Through stories of food, Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee examines how economics influences culture

There is a long and important debate in the social sciences on whether economics primarily shapes culture or if it’s the other way around. Karl Marx favoured economics. At the risk of caricaturing, for him, it was the organisation of production that, to a first approximation, determined the culture: feudal production went with a feudal culture, full of rituals and hierarchies; capitalist production created a more transactional cultural style. On the other hand, Max Weber, another great German thinker from later in the 19th century, was convinced that it was the culture which came out of Protestantism – with its focus on frugality and accumulation of wealth – that led to capitalism.

It is easy to see why this matters. If culture is no constraint and capitalism comes naturally to everyone, then it is only policies that are in our way to the wonders of free-market capitalism. Marx (it is worth emphasising, given his reputation) believed that the dynamic force of capitalism must sweep away the vestiges of feudal economics before the glorious march towards socialism can really begin. This is why some free-market economists from the University of Chicago used to call themselves right-wing Marxists (they just didn’t want the final step), and why Marxist parties use the word “feudal” in a particularly pejorative way.

On the other hand, if culture has a certain primacy over economics, the possibilities for radical transformation might be more limited. Unless you have the right set of social norms, it could be harder to successfully implement capitalism.

Both views have their devotees among social scientists. On the one side, there is the fact that most market-driven growth successes are concentrated in Europe, the Anglo-Saxon countries outside Europe (US, Canada, etc.) and East Asia. It is possible to see this as evidence of the advantages of certain cultures, though those more sceptical point to the fact that the “right” culture is no longer just Protestantism. At some point, to fit the data, Weber’s theory had to be extended to include all of Christianity, Judaism and Confucianism. Will Hinduism be next, notwithstanding the cliché of it being other-worldly? Moreover, while South Korea is now often cited as a shining example of a Confucian success story, in the 1960s, there was a lot of anxiety – in Korea and beyond it – about the same Confucianism, and its emphasis on high thinking and scholarly pursuits rather than manual labour and business creation.

This smells like one of those deep but ultimately unanswerable questions, and certainly not one to be resolved between the covers of this thin book. On the other hand, the context of food and eating practices offers a very natural space to discuss the mechanisms through which economics shapes culture and vice versa. For example, it is hard to think of the difference between Chitpavan Brahmin food and Goan food from a few hundred kilometres down the Malabar coast without bringing in caste and religion – in other words, culture. On the other hand, the US’s exceptionalism in food – the fact it has the potential to grow great produce and yet has famously bad food, unlike most other such fertile places (like Italy, France, China, India) – is unlikely to be just culture. The bad Boston pizzas are made by immigrants from the pizza paradise of Naples. The piece titled “Foodscapes and Landscapes” argues that it is economics, resulting from the particular combination of the US’s geography and the historical patterns of immigration, to be blamed.

Trade and immigration are, of course, very powerful forces shaping diets everywhere. Potatoes came from the New World and remade Polish and Punjabi food. Tomatoes did the same for Italy. Hakka immigrants from China started a process that gave us Chineej food and a similar accident gave Egypt its so-called national dish, koshari. The English imperialists left, but their cake stayed behind with us – one slightly savoury exception in the pantheon of ultra-sweet Indian desserts, totally indigenised and sold across the country.

Immigrants also adjust their diets to their new homes, albeit slowly. Food nostalgia is a powerful example of cultural resistance to economic pressures – people buy the foods that they grew up with even when they cost more, as my MIT colleague David Atkin’s research shows.

If economics changes culture, cultural and social practices undergird the economy; there is now a growing emphasis within economics on the role of social networks in making possible a range of economic transactions, from supply chains to credit to mutual insurance. We need to trust people and we need them to trust us for most economic exchanges to happen. My own research suggests, however, that these networks are not necessarily products of some economic engineering: we thankfully don’t make friends only because they will serve some economic function, or pick our family because they offer some economic advantages. We are, with prominent exceptions, first human and then economic agents. Therefore, it is the way we are brought up, the way we relate to people and the way we collectively react to what, within our culture, is seen as egregiously selfish and/or amoral conduct, which make certain transactions possible and others not. ‘Trust and Trade’ discusses the hundi system of financial transfers that has linked the rest of the world to India for many centuries, and the role of trust in it.

Trust is easier when we know people – we obviously don’t trust everyone we know, but a lot of those we trust are people we know or friends of people we know. Social isolation – between different castes who live in different hamlets within the village or between different religious groups who live in different neighbourhoods – undermines trust. That makes it harder to act cohesively on economic opportunities, and also when there is a fight or a standoff. For many years, Ramzan was seen as an opportunity to cross the barriers and reinforce those cross-community connections, but that seems to be less and less prevalent, which is worrying.

Gift-giving is another pretext to reinforce ties, and Christmas (back to the English cake), Ramzan and Durga Puja are all occasions when giving and accepting gifts is socially approved and even encouraged, unlike at other times when we feel slightly awkward in doing so. There is a literature in economics asking why such occasions exist, given that it is easier to send people money than to give them gifts. This seems completely backwards, since the point of the gift is precisely not the transfer, but the fact that both the parties give and take (not necessarily commensurating amounts) and, by doing so, signal that they are open to each other for further interactions, economic or otherwise.

An essay returns to the idea of a two-way interplay between economics and culture. Bengali culture, as the cliché goes, is more devoted to eating and travelling than to making money, in contrast particularly with the culture of the immigrants from western India, long settled in Bengal. There are potential historical roots to this divergence – for example, the British systematically undermined the early nineteenth-century boom in Bengali-run businesses. Also, these communities came to Bengal precisely to do business. And in any case, today, most Bengali would-be entrepreneurs suffer from not having other entrepreneurs to learn and get loans from, unlike, for example, the Gujaratis and Marwaris in Bengal. So, it is equally harder for them to succeed in business. Perhaps, for that reason, it is “economically and psychologically rational” for Bengalis to embrace the eating and travelling that their modest incomes permit than to chafe about not making more money.

For me, despite the very abstract framing, the economics versus culture debate is important because it gets us to try and be more thoughtful about all the customs and stereotypes that we lean on in our everyday lives. It won’t rid us of all our prejudices – I still can’t pretend that I love American food – but it doesn’t hurt to fight with them a bit more.

Excerpted with permission from Chhaunk: On Food, Economics And Society, Abhijit Banerjee, illustrated by Cheyenne Olivier, Juggernaut.