Does the importance of values encouraged in children vary with size of government?

If big government is taking us towards a brave new world we might expect this to show up in differences in values held by people in countries with big and small governments. As discussed in my last post there seems to be some evidence that people in high-income countries with big governments tend to hold more secular-rational values than those in high-income countries with small governments. In this post I explore this further by looking particularly at differences in the values that children are encouraged to learn at home.


World Values Surveys ask a directly relevant question about what qualities it is especially important for children to be encouraged to learn at home. Respondents are asked to choose from the following list: good manners, independence, hard work, feeling of responsibility, imagination, tolerance and respect for other people, thrift (saving money and things), determination/ perseverance, religious faith, unselfishness and obedience.

I have focused on the 14 high-income countries with protestant or catholic heritage for which data is available from the most recent World Values Survey (WVS 2005 – 2008). These countries have been ranked by size of government, using government spending as a percentage of GDP as an indicator of size of government (OECD Economic Outlook data on general government outlays as a percentage of nominal GDP, averaged over the three years 2005–08).

Child qualities which apparently differ in importance between the countries with big and relatively small governments were identified by looking at the differences between the averages for the four countries with largest and smallest size of government. The differences were greatest (relative to the mean) in the case of hard work, thrift, religious faith and unselfishness.

The results are shown in the following table in which countries are ranked by size of government. For each variable the five highest numbers are shown against a red background and the five lowest ratings are shown against a blue background.

The results suggest that hard work tends to be more strongly encouraged in the countries with relatively small governments, while thrift tends to be more strongly encouraged in countries with big governments. (I find that result surprising because hard work and thrift often tend to be linked together as traditional virtues.) The results for religious faith and unselfishness do not appear to be consistently related to size of government.

It will be interesting to see whether any consistent patterns emerge from an examination of other values that apparently differ according to size of government.

Is big government taking us towards a brave new world?

In my last post I discussed Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ and ended up asking whether culture and public policies in pursuit of happiness are moving systematically in directions that dehumanize people. I suggested that the next step could be to consider what dehumanizing involves and hinted that it could have to do with taking away liberty i.e. individual responsibility for making choices and bearing the consequences actions. If you accept, as I do, that the nature of adult human beings is such that their flourishing must be a self-directed process (discussed in an early post on whether freedom is necessary for human flourishing) then I think you should also accept that restrictions on liberty are dehumanizing.


I must admit, however, that I would find it hard to argue that governments are dehumanizing me when they impose restrictions on my liberty to do things that I don’t want to do or compel me to do things that I would do in any case. Nevertheless, that kind of paternalism is not benign – it is disrespectful and encourages people to become dependent on government for guidance about how they should live their lives.

Rather than pursuing that line of reasoning, what I want to do in this post is to consider in general terms where cultural change is taking us. I think the best place to begin is with the work of Ronald Inglehart on changes in cultural values that have occurred with economic growth. (At this point readers who are familiar with Inglehart’s research may wonder how it is relevant to the topic of the post. Please be patient!)

Inglehart has documented that a substantial shift from survival values to self expression values has generally occurred in countries with rising per capita incomes. This has entailed, among other things, less deference for external authority, rising demands for participation in political decision making, more emphasis on gender equality, more tolerance of diversity and more emphasis on imagination and tolerance as values to teach a child and less emphasis on the virtue of hard work. This shift in cultural values has been followed through successive age cohorts over the period from 1970 to 2006, with the younger generation apparently continuing to establish values during their formative years that place greater emphasis on self expression (‘Changing values among western publics from 1970 to 2006’, 2008).

Inglehart (with Wayne Baker) has also examined shifts in another dimension of values – the change from traditional values to what he refers to as ‘secular-rational values’. Traditional values, which are most prevalent in pre-industrial societies, place a strong emphasis on religion and national pride, and have relatively low levels of tolerance for divorce, homosexuality and abortion. However, the relationship between economic growth and secularization is more complex than that between economic growth and self expression values. Secularization seems to apply mainly to the shift to an industrial society, which was completed some time ago in most advanced industrial countries. The authors suggest that the fact that the broad cultural and religious heritage of a society leaves an imprint on values that endures despite modernization (‘Modernization, cultural change and the persistence of traditional values’, 2000).

Researchers have used the two dimensions of cultural change outlined above to prepare the cultural map of the world shown below.

Source: Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005: p. 64 based on the World Values Surveys, see www.worldvaluessurvey.org .

The point that strikes me in this chart – apart from the apparent importance of cultural and religious heritage in explaining values – is that the countries with relatively high secular-rational values in Protestant and Catholic Europe tend to be countries with big governments. I don’t know whether these countries have secular-rational values because they have big governments, whether they have big governments because they have secular-rational values, or whether cultural heritage explains both big governments and secular-rational values. It is possible that causation runs in all those directions and that ideological factors (e.g. the influence of Marxism in continental Europe) are also important.

What does it mean if people in high-income countries with big governments tend to have secular-rational values? Is this evidence of movement towards a brave new world? I don’t know, but it seems like a good idea to look more closely at the data from the world values surveys to see what it shows about differences in values of people in OECD countries with relatively big and relatively small governments.

Is collective pursuit of happiness taking us to a 'brave new world'?

‘O, wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in't’

William Shakespeare, ‘The Tempest’ (V, i)

Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ (1932) is about the potential conflict between human happiness as a goal of society and traditional virtues such as nobility and heroism.

Mustapha Mond, a controller of the new world, explains to John Savage that there is no longer any need for civilized man to bear anything seriously unpleasant. As the discussion continues, Mond claims that civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism:

‘In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise ... And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are’ (Chapter 17).

The discussion ends with Savage rejecting this new world in which happiness is paramount:

‘But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.’

‘In fact,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘you're claiming the right to be unhappy.’

‘All right then,’ said the Savage defiantly, ‘I'm claiming the right to be unhappy'.

'Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.’ There was a long silence.

‘I claim them all,’ said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. ‘You're welcome,’ he said.

Some of the rights that Savage claims do not seem to me to be an essential part of the rich tapestry of human life. What he must be saying is that he would prefer to live in our imperfect world rather than a de-humanizing world in which happiness is paramount.

Are we heading towards Huxley’s brave new world? If so, we clearly still have some way to go before we get there. There are still a lot of noble and heroic people around, as is particularly evident at times of natural disasters such as the current floods in Queensland. There doesn’t seem to be much risk of human reproduction and child rearing being taken over by government, even though much of the technology needed to do this already exists. Sexual promiscuity has increased, but there doesn’t seem to be much risk that social mores will develop in directions opposed to monogamous relationships. The risk of totalitarianism seems to have receded.

At the same time, however, while we may never have soma, there is already widespread use of pharmaceutical products to influence emotions. Entertainment involving virtual reality is popular and technology seems to be advancing rapidly in this area. Perhaps the ‘feelies’ will soon be coming to a theatre near you.

I see no grounds to object to individuals using new technologies in pursuit of their own happiness if that is their choice. The question is whether culture and public policies in pursuit of happiness are moving systematically in directions that dehumanize people.

That question seems to be a lot like the question I started with. I hope I am not going to become locked into some kind of Groundhog’s day where I keep asking the same question over and over. If I am going to make progress, the next step might be to consider what it means to dehumanize a person. Perhaps it has to do with taking away their responsibility for making choices and bearing the consequences their actions.

Where does the greatest challenge to liberty come from?

‘If respect for individual rights were to be shown to lead, not to order and prosperity, but to chaos, the destruction of civilization, and famine, few would uphold such alleged rights, and those who did would certainly be held the enemies of mankind. Those who can see order only when there is a conscious ordering mind - socialists, totalitarians, monarchical absolutists, and the like - fear just such consequences from individual rights. But if it can be shown that a multitude of individuals exercising a set of “compossible” rights ... [rights that can exercised at the same time without entailing conflicts] ... generates, not chaos, but order, cooperation, and the progressive advance of human well-being, then respect for the dignity and autonomy of the individual would be seen to be not only compatible with, but even a necessary precondition for, the achievement of social coordination, prosperity, and high civilization’ - Tom G Palmer, ‘The literature of liberty’.

I wish I had written that paragraph. It captures a lot about the relationship between freedom and flourishing that I have been writing about on this blog for the last couple of years. My personal conviction is that individual liberty is necessary to individual flourishing because individual flourishing is an inherently self-directed process. While I seek to persuade others to adopt that view, I recognize that the course of public policy depends much more strongly on public perceptions of the consequences of alternative courses of action.

Much of the discussion in my blog has been about the consequences of freedom or lack of it. I discussed the strong positive relationship between freedom and objective measures of well-being (income, longevity etc) in an early post. The general conclusion from my posts discussing measurement of subjective well-being is that claims sometimes made that the findings of happiness research conflict with these conclusions are simply wrong. Not only do people in countries with relatively high levels of freedom have higher material living standards, they also tend to have higher life satisfaction.

However, even though the existence of a positive general relationship between liberty and well-being now seems to be disputed less frequently, freedom is still under challenge from several different directions. First, there is a challenge to economic freedom associated with the global financial crisis (GFC). The GFC has raised important economic issues about the role of monetary and fiscal policy, the effects on the financial system of the failure of large financial institutions and the effects of different regulatory regimes on behaviour of large financial institutions. Economists will probably still be debating some of these issues in 50 years time, but at this stage it looks to me as though the extent of additional regulation likely to be seriously contemplated will be relatively minor and confined to the financial sector. Not many people are suggesting the nationalization of industry and the introduction of Soviet-style economic planning to prevent future financial crises.

The second challenge to freedom is associated with action to deal with alleged externalities, particularly global emissions of greenhouse gases. Some restriction of freedom is of course justified to discourage activities that impinge on the rights of others. Some of the ways the ‘problem’ of greenhouse gas emissions is being tackled in many countries, however, involve greater than necessary restrictions of economic freedom. This stems from rent-seeking activities of industries, including those favouring particular technologies. The challenge is serious, but probably easier to deal with than previous challenges that many countries have dealt with successfully, including, for example, overcoming opposition to reductions in barriers to international trade.

The third challenge to freedom seems to me to be more fundamental and more serious. It stems from the collectivist idea that governments are responsible for the happiness of citizens, rather than for protecting their rights - including their right to pursue happiness as they think fit. Many people have come to expect governments to act as guardians of their well-being, not only giving financial support in times of need, but also protecting them from making bad decisions. In relying on governments to perform such a role they infringe the liberty of other people who do not want or need such protection.

This challenge to individual liberty seems to come mainly from people who do not mean anyone any harm – people who live among us who want us all to have happier lives. As I write this I am conscious that at times I have actually supported government regulations to protect people from making bad decisions that might adversely affect their well-being. You might have similar memories. Sometimes we may have had reason to be concerned that if people were not compelled to act in what we perceived as ‘their interests’ they would end up imposing a burden on the welfare system or on private charity. That just underlines the point I am making - the greatest challenge to individual liberty comes from people who do not mean anyone any harm.

In modern democracies the choice between liberty and paternalism rests ultimately in the hands of our fellow citizens. The course of public dialogue about such matters turns most crucially on public perceptions of the consequences for human well-being of the policy choices that governments are making. While each public policy decision to restrict liberty and relieve individuals of responsibility for their own actions may seem relatively benign when considered in isolation, that doesn’t mean that the cumulative impact of many such decisions will be benign.

This raises the question I will consider in the next post:
Is collective pursuit of happiness taking us in directions that are relatively benign, or is it taking us to a ‘Brave New World’?