In response to Lawrence Harrison, I agree that there are huge development problems in Africa, but I don’t see the evidence connecting this to culture. Botswana has been a great success, and it is true that a large proportion of GDP (about 40%) is diamonds, but diamonds are usually connected to political instability and poverty in Africa, think of Sierra Leone or Angola. Even without diamonds Botswana would be much richer than other African countries. Yes, there has been good leadership, but Botswana had good leadership in the 19th century  so this is not a coincidence, nor can it be tied in a simple way to culture. What distinguished the Tswana states, from which modern Botswana sprang, was not their culture but rather their political institutions and this is the root of a succession of leaders who internalized public welfare.
As I said, it might be true that if one had the right institutions and policies in place, Africa would not grow, but I don’t see any evidence supporting this, and Botswana is certainly against it.
I find the attempt to provide a cultural explanation of the economic success of Chile since 1985 utterly unconvincing. The fact that Chile had free trade in the 19th century is unremarkable—so did every other Latin American country. Most Liberal governments massively cut tariffs and removed obstacles to trade, and the first growth in these countries was based on trade—coffee in Colombia or Costa Rica, guano in Peru, wool, mutton and beef in Argentina. The notion that Chile was somehow a “civilized and free country” compared to other Latin American countries in untenable. First, it is difficult for me to connect civilization, even if I am not sure what its relationship is with culture, with the murderous Pinochet dictatorship who bequeathed a structure of political institutions designed to bolster the right. Second, Chile was not free. Illiterates were only given the vote in Chile by Salvador Allende in the early 1970s, whereas they were enfranchised much earlier in most Latin American countries—in 1936 in Colombia, for example, and in the 19th century in Argentina. Moreover, there was huge coercion in elections in rural areas, as I noted. It was only after this was stopped in 1958 that campesinos were free to vote for who they wanted, which drove Allende into power. The Chilean economic miracle has little to do with culture but is rather the joint outcome of the massive deconstruction of the traditional rural economy achieved by the land reforms in conjunction with the change in the incentive environment that flowed from some of Pinochet’s reforms. These changes allowed a dynamic rural sector to emerge for the first time.
I would certainly be the last person to argue that economists such as Jeffery Sachs have been startlingly successful in promoting development. But why would you expect them to be? It is foolish to imagine that economists can come up with a magic bullet to solve the problem of development. Underdevelopment is not a coincidence and arises because societies become trapped in dysfunctional political equilibria where the incentives to invest and innovate, and do all the things that makes a society prosperous, are absent. Such a situation is difficult to change because it is not just about economics (getting the prices right, etc.) but also about politics, which we understand much less well. While I have tremendous respect for the work of Guido Tabellini, his work only establishes to my mind that some variables capturing aspects of what we might call culture are correlated with income per-capita. As with the facts about the success of minority groups much beloved by cultural theorists, I find these correlations interesting, but I am not convinced that they demonstrate the causal role of culture. Many things are positively correlated—for example, latitude and income per-capita—but this does not mean they cause one another.
This exchange does, however, demonstrate a different failure of economists: they have so far not focused intensively enough on articulating and testing theories of how culture influences development. Here Tabellini’s work is seminal. We probably all agree that we need much more of this.
 Q. Neil parsons, King Khama, Emperor Joe and the Great White Queen, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).