Mitt Romney's Cultural Illiteracy

I have to admit it: I love seeing Mitt Romney continually pummeled for his asinine statements made during his failed overseas charm offensive.  Rather than showing himself as remotely competent on foreign policy issues, Romney mainly showed himself to be offensive and out of touch.  Fareed Zakaria has a column in the Washington Post that looks at Romney's cluelessness and cultural insensitivity - even prejudice if you will - and ignorance about larger economic issues.  Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Romney just doesn't understand what makes most people - or most countries - tick.   As I have noted before, the more I see of the man, the more contempt I have for him.  Here are some column excerpts:

“Culture makes all the difference,” Romney said at a fundraiser in Israel, comparing the country’s economic vitality to Palestinian poverty. Certainly there is a pedigree for this idea. Romney cited David Landes, an economics historian. He could have cited Max Weber, the great German scholar who first made this claim 100 years ago in his book “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” which argued that Protestant values were the most important fuel for economic progress.

 

The problem is that Weber singled out two cultures as being particularly prone to poverty and stagnation, those of China and Japan. But these have been the world’s fastest-growing large economies over the past five decades. Over the past two decades, the other powerhouse has been India, which was also described for years as having a culture incompatible with economic success — hence the phrase “the Hindu rate of growth,” to describe the country’s once-moribund state.

Had Romney spent more time reading Milton Friedman, he would have realized that historically the key driver for economic growth has been the adoption of capitalism and its related institutions and policies across diverse cultures.

The link between economic policies and performance can be seen even in the country on which Romney was lavishing praise. Israel had many admirable traits in its early decades, but no one would have called it an economic miracle.  .  .  .  .  The miracle Romney was praising had to do with new policies rather than deep culture.

Despite all this evidence, most people still believe that two cultures in particular, African and Islamic, inhibit economic development. But the two countries that will next achieve a gross domestic product of $1 trillion are both Muslim democracies — Turkey and Indonesia. Of the 10 fastest-growing economies in the world today, seven are African. The world is changing, and holding on to fixed views of culture means you will miss its changing dynamics.