Rice farming is hard work. it’s complicated. Traditional rice farming is twice as labor intensive as crops such as wheat, corn and potatoes. Rice was built on an irrigation network that forced farmers to cooperate with each other. Rain falls on the fields of both the rogue and cooperative wheat farmers, but the irrigation network waters the fields only if the farmers work together to build them and manage to keep them working. In short, rice required more social adjustment compared to Western-based crops such as wheat.
Rice farming may seem a far cry from the COVID-19 pandemic. However, research in my lab has shown that some cultural characteristics of rice-growing communities are more important than hard assets such as medical costs and hospital beds in dealing with a pandemic. rice field. Cultural traits regarding social norms and relationship networks explain why mortality rates in rice-growing countries, including the world’s poorest, reached 3% of that in non-rice-growing countries, including the world’s richest. I can do it. The theory suggests that millions of lives could be saved if everyone thought like a rice farmer instead of a wheat farmer when the next highly contagious disease emerged. I’m here.
In the early days of COVID, China, Vietnam, and South Korea clearly stood out in terms of infection control. At the time, some observers suggested that the collectivist culture of some East Asian countries made them more likely to wear masks and follow stay-at-home orders. I have noticed that these star performers are cultures with deep histories of rice farming. I wondered if these characteristics might help explain their superior performance.
Rice culture is closing social networks
One of the common features of rice cultures is low relational mobility. People in cultures with low relationship fluidity tend to have closed social networks and report meeting new acquaintances less often in the past 30 days. A study of 39 countries found that relationships are more fluid in the US, UK and Mexico, and less in rice cultures such as Malaysia and Taiwan. Japan, notoriously introverted, came last in relational mobility.
These fixed relationships make sense in traditional rice village work. A rice farmer spends twice as much time in the field as a wheat farmer. Rice farmers rely heavily on extended families and neighbors to cope with this arduous labor.
This division of labor makes people into binding relationships. It’s like paying for a friend’s coffee today and paying for yours tomorrow. This interdependence helps solidify relationships over time.
Norms help manage irrigation and pandemics
Rice cultures also tend to share strict social norms. In cultures with strict social norms, people feel more restricted in what they can do in public. For example, strict Singapore is notorious for its chewing gum ban.Rice cultures such as Sri Lanka and Japan report stricter social norms than people in cultures such as the United States, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
These strict social norms are reflected in anthropologists’ descriptions of rice villages. Social norms help govern the irrigation networks rice farmers use to flood their paddies. Maintaining irrigation canals benefits every farmer in the village, but not a single farmer wants to be stuck with the heavy burden of building and dredging irrigation canals every year. To make it work, rice villagers divide up the work so that everyone contributes. punish the villagers.
How are these cultural traits related to COVID? My colleagues and I analyzed COVID cases and deaths in 132 countries around the world. The results showed that the rice culture suffered only 3% of her per capita deaths in non-rice-growing countries. Both low relational mobility and strict social norms independently explained differences in COVID outcomes. And both cultural traits continued to explain COVID deaths and case numbers after accounting for wealth and healthcare infrastructure.
Eliminate Confusion from Natural Experiments
One alternative explanation is that countries with seemingly good COVID results were simply keeping their numbers down. Turkmenistan, for example, famously reported that he had had no coronavirus cases in over a year since the pandemic began. Countries like the US and UK have conducted more tests and probably reported deaths more openly than countries with few resources or repressive governments.
In other words, underreporting had to be taken into account. Statistically controlled coronavirus testing across the country. We also used estimates of underreported mortality from independent researchers. But even after considering testing and transparency, the data showed that culture matters.
East Asia is the quintessential rice basket, but rice cultivation cultures outside of Asia also surpass neighboring countries. Our World in Data estimates that the African countries of Madagascar and Sierra Leone grow rice, outperforming neighboring countries such as Senegal and Zimbabwe.
Another way to solve this problem is to compare counties in southern and northern China. Rice is grown in southern China and wheat in northern China. Examining rice wheat differences between nearby counties in China allows us to compare regions with the same national policies, ethnicity and religion, but with different agricultural heritages.
Wheat-producing regions were found to report three times as many COVID cases as rice-producing regions. Similar to global findings, our data show that China’s rice provinces have stricter social norms than wheat provinces.
Mobility first, then norms
The data also taught us that mobility and norms play different roles. Early in the pandemic, when the coronavirus hijacked people’s flexible social networks, relational mobility hit societies like France and Brazil hardest. Even people in a mobile culture like us have started cutting back on social networks, a study reveals.
Rigid norms have taken the opposite trajectory. In the first few months of the pandemic, norms didn’t seem to matter. But by September 2020, cultures with stricter norms began to outperform others in cases and deaths. It will take time for cultures to converge on new disease standards. By one estimate, it takes an average of four months for COVID.
The narrow network of relationships in rice cultures like South Korea gave the coronavirus a little less runway to speed up early on. It has become easier to enforce and monitor whether people are following quarantine guidelines.
By contrast, cultures based on less binding crops like wheat, like those in the United States and Great Britain, have for the most part refused to enforce rules. and spoke openly with journalists. The BBC reported that 300,000 British travelers flouted quarantine rules. UK officials said enforcing mask rules would only be a “last resort”.
Why Rankings Are Wrong
Culture tells us why the prep experts got it wrong. In October 2019, just before COVID hit, researchers at Johns Hopkins University ranked countries around the world on their readiness to deal with the pandemic. Wealthier countries such as the US, UK and the Netherlands occupy the top three positions. Meanwhile, poor countries such as Sierra Leone, Madagascar and Vietnam rank him below 50th.
Two years later, the US, UK and the Netherlands are among the countries with the highest number of COVID cases and deaths per capita in the world. The number of cases and deaths was lower than the global average.
The Johns Hopkins University rankings focus on countless assets such as accredited laboratories, government healthcare spending, and hospital beds. Our analysis suggests that the ranking was wrong because it ignored the ‘softer’ assets of culture. Real assets such as dollars, labs, and hospital beds are important. But the fact that beds are easy to count should not get in the way of explaining culture. Sometimes culture is a matter of life and death.
This is an opinion and analysis article and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
