Last week, David Brooks wrote this column in The New York Times. He cited Michelle Gelfand's book Rule Makers Rule Breakers, and (as I understand his argument) proposed that the USA is doing so badly at containing COVID19 because of its rule-breaking culture that has to change.
It ain't necessarily so.
You can buy Rule Makers Rule Breakers on Kindle for $13.99. Or you can download a sample for free. I downloaded the sample. The sample includes a presentation of Singapore as an archetypical rule-making society, with strict and strongly enforced social norms, and New Zealand as an archetypical rule-breaking society, with loose and weakly enforced social norms. As of this writing, according to worldometer, New Zealand has 312 cases per million people and 4 deaths per million people, whereas Singapore has 5,467 cases per million people and, like New Zealand, 4 deaths per million people. Either Singapore had absolutely amazing hospitals or they are lying. In either case, how well a society does against COVID19 appears to have nothing to do with how rigid its social norms are.
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