Culture: Persistence and Evolution

This paper presents evidence on the speed of evolution (or lack thereof) of a wide range of values and beliefs of dierent generations of European immigrants to the US and interprets the evidence in the light of a simple model of socialization and identity choice. The main result is that persistence diers greatly across cultural attitudes. For instance, many family values, political orientation, and most deep personal religious values converge slowly to the prevailing US norm. Others, such as attitudes toward cooperation, children’s independence, and sexual matters, converge rather quickly. The results obtained studying higher generation immigrants dier greatly from those found when the analysis is limited to the second generation, as typically done in the literature, and they imply a lesser degree of persistence than previously thought. Finally, we show that persistence is \culture specic" in the sense that the country from which one’s ancestors came matters for the pattern of generational convergence.