Argh! Some Things Are Culturally Determined!
I love economics and economists (the way a sports fan loves sports and athletes) but this otherwise interesting post on gratuities irks me for its lack of consideration of one very basic question: “To what extent are variations in tipping culturally determined?” This is a nontrivial question for me, because I have been known to forget when or how much to tip, simply because keeping track of American, Chinese, Irish, German, and Serbian practices on service charges taxes my wee brain.
This is, in general, a problem with economic analyses of comparative behavior. There are enduring differences in how human behavior is patterned; even a genetic fundamentalist like Steven Pinker will admit that a sizable fraction of human behavior is culturally constructed. Within one community at one time, of course, the degree to which behavior is determined by exogenous cultural factors* is irrelevant for the purpose of analysis; but comparing a community’s behavior at different times, or different communities’ behavior, requires asking those sorts of questions.
*This presupposes the existence of exogenous cultural factors, but even I, despite believing that the means of production exert a tremendous influence on culture, disagree that everything about a society is determined by its techne.
4 Responses to “Argh! Some Things Are Culturally Determined!”
Here, just print up this page
http://www.magellans.com/store/article/367?Args=
and carry it around with you.
Paul, there is one bit of cultural-variability piece on Tyler’s post, which makes me unsure whether I understand the exact nature of your complaint:
“4. The more a culture values status and prestige, the more likely that culture will use tipping to reward service.”
(That’s meant to be a “not sure I understand” as really “not sure I understand”, as opposed to the blogospherically endemic “not sure I understand” as “you’re so wrong that you don’t even make sense, loser, but I’m pretending to be too polite to put it that way”.)
Is your complaint, then, that he doesn’t consider whether tipping norms could be just independent even of other culturally-local aspects factors? Or, as an analytic philosopher might say, that tipping norms need not supervene on the non-tipping aspects of a culture?
Mainly I was focusing on #2, #6, #7 and #8, the ones which offer specific numbers (and which are therefore the strongest claims). #3 and #4, which form the basis of your question, are weaker and harder to define. More importantly for my purposes, they aren’t reconciled with 2, 6, 7 and 8.
Generally, though, this is a complaint about how economists either a) take preferences as a given (which is OK in some situations, as I outline in my post) or b) are clueless (or act as if they were clueless) about the non-economic factors that influence economic analysis.
The list by countries is inaccurate, too. In France, service is virtually always included in the price of a meal, and a tip is almost never expected. A couple of Euros here or there is a nice added bonus, but declining to tip is in no sense an insult.
Here in Australia, tipping is not the norm. Typically people will tip their cab driver by rounding up to the next dollar (or for large fares to the next $5/$10) and in restaurants by rounding to the next $5/$10 only if the service has been good. The culture of tipping has never really been established because most people working in service industries are on reasonable rates of pay unlike the US, where pay rates are ludicrously low and tipping is a necessity.