Money—aka self interest—makes the world go ’round. If you alone decide to leave the rat race, it’ll surely impact you, but it won’t make much difference to the planet at large.
But what if an entire country decides that self restraint is the way to go?
German bankers make perhaps $100,000 where their American counterparts make $100,000s or millions. German civil servants routinely turn down lucrative private sector jobs because, well, it would be the wrong thing to do. The head of the German equivalent of Bank of America laments million-dollar banking bonuses and resents the 32-year-olds who get them across the Atlantic. All of that makes Germans the most solvent European and the ones now on the hook for bailing out everyone else.
Yet none of that stopped German banks from losing billions themselves. “Stupid Germans in Düsseldorf” were the last ones buying the worst financial products peddled by their greedy Wall Street counterparts. Blame it on blind faith in the goodness of others, or German tendency to stick to rules über alles and not to question those rules that tell them to buy anything AAA-rated, no matter how unbelievable the rating.
So yes, culture clearly drives behavior and can help entire societies move beyond narrow self-interest. I challenge you to find a German who doesn’t recycle. But even an entire country moving beyond self interest can’t prevent the globe from going down the tubes when others take them for suckers.
