature in history, anthropology, social psychology, evolutionary biology, neurology, sociology and economic history making the book both accessible and interesting to a wider audience.