Why do people in different areas have different living habits?

The reason why people in different regions have different living habits is due to both natural and social factors. As far as nature is concerned, it is mainly geographical location, climate and resource status; Social factors are mainly the long-term accumulation of local history and culture and the influence of foreign politics, economy and culture. However, these natural factors and social factors are basic factors. The reason why these factors can lead to people's different behaviors and make people have different personalities and different living habits depends on people's behavioral motives. As far as economic research is concerned, according to Marshall's point of view, human economic activities are based on two motives: one is to pursue satisfaction and promote human behavior; The second is to avoid sacrifice and limit people's behavior. Broadly speaking, economic activities can be considered to include all activities involving human choice behavior, because choice means "rationality". Choice behavior itself is regarded as the research object of modern economics, and economics is increasingly defined as the science of studying human choice behavior, rather than the knowledge of studying wealth or resource allocation. The following is a detailed analysis of the reasons for the formation of people's living customs in some distinctive areas to reveal some aspects of human economic behavior. 1, the shrewdness of Shanghai people. The general understanding of Shanghainese is: Shanghainese are smart, stingy, stingy, calculating and stingy. The merchant's evaluation is that they are smart, the goods are better, the price is cheaper, and even a dime of change is not spared, so it is difficult to do business with Shanghainese. Others say that Shanghainese are calculating, that they are "ghosts", "traitors", sophisticated and eloquent. Another feature of Shanghainese is arrogance. Shanghainese have a particularly good mentality and a sense of superiority in their bones. Shanghai people's shrewdness and haggle over every ounce in life can be considered as two main reasons. First of all, Shanghai people's shrewdness stems from the influence of business tradition. Shanghai established a town in the Song Dynasty and a county in the Yuan Dynasty. During the Song and Yuan Dynasties, maritime trade was developed and commerce flourished. At that time, the main economic pillars of Shanghai were textiles and shipping. Being engaged in the textile industry requires ingenuity, diligence and simplicity, and developing the maritime industry requires eloquence and flexible management, and all business activities are actually inevitable and prudent, which is the basic requirement of business spirit. Shanghai, a city, developed on the basis of commercial activities from the beginning. As a trading port in the late Qing Dynasty, Shanghai came into contact with the capitalist business spirit earlier. After the reform and opening up, Shanghai has become a national commercial center, and Shanghainese have become modern business elites. The only principle of enterprise management is economic interests, which requires profit maximization. Modern capitalism instills in people the idea of getting rich through commodity exchange, rational calculation and planning. Shanghai's business tradition has cultivated their merchant style, which is characterized by careful calculation. Secondly, Shanghai is an immigrant city. During the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, a large number of wealthy businessmen from Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces poured in, and during the Republic of China, a large number of refugees poured in, including colonialists and business adventurers. It can be said that Shanghai is a mixed place. In such a place, most people are far away from home, strangers to each other, and face great pressure to survive. Only by haggling over every ounce, calculating carefully and being cautious can we survive. Shanghai people's self-confidence, even conceit and arrogance, are all due to the improvement of Shanghai's economic strength, commercial prosperity and status as an international metropolis in recent decades. Under the spirit of capitalism and commerce, and advocating the accumulation of material wealth, the great wealth of Shanghainese itself can give birth to people's self-confidence. On the other hand, Shanghai has the deepest contact with western culture, with obvious western cultural color. In an era when everyone is full of yearning for the west, Shanghai is clearly in the forefront, and he has reason to show his pride as a leader. Finally, it should be noted that Shanghai is also the city with the strongest legal concept in China, and there is little bullying. Shanghai businessmen abide by the commercial law of business ethics and do not engage in illegal business, which is also the need of developing modern business. It can be said that many living habits of Shanghainese are actually the result of adapting to the modern commercial society. 2. Leisure of Chengdu people. An important reason, as Mr. Sun said, is that the construction of Dujiangyan has solved the problem of agricultural irrigation in Sichuan Basin and Chengdu Plain, and the agricultural output is stable, so that local residents have a stable income expectation. Fertile soil and climatic conditions suitable for crop growth also make the marginal output of additional agricultural labor input lower. The steady income and less labor input naturally cultivate the leisure habits of Chengdu people. In addition, Sichuan Basin is located in the southwest corner, and it has been in a semi-closed state for a long time, because it has little contact with the mainland. People there are like a comfortable small country, less disturbed by the outside world, cultivating people's self-care leisure life and providing an environment for leisure life. Northeasters are very generous. Montesquieu said in his "On the Spirit of Law": "The extremely hot climate is not conducive to human strength and courage. People who live in hot weather are weak by nature, which will inevitably lead to their status as slaves, while the cold climate gives people some strength in spirit and body, enabling them to engage in sustained, difficult, great and brave actions and keep them free. " Although this absolute geographical determinism is doubtful, the cold climate and adaptation to the cold climate have at least affected the character of the Northeast people to some extent, making them tough and generous, giving people the feeling of courage and strength. Northeast people have developed the habit of drinking in the cold climate environment, which must have played a role in the formation of unrestrained personality to some extent. It should be noted that once a living habit and regional culture are formed, it is likely to accumulate without external influence. In this regard, John Mill has such an argument: "They are influenced by habitual emotions, common thinking and behavior patterns, they are influenced by the emotional habits and thinking patterns of the specific class to which the group belongs ... and they are influenced by the code of conduct and traditions handed down by their ancestors." For the mutual influence of habits and the appearance of similar network economic effects, we can consider individual capital and social capital proposed by Becker. Personal behavior choice is influenced by personal past experience, social interaction and culture. Everyone must be recognized by the culture recognized by most people in his environment when making behavior choices. When choosing a living habit, he actually gets another commodity brought by "living habit": social differentiation and social prestige. The recognition of his behavior by other members is part of the utility brought by his behavior choice. Moreover, once a person is born, in the process of growing up, he will naturally become familiar with the local living habits. Applying the logic of Smith's sentence, it can be said that it is not the difference of talent that leads him to choose different social habits, but that he has cultivated his adaptability to a certain social habit in the process of constant contact. (Smith's original words are: "In most cases, people's extremely different talents in different occupations in their prime are not so much the cause of division of labor as the result of division of labor." Smith, A Study on the Nature and Causes of National Wealth, Chapter 2, Reasons for Division of Labor) 4. People in Guangzhou dare to eat anything and want to eat everything. On the one hand, Guangdong Province is located in the subtropical zone, with hot and humid climate, criss-crossing rivers, dense virgin forests, and many furuncle viruses caused by poisonous snakes and beasts. Such an ecological environment was very bad in ancient times when productivity was low. Liu An, king of Huainan, advised Emperor Wu of Han Dynasty to go to Lingnan, saying, "The south is hot and humid, and the summer is hot, and it lives with dew. A viper stings, and it's sickly. It is regarded as bladeless blood, but 23 people in 10 died of illness. " In the instinct of survival, the local people are forced to fight against nature tenaciously, and in the process of fighting, they cultivate the spirit of taking risks; On the other hand, Guangzhou has been an important overseas trading port since the Song and Yuan Dynasties, and most people are engaged in the shipping industry, which also requires the spirit of taking risks and pioneering. Lingnan area is rich in treasures in ancient China. In the process of contact with overseas, Guangzhou people also saw many unique overseas products, which cultivated the curiosity of Guangzhou people. The adventurous spirit cultivated by Guangzhou people out of their adaptation to the living environment and curiosity can be said to have both the desire to try-curiosity and the ability to pay-adventurous spirit, which naturally forms an effective demand for the behavior of "dare to eat anything". Moreover, the Lingnan area where Guangzhou is located is not suitable for the growth of food crops. From the Ming Dynasty, cash crops were basically planted in the local area. The shortage of major food crops may be the reason why Guangzhou people try to find more other kinds of food. When the cost of choosing a commodity is too high, people will naturally seek alternatives, although there may be some risks. The harsh environment in ancient Guangdong and the great risk of ocean navigation in the shipping industry also formed another feature of Guangzhou people. They are afraid of superstition and hope to seek protection from supernatural forces. They believe in feng shui and fate, and their shops and restaurants are full of Buddha statues, such as Tathagata, Guanyin or God of Wealth. They think that getting rich and lucky are inseparable from God's blessing. The superstition of Guangzhou people seems to be very popular in Hong Kong, even in Fujian and Taiwan Province provinces, which seems to be related to the loss of traditional culture and sense of belonging caused by the pursuit of material interests by modern people. 5. Wenzhou people's good business and "good business" style. When it comes to businessmen, no one does not think of Wenzhou. The biggest feature of Wenzhou people is that their business style is reflected everywhere in their lives. Wenzhou people want to be businessmen and bosses, and making money and developing is the primary task of Wenzhou people. Wenzhou people become businessmen also related to local natural conditions. Zhejiang is hilly and the land fertility is low. "Wenzhou Fuzhi" records: "The soil is thin and it is difficult to make art, and the people win with strength. It is not easy to weave clothes at the bottom of the valley, and the paint is not produced. " This record reflects that Wenzhou is generally engaged in business because of its "thin soil" and it is difficult to make a living. Moreover, Wenzhou is located in the southeast corner, which is less influenced by orthodox culture. It does not have the traditional idea of emphasizing agriculture and restraining business, nor does it think that businessmen have low social status. During the Song and Yuan Dynasties, the commodity economy in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces developed highly, while in the Southern Song Dynasty, Wenzhou's foreign trade developed rapidly and its commerce and trade flourished. This was the great environment for the rise of Wenzhou businessmen at that time, which initially cultivated the business spirit of Wenzhou people. Ye Shi and others of Yongjia School in the Southern Song Dynasty affirmed the idea of paying equal attention to profit, agriculture, industry and commerce. Although it was largely the result of people fighting for business in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces at that time, their thoughts had a great influence and promoted the establishment of people's profit-seeking concept in the future. Wenzhou people's strong sense of business and the long-term continuation of Zhou Bianyou style are the result of a long-term accumulation of culture, which is similar to the inheritance of northeast people's living customs analyzed earlier. In addition, the inheritance of Wenzhou people's good business spirit is also characterized by the role played by family education. In Wenzhou, children seldom have pocket money. Adults require them to earn money through their own labor and emphasize the cultivation of their business adventure spirit. These experiences have influenced the career preference of Wenzhou children when they grow up. Moreover, since parents and neighbors are mostly engaged in business activities, from the perspective of accumulating and utilizing social capital, engaging in business is also the best choice, which once again embodies the characteristics of the network economy and is actually a path dependence phenomenon. The above is a brief analysis of the differences in living habits of residents in several well-known areas. The investigation of the economic motives and conditions behind human choice behavior requires a lot of observation, especially the observation of the consequences of human behavior. According to the theory of economics, given the assumption of individual maximization, people's choices are optimal. By observing these behaviors, according to the principle of display preference, we can infer people's stable preferences, explain people's behaviors on this basis, and more importantly, make predictions about future behaviors. In fact, there are many difficulties here, the first is the difficulty of a large number of observations. The establishment and verification of social science, especially economics, must be based on a large number of factual materials and evidence. When collecting materials, we must fully investigate various factors that affected human behavior at that time. As far as investigating the differences of people's living habits is concerned, we should first abstract the general characteristics of people's living habits in different regions through a lot of observation. Although we call it "average", in fact, as Friedman collected in "positive economics Methodology", it only depends on the "actual situation" that happens by accident, because we often deliberately ignore many interference factors in our observation, and the neglect of these factors makes many behaviors lose generality. When we test our hypothesis, the difficulty in this respect is even greater. But economics, after all, provides us with a good analytical method. It teaches us how to abstract those assumptions that are useful to us from the observation of phenomena and the basic assumptions of this discipline, and verify them to some extent as a powerful tool for us to explain and predict many human behaviors. An important aspect that needs to be constantly emphasized is that the process of finding such a tool and using it to explain phenomena must rely on a lot of observation of human behavior. "This process must be studied with the help of autobiography and biography, rather than looking for answers from monographs of scientific methods; This process must be driven by axioms and examples and should not be derived from theorems or principles. " Friedman, positive economics's methodology. Finally, as far as I know, there are many views on the explanation of the difference of human living habits, a specific human choice behavior. Hume believes that human feelings and impressions of existing experiences are reflected and repeated in memory and imagination, and the feelings reflected in impressions are called "beliefs", and "beliefs are vivid concepts related to or associated with impressions". (Kang Mangsi's "Institutional Economics" Chapter IV Hume and Pias) Belief and repetition combine to form habits, while the habits of people with the same * * * constitute customs; Marxist historical materialism holds that people's living habits are always based on a certain economic foundation and combined with specific political and cultural conditions, that is to say, all explanations of living habits, people's habits and personality formation must be found in the economic foundation, and the most important economic foundation is the development level of productive forces and the corresponding production relations; Weber regards religion as one of the reasons to reveal people's behavior, and believes that religious beliefs and activities have a binding effect on psychology and affect people's behavior. He emphasized the significance of Protestant ethics in the spirit of modern capitalism and the process of modern western culture. Freud, on the other hand, thinks that it is doubtful that Marx's behavioral motivation and cultural evolution are attributed to the change of social and economic foundation. He believes that human behavior choices are mostly the result of subconscious, an instinct, a special impulse and a sexual instinct. He also criticized the view that religion influences human behavior and promotes human evolution, because in his view, religion "doesn't seem to be permanent, it is just something similar to the mental illness that individual civilized people must experience from childhood to adulthood", that is to say, it further regards religion as influenced by human subconscious. However, although all the above research angles have aroused great repercussions and are regarded as great achievements in academic history, they are not absolutely authoritative. Maybe they are all right and imperfect to some extent. However, science is always correct to some extent. "It only contains different degrees of probability" (Freud), and Pascal even thinks that we can't explain nature or anything about human universality at all. ) Comments (0)