“What is the essential dividing line between human beings around the world?”

In your opinion, is there one fundamental difference which separates people of the wold?

What is the primary division of the world?

As global citizens vs citizens of somewhere?

As the winners and losers from globalization?

As a clash of civilizations?

There is no necessarily correct answer for this assignment – points will be given for clear expression of thought.

An equally valid response is to explain why you think there isn’t one fundamental way in which the world separates.

Assignment instructions:

Part 1

Read the three articles:

1 – Friedman – It’s a flat world, after all

2 – Forsyth – Theresa May’s new 3rd way

3 – Gelfand – Here’s the science…

Part 2

Summarize and explain the key global division identified in each article. This should be at least a paragraph per article.

Part 3

Which of the three approaches do you find most convincing for explaining the world? Give justification for your answer. If you prefer a different framework for identifying the world (e.g. Huntingdon’s Clash of Civilization thesis), this is the point to introduce it. To have a chance of maximum points, you should try and explore how the three readings connect with each other, even though they use different frameworks. For example, are the winners and losers for Friedman the same groups as Gelfand identifies?

Part 4

Depending on your answer to Part 3 – which single policy would you advocate for to improve the quality of life of those identified as losing out from globalization.

It’s a Flat World, After All
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
APRIL 3, 2005
New York Times Magazine

In 1492 Christopher Columbus set sail for India, going west. He had the Nina, the Pinta and the
Santa Maria. He never did find India, but he called the people he met “Indians” and came
home and reported to his king and queen: “The world is round.” I set off for India 512 years
later. I knew just which direction I was going. I went east. I had Lufthansa business class, and I
came home and reported only to my wife and only in a whisper: “The world is flat.”
And therein lies a tale of technology and geoeconomics that is fundamentally reshaping our
lives — much, much more quickly than many people realize. It all happened while we were
sleeping, or rather while we were focused on 9/11, the dot-com bust and Enron — which even
prompted some to wonder whether globalization was over. Actually, just the opposite was true,
which is why it’s time to wake up and prepare ourselves for this flat world, because others
already are, and there is no time to waste.

I wish I could say I saw it all coming. Alas, I encountered the flattening of the world quite by
accident. It was in late February of last year, and I was visiting the Indian high-tech capital,
Bangalore, working on a documentary for the Discovery Times channel about outsourcing. In
short order, I interviewed Indian entrepreneurs who wanted to prepare my taxes from
Bangalore, read my X-rays from Bangalore, trace my lost luggage from Bangalore and write my
new software from Bangalore. The longer I was there, the more upset I became — upset at the
realization that while I had been off covering the 9/11 wars, globalization had entered a whole
new phase, and I had missed it. I guess the eureka moment came on a visit to the campus of
Infosys Technologies, one of the crown jewels of the Indian outsourcing and software industry.
Nandan Nilekani, the Infosys C.E.O., was showing me his global video-conference room,
pointing with pride to a wall-size flat-screen TV, which he said was the biggest in Asia. Infosys,
he explained, could hold a virtual meeting of the key players from its entire global supply chain
for any project at any time on that supersize screen. So its American designers could be on the
screen speaking with their Indian software writers and their Asian manufacturers all at once.
That’s what globalization is all about today, Nilekani said. Above the screen there were eight
clocks that pretty well summed up the Infosys workday: 24/7/365. The clocks were labeled
U.S. West, U.S. East, G.M.T., India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia.

“Outsourcing is just one dimension of a much more fundamental thing happening today in the
world,” Nilekani explained. “What happened over the last years is that there was a massive
investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars
were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables, all those
things.” At the same time, he added, computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the
world, and there was an explosion of e-mail software, search engines like Google and
proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part
to Bangalore and one part to Beijing, making it easy for anyone to do remote development.
When all of these things suddenly came together around 2000, Nilekani said, they “created a
platform where intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be delivered from anywhere. It could
be disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced and put back together again — and this
gave a whole new degree of freedom to the way we do work, especially work of an intellectual
nature. And what you are seeing in Bangalore today is really the culmination of all these things
coming together.”

At one point, summing up the implications of all this, Nilekani uttered a phrase that rang in my
ear. He said to me, “Tom, the playing field is being leveled.” He meant that countries like India
were now able to compete equally for global knowledge work as never before — and that

America had better get ready for this. As I left the Infosys campus that evening and bounced
along the potholed road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: “The playing field is
being leveled.”

“What Nandan is saying,” I thought, “is that the playing field is being flattened. Flattened?
Flattened? My God, he’s telling me the world is flat!”

Here I was in Bangalore — more than 500 years after Columbus sailed over the horizon, looking
for a shorter route to India using the rudimentary navigational technologies of his day, and
returned safely to prove definitively that the world was round — and one of India’s smartest
engineers, trained at his country’s top technical institute and backed by the most modern
technologies of his day, was telling me that the world was flat, as flat as that screen on which
he can host a meeting of his whole global supply chain. Even more interesting, he was citing
this development as a new milestone in human progress and a great opportunity for India and
the world — the fact that we had made our world flat!

This has been building for a long time. Globalization 1.0 (1492 to 1800) shrank the world from a
size large to a size medium, and the dynamic force in that era was countries globalizing for
resources and imperial conquest. Globalization 2.0 (1800 to 2000) shrank the world from a size
medium to a size small, and it was spearheaded by companies globalizing for markets and
labor. Globalization 3.0 (which started around 2000) is shrinking the world from a size small to a
size tiny and flattening the playing field at the same time. And while the dynamic force in
Globalization 1.0 was countries globalizing and the dynamic force in Globalization 2.0 was
companies globalizing, the dynamic force in Globalization 3.0 — the thing that gives it its
unique character — is individuals and small groups globalizing. Individuals must, and can, now
ask: where do I fit into the global competition and opportunities of the day, and how can I, on
my own, collaborate with others globally? But Globalization 3.0 not only differs from the
previous eras in how it is shrinking and flattening the world and in how it is empowering
individuals. It is also different in that Globalization 1.0 and 2.0 were driven primarily by
European and American companies and countries. But going forward, this will be less and less
true. Globalization 3.0 is not only going to be driven more by individuals but also by a much
more diverse — non-Western, nonwhite — group of individuals. In Globalization 3.0, you are
going to see every color of the human rainbow take part.

“Today, the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or
the Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily
available to apply knowledge however they want,” said Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of
Netscape and creator of the first commercial Internet browser. “That is why I am sure the next
Napster is going to come out of left field. As bioscience becomes more computational and less
about wet labs and as all the genomic data becomes easily available on the Internet, at some
point you will be able to design vaccines on your laptop.”

Andreessen is touching on the most exciting part of Globalization 3.0 and the flattening of the
world: the fact that we are now in the process of connecting all the knowledge pools in the
world together. We’ve tasted some of the downsides of that in the way that Osama bin Laden
has connected terrorist knowledge pools together through his Qaeda network, not to mention
the work of teenage hackers spinning off more and more lethal computer viruses that affect us
all. But the upside is that by connecting all these knowledge pools we are on the cusp of an
incredible new era of innovation, an era that will be driven from left field and right field, from
West and East and from North and South. Only 30 years ago, if you had a choice of being born
a B student in Boston or a genius in Bangalore or Beijing, you probably would have chosen
Boston, because a genius in Beijing or Bangalore could not really take advantage of his or her
talent. They could not plug and play globally. Not anymore. Not when the world is flat, and
anyone with smarts, access to Google and a cheap wireless laptop can join the innovation fray.

When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate. This is going to get
interesting. We are about to see creative destruction on steroids. How did the world get
flattened, and how did it happen so fast?

It was a result of 10 events and forces that all came together during the 1990’s and converged
right around the year 2000. Let me go through them briefly. The first event was 11/9. That’s
right — not 9/11, but 11/9. Nov. 9, 1989, is the day the Berlin Wall came down, which was
critically important because it allowed us to think of the world as a single space. “The Berlin
Wall was not only a symbol of keeping people inside Germany; it was a way of preventing a
kind of global view of our future,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen said. And
the wall went down just as the windows went up — the breakthrough Microsoft Windows 3.0
operating system, which helped to flatten the playing field even more by creating a global
computer interface, shipped six months after the wall fell.

The second key date was 8/9. Aug. 9, 1995, is the day Netscape went public, which did two
important things. First, it brought the Internet alive by giving us the browser to display images
and data stored on Web sites. Second, the Netscape stock offering triggered the dot-com
boom, which triggered the dot-com bubble, which triggered the massive overinvestment of
billions of dollars in fiber-optic telecommunications cable. That overinvestment, by companies
like Global Crossing, resulted in the willy-nilly creation of a global undersea-underground fiber
network, which in turn drove down the cost of transmitting voices, data and images to
practically zero, which in turn accidentally made Boston, Bangalore and Beijing next-door
neighbors overnight. In sum, what the Netscape revolution did was bring people-to-people
connectivity to a whole new level. Suddenly more people could connect with more other
people from more different places in more different ways than ever before.

No country accidentally benefited more from the Netscape moment than India. “India had no
resources and no infrastructure,” said Dinakar Singh, one of the most respected hedge-fund
managers on Wall Street, whose parents earned doctoral degrees in biochemistry from the
University of Delhi before emigrating to America. “It produced people with quality and by
quantity. But many of them rotted on the docks of India like vegetables. Only a relative few
could get on ships and get out. Not anymore, because we built this ocean crosser, called fiber-
optic cable. For decades you had to leave India to be a professional. Now you can plug into
the world from India. You don’t have to go to Yale and go to work for Goldman Sachs.” India
could never have afforded to pay for the bandwidth to connect brainy India with high-tech
America, so American shareholders paid for it. Yes, crazy overinvestment can be good. The
overinvestment in railroads turned out to be a great boon for the American economy. “But the
railroad overinvestment was confined to your own country and so, too, were the benefits,”
Singh said. In the case of the digital railroads, “it was the foreigners who benefited.” India got a
free ride.

The first time this became apparent was when thousands of Indian engineers were enlisted to
fix the Y2K — the year 2000 — computer bugs for companies from all over the world. (Y2K
should be a national holiday in India. Call it “Indian Interdependence Day,” says Michael
Mandelbaum, a foreign-policy analyst at Johns Hopkins.) The fact that the Y2K work could be
outsourced to Indians was made possible by the first two flatteners, along with a third, which I
call “workflow.” Workflow is shorthand for all the software applications, standards and
electronic transmission pipes, like middleware, that connected all those computers and fiber-
optic cable. To put it another way, if the Netscape moment connected people to people like
never before, what the workflow revolution did was connect applications to applications so that
people all over the world could work together in manipulating and shaping words, data and
images on computers like never before.

Indeed, this breakthrough in people-to-people and application-to-application connectivity
produced, in short order, six more flatteners — six new ways in which individuals and
companies could collaborate on work and share knowledge. One was “outsourcing.” When my
software applications could connect seamlessly with all of your applications, it meant that all
kinds of work — from accounting to software-writing — could be digitized, disaggregated and
shifted to any place in the world where it could be done better and cheaper. The second was
“offshoring.” I send my whole factory from Canton, Ohio, to Canton, China. The third was
“open-sourcing.” I write the next operating system, Linux, using engineers collaborating
together online and working for free. The fourth was “insourcing.” I let a company like UPS
come inside my company and take over my whole logistics operation — everything from filling
my orders online to delivering my goods to repairing them for customers when they break.
(People have no idea what UPS really does today. You’d be amazed!). The fifth was “supply-
chaining.” This is Wal-Mart’s specialty. I create a global supply chain down to the last atom of
efficiency so that if I sell an item in Arkansas, another is immediately made in China. (If Wal-
Mart were a country, it would be China’s eighth-largest trading partner.) The last new form of
collaboration I call “informing” — this is Google, Yahoo and MSN Search, which now allow
anyone to collaborate with, and mine, unlimited data all by themselves.

So the first three flatteners created the new platform for collaboration, and the next six are the
new forms of collaboration that flattened the world even more. The 10th flattener I call “the
steroids,” and these are wireless access and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). What the
steroids do is turbocharge all these new forms of collaboration, so you can now do any one of
them, from anywhere, with any device.

The world got flat when all 10 of these flatteners converged around the year 2000. This created
a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration on research
and work in real time, without regard to geography, distance or, in the near future, even
language. “It is the creation of this platform, with these unique attributes, that is the truly
important sustainable breakthrough that made what you call the flattening of the world
possible,” said Craig Mundie, the chief technical officer of Microsoft.

No, not everyone has access yet to this platform, but it is open now to more people in more
places on more days in more ways than anything like it in history. Wherever you look today —
whether it is the world of journalism, with bloggers bringing down Dan Rather; the world of
software, with the Linux code writers working in online forums for free to challenge Microsoft;
or the world of business, where Indian and Chinese innovators are competing against and
working with some of the most advanced Western multinationals — hierarchies are being
flattened and value is being created less and less within vertical silos and more and more
through horizontal collaboration within companies, between companies and among individuals.
Do you recall “the IT revolution” that the business press has been pushing for the last 20
years? Sorry to tell you this, but that was just the prologue. The last 20 years were about
forging, sharpening and distributing all the new tools to collaborate and connect. Now the real
information revolution is about to begin as all the complementarities among these collaborative
tools start to converge. One of those who first called this moment by its real name was Carly
Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard C.E.O., who in 2004 began to declare in her public
speeches that the dot-com boom and bust were just “the end of the beginning.” The last 25
years in technology, Fiorina said, have just been “the warm-up act.” Now we are going into the
main event, she said, “and by the main event, I mean an era in which technology will truly
transform every aspect of business, of government, of society, of life.” As if this flattening
wasn’t enough, another convergence coincidentally occurred during the 1990’s that was
equally important. Some three billion people who were out of the game walked, and often ran,
onto the playing field. I am talking about the people of China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe,
Latin America and Central Asia. Their economies and political systems all opened up during
the course of the 1990’s so that their people were increasingly free to join the free market. And

when did these three billion people converge with the new playing field and the new business
processes? Right when it was being flattened, right when millions of them could compete and
collaborate more equally, more horizontally and with cheaper and more readily available tools.
Indeed, thanks to the flattening of the world, many of these new entrants didn’t even have to
leave home to participate. Thanks to the 10 flatteners, the playing field came to them!
It is this convergence — of new players, on a new playing field, developing new processes for
horizontal collaboration — that I believe is the most important force shaping global economics
and politics in the early 21st century. Sure, not all three billion can collaborate and compete. In
fact, for most people the world is not yet flat at all. But even if we’re talking about only 10
percent, that’s 300 million people — about twice the size of the American work force. And be
advised: the Indians and Chinese are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the
top. What China’s leaders really want is that the next generation of underwear and airplane
wings not just be “made in China” but also be “designed in China.” And that is where things
are heading. So in 30 years we will have gone from “sold in China” to “made in China” to
“designed in China” to “dreamed up in China” — or from China as collaborator with the
worldwide manufacturers on nothing to China as a low-cost, high-quality, hyperefficient
collaborator with worldwide manufacturers on everything. Ditto India. Said Craig Barrett, the
C.E.O. of Intel, “You don’t bring three billion people into the world economy overnight without
huge consequences, especially from three societies” — like India, China and Russia — “with
rich educational heritages.”

That is why there is nothing that guarantees that Americans or Western Europeans will continue
leading the way. These new players are stepping onto the playing field legacy free, meaning
that many of them were so far behind that they can leap right into the new technologies
without having to worry about all the sunken costs of old systems. It means that they can move
very fast to adopt new, state-of-the-art technologies, which is why there are already more
cellphones in use in China today than there are people in America.

If you want to appreciate the sort of challenge we are facing, let me share with you two
conversations. One was with some of the Microsoft officials who were involved in setting up
Microsoft’s research center in Beijing, Microsoft Research Asia, which opened in 1998 — after
Microsoft sent teams to Chinese universities to administer I.Q. tests in order to recruit the best
brains from China’s 1.3 billion people. Out of the 2,000 top Chinese engineering and science
students tested, Microsoft hired 20. They have a saying at Microsoft about their Asia center,
which captures the intensity of competition it takes to win a job there and explains why it is
already the most productive research team at Microsoft: “Remember, in China, when you are
one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.”

The other is a conversation I had with Rajesh Rao, a young Indian entrepreneur who started an
electronic-game company from Bangalore, which today owns the rights to Charlie Chaplin’s
image for mobile computer games. “We can’t relax,” Rao said. “I think in the case of the United
States that is what happened a bit. Please look at me: I am from India. We have been at a very
different level before in terms of technology and business. But once we saw we had an
infrastructure that made the world a small place, we promptly tried to make the best use of it.
We saw there were so many things we could do. We went ahead, and today what we are
seeing is a result of that. There is no time to rest. That is gone. There are dozens of people who
are doing the same thing you are doing, and they are trying to do it better. It is like water in a
tray: you shake it, and it will find the path of least resistance. That is what is going to happen to
so many jobs — they will go to that corner of the world where there is the least resistance and
the most opportunity. If there is a skilled person in Timbuktu, he will get work if he knows how
to access the rest of the world, which is quite easy today. You can make a Web site and have
an e-mail address and you are up and running. And if you are able to demonstrate your work,
using the same infrastructure, and if people are comfortable giving work to you and if you are
diligent and clean in your transactions, then you are in business.”

Instead of complaining about outsourcing, Rao said, Americans and Western Europeans would
“be better off thinking about how you can raise your bar and raise yourselves into doing
something better. Americans have consistently led in innovation over the last century.
Americans whining — we have never seen that before.” Rao is right. And it is time we got
focused. As a person who grew up during the cold war, I’ll always remember driving down the
highway and listening to the radio, when suddenly the music would stop and a grim-voiced
announcer would come on the air and say: “This is a test. This station is conducting a test of
the Emergency Broadcast System.” And then there would be a 20-second high-pitched siren
sound. Fortunately, we never had to live through a moment in the cold war when the announcer
came on and said, “This is a not a test.”

That, however, is exactly what I want to say here: “This is not a test.”

The long-term opportunities and challenges that the flattening of the world puts before the
United States are profound. Therefore, our ability to get by doing things the way we’ve been
doing them — which is to say not always enriching our secret sauce — will not suffice any more.
“For a country as wealthy we are, it is amazing how little we are doing to enhance our natural
competitiveness,” says Dinakar Singh, the Indian-American hedge-fund manager. “We are in a
world that has a system that now allows convergence among many billions of people, and we
had better step back and figure out what it means. It would be a nice coincidence if all the
things that were true before were still true now, but there are quite a few things you actually
need to do differently. You need to have a much more thoughtful national discussion.”
If this moment has any parallel in recent American history, it is the height of the cold war,
around 1957, when the Soviet Union leapt ahead of America in the space race by putting up
the Sputnik satellite. The main challenge then came from those who wanted to put up walls;
the main challenge to America today comes from the fact that all the walls are being taken
down and many other people can now compete and collaborate with us much more directly.
The main challenge in that world was from those practicing extreme Communism, namely
Russia, China and North Korea. The main challenge to America today is from those practicing
extreme capitalism, namely China, India and South Korea. The main objective in that era was
building a strong state, and the main objective in this era is building strong individuals.
Meeting the challenges of flatism requires as comprehensive, energetic and focused a
response as did meeting the challenge of Communism. It requires a president who can
summon the nation to work harder, get smarter, attract more young women and men to science
and engineering and build the broadband infrastructure, portable pensions and health care that
will help every American become more employable in an age in which no one can guarantee
you lifetime employment.
We have been slow to rise to the challenge of flatism, in contrast to Communism, maybe
because flatism doesn’t involve ICBM missiles aimed at our cities. Indeed, the hot line, which
used to connect the Kremlin with the White House, has been replaced by the help line, which
connects everyone in America to call centers in Bangalore. While the other end of the hot line
might have had Leonid Brezhnev threatening nuclear war, the other end of the help line just has
a soft voice eager to help you sort out your AOL bill or collaborate with you on a new piece of
software. No, that voice has none of the menace of Nikita Khrushchev pounding a shoe on the
table at the United Nations, and it has none of the sinister snarl of the bad guys in “From
Russia With Love.” No, that voice on the help line just has a friendly Indian lilt that masks any
sense of threat or challenge. It simply says: “Hello, my name is Rajiv. Can I help you?”
No, Rajiv, actually you can’t. When it comes to responding to the challenges of the flat world,
there is no help line we can call. We have to dig into ourselves. We in America have all the
basic economic and educational tools to do that. But we have not been improving those tools
as much as we should. That is why we are in what Shirley Ann Jackson, the 2004 president of
the American Association for the Advancement of Science and president of Rensselaer

Polytechnic Institute, calls a “quiet crisis” — one that is slowly eating away at America’s
scientific and engineering base.

“If left unchecked,” said Jackson, the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics
from M.I.T., “this could challenge our pre-eminence and capacity to innovate.” And it is our
ability to constantly innovate new products, services and companies that has been the source
of America’s horn of plenty and steadily widening middle class for the last two centuries. This
quiet crisis is a product of three gaps now plaguing American society. The first is an “ambition
gap.” Compared with the young, energetic Indians and Chinese, too many Americans have
gotten too lazy. As David Rothkopf, a former official in the Clinton Commerce Department, puts
it, “The real entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement.” Second, we have a
serious numbers gap building. We are not producing enough engineers and scientists. We used
to make up for that by importing them from India and China, but in a flat world, where people
can now stay home and compete with us, and in a post-9/11 world, where we are insanely
keeping out many of the first-round intellectual draft choices in the world for exaggerated
security reasons, we can no longer cover the gap. That’s a key reason companies are looking
abroad. The numbers are not here. And finally we are developing an education gap. Here is the
dirty little secret that no C.E.O. wants to tell you: they are not just outsourcing to save on
salary. They are doing it because they can often get better-skilled and more productive people
than their American workers.

These are some of the reasons that Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, warned the governors’
conference in a Feb. 26 speech that American high-school education is “obsolete.” As Gates
put it: “When I compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I am terrified
for our work force of tomorrow. In math and science, our fourth graders are among the top
students in the world. By eighth grade, they’re in the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, U.S.
students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations. . . . The percentage of a
population with a college degree is important, but so are sheer numbers. In 2001, India
graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China
graduates twice as many students with bachelor’s degrees as the U.S., and they have six times
as many graduates majoring in engineering. In the international competition to have the biggest
and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind.”

We need to get going immediately. It takes 15 years to train a good engineer, because, ladies
and gentlemen, this really is rocket science. So parents, throw away the Game Boy, turn off the
television and get your kids to work. There is no sugar-coating this: in a flat world, every
individual is going to have to run a little faster if he or she wants to advance his or her standard
of living. When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, “Tom, finish your dinner —
people in China are starving.” But after sailing to the edges of the flat world for a year, I am
now telling my own daughters, “Girls, finish your homework — people in China and India are
starving for your jobs.”
I repeat, this is not a test. This is the beginning of a crisis that won’t remain quiet for long. And
as the Stanford economist Paul Romer so rightly says, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

10/25/18, 12)55 PMHereʼs the science behind the Brexit vote and Trumpʼs rise | Michele Gelfand | Opinion | The Guardian

Page 1 of 4https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/17/science-behind-brexit-vote-trump

Here’s the science behind the
Brexit vote and Trump’s rise
Michele Gelfand
My research shows that when people feel threatened
they want ‘tighter’ social norms, with profound
consequences for politics

Mon 17 Sep 2018 01.00 EDT

Illustration by Thomas Pullin

W hat is the essential dividing line between human beings around the world? Theone between the haves and the have-nots? East and west, rural and urban,secular and religious? Or maybe globalists and nationalists – a split purported toexplain Putin, Brexit and the rise of Trump? These divisions are all significant,
but none provide a consistent way of understanding differences observed from

antiquity to the present day, in everything from international relations to relations in our
homes.

My research across hundreds of communities suggests that the fundamental driver of

https://www.theguardian.com/profile/michele-gelfand

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/eu-referendum

10/25/18, 12)55 PMHereʼs the science behind the Brexit vote and Trumpʼs rise | Michele Gelfand | Opinion | The Guardian

Page 2 of 4https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/17/science-behind-brexit-vote-trump

difference is not ideological, financial or geographical – it’s cultural. Behaviour, it turns out,
depends a lot on whether the culture in which we live is a “tight” or “loose” one.

This is simply a way of describingthe strength of social norms and the strictness with which
those norms are enforced. All cultures have norms – rules for acceptable behaviour – that we
take for granted. As children, we learn hundreds of them: to not grab things out of other
people’s hands, to put on clothes each day. We continue to absorb new norms throughout our
lives: what to wear to a funeral; how to behave at a rock concert versus a symphony; and the
proper way to perform ritualsfrom weddings to worship. Social norms are the glue that holds
groups together; they give us our identity, and they help us coordinate in unprecedented ways.
Yet cultures vary in the strength of their social glue, with profound consequences for our
worldviews, our environments and our brains.

Tight cultures have strong norms and little tolerance for deviance, while loose cultures are the
opposite. In the US, a relatively loose culture, a person can’t get far down their street without
witnessing a slew of casual norm violations, from littering to jaywalking to arguing loudly on
the street. By contrast, in Singapore, gum is banned, streets are pristine and jaywalkers are
rare. Or consider Brazil, a relatively loose culture, where arriving late for business meetings is
more the rule than the exception. In fact, if you want to be sure someone will arrive on time in
Brazil, you say com pontualidade britânica, which means “with British punctuality”.
Meanwhile, in Japan, a tight country, there’s a huge emphasis on punctuality – trains almost
never arrive late. On the rare days that delays do occur, some train companies will hand out
cards to passengers that they can submit to their bosses to excuse a tardy arrival.

A discovery I and my team published in Science is that the strength of a culture’s norms isn’t
random. Though they were separated by miles, and in some cases centuries, tight cultures as
diverse as Sparta and Singapore have something in common: each faced (or faces) a high degree
of threat, whether from Mother Nature – disasters, diseases, and food scarcity – or human
nature – the chaos caused by invasions and internal conflicts. Strong norms are needed in these
contexts to help groups survive. And when we look at loose cultures, from classical Athens to
modern New Zealand, we see the opposite pattern: they enjoy the luxury of facing far fewer
threats. This safety is used to explore new ideas, accept newcomers, and tolerate a wide range
of behaviour. In contexts where there are fewer threats and thus less of a need for
coordination, strong norms don’t materialise.

Analysing hundreds of hunter-gatherer groups, as well as nation-states including the Aztecs
and Incas, we found that cultures that experienced existential threats, such as famine and
warfare, favoured strong norms and autocratic leaders. Our computer models show a similar
effect: threat leads to the evolution of tightness.

This tight-loose logic also applies to regional differences within countries. We’ve shown that US
states with histories punctuated by high threat, including more natural disasters, higher
pathogen prevalence and food instability, are much tighter than those that enjoyed relative

https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/6df109_a5da34d6a9ae4114be82ccf4b024a2b2

http://www.gelfand.umd.edu/papers/OBHDP%20Roos,%20Gelfand,%20Nau%20&%20Lun

https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/6df109_23dae6ef2e4a4f72960ef82108d9fc9c

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safety. Similarly, communities that face financial danger – hunger, poverty, bankruptcy – and
higher occupational hazards, are substantially tighter. This helps explain why those on low
incomes have consistently told us they desire strong rules and leaders. In fact, when we ask
respondents to free-associate from the word “rules”, low-income subjects consistently write
positive words such as “good”, “safe” and “structure”, while wealthier ones write down words
such as “bad”, “frustrating”, and “constricting”. These preferences arise early: in our lab,
three-year-olds from low-income families were more visibly upset than peers from wealthier
homes when they saw puppets violate clear rules.

Is tight better, then, or loose? The answer is, neither are. Both confer different advantages and
liabilities, depending on your vantage point. Tight groups have cornered the market in social
order: they have lower crime and tend to be cleaner and more coordinated. They also exhibit
higher self-control: they tend to have fewer problems with obesity and debt, and lower rates of
alcoholism and drug abuse. Loose groups are comparatively more disorganised and experience
a host of self-regulation failures; yet they excel at openness. They’re much more tolerant,
creative and flexible. Tight groups, by contrast, are far less innovative, more ethnocentric, and
more resistant to new ideas. This is what I call the tight-loose trade-off; advantages in one
realm coexist with drawbacks in another.

Tight-loose differences can explain global patterns of conflict, revolution, terrorism and
populism. They operate as a universal faultline, causing cultural cohesion to buckle and rifts to
open up. As threats arrive, groups tighten. As they subside, groups loosen. Threats don’t even
need to be real. Our experiments show that, as long as people perceive a threat, the perception
can be as powerful as objective reality.

Threats lead to a desire for stronger rules – and obedience to leaders who promise to deliver a
tight social order. Our research confirms that the strongest Trump supporters, as well as the
supporters of Marine Le Pen in France, believe their country is threatened, whether by
terrorism, illegal immigration, natural disasters or disease. They felt their countries were too
loose, and they wanted tighter rules and stricter leaders. Fearful voters also drove the UK’s
Brexit decision and the candidacies of far-right or autocratic politicians in Poland, Russia, the
Philippines, Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands and Italy.

Tight-loose is the key to anticipating our divides – mild clashes, in the case of a construction
worker rolling his eyes at a gold-cufflinked Wall Streeter, or more lethal ones, such as when
those who live by the tenets of a sacred text come into contact with those who dismiss guiding
texts altogether. With greater awareness of the cultural code of tightness-looseness, we can
better understand why we act the way we do – from revolution to war, from Brexit to Trump.

• Michele Gelfand is a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland and the author of
Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World

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