Posted on 10/22/2004 9:13:28 AM PDT by ckilmer
Although I haven't read De Soto's book, it seems they have similar themes.
One of the sub-themes of Fukuyama's book is that Asian entrepeneurs tend to keep the business in the family. So a hardworking father hands over his shipping company to his spoiled, drug-addled son and a once thriving company goes down the drain.
In the West, we tend to have larger spheres of trust due to contract law, etc. and so businesses are passed on to people based on their business acumen rather than on family or neighborhood connections.
It could be that Christianity, by being a univeral religion, got people to trust others outside their family or neighborhood groups so long as they shared the same religious beliefs.
So it might not be so much the morality taught by Christ, as the universality he taught that ultimately led to the success of Capital formation in the West.
After all, the Confuscianism of the East is not a bad set of prinicples to guide one's life by, but there is a strong undergirding of "family comes first" and "blood is thicker than water".
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