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A Note on the Treatment of Culture in Alcohol Research

A little culture is a dangerous thing, at least in empirical analysis. Prior assumptions about its importance can lead to structure, in the form of groupings of countries, being imposed on data rather than being tested, and cultural differences can be assumed as explanations for differences in estimated coefficients, to the detriment of testing for misspecification and omitted variable bias. The starting point for any study of the effect of cultural differences on behavior—the null hypothesis—must be culture has no effect. Culture, in this approach, is a term that refers to the way groups of people have chosen to respond to the constraints imposed by the geographic circumstances in which they find themselves, but it is not something which can, in the long run, override the universals of human nature. People are, at bottom, verymuch the same in all times and places, and culture is simply a shorthand for the way groups of people have, in the past, chosen to deal with such factors as common property problems. It is worth remembering how quickly people adapt when they move permanently from one culture to another—studies of immigrant consumption patterns, for example, show relatively rapid tendencies to approach the patterns of their new surroundings.