Does rice farming shape individualism and innovation? A response to Talhelm et al. (2014)

Jianqing Ruan (), Zhuan Xie and Xiaobo Zhang

No 1389, IFPRI discussion papers from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

Abstract: Talhelm et al. (2014) provided an original rice theory to explain large psychological differences across countries and even within countries and their impact on innovation. However, their findings are subject to the problems of sample bias, measurement error, and model misspecification. After correcting these problems, most findings in the original paper no longer hold. The authors of this paper collected data on collectivism from other sources and linked them with rice areas but failed to find any relationship as predicted by the rice theory. The role of rice farming in shaping cultural psychology and innovations seems to be much more muted.

Keywords: innovation; sociology; rice; psychology; China; Asia; Eastern Asia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hdl.handle.net/10568/151356

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fpr:ifprid:1389

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IFPRI discussion papers from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().