This book pulls together experts in the fields of economics and Russian culture, all participants in the Samuel P. Huntington Memorial Symposium on Culture, Cultural Change and Economic Development, a follow-up to the 1999 Cultural Values and Human Progress Symposium at Harvard University. As the sequel to the 2001 volume Culture Matters, it discusses modernization, democratization, economic, and political reforms in Russia and asserts that these reforms can happen through the reframing of cultural values, attitudes, and institutions. (Cover design by Katie Makrie.)

This book pulls together experts in the fields of economics and Russian culture, all participants in the Samuel P. Huntington Memorial Symposium on Culture, Cultural Change and Economic Development, a follow-up to the 1999 Cultural Values and Human Progress Symposium at Harvard University. As the sequel to the 2001 volume Culture Matters, it discusses modernization, democratization, economic, and political reforms in Russia and asserts that these reforms can happen through the reframing of cultural values, attitudes, and institutions. (Cover design by Katie Makrie.)

What lies behind America's economic and social decline? Can racism explain the ghetto tragedy if two-thirds of America's blacks have made it into the middle class? Why have Chinese, Japanese, and Korean immigrants done so much better than Mexicans? Why are the United States and Canada so far ahead of Latin America? According to Lawrence E. Harrison, the key to answering these and other questions is culture-- the values of a people with respect to work, education, frugality, community, fair play, and progress.

This title looks at why some countries and ethnic groups are better off than others, and the role that cultural values play in the shaping of nations' and peoples' political, economic and social performance. Prominent scholars and journalists ponder the question of why, at the beginning of the 21st century, the world is more divided than ever between the rich and the poor, between those living in freedom and those under oppression.