A lot has been said about this article today already but I wanted to add one thing: these types of arguments have been articulated by leading political scientists for a long time. And the best evidence is the later work of Samuel Huntington 1/ https://twitter.com/BazziNYU/status/1286740934466719744

In his later career (1980s on) Huntington went all in on the argument that poverty is due to culture. This idea was widespread at the time, to discussion of :culture of poverty to debates over welfare reform to criticisms of dependency theory. 2/

There are a lot of examples of this in Huntington's writing. Its clear, for example, in The Third Wave (1991) that Huntington believes in the Protestant ethic. On page 39, for example, he talks about protestantism as a key force behind democracy. Catholicism, he argues, only 3/

encouraged democracy once the church changed in the 1960s/70s. In Clash of Civilizations, Huntington repeats the arguments of many contemporaries, that East Asian growth is not a product of industrial policy or governance, but "culture." 4/

"the major differences in political and economic development are clearly rooted in...different cultures. East Asian economic success has its source in East Asian culture, as do the difficulties East Asian societies have in achieving stable democratic political systems." (29) 5/

Perhaps this is most promising in Huntingon's edited volume Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (2000), edited with Lawrence Harrison. Harrison, a former USAID bureaucrat, published other work in this vein including 6/

Underdevelopment is a State of Mind: The Latin American Case (1985), Who Prospers: How Culture Values Shape Economic and Political Success (1992), and Jews, Confucians and Protestants: Cultural Capital and the End of Multiculturalism (2012) 7/

In his introduction to Culture Matters, Huntington opens with a question: why has the economic and political fate of South Korea and Ghana differed? The answer is culture and values. “South Koreans valued thrift, investment, hard work, education, organization and discipline...8/

Ghanians had different values.” (xiii) And stems from discourses about both foreign and domestic poverty. He goes on to cite Daniel Moynihan, that culture, not politics, determine the success of a society. 9/

Lest you think this was an outlier, other contributors included Jeffrey Sachs, Francis Fukuyama, Seymour Martin Lipset, Lucian Pye, and Tu Weiming. The volume came from a symposium funded by Harvard's Academy for International and Area Studies.

So Mead's article is not surprising. These ideas have been around--articulated by perhaps the most famous political scientist in the country--for a long time, funded by the wealthiest academic institution in the world.

For more on the background of this thinking, the role of neoconservatives, and connections between culture of poverty thinking at home and ideas about international poverty, I have an article coming out in Modern Intellectual Thinking about NC thinking on East Asian growth 12/

It shows that writing about East Asia in the 1970s and 1980s became an important way to further develop radicalized and essentialist claims that economic growth, and thus poverty, stems from culture. It should be online next month!

Okay, that should be racialized. I was so excited to finally have a reason to cite all these Samuel Huntington books that I slogged through that I typed too fast!!!