In my office in Colorado, I started keeping a collection of pictures of ugly political scientists. To see who's on the board, you'll have to come to my office in Alaska now, but I will note that it's easy to find pictures of poorly dressed academics.
One of the scholars who I longed to get a picture of to post was Ron Inglehart, who is sort of a famous scholar of economic development and culture (famous in the nerdy world of Poli. Sci., at least). Although Inglehart is not himself particularly ugly, he does have a reputation for having an enormous head. That is not to say that he is arrogant, just that the size of his head is quite large, physically. Fun fact. More importantly, he also has not-particularly-impressive, Amish-like facial hair. Truthfully, I would place my moustache in the top .1% of Political Science facial hair. Not that that's saying much.
Inglehart has made a career out of publishing a series of books and a long list of articles that argue that economic development and values are intrinsically linked--that particular types of social values tend to produce economic growth, but also, economic development (or rather, the stages of economic development) tend to produce different types of economic growth and types of economic activity more generally.
Basically, there are three types of values that favor particular types of economic activity. These are called "traditional" values, "materialist" values, and "post-materialist" values. One way of thinking about traditional values is that they are inherently risk-averse and conservative. People who hold these types of values tend to resist change and innovation, because they fear the risks that come with it.
When societies have traditional values in abundance, they tend to be poor and stay poor (so goes Inglehart's argument). Once they start to develop values that encourage risk-taking and the accumulation of wealth, that's when they start to develop. Inglehart would argue that the Latin American countries have these types of values--materialist values--in abundance these days, and so do India and China, and that is one of the reasons why the economies of these places are growing so fast.
Once countries develop to a certain point, they start to experience diminishing returns from economic development and wealth, and at that point, people start to develop post-materialist values, where they are worried more about quality of life, and less about income. Maybe Boulder, Colorado, and Denmark are places where post-materialist values are particularly common.
Anyways, it strikes me as relevant that places that I would consider likely settings for a lot of materialist values--places like Lima, La Paz, Santiago, and now Kampala, are places where people really make an effort to dress up. It's hard to believe how many guys wear jackets and ties here! While other places that are more developed--Europe, the US, Canada--are often very fashionable, but the fashion is much less formal. For example, in the US, cell phone salesmen wear polo shirts, while they often wear three-piece suits in Latin America, and there are hardly any t-shirts visible on the street here. Is dress an outward sign of materialism? I don't mean this in a pejorative way--Lord only knows that they need some material things here!
I'm not aware of any economists that take Inglehart's account of economic development seriously, so all this needs to be taken with a grain of salt, but perhaps it is a good sign for Uganda's economic development that people dress so nicely? And perhaps there is a way to forecast economic growth based on ties and jackets? Conversely, perhaps Alaska is headed for the economic trash heap, as we are evidently the US' largest fashion emergency.
All of that said, I miss my Xtra Tufs.
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