Michael Munger on Cultural Norms

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 31 August 2009

⏱️ 59 minutes

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Summary

Michael Munger of Duke University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about cultural norms--the subtle signals we send to each other in our daily interactions. Mike, having returned from a four-month stint as a visiting professor in Germany, talks about the challenges of being an American in a different culture with very different expectations on how people will interact. Our speech patterns, how we wait in line, how we treat each other at the grocery, the interaction between a teacher and a student, how we drive, how we tip for services rendered, even how we listen to music all emerge from our culture and are often different in different countries. The listener will learn what Ted Williams and Joe Dimaggio have to do with the Book of Judges along with the relative merits of Williams and Dimaggio performances in 1941.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you. Today is August 21st, 2009, and my guest is Michael Munger of Duke University.
0:44.4	Mike, it is always a pleasure to have you on the program. It's great to be back. Our topic for
0:49.5	today is culture, and by culture, I don't mean Puccini and Picasso, but rather the way that people
0:56.2	interact on a daily basis in our ongoing lives with each other, our expectations, assumptions
1:02.4	about how others will behave. You and I came up with this topic after your recent stay in Europe. Tell
1:08.3	our listeners what you were doing there. I was teaching at Friedrich Alexander University. I was
1:12.2	teaching two graduate classes, and it's in Germany, in Erlung in Germany, just north of Nernberg. I
1:19.0	don't speak any German. That's not normally a problem because I live in the US, but living in Germany
1:24.2	for four months, I was often reminded of the importance, not just of speaking German, but of
1:29.7	understanding kind of meanings and expectations, which were sometimes subtly and sometimes substantially
1:36.4	different than I often embarrassed myself. When business people travel, they're told about how
1:43.7	people shake hands, whether they bow, what kind of small talk, hand gestures, etc, are going to be
1:54.2	expected or the norm. My brother recently was in Japan, and he was in his hotel. He checked
2:01.2	into his hotel, and he asked somebody, maybe the concierge, if he should tip the person who took
2:08.7	his bag for him to his room, and there was a look of horror in response, because in Japan,
2:14.9	tipping is not done. It's an insult, isn't it? In America, if you don't tip, you might get your
2:20.3	bag straight. Yeah, much worse. That's a mistake you want to make in one direction if you're
2:26.8	going to make it. But those kind of things, we understand, those kind of differences are
	...

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