Matthias Herfert

Humane Progress Matthias Herfert

HUMANE PROGRESS is likely thought-provoking for international management and tourism, social and economic policy, academic research, and everyday intercultural life. Most of the book is a table-based atlas of 79 countries that allows anyone to study international cultural similarities, cultural uniqueness differences, and levels of a particular cultural living standard. The author relates them to 2017 data of international trade and gross domestic product. In his study, economically richer countries trended to have more unique cultures, trade more with more similar cultures, not have lower cultural living standards, not trade more long distance, and not trade more reciprocally. As a high measure of his devised cultural living standard, the author imagined a society that in his view is very attractive in how people interact with each other and what their general priorities are in life. What he came up with is in his belief a socially very humane way of living together. Advancement with respect to such cultural living standard, in his view represents a type of humane progress.