🚀 go-pugleaf

Before I begin with my comments, I would like to express my extreme 
disappointment.  Instead of an intelligent discussion over Francis 
Fukuyama's latest contribution to social science (*Trust*, Free Press, 
1995), what we have here is a mere exchange of insults.  This is too 
bad, because a reasoned debate over the merits of Fukuyama's book and 
the growing field of socioeconomics could have been extremely edifying.
Is there a more temperate soul out there who has some thoughts about 
Fukuyama's ideas on socioeconomics from an economist's standpoint? 


In article <4647rj$ch4@news.acns.nwu.edu>, @casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Mark 
Witte) wrote:


>My reading of the book was that Fukuyama is trying to explain the 
>levels and growth rates of economic output across nations...
>
>He does give lip service to neoclassical determinants of these but then >he very oddly ignores their explanatory power.


As I have said before, you obviously haven't read his book (You even admitted as much in a previous posting, saying that you only gl=
anced at it while you were at the bookstore.  Browsing does not an expert make).  You simply read one book review by Robert Solow an=
d think you know exactly what Fukuyama is saying.  Well, you do not.

For example, you go on and on and on again about growth.  Although Fukuyama makes some references to growth, the main point of his b=
ook is not to show how neoclassical models of growth are inadequate and how adding cultural factors will improve the accuracy of its=
 models.  Still unclear about that?  It's not about models or their predictive ability.  Fukuyama readily admits that these models t=
o a pretty good job already.

But neoclassical economics and its rational-actor component does not do a good job explaining *all* economic behavior. 

On this point, Fukuyama says that economists might want to pay a little more attention to what is going on in the field of socioecon=
omics, because some of the theories emerging from this new field have explanatory power in their own right (Developing some impressi=
ve theories himself, Fukuyama contributes a great deal to this growing field). See the relatively recent scholarship by James Colema=
n, or the work of Mark Granovetter on embeddedness if you doubt me on this point.  I say "relatively" because the field of socioecon=
omics is not new. Max Weber's *The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism*, written many, many years ago is considered to be =
the pioneering work in the field.

What kind of questions can socioeconomics help us explain?  For starters, why are Chinese firms, on average, smaller than their Japa=
nese or American counterparts?  Neoclassical economics doesn't do a very good job of explaining this. Socioeconomics, on the other h=
and, does.  Fukuyama says that Chinese firms are smaller than others because of Confucian values that prevent outsiders from assumin=
g control of the family business. As an example of this, Fukuyama shows how An Wang, the CEO of Wang Laboratories, in traditional Ch=
inese fashion turned the massive corporation over to his incompetent son.  Thus, Fukuyama is arguing that in trying to explain Chine=
se industrial composition (lots of small family firms, very few large ones), we might have to look outside of neoclassical economics=