Values to escape poverty

 

Economic development is usually explained by investment, technology, education, and economic policy. These factors matter, but they operate on a deeper foundation that determines whether they work or not: the values that guide people's behavior and the rules that govern how they live together. Neither natural resources, nor geography, nor access to markets are enough to explain the outcome. There are countries with abundant natural wealth that remain poor and others, with geographic limitations and scarce resources, that have achieved extraordinary transformations. The outcomes of a society are a reflection of what its members value and of how they behave accordingly.

The reason is that all productive activity is, at bottom, cooperation, and cooperation depends on what people expect of one another. Responsibility, respect for the dignity of others, honesty, and compliance with common rules are practical conditions for producing wealth, because they determine whether people can trust one another, work together, create value, and make agreements that transcend their immediate self-interest. Those who understand that their decisions affect others keep their commitments, care for shared spaces, and obey the rules, and the same holds for businesses, public bodies, and political leaders. Where that attitude is widespread, trust is built easily, contracts are honored without constant monitoring, and every transaction costs less. Where everyone shifts their responsibilities onto others or seeks advantage at the community's expense, cooperation becomes costly, people must distrust, monitor, and litigate, and opportunities are wasted. Respect also includes the rights of others: those who demand for themselves what they deny to others destroy the trust on which all cooperation depends.

That is why the same rules produce very different results in different societies. A written law does not enforce itself: it depends on judges who apply it independently, on officials who do not sell their signature, and on citizens who accept it even when no one is watching. Two countries can have nearly identical constitutions, codes, and agencies and obtain opposite results, because what separates them is the way people behave toward those norms. Rules matter, but their effectiveness is determined by the values of those who comply with them and enforce them.

Japan shows how these values are woven into daily life. The expression hito ni meiwaku o kakenai conveys the expectation of not imposing unnecessary inconvenience on others, and concepts such as wa, social harmony, and kizukai, consideration for others, guide behavior on public transport, in the street, and in shared spaces. This is not a matter of good manners but of the awareness that one's own conduct affects those who share the environment. That awareness is transmitted deliberately. Families teach through example, imitation, and correction, and schools reinforce it through collective routines, such as students cleaning their own classrooms, which joins work, responsibility, and care for what is common. Japan's Basic Act on Education includes among its objectives respect for the dignity of the individual, justice and responsibility, mutual respect and cooperation, and active participation in building society, so these principles are not left solely in the hands of families. This is how a culture is formed: what begins as individual habit, repeated and reinforced, becomes a social norm and ends up defining how a country functions.

That norm is consolidated through institutions, understood as the formal and informal rules that organize collective life: laws, contracts, property rights, conventions, and the expectations that regulate conduct. Organizations, such as governments, courts, or businesses, operate within those rules, but they are not the same thing as the rules. Culture and institutions reinforce each other. Values shape the rules, and the rules, consistently applied, shape the behavior of new generations and their understanding of their responsibilities. A legal framework that protects rights, applies norms equally, and demands accountability strengthens respect for the law over time, and a society that values responsibility and justice demands institutions worthy of those values.

If values and rules determine outcomes, anyone who wants better outcomes must change them. The past influences a society but does not condemn it, because culture is reproduced through practices and rules, and what is reproduced can be deliberately modified. That is the decision to develop.

The cases of recent development confirm this, and the best proof is that in them geography and resources did not change. Ireland made the decision through crisis. In the mid-1980s it was one of the most backward economies in Western Europe, with a public debt close to 115 percent of national product, unemployment above fifteen percent, and constant emigration of young people who took for granted that their future lay elsewhere. That situation reflected a way of understanding the economy: an inward-looking society protected from competition, which expected the State to solve every problem, and in which employers, unions, and government defended their claims separately and in the short term, often in open conflict. The crisis made it plain that this way of acting was unsustainable. In 1987 the government, employers, and unions negotiated the Programme for National Recovery, and the actors who had previously competed for their immediate share agreed to moderate their demands in exchange for a shared long-term project. That agreement inaugurated a practice of social partnership that was renewed successively until 2009. Around it, public finances were put in order, education was made the country's main asset, the economy was opened to foreign investment, and integration with Europe was embraced as an opportunity rather than a threat. What changed were the values with which society understood the economy: from the isolated claim to the pact, from protection to competition, from dependence on the State to confidence in its own capacities. By the late 1990s Ireland had become an open, educated, and confident society that attracted investment and kept its young people, with unemployment having fallen from nearly eighteen percent to just over four, and it went from being a lagging economy to ranking among the most prosperous in Europe, without its territory or its resources having changed.

Singapore made it from the top down, through leadership. After independence in 1965 it was a small port city with no domestic market, no industry, no water of its own, and no natural resources, with slum neighborhoods, unemployment of between ten and twelve percent, and a population divided among Chinese, Malays, and Indians who shared a territory but not an identity. Its leaders understood that the country would survive only if its inhabitants changed the way they behaved, and set out to build those values deliberately. They made honesty in public service a non-negotiable rule: they strengthened, with the 1960 law, the anti-corruption agency inherited from the colonial era, applied exemplary sanctions, and, over the years, established competitive pay for civil servants. They adopted meritocracy as the criterion for promotion and appointment, so that effort and ability weighed more than origin or connections. They gave the country a common identity above ethnic differences, with English as a shared working language and massive public housing that lifted the population out of the slums and that, from 1989, set ethnic quotas per building to prevent the formation of enclaves. They encouraged saving and home ownership as forms of personal responsibility, and promoted, through sustained campaigns and strict rules, cleanliness, courtesy, punctuality, and discipline at work. The Economic Development Board, created in 1961, four years before independence, attracted foreign investment, developed infrastructure, and built technical capacities, and the schools prepared the population for the jobs the country needed. Singapore thus became a society where contracts are trusted to be honored, where rules are applied equally, and where the civil service ranks among the least corrupt in the world, and it went from precariousness to ranking among the countries with the highest income per person on the planet.

Other societies have changed gradually, from within families, schools, businesses, and communities. The starting point varies, but the change is always the same: turning the decision to transform into a sustained modification of the values, rules, and behaviors that organize society.

The three cases, so different in their origins, converge on the same set of values. The first is responsibility toward others, which in Japan is expressed as the duty not to cause inconvenience, in Ireland as each sector's willingness to moderate its claims for the sake of the whole, and in Singapore as the civic discipline demanded of everyone. The second is honesty and equality before the rule, without which the law is not applied and trust is not formed, and which Singapore made a non-negotiable condition of public service. The third is cooperation oriented toward the long term, the capacity to sacrifice immediate benefit for a common project, visible in the Irish pact and in Singapore's saving and planning. The fourth is effort and merit, which reward ability and work above origin and connections, and which are reflected in the emphasis on education in Ireland and Singapore and in the school and work discipline of Japan. The fifth is openness and confidence in one's own capacities, that is, the willingness to compete, to learn from the world, and to accept that the future depends on what one's own society does and not on what others grant it. When these five values become expected conduct, cooperation costs little, trust abounds, and wealth becomes possible. When they are missing, no endowment of resources and no economic policy can compensate for their absence.

Turning those values into conduct cannot be achieved through declarations. It requires that they move from being ideals to being expected behaviors, taught from childhood, demanded by the rules, and practiced by those in positions of leadership.

The most important decision, therefore, is not to pursue higher incomes or faster growth, but to decide which values will govern life in common and to commit to living by them. Development is the consequence of that decision, and the societies that make it build a future different from the one their past seemed to promise.

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