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Cultural codes: An economic analysis

In her article ‘Cultural Codes and Military Ethics Israel’s Leadership and POWs from the 1973 Yom Kippur War,’ Dalia Gavriely-Nuri (2012) presents a simple but important hypothesis: ‘When an official code of military ethics has yet to be institutionalized, cultural codes tend to substitute as guides to conduct.’ To investigate this hypothesis Gavriely-Nuri examines what she calls the ‘Cultural Code of Captivity.’ That code offered to fill a void created by the absence of formal rules stipulating how Israeli political and military leaders were to behave toward Israeli prisoners of war (POWs) captured during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Gavriely-Nuri finds that Israeli leaders generally failed to comply with the Cultural Code of Captivity. On the basis of this failure she warns of ‘the danger posed by the absence of official . . . codes of conduct’ that ‘allows . . . culture to fill the vacuum.’ My commentary brings economic analysis to the discussion. I use rational choice theory to consider the basic themes Gavriely-Nuri’s article raises. By highlighting the role that individuals’ incentives play in determining their behavior, the economic approach makes it possible to understand why some cultural codes are effective while others aren’t, and to predict the contexts in which cultural codes are likely to succeed or fail. My argument is straightforward. Gavriely-Nuri’s hypothesis is surely right. In the absence of formal codes of military conduct, informal codes that regulate such conduct emerge in their place. Indeed, it’s not only in military contexts that cultural codes substitute for missing formal ones. They do so in any context where persons require rules to cooperate. But a crucial element is missing from Gavriely-Nuri’s discussion one that illuminates why Israeli political and military leaders largely failed to comply with the informal code that emerged in their context and why, in general, cultural codes that share the Cultural Code of Captivity’s basic features are destined to be ineffective. That element is enforcement. Like formal codes, cultural codes without mechanisms for enforcing their regulations have no teeth. Rational, self-interested persons will only comply with such codes when they would have done so without them. This is a problem because the very purpose of codes is to cause individuals to behave in ways they wouldn’t behave otherwise. Journal of Multicultural Discourses Vol. 7, No. 3, November 2012, 227 233