IN MY CAREER I HAVE HAD many advantages—parents, teachers, colleagues, and a happy marriage with my wife Viviana. This book is dedicated to four giants who for decades inspired and influenced me: Paul Samuelson, William Fellner, John Rawls, and Robert Merton.
The book grew from several ideas, one of them being the importance of a nation’s attitudes and beliefs. In the 1980s Viviana sometimes remarked to me in our travels that we shouldn’t be surprised that people in other countries behave in ways different from my country of birth, America, and hers, Argentina. Nations differ in their attitudes and beliefs. This perspective stayed with me as we visit or work in countries overseas. I also remembered a fascinating dinner, probably in the 1990s, with the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset at which he told me of his work on values in America that were less pronounced elsewhere. In a course I gave at Columbia from 1992 to 2006, World Economic Problems, I began to suggest that differences in values give rise to the differences in economic institutions and economic performance we observe in the West. Research on the hypothesis started in May 2006 when I had the good fortune to find two graduate students, Luminita Stevens and Raicho Bojilov, who were eager to test the hypothesis against data. They hit upon the World Values Survey, which proved in a 2006 report to be a gold mine. (In 2010 I was delighted to be able to tell the WVS founder Ronald Inglehart about some of our statistical results.)
In that same course and a later seminar, two research assistants helped me by reading and distilling a range of materials that improved my book at many places: Eleanor Dillon and Valeria Zhavoronkina. More informally, three other students, Oren Ziv, Edward Fox, and Jonathan Krueger engaged me in discussion. My Chapter 1 quotes Jonathan’s term paper. (I learned one day that the acuteness of his comments on my text came from reading scripts for a Hollywood studio. I was sad to see him die so young and talented.)
No work as different from standard texts as this one could have been written by a committee, but it could not have been written without numerous, often continuing, interactions with others. During the four years of writing, I benefitted enormously from the generous help on a range of issues of Richard Robb, Gylfi Zoega, Raicho Bojilov, Amar Bhidé, Roman Frydman, Saif Ammous, and Juan Vicente Sola—all colleagues of mine at Columbia’s Center on Capitalism and Society. Richard and Saif kindly read chapters of the book. Jeff Sachs and Amartya Sen were there for me in times of need. Peter Jungen was a great supporter of my message in recent years, as was Luigi Paganetto from early days at the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. Esa Saarinen made me see how valuable it is to write with all the empathy and passion I feel. Conversations with Barnaby Marsh and Mark C. Berner of the Templeton Foundation and with Seth Ditchik of Princeton University Press were also a boost. I am also grateful to Robert J. Gordon for providing me with the calculations that made it possible to chart in Chapter 9 the slowdown of total factor productivity alongside his chart showing the lesser slowdown of labor productivity.
I am very grateful to the Kauffman Foundation, particularly to Carl Schramm, Robert Litan, and Robert Strom, for their consistent financial and intellectual support of my research on modern capitalism. I am glad too that Andrew Wylie took on the book and gave its publication the benefit of his advice.
I have been blessed with the help of an extraordinarily talented group who came out of Literature and Classics at Harvard. It was perfect. They knew much that I did not know. Miranda Featherstone, a writer, edited chapters in 2008 and 2009. Francesca Mari, also a writer, followed in 2010. Jeff Nagy, a poet, came in 2012. They not only did their work at a high level. They put their hearts into it. Their spirit made my years on the project a special pleasure.