Towards a Theory of Societal Co-Evolution: Individualism versus Collectivism

TL;DR

This paper develops a theoretical model to analyze how individualism versus collectivism influences societal traits like welfare, inequality, and population, revealing trade-offs between individual benefits and societal costs.

Contribution

It introduces one of the first analytical models of societal co-evolution considering individualism-collectivism, predicting impacts on multiple societal metrics.

Findings

Individualism increases average and cumulative welfare.

Higher individualism leads to lower average life-time and total population.

Individualism results in higher societal inequality.

Abstract

Substantial empirical research has shown that the level of individualism vs. collectivism is one of the most critical and important determinants of societal traits, such as economic growth, economic institutions and health conditions. But the exact nature of this impact has thus far not been well understood in an analytical setting. In this work, we develop one of the first theoretical models that analytically studies the impact of individualism-collectivism on the society. We model the growth of an individual's welfare (wealth, resources and health) as depending not only on himself, but also on the level of collectivism, i.e. the level of dependence on the rest of the individuals in the society, which leads to a co-evolutionary setting. Based on our model, we are able to predict the impact of individualism-collectivism on various societal metrics, such as average welfare, average life-time, total population, cumulative welfare and average inequality. We analytically show that individualism has a positive impact on average welfare and cumulative welfare, but comes with the drawbacks of lower average life-time, lower total population and higher average inequality.