| > You can see this just by going around the country. Scandinavia has much higher social trust than Italy. The upper midwest, where Scandinavian immigration dominated, has higher social trust than NJ/NY, which saw mass immigration from southern Italy. OK, that's interesting, I'll have to look into that book. However, what's going on in this chart? https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-trsic/tru... I can see that (as you said) the Nordic countries have much more trust than Italy, and Italy, Spain and France are similar (along with a similar language and large inter-mixtures over time). However, look at Ireland vs the UK. Basically the same genetics, an extremely similar culture (particularly given the amount of cross migration back and forth), and yet very divergent amounts of social trust (I'm sceptical of the metric here, would like to see it very density as I suspect that drives a bunch of the results). > Think about your own life. How important is food to your family and friends as a way of social bonding? Do you think you’d be able to change that easily? In terms of my parents/culture, not at all. It was much, much, much more about drinking alcohol rather than food. And yet, while that part is still there, there's far more emphasis on food as a socialisation tool in my generation. Some of that is because of drink-driving laws being enforced, but some of it is definitely a cultural change which would seem to argue against your suggestion of long-term impacts due to culture. > The cultural differences between companies in a country are superficial compared to the cultural differences between countries. Again, I'm not convinced this is true. Like, if a company in Ireland has majority European employees but American leadership, what culture will it have? > You can see this just by going around the country I think that the particular outcomes of one country, predominantly founded by Europeans, tells us very little about how culture works. |
Ireland is culturally distinct from the U.K. For example, the U.K. is historically predominantly Protestant, while Ireland is historically strongly Catholic. That manifests in many ways. For example, the Anglosphere tends to have the latest gestational limits on abortion among European and European-derived countries. By contrast, abortion was illegal altogether in Ireland until recently (2018).
There is also the fact that the Irish were brutally colonized by England and Irish society developed a strong cohesiveness from that external pressure. The Bengal Famine of 1943 killed 3 million people out of a population of about 60 million. The Irish Famine, by contrast, killed 1 million people out of a population of only about 8 million. Indeed, the Irish population peaked in 1841, a few years before the start of the Great Famine and never returned to that peak.
> I think that the particular outcomes of one country, predominantly founded by Europeans, tells us very little about how culture works.
Europeans are culturally quite different from each other! For example, the Swedish practice of not feeding guests (https://www.the-independent.com/voices/swedengate-sweden-din...) would be mortifying to Americans in the southern U.S.