As Stephen Dowling put it in his BBC News article a few years ago, “when it comes to crossing the road, there's no such thing as an international standard. Every country does it differently.” How people drive and cross the road, according to Dowling, is a matter of a country’s cultural values. Is it really?

An unprejudiced look at the Georgian economy is rather disenchanting. Starting in 1990 at a per capita income that was close to Poland’s, Georgia went into a free fall as a result of secession wars, loss of markets, an explosion of crime and corruption, and the staggering incompetency of its governments.

In 1905, Max Weber, in his masterpiece, “The Protestant Ethics and Spirit of Capitalism”, proposed an interesting hypothesis which claimed that Protestantism, Calvinism, and Puritan ethics influenced the development of capitalism.