Stelios Michalopoulos and Melanie Meng Xue write,
Folklore is the collection of traditional beliefs, customs, myths, legends, and stories of a community, passed through the generations by word of mouth. This vast expressive body of culture, studied by the corresponding discipline of folklore, has evaded the attention of economists. In this study we do four things that reveal the tremendous potential of this corpus for economists and political scientists interested in comparative development and culture.
I am tempted to say that culture = folkways + institutions. That is, one aspect of culture is bottom-up, informal, emergent folkways (or folklore). Another aspect, institutions, is culture that is hierarchically-influenced, formalized, and codified.
Following a painstaking effort to catalog folklore across subgroups, the authors write,
We demonstrate the predictive power of folklore-based measures of culture on current norms as reáected in modern surveys, concluding that folklore itself may be one of the vehicles via which culture is vertically transmitted across generations.
It seems interesting.
See this post:
https://www.aier.org/article/secret-history-tamales-offers-lesson-humility
“. . . concluding that folklore itself may be one of the vehicles via which culture is vertically transmitted across generations.”
They write this as if they’ve discovered a new continent, or just came up with a unified field theory. To me, it sounds pretty obvious. But then, I’m not an economist.
I would also encourage economists to study the folklore of the profession itself.
There are many a fable, totem and hagiography in the Temple of Macroeconomics.