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Gregory Clark www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/ the economic historian we met in chapter 4, has estimated the interest rates that Englishmen demanded (in the form of rents on land and houses) from 1170 to 2000, the millennium over which the Civilizing Process took place. Before 1800, he argues, there was no inflation to speak of, incomes were flat, and the risk that an owner would lose his property was low and constant. If so, the effective interest rate was an estimate of the degree to which people favored their present selves over their future selves.
Figure 9-1 shows that during the centuries in which homicide plummeted in England, the effective interest rate also plummeted, fro more than 10 percent to around 2 percent. Other European societies showed a similar transition. The correlation does not, of course, prove causation, but it is consistent with Elias’s claim that the decline of violence from medieval to modern Europe was part of a broader trend toward self-control and an orientation to the future.
According to Hofstede’s data, countries differ along six dimensions. One of them is Long-Term versus Short-Term Orientation. “Long-term oriented societies foster pragmatic virtues oriented toward future rewards, in particular saving, persistence, and adapting to changing circumstances. Short-term oriented societies foster virtues related to past and present such as national pride, respect for tradition, preservation of ‘face,’ and fulfilling social obligations.” Another dimension is Indulgence versus Restraint: “Indulgence stands for a society that allows relatively free gratification of basic and natural human drives related to enjoying life and having fun. Restraint stands for a society that suppresses gratification of needs and regulates it by means of strict social norms.” Both, of course, are conceptually related to the faculty of self-control, and not surprisingly, they are correlated with each other (with a coefficient of 0.45 across 110 countries). Elias would have predicted that both of these national traits should correlate with the countries’ homicide rates, and the prediction turns out to be true. The citizens of countries with more of long-term orientation commit fewer homicides, as do the citizens of countries that emphasize restraint over indulgence.
So the theory of Civilizing Process, like the theory of the expanding circle, has found support in experiments and datasets that are far from its field of origin. Psychology, neuroscience, and economics have confirmed Elias’s speculation that humans are equipped with a faculty of self-control that regulates both violent and nonviolent impulses, that can be strengthened and generalized over the lifetime of an individual, and that can vary in strength across societies and historical periods. ~ Pages 609 - 611
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