True enough. To anyone who has spent (as I have) the last four and a half years working in Tokyo covering the relentless economic development in East Asia, the idea that cultural patterns of behavior can affect economic success is undeniable. To say that the Japanese are industrious people who save a lot of money and place a relentless emphasis on education and family stability is, of course, a stereotype. But it’s also, to a very significant extent, true.
And tribes, as Kotkin further argues, gain a lot by doing business with people they trust: themselves. Look, as Kotkin does in a long chapter, at the stunning development of the “Chinese diaspora” for a recent example of “tribalism” driving growth: the overseas Chinese-from Taiwan to Vancouver-are pouring money back into the mainland’s southern crescent and rapidly creating Asia’s latest economic miracle.
The notion that culture can promote economic dynamism is widespread in East Asia. Many Japanese believe that their country’s ethnic homogeneity lends a discipline and stability to society that a multiracial United States cannot hope to match. In both Japan and China, widely shared values-now often lumped together under the rubric of “Confucianism”-contribute to the tribes’ successes. In China specifically, Kotkin writes, “Confucianism [has] evolved into. . . ’the culture of rationalistic traditionalism,’ a combination of traditional filial and group virtues with a pragmatism shaped by the conditions of a new competitive environment.” Translation: like-minded people who work together, work hard and respect authority tend to be successful as a group.
Too much, however, can be made of this, and Kotkin ultimately falls into the trap. The development of “Confucian capitalism,” with its emphasis on group cooperation and long-term loyalty to customers and suppliers, has as much to do with institutions as it does with “culture.” There is nothing particularly Japanese, for example, about the close relations among keiretsu-the big business groups like Mitsubishi that hold each other’s shares and do a lot of business with each other. The same thing exists today in Germany, and did in the United States at the turn of the century. J. P. Morgan’s business empire-organized around a core bank, just like Japan’s business groups-was arguably just a big American keiretsu. In the United States, the government (an important institution in the life of economic tribes the world over) eventually decided it didn’t like concentrations of economic power, so the trusts were busted. In Japan, the government decided it did like concentrations of economic power, and Mitsubishi’s three-diamond logo hangs in every capital in the world today–for reasons that have precious little to do with “culture.”
Kotkin, as critic Francis Fukuyama wrote recently, has also apparently never met an ethnic economic tribe he doesn’t like. Besides the Japanese and the Chinese, his other chapters deal with the history of the Jewish diaspora and the British “commercial conquerors” of the 19th century, as well as present-day Indian businessmen scattered around the globe. Kotkin’s conceit is to lump them all together and call them “global tribes.” But despite his efforts to link them, the similarities between an Indian entrepreneur in London and a Japanese Toyota executive running an auto plant in Kentucky are murky at best. Yes, they’re both in business, and yes, they’re living abroad (and thus “global”). But so what? So are the Filipino housekeepers who gather in Hong Kong’s Victoria Square every weekend. Some tribes -the Japanese, obviously, and perhaps the Chinese in the long run-are going to write more economic history than others.
The book’s biggest flaw is that in raising the delicate subject of ethnicity, culture and commercial success, Kotkin can’t bring himself to acknowledge tribes that aren’t so successful. Why some thrive, and others don’t, could have been the core of a very interesting book.
