Economics and National Cultures

Max Weber’s essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1920-1) has provoked a huge amount of research and discussion about the relations between cultures, religions, and economic life. Though with different specific conclusions, this essay has influenced the ideas on the economic life of the Spanish thinker Ramiro de Maeztu (1875-1936; see Enrique Fernández Barros 1974 and José Alsina Calvés 2011). Apart from his normative intentions, de Maeztu relates a positive “reverential” way and a wicked “sensual” way of using money to the different races of America: the race that speaks English and the race that speaks Spanish or Portuguese, respectively. These races, de Maeztu argues, have different idiosyncrasies, ethoi, or cultures that influence their attitudes toward economic behavior. In this paper, I will first show how John Stuart Mill ([1844] 2006 and 1882), Carl Menger (1960), John Neville Keynes ([1891] 1955), and Dani Rodrik (2015) argue that economics has to take into account the specificities of different cultures. I will also mention contemporary economists adhering to “cultural economics”. Finally, I will describe the cyclical evolution of the economy of Latin America, specifically of Argentina, which has a relation with the ideas of de Maeztu. The conclusion will be that the characteristics of Latin America’s culture and their impact on the economy call for economic theories and practices that complement and sometimes modify the standard theories and practices