Cultural relativism and ideological policy makers in a general equilibrium model with for-profit and non-profit enterprises

This paper shows that two societies differing because of the people’s initial propensity to devote time and efforts to non-profit activities may never converge. This lack of convergence is interpreted as the tendency of the cultural values and attitudes dominant in each society to perpetuate because of the economic behavior and the social processes that they contribute to elicit. Furthermore, it may not be possible to rank the different steady states toward which these two societies converge according to the Paretian criterion. Finally, the paper examines policies that promote values and attitudes non-coincident with those that are currently dominant. c © 2007 University of Venice. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.