Spicing It Up

A memoir as well as a cookbook, economist and Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee playfully makes unexpected connections between food, economics and social issues

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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 organization 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 nineteenth 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 emphasizing, 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.