Living in the Garden of Eden: Mineral Resources Foster Individualism

Mathieu Couttenier and Marc Sangnier

Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'économie from Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, Département d’économie

Abstract: This paper documents a positive relationship between mineral resources abundance and individualistic values in the United States. We refer to "individualism" as the set of values opposed to public intervention in income allocation and favorable to individual selfresponsibility. We show that individuals living in states with large mineral resources endowment are more individualistic. We take advantage of both the spatial and the temporal distributions of mineral discoveries since 1800 to uncover two channels. The experience channel arises because of direct observation of discoveries by individuals. The transmission channel consists in the persistence of specific values across generations.

Keywords: individualism; redistribution; mineral resources; persistence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O10 Q32 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pp. + figures and tables
Date: 2012-06
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.hec.unil.ch/deep/textes/12.05.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Living in the Garden of Eden: Mineral resources and preferences for redistribution (2015)
Working Paper: Living in the Garden of Eden: Mineral Resources and Preferences for Redistribution (2015)
Working Paper: Living in the garden of Eden: Mineral resources foster individualism (2010)
Working Paper: Living in the garden of Eden: Mineral resources foster individualism (2010)
Working Paper: Living in the garden of Eden: Mineral resources foster individualism (2010)
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:lau:crdeep:12.05

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'économie from Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, Département d’économie Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, Département d’économie, Internef, CH-1015 Lausanne. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christina Seld (christina.seld@unil.ch).