This week’s series showed a simple fact: economies reflect culture.
Policy, capital, and technology matter, but they operate inside cultural systems that define fairness, success, and duty. We examined four cultural logics:
Confucian Pragmatism (Tuesday): order and coordination sustain growth.
Western Individualism (Wednesday): freedom and competition drive innovation and volatility.
Islamic Collectivism (Thursday): faith and obligation anchor stability.
Cooperative Sustainability (Friday): equality and trust produce durable prosperity.
The Core Argument
Prosperity endures when a country’s economic design matches its dominant cultural perspectives. Misalignment creates problems. The four models provide different answers for the same questions: who the economy is for, how risk is managed, and what makes success acceptable to society, and those choices generate distinct patterns of growth, stability, and stress.