Description: Cultural Evolution argues that people's values and behavior are shaped by the degree to which survival is secure; it was precarious for most of history, which encouraged heavy emphasis on group solidarity, rejection of outsiders, and obedience to strong leaders. For under extreme scarcity, xenophobia is realistic: if there is just enough land to support one tribe and another tribe tries to claim it, survival may literally be a choice between Us and Them. Conversely, high levels of existential security encourage openness to change, diversity, and new ideas. The unprecedented prosperity and security of the postwar era brought cultural change, the environmentalist movement, and the spread of democracy. But in recent decades, diminishing job security and rising inequality have led to an authoritarian reaction. Evidence from more than 100 countries demonstrates that people's motivations and behavior reflect the extent to which they take survival for granted - and that modernization changes them in roughly predictable ways. This book explains the rise of environmentalist parties, gender equality, and same-sex marriage through a new, empirically-tested version of modernization theory.
Brief description: Ronald F. Inglehart is the Lowenstein Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He holds honorary doctorates from Uppsala University, Sweden; the Free University of Brussels, Belgium; and the University of Lueneburg, Germany. Inglehart helped found the Euro-Barometer surveys and is founding president of the World Values Survey Association, which has surveyed representative national samples of the publics of 105 countries containing over ninety percent of the world's population. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. In 2011, he won the Johan Skytte prize in Political Science, often considered the highest prize awarded in the field.
Review Quotes: 'Cultural Evolution may be one of the three greatest books ever written in the category 'Optimistic Accounts of Change in Public Opinion.' ... Life may generally be short, harsh, and exploitive, but the values transitions documented by Inglehart suggest that there are viable avenues for social improvement.' Samuel Cohn, American Journal of Sociology