Culture Components

Just looking solely at the relative value of a country's workers misses the role that the culture plays in determining how much a country will grow. As I've discussed, culture influences the decisions people make about factors like savings rates or how many hours they work each week, which we measure in the previously shown indicators, but culture can also influence work attitudes, levels of efficiency, reliability and other such influences on whether countries underperform or outperform. While some people shy away from examining culture because it is perceived as a sensitive subject and/or that it's difficult to measure, I think those views are mistaken. I don't see any reason why we shouldn't look at culture objectively as we do any other element of an economy; also, it can be well measured. I think that it's unfortunate that this important influence on economic well-being has not been well studied.

仅仅看一个国家工人的相对价值，就忽略了文化在确定一个国家将有多大增长的作用。正如我所讨论的，文化影响人们对储蓄率或每周工作几个小时的决定，这在我们以前显示的指标中是衡量的，但文化也可以影响工作态度，效率水平，可靠性等对国家是否表现不佳或跑赢的影响。虽然有些人因为被认为是一个敏感的话题而回避文化，或者很难衡量，但我认为这些观点是错误的。我没有看到任何理由，不要客观地看待文化，因为我们做任何其他经济要素;也可以很好地衡量。我认为这对经济福利的重大影响是不幸的。

To be clear, I don't mean to judge whether a culture is good or bad any more than I could judge whether working hard is a better way to live one's life than savoring the pleasures of life. I am, however, confident that people who prefer savoring life over working hard will work and produce differently in ways that we should understand. Similarly, it makes intuitive sense that countries that emphasize individual self-reliance and striving to achieve are more likely to succeed than countries that don't. Countries can also outperform if the people in them are more innovative in producing new products and ideas of value and more commercially minded in harvesting them. It makes fundamental sense that countries will underperform if they are corrupt, bureaucratic or if the rule of law is unsound. In this section we will look at the relationships between measures of such factors and future growth, and we will examine how different countries stack up against these measures and what that implies for their future growth rates.

要明确的是，我不是要判断一种文化是好还是坏，不如我可以判断，努力工作是一种比享受生活乐趣更好的生活方式。但是，我相信，喜欢品尝生活的人们会努力工作，以不同的方式工作，我们应该明白。同样地，直观上说，强调个人自力更生和争取实现的国家比没有国家的国家更有可能成功。如果其中的人们在生产新产品和价值观念方面更具创新性，那么在收获方面更具商业意义的国家也可以跑赢大国。如果腐败，官僚主义或法治不健全，那么国家将表现不佳。在本节中，我们将看看这些因素与未来增长的措施之间的关系，我们将研究不同国家如何与这些措施相抵触，以及对未来增长率的影响。

Some additional observations worth noting are as follows: people in poorer countries typically appear to value achieving because they need to work hard to sustain themselves, but as countries get richer, people tend to put more emphasis on enjoying their success. On an individual level, people spend more time relaxing; nationally, you can see it in countries turning away from policies that maximize growth towards policies that try to make society more equal or protect the environment. There is a strong correlation between the quality of a system's institutions (whether the system works) and a country's level of income. Similarly, richer countries seem more innovative because they can afford to invest more in conducting research or educating researchers, and developed capital markets in rich countries make it easier to start businesses and reap the potential rewards.

值得注意的另外一些意见如下：较贫穷国家的人们通常似乎认为是实现价值，因为他们需要努力维持自己，但随着国家越来越多，人们越来越重视享受成功。在个人层面上，人们花更多的时间放松身心;在全国范围内，您可以看到，在各国摆脱政策，将政策最大化，使政策试图使社会更加平等或保护环境。系统的机构（无论系统工作）的质量与国家的收入水平之间存在很强的相关性。同样，更富有的国家似乎更具创新性，因为他们可以负担更多的投资来进行研究或教育研究人员，而富裕国家发达的资本市场更容易启动企业并获得潜在的回报。

Our goal with the culture indicator is to capture the essence of whether a country's culture is conducive to growth, regardless of the influence of their stage of development. So, for each dimension of our culture gauge, we take out the effect of income on that dimension (using income as a proxy for the country's development stage).

我们的文化指标的目标是掌握一个国家的文化是否有利于增长的本质，不论其发展阶段的影响如何。那么，对于我们文化规模的每一个维度，我们将收入的影响作为这一维度（以收入为代表的国家的发展阶段）。

For the reasons we have described above, the culture gauge focused on the elements of culture we believe matter most for a country's future growth: 1) self-sufficiency, 2) savoring life versus achieving, 3) whether their society fosters innovation and commercialism, 4) bureaucracy, 5) corruption and 6) rule of law. For simplicity we put equal weight on each of our culture indicators, which balances measures related to the motivations of the individual and how the system operates. Because we took out the effect of income, each of the pieces is correlated to growth without being correlated at all to the income level of the country. The table below summarizes our weighting of the various gauges. Overall this gauge is about 58% correlated with future growth.

由于上述原因，文化考察重点集中在我们认为对一个国家未来增长最重要的文化因素上：1）自给自足，2）品味生活与实现，3）社会是否促进创新和商业主义，4）官僚主义，5）腐败6）法治。为了简单起见，我们同样重视我们的每个文化指标，平衡与个人动机相关的措施以及系统的运作方式。因为我们取消了收入的影响，每一件都与增长相关联，而与国家的收入水平无关。下表总结了我们对各种量规的权重。总体来说，这个量表与未来的增长率大致相当于58％。

Again, the way we think about culture is that a country's competitiveness and productivity is mainly a function of its value proposition, but culture can be a drag or additional boost. So we use our gauge of culture to adjust our measure of a country's productivity by shifting it up or down based on whether the country's culture is likely to be a pressure for the country to perform above or below its potential (we call it a "bump" for lack of a better term).

再次，我们对文化的看法是，一个国家的竞争力和生产率主要是其价值主张的一个功能，但文化可能是拖累或增加的。所以我们用文化尺度来调整我们的国家生产率的衡量标准，是根据国家的文化是否可能成为国家在其潜力之上或之下进行压力的一个压力（我们称之为“颠簸“因为缺乏一个更好的术语）。

Below we look at our culture indicator's current readings before diving into its individual pieces and describing in more depth our logic behind them.

下面我们来看一下我们的文化指标的当前读数，然后再深入探讨其个人作品，并更深入地描述我们的逻辑背后。

Culture shifts our predictions for future growth some. Based on this gauge, culture is the strongest support to growth in Asia, particularly in Singapore, India, Thailand, Korea, and China. Singapore's culture is strong across all four of our measures. In contrast, China's institutions aren't nearly as effective (due to bureaucracy and corruption), but China's culture shows an extremely strong work ethic, desire to achieve and self-sufficiency. For Korea, its orientation toward innovation and work ethic offset relatively weak institutions. The US stands just behind Korea with a highly innovative spirit and achievement orientation, but with a system that prioritizes redistribution over maximizing growth. Culture is a more moderate support in Japan, more neutral in the rest of the English-speaking developed world and Germany, and a drag in Latin America and most European countries, especially the periphery. In Europe's periphery, corruption, a focus on savoring life, relatively low self-sufficiency, and stagnant commercial and scientific environments appear to be a material drag on growth. Russia and Argentina, two of the countries where our measures of what you pay versus what you get are attractive, also score near the bottom of the list because of corruption in Russia, and low self-sufficiency and a high value on savoring life relative to achieving in Argentina.

文化改变了我们对未来增长的预测。基于这一观点，文化是对亚洲，特别是在新加坡，印度，泰国，韩国和中国的增长最有力的支持。新加坡的文化在我们所有四项措施中都很强大。相比之下，中国的制度并不是那么有效（由于官僚主义和腐败），而中国的文化表现出非常强的工作伦理，实现自给自足的愿望。对于韩国来说，其对创新和工作道德的定位抵消了相对较弱的机构。美国立足于韩国，具有高度创新的精神和成就导向，但以优先重新分配为最大化增长的制度。文化在日本是一个更温和的支持，在英语发达世界和德国的其他地方更加中立，拉丁美洲和大多数欧洲国家，特别是边缘地区的拖累。在欧洲的周边地区，腐败，重视生活，相对较低的自给自足以及停滞不前的商业和科学环境似乎是对经济增长的物质拖累。俄罗斯和阿根廷这两个国家，我们采取什么样的措施和你所得到的是有吸引力的，因为俄罗斯的腐败而在列表的底部附近得分，而且自给自足也很低，而且相对于美味生活的价值很高在阿根廷实现。