Unit 17 · World Cultures Today, and Capstone

Picture three dinner tables. In a German apartment, two parents and one teenager eat together. In a Japanese home, a grandmother sits with her son, his wife and their child. In a Mexican house, aunts, cousins and grandparents drop by on Sunday. None of these scenes is the whole story of a country. But each reflects a real pattern that census data show.

A household is the group of people who live under one roof. German households are small on average, and many adults live alone, especially in big cities. Japan has long had a tradition of the extended family, where three generations share a home. That pattern has shrunk as young people move to cities, yet many older Japanese still live with or near a grown child. Mexican households are larger on average, and relatives often live close by and share child care.

Duties inside families differ too. In Japan, caring for aging parents has been treated as a key duty, often falling on a daughter or daughter-in-law. In Mexico, familismo describes a strong sense of loyalty and mutual help among relatives. In Germany, the state pays for more of the care of the old and the young, so families lean less on each other for money. Supporters of each pattern point to its strengths, and critics point to the strain on some members, often women.

Lena’s brother trains as an electrician. Three days a week he works at a company, and two days he studies at a vocational school. This is Germany’s dual system of training. A large share of young Germans choose it, and skilled trades carry real respect. Supporters say it gives many young people a steady path without a university degree. Critics say students are sorted into tracks too early, at around age ten in many states, which can lock in class differences.

In Japan, the main road runs through schools and exams. Getting into a well-known university has long led to jobs at large companies. Many of those jobs once promised lifetime employment, meaning a worker could stay with one firm until retirement. That promise has weakened since the 1990s. Today almost four in ten Japanese workers hold part-time or temporary jobs, with lower pay and less security.

In Mexico, a large share of people work in the informal economy: street vendors, small family shops and day laborers who pay no payroll taxes and get no official benefits. Mexico’s statistics agency, INEGI, counts a little over half of workers this way. Some informal businesses thrive, and some owners prefer the freedom. But informal workers often lack health coverage and pensions, which makes moving up harder. Economists debate whether lower taxes, easier rules or stronger enforcement would help most.

After defeat in World War II, both Germany and Japan wrote new constitutions. West Germany adopted its Basic Law in 1949, and it became the constitution of all Germany at reunification in 1990. Germany is a federal republic of sixteen states. Voters elect the Bundestag, the national parliament, and it chooses the chancellor, who leads the government. The Basic Law opens by protecting human dignity, a direct answer to the crimes of the Nazi years.

Japan’s constitution took effect in 1947. It keeps the emperor, but only as a symbol of the state with no power to govern. This is a constitutional monarchy. Voters elect the Diet, the two-house parliament, and the Diet chooses the prime minister. One party, the Liberal Democratic Party, has led Japan for most years since 1955. Supporters see stability; critics see too little competition.

Mexico’s constitution dates from 1917, after the Mexican Revolution. Mexico is a federal republic with a presidential system: voters elect the president directly, separate from Congress. A president serves one six-year term and can never run again, a rule born from anger at long-ruling leaders. For most of the twentieth century one party, the PRI, won every presidential election. In 2000 a candidate from another party won, and Mexico’s elections became openly competitive.

In early November, families across Mexico build ofrendas, home altars with marigolds, photographs, candles and a loved one’s favorite foods. This is the Day of the Dead. It honors ancestors with joy as well as grief. UNESCO added it to its list of the world’s intangible cultural heritage in 2008. In Chicago, the National Museum of Mexican Art in the Pilsen neighborhood hosts a large Day of the Dead exhibition each year.

In Japan, many families travel home in summer for Obon, when ancestors’ spirits are welcomed back with lanterns and dances. In Germany, towns fill with Christmas markets in December, with wooden stalls, mulled drinks and carols. Each of these is a tradition, a custom handed down across generations. Notice that all three honor family and memory, even though they look very different.

Traditions are not frozen. Many Japanese couples now hold Western-style wedding ceremonies. German Christmas markets draw tourists who are not Christian. The Day of the Dead grew more widely known after films and parades spread its images. Scholars call this cultural change. Some people welcome it as living culture; others worry that meaning is lost when customs become commercial.

In the 1880s, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck created the world’s first national social insurance: health insurance in 1883, accident insurance in 1884, and old-age pensions in 1889. Bismarck was a conservative. He hoped the programs would win workers away from socialist parties. His model still shapes Germany, where workers and employers pay into insurance funds. This is one type of welfare state, a government that protects people against life’s major risks.

The Danish scholar Gøsta Esping-Andersen, in a famous 1990 book, sorted rich democracies into three types. Liberal welfare states, like the United States, offer more modest help and rely more on markets. Conservative welfare states, like Germany, tie benefits to work and family. Social democratic welfare states, like Sweden, offer broad benefits to everyone, paid for with high taxes. Japan borrowed from several models and also leans on large companies and families.

Mexico created its social security institute, the IMSS, in 1943 for workers in formal jobs. Because so many work informally, millions were left out. In 1997 Mexico launched Progresa, which paid poor families cash if their children attended school and had health checkups. It became a model copied in many countries. Supporters of big welfare states say they reduce poverty and fear. Critics say high social spending can slow growth, raise debt and weaken the habit of self-reliance. Economists still debate how large the trade-offs are.

In some rural Japanese towns, schools have closed for lack of children while clinics are full of older patients. Japan has one of the oldest populations in the world. About three in ten Japanese people are 65 or older. The average woman in Japan has about 1.2 children in her lifetime. A population needs about 2.1 to replace itself over time. This number is called the replacement rate.

The fertility rate is the average number of children a woman has. It has dropped below the replacement rate across Europe and East Asia. South Korea’s rate fell below 1.0, the lowest in the world. Germany’s is about 1.4. Mexico’s has fallen too, to below 2.0, but Mexico is still a much younger country, with a median age around thirty. Japan’s median age is near fifty.

An aging society has fewer workers paying taxes for each retiree drawing a pension. This is measured by the dependency ratio. Countries respond in different ways. Germany has raised its retirement age and relies more on immigration. Japan has invested in robots for care work and accepted more foreign workers, though more cautiously. Some leaders favor paying families to have children; others favor immigration; others favor longer working lives. Each choice has supporters and critics.

Greater Tokyo is the largest metropolitan area on Earth, home to about 37 million people by UN estimates. Trains arrive every few minutes, and millions ride them daily. Greater Mexico City holds over 20 million people. It sits on an old lakebed, and heavy pumping of groundwater has made parts of the city sink. Urbanization is the growth in the share of people who live in cities.

People move to cities for jobs, schools and hospitals. In Mexico, large numbers moved from farms to cities during the twentieth century. Many built homes themselves on the edges of cities, in informal settlements that later gained roads, water and titles. Germany urbanized earlier, during the 1800s, and its people are spread across many mid-sized cities rather than one giant capital.

Cities bring strain too. Housing costs rise, commutes lengthen and air can grow dirty. At the same time, the countryside can empty out. Japan now has thousands of empty rural houses, called akiya. Planners argue over the fixes. Some want more public housing and transit; others want fewer building rules so the market can add homes faster. A megacity of over ten million people needs both good planning and room to grow.

Every December 12, millions of pilgrims travel to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. It is one of the most visited Catholic sites in the world. In Mexico’s 2020 census, about 78 percent of people called themselves Catholic, and a growing share named Protestant churches or no religion. Faith shapes holidays, family events and many people’s sense of what Mexico is.

In Germany, members of registered churches pay a church tax, collected by the state along with income tax. Leaving a church ends the tax, and many Germans have left. By the early 2020s, fewer than half of Germans belonged to the Catholic or Protestant church. Germany is also home to millions of Muslims, many from families that came from Turkey as workers from the 1960s on.

Japan looks different again. Most Japanese tell surveys they do not belong to a religion. Yet many visit a Shinto shrine at New Year and hold Buddhist funerals. Scholars say Japanese religion is often about practice, what people do, more than belief, what people say they believe. This is a reminder that a label like secular can mean different things in different places.

Since 1981, the World Values Survey has asked people in about one hundred countries the same questions. How important is family? Is it more important for a child to learn obedience or independence? How much do you trust people you do not know? The answers let researchers compare values without relying on outsiders’ guesses.

Political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel used the survey to draw a well-known map. One line runs from traditional values, stressing religion, family and respect for authority, to secular-rational values. Another runs from survival values, stressing security, to self-expression values, stressing free choice. On that map, Japan and Germany rank high on secular-rational values, and Mexico ranks more traditional and high in reported happiness.

Such maps are useful but limited. A country average hides big differences between young and old, city and village, rich and poor. People also describe their values in their own words. Many Japanese speak of harmony and consideration for others. Many Mexicans speak of family and faith. Many Germans speak of order, fairness and reliability. Each of these is a self-description, and each is only part of the picture.

Think back to the three exchange students. Each described a real pattern at home. Each also had a friend whose life broke the pattern. A stereotype is a fixed, oversimplified idea that all members of a group are alike. It turns a pattern into a rule and a rule into a judgment about people. Stereotypes can be negative or seemingly positive, and both kinds erase real people.

In a 2009 talk, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned about the danger of a single story. When we hear only one story about a people, she said, that story becomes the only thing we know about them. A careful comparison does the opposite. It asks, Compared with what? How many people? Measured by whom? It uses words like many, most and on average instead of all and always.

Generalization is not the enemy. Scholars need patterns to compare societies at all. The skill is to hold a pattern loosely. State what the evidence shows, name the source, and notice the exceptions. Also check your own cultural lens, the habits and values you grew up with that shape how you see others. What looks strange from outside often makes good sense to the people inside.

Compare two questions. When did the Berlin Wall fall? The answer is 1989, and it is settled. Why do some democracies last while others collapse? Historians and political scientists still argue about that one. The first is a fact question. The second is a research question: open, worth arguing, and answerable with evidence rather than opinion alone.

This course suggests three kinds of capstone questions. What best helps people move up? Why do some democracies last? What makes an ideology turn extreme? Each has a record to study. The last question, for example, can draw on the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, and on Communist regimes such as the Soviet Gulag system and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, where about a quarter of the population died between 1975 and 1979.

A good question is also narrow enough to finish. What causes poverty in the world? is too big for a semester. What helped South Korea move from poverty to wealth after the 1950s, compared with Mexico? is a better scope. Finally, a good question has more than one serious answer. If only one answer is possible, you do not have an arguable claim to make.

Suppose your question is what helps people move up. If you study only the United States, you cannot tell whether your answer is about human societies or only about one country. Adding Germany, Japan, Mexico or Denmark lets you compare. This method is called comparative analysis: studying cases side by side to see which causes seem to matter.

Sources come in two main kinds. A primary source comes from the time or people being studied: a constitution, a census table, a speech or a survey. A secondary source is written later by someone interpreting the evidence, like a history book or a research article. Strong projects use both. Primary sources give you the raw record. Secondary sources show how experts have read it.

Check every source. Who made it, and why? Is it published by a known body, such as the OECD, the World Bank, a national statistics office or a university press? Does another source agree? This habit is called corroboration. A single striking number shared on social media, with no author or date, is not yet evidence. Find where it came from before you use it.

Economist Miles Corak compared rich countries using a measure called intergenerational earnings elasticity. It shows how strongly a father’s earnings predict his son’s. A figure near zero means children’s earnings barely depend on their parents’. A figure near one means they depend almost entirely on them. In Corak’s figures, Denmark scored about 0.15 and the United States about 0.47.

Countries with more income inequality also tended to show less mobility. Economist Alan Krueger named this pattern the Great Gatsby Curve in 2012. It is a correlation: two things that rise and fall together. A correlation does not prove that one thing causes the other. Inequality might block mobility, or a third factor, such as school quality or family structure, might drive both.

Read every number with questions. What exactly was measured, and for whom? Corak’s data followed fathers and sons, partly because older records tracked men’s earnings better. Figures from different studies can use different methods, so compare numbers from the same source when you can. Name the source every time. This is part of data literacy, the skill of reading numbers honestly.

Weimar Germany became a democracy in 1919. By 1933 Adolf Hitler was chancellor, and within months the democracy was gone. India became a democratic republic in 1950 while still very poor, and it has held regular elections since, with a break in civil rights during the Emergency of 1975 to 1977. Chile, one of Latin America’s longest-running democracies, fell to a military coup in 1973 and returned to democracy in 1990. These cases make a good puzzle.

One well-known finding comes from political scientist Adam Przeworski and colleagues: democracies in richer countries have rarely collapsed. Wealth seems to help democracy survive once it exists. But India shows that a poor country can sustain democracy, and Weimar shows that a modern, educated country can lose it. So scholars also look at institutions, the rules and organizations like courts, parties and a free press.

In their 2018 book How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argued that written rules are not enough. Democracies also depend on norms, unwritten habits. Two matter most, they said: mutual toleration, treating opponents as legitimate rivals rather than enemies, and forbearance, not using every legal power to the hilt. Other scholars stress economic crisis, war or outside pressure. A strong capstone weighs these explanations rather than picking one without evidence.

Take Maya’s question: what best helps people move up? Many on the political left start from the Nordic countries. Denmark and Norway combine high taxes with free university, strong public schools, paid parental leave and wide health coverage. They also show high mobility in Corak’s figures. To left-leaning thinkers, that is no coincidence.

The argument runs like this. Children do not choose their parents. If a poor child lacks good schools, health care or a stable home, talent is wasted. Public spending evens the starting line, the argument goes, and redistribution, moving income from richer to poorer people through taxes and benefits, keeps inequality from hardening into a class system. Some point to the Great Gatsby Curve as support.

To represent this side fairly, state it in its strongest form, as its best defenders would. Do not pick its weakest supporter or its worst slogan. Then note its record. The democratic left built much of Europe’s welfare states. The far left, in its revolutionary Communist form, also produced the Soviet Gulag and the Great Leap Forward famine in China. Most social democrats reject that path and support elections and markets with a strong safety net.

Many on the political right start from a different set of cases. South Korea was one of the poorest countries on Earth in the 1950s. Through fast growth driven by exports, hard work and heavy investment in education, it became a rich country within two generations. To right-leaning thinkers, economic growth is the most powerful ladder, because it creates jobs and lifts whole societies.

They also point to institutions outside government. Research by Raj Chetty and colleagues found that upward mobility was higher in American areas with more two-parent families, stronger community ties and more civic groups. Conservatives read this as support for strengthening families, churches and local communities. Many on the right also stress personal responsibility and free markets, arguing that high taxes and heavy rules can slow growth and discourage work.

Represent this side in its strongest form too, not by its worst slogan. Then note its record. The democratic right built much of the postwar prosperity in West Germany and Japan. The far right, in its Fascist and Nazi forms, produced violent dictatorships, war and the Holocaust. Mainstream conservatives reject that path and defend elections, the rule of law and individual rights.

In 1859 the English philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote On Liberty. He argued that a person who has only heard one side of a question does not truly understand even their own view. You need to hear opposing arguments from people who actually believe them, at their most persuasive. Only then can you know why your view holds up, if it does.

Today people call this steelmanning: building the strongest version of an argument you disagree with. It is the opposite of a straw man, a weak, twisted version of the other side that is easy to knock down. A straw man may win applause from people who already agree. It will not convince anyone else, and it leaves your own thinking untested.

A simple test helps. Could a supporter of the other side read your summary of their view and say, Yes, that is what I believe? If so, you have been fair. Watch also for confirmation bias, the habit of noticing evidence that fits what you already think and skipping what does not. Maya’s early plan to find three studies that agreed with her was confirmation bias at work.

Here is a claim Maya might write: Access to paid, recognized job training outside university helps many young people move up. Her evidence: Germany’s dual system reaches a large share of young people, and Germany’s youth unemployment has stayed lower than many European neighbors’. Her reasoning: a paid path with a recognized credential lets students earn while learning, so family money matters less.

In 1958 the British philosopher Stephen Toulmin described the parts of an everyday argument. The claim is what you want the reader to accept. The data or evidence are the facts that support it. The warrant is the reasoning that explains why the evidence supports the claim. Many classrooms now teach this as claim, evidence and reasoning.

Strong writers also add a qualifier, a word that shows how sure they are, such as often, in many cases or probably. Maya’s claim says many young people, not all. Qualifiers are not weakness. They are honesty about what the evidence can carry. A claim that is too strong breaks when a reader finds one exception.

A reader of Maya’s argument might object: Germany sorts students into school tracks at about age ten, so apprenticeships may lock working-class children out of university. This is a counterargument, a reason someone might reject your claim. It is a serious one, raised by German researchers themselves. Ignoring it would make Maya’s essay weaker.

There are three honest ways to answer. You can offer a rebuttal, evidence that the objection is wrong or smaller than it seems. For example, Germany offers routes from vocational training to later university study. You can narrow your claim so it no longer overreaches. Or you can make a concession, admitting the objection has force, and then explain why your claim still holds on balance.

Place the counterargument where a reader would raise it, often after your main evidence. State it fairly, in its strongest form. Answer it with evidence, not with a label or an insult. Readers trust writers who show them the whole field. A capstone that answers the best objection is more persuasive, not less, because the reader can see the claim has been tested.

Maya presents her findings to her class. A classmate, Andre, disagrees: he thinks college is still the surest road up in the United States. Maya does not roll her eyes. She says, Tell me more about your evidence. Andre cites data showing college graduates earn more on average. Maya agrees that the pattern is real, then shares her German and Danish comparisons. Both leave with something new.

This is civil discourse: discussion in which people disagree honestly while treating each other with respect. A few habits make it work. Listen to understand, not only to reply. Restate the other person’s point before you answer it. Critique the idea, never the person. An ad hominem attack, aimed at a person instead of their argument, proves nothing about the argument.

When you present, make it easy to follow. Start with your question and claim. Show two or three pieces of evidence, each with its source named. Give the strongest counterargument and your answer. End with what you still do not know. Visual aids help many listeners. A clear chart or map with a citation on it lets your audience check your evidence for themselves.