That Iran, with 10% of the world’s known oil reserves, 2nd in natural gas reserves, and an intelligent eager workforce, is going through the most dire of circumstances in living memory, is not a secret. Iran’s economy is basically in the doldrums. It looks up to countries like Qatar, Emirates, and Turkey for how to get things done, and is ruled by a ruthless religious dictatorship, all while its environment plummets down the drain. It thrives on international tensions, and it loves constantly reminding its people of external threats. In short, life in Iran is pretty shitty for the ordinary citizen, to be frank.
What are the reasons behind such a mess of a country? Who is responsible for such a perpetual waste of talents, resources, and life? Many blame it on the international sanctions. Many others put the blame on a dismal record of mismanagement by the country’s anti-technocratic officials, and yet some others blame the nature of the Islamic system itself which by definition functions counter to a free market economy.
But what can be said from a scientific point of view? Can we pinpoint some factors or elements, that might bear some direct influence on the status of the country’s social and economic health? Is there a relationship between the degree of poverty in a country, and the amount of how people perceive each other? According to Paul Zak, a neuroeconomist, there is.
According to Zak, . And what’s more interesting is that “high-trust countries are by and large rich countries, or certainly fast-growing countries, and poor countries are countries with low trust”. So according to him, “countries in which trust is high have effective governments, they have very tight social structures, people interact very nicely with each other, they don’t have a lot of divisions, and there’s a positive feedback loop. They have higher incomes which further accentuates greater growth. So trust is this kind of great summary measure of a society in which things are working well. And lack of trust therefore is a measure of how things do not work well in society. If trust is too low, it’s just too hard to engage in transactions. There’s too many, what economists call, transaction costs. I need lawyers and judges and the cops to enforce all of these agreements. And so therefore, the number of people I interact with economically gets very small. I am only going to interact with my family or my clan or someone who is really trusted because I can’t count on the government to enforce these contracts. That limits the size of the market and therefore the number of transactions that can occur that increase prosperity.”
This becomes critically important for developing countries, according to Zak, where one needs to have solid institutions that will facilitate economic transactions. So trust, for example in China is quite high. China has a very effective government that is market oriented. On the other hand, in sub-Saharan Africa or some South American countries, one sees trust levels that are so low that there is no or little economic growth. In places like Haiti or Venezuela, governments are so corrupt that there’s no reason to even undertake any commercial transactions. One does what one needs to survive, and then most of the money flows out of that country into the United States or into the West, where the money is safer. For example, if we look at his data: 2% of Brazilians said they trust each other, whereas in the United States around 45% of Americans said they trust each other and two-thirds of Norwegians trust each other.
Seeing that countries like Turkey are at the bottom of his plots, one then starts to wonder where Iran would be on his set of data. Considering that Iran sits at 145th on the 2010 Corruption Perception Index, would it be a stretch to expect to see Iran sitting smack in the middle of his linear regression model, at the bottom of the curve? The interesting part is not that Iran is suffering poverty (despite abundant natural resources). The interesting part of it would be that it shows Iranians have utterly no trust for eachother, and for their government, and vice versa.That, is interesting, coming from a government that claims to represent God on Earth, or as they love to repeat: Islam-e Naab-e Mohammadi.
Paul Zak asserted that Oxytocin levels are low in a society with low moral values. But he doesnt seem to tell us which one causes which one: Is morality low because Oxytocin is low in the body, or is it the other way around?
What Paul Zak dared not delve into (and yet hints at in some of his lectures) is the question of whether race and ethnicity have anything to do with Oxytocin. Oooo, touchy subject, aint it. What if I were to claim that Iranians (and Middle Easterners in general) have a low propensity overall towards being moral (which is why weve had the most fucked up govt on the planet for 30 yrs, and yet some of us are still defending it, while others simply live with it)? Are we genetically programmed to be so muleaheadedly stubborn and bezehkaar? Or is it a cultural thing? Or is it the sway and influence of a 7th century incompetent faith on the affairs of the state? Even wikileaks reveals that “ONE SHOULD NOT EXPECT AN IRANIAN READILY TO PERCEIVE THE ADVANTAGES OF A LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIP BASED ON TRUST. HE WILL ASSUME THAT HIS OPPOSITE NUMBER IS ESSENTIALLY AN ADVERSARY. IN DEALING WITH HIM HE WILL ATTEMPT TO MAXIMIZE THE BENEFITS TO HIMSELF THAT ARE IMMEDIATELY OBTAINABLE. HE WILL BE PREPARED TO GO TO GREAT LENGTHS TO ACHIEVE THIS GOAL, INCLUDING RUNNING THE RISK OF SO ALIENATING WHOEVER HE IS DEALING WITH THAT FUTURE BUSINESS WOULD BE UNTHINKABLE, AT LEAST TO THE LATTER”. (It’s a shame they took Wikileaks offline, but in case they bring it back)
Regardless, at the end of the day, when there is litterally no trust and mutual respect between people in a society, how can one expect anything positive to come from that society? Not only will they remain the backward country in the face of their neighbor’s progress, but they will remain delusionally retarded in seeing things as well. Maybe this is a case for the famous saying “khalaayegh raa har che laayegh”.
