Why do Cultures Differ? Evidence from Cross-Cultural Data

History, geography, environment, and technology influence the cultural practices and institutions of a society and vice versa. But how strongly do geography, environment, and technology correlate with culture and institutions? To add insight into this question, we use a new methodology which explores the relationship between a variety of bilateral proximity measures developed using the societies in Murdock’s (1967) Ethnographic Atlas. Specifically, we investigate the correlation between bilateral distance measures reflecting technological, environmental, and cultural differences between all possible pairwise combinations of societies in the Ethnographic Atlas. One result of interest is that differences in cultural practices correlate very strongly with differences in language and tend to have the most predictive power in our model. One might take interpret this as evidence for the overriding importance of common history in driving cultural practice. However, measures of technological distance also correlate with measures of cultural distance. Department of Economics, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, 695 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10065 USA Fax 212 772 5398, Email: [email protected]. Development Economics Group, Wageningen University, and Department of Economics, Tilburg University, Netherlands, Fax +31 13 466 3042, Email: [email protected]. Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen, 1455 Copenhagen, Denmark, Fax +45 32 30 30 00, Email: [email protected].