Contact Magazine - Transforming Trinidad & Tobago

transforming t&T
Do we really
like it so?
Our resistance to change is rooted deep in the national culture
Sunity Maharaj discusses We Like It So?: The
Cultural Roots of Economic Underachievement
in Trinidad and Tobago by Terrence W. Farrell
A
lifetime’s worth of experience as an economist at the highest levels of
the public and private sectors of Trinidad and Tobago has left Dr Terrence
Farrell with the question posed in the title of his 2017 book, We Like
It So? This follow-up from the author of The Underachieving Society:
Development Strategy and Policy in Trinidad and Tobago, 1958-2008 is both a quest
to understand the source of West Indian economic underachievement and a clarion
call for change.
For a while, Farrell is detained by such theorists as the Dutch cultural researcher
Geert Hofstede and the American psychologist David McClelland, whose work in
culture, attitudes and behaviour enjoys international currency in the corporate
world. However, he quickly comes up against the limitations of cultural extrapolation
in the findings of a McClelland-inspired survey conducted in Trinidad and Tobago.
According to the World Values Survey (WVS) 6th Wave (2010-2014),
Trinbagonians value work more highly and leisure slightly less than global averages.
They are also far less tolerant of corruption than the average person in other
countries, with over 87 per cent of the Trinbagonian respondents saying bribery is
never justifiable, compared to the global sample of 69 percent.
Farrell knows quite enough about his country to recognise that such findings
do not square with reality. “These anomalous or counter-intuitive results probably
arise because people respond the way they think they are expected to respond,” he
remarks. He ascribes the tendency to “ambivalence”, a cornerstone of his developing
theory about the cultural roots of the phenomenon of economic underachievement
in energy-rich Trinidad and Tobago.
The intellectual context
In fleshing out his analysis and argument, Farrell picks his way through the work of a
broad spectrum of thinkers, social scientists, novelists and poets who have plumbed
the Caribbean condition and provide theoretical ballast for his argument.
For graduates of an education system that remains disconnected from its
Caribbean moorings, We Like It So? is a useful introduction to the substantial body
of Caribbean thought developed over the 19th and 20th centuries, going back to
John Jacob Thomas, the revolutionary intellectual born in Cedros in 1841, three
years after Emancipation.
30
Trinidad
and Tobago Chamber
of Industry and Commerce
www.chamber.org.tt/contact-magazine