summarize the main ideas of the article following：1. The emergence of the discipline of economics in the 18th century was the result of people trying to explain something that had never happened before. At the time a handful of countries were becoming fabulously rich, while others remained dirt-poor. In 1500 the world’s richest country was twice as well-off as the poorest one; by 1750 the ratio was five to one. It is no coincidence that the most famous book in economics, published in 1776, inquired into “the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations”.

2. In order to explain such a divergence between rich and poor countries, the early economists were obsessed with culture, a catch-all term encompassing a society’s beliefs, preferences and values. Adam Smith, the author of “The Wealth of Nations”, explored the ways in which culture helped or hindered capitalism. He argued that certain norms were required in order for market economies to thrive —most importantly that people would be self-interested, but that they would satisfy their selfinterest by adapting to the needs of others. Karl Marx, a few decades later, worried that a culture of “oriental despotism (专制)” prevented the emergence of capitalism in Asia. 

3. The speculations of Smith, Marx and others were often vague. Max Weber’s “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”, published in 1905, made them concrete. Weber argued that Protestants, in particular Calvinists, drove the emergence of capitalism due to a strong work ethic. 

4. In the middle of the 20th century such cultural explanations began to fall out of favour. The rapid rise of Japan’s economy in the 1950s, and later of the Asian “tigers”, quashed (击碎) the Marxist-Weberian notion that Western culture alone was conducive to industrialisation. At the same time the increasing availability of data with which to do statistical analysis meant that economists’ attention went elsewhere. Why bother with hard-to-measure matters such as morals, when it is possible to plug hard data such as capital accumulation, wages or employment into a regression model? In 1970 Robert Solow, a Nobel prizewinner, quipped (讥讽) that attempts to explain economic growth with reference to culture ended up “in a blaze (大火) of amateur sociology”.    