Boomerang Michael Lewis

Culture is defined as human phenomena that cannot be attributed to genetic inheritance. Meaning that cultures is all around us, it is our language, our interactions with others, our customs and traditions and the way we go about completing specific tasks. We inhabit a world that has a multitude of language and cultures which bring about various ways of practicing both politics and economics. In his book Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, Michael Lewis takes us with him to places like Iceland, Greece, Germany and Ireland to show us how the culture there influenced the bad decisions that brought about the financial collapse. He calls it the new third world because the region took a step backwards by falling into huge amounts of debt followed by riots and governmental collapse in places like Greece. There are many lessons the reader can learn from this book as long as the reader reads it with a grain of salt and does get lost in the excessive use of stereotypes and racial remarks that Lewis makes. Each statement he makes in the book is vital to make a correlation further on to show how culture relates to politics and economics. The most astounding cultural impact I noticed in the book that led to bad economic decisions was that of Germany. Lewis mentions on page 137 that the German people liked to be near shit but not in it. He relates this to the reader after mentioning his visit to the German red light district of Hamburg. Lewis asserts the claims that the German people are infatuated with dirt, filth, shit, and are open in their discussion on this topic. However when you look at Germany and its financial status it is fairly stable worldwide and is one of the strongest economies in Europe. It is the foundation for the European Union banking system since the Bundesbank had the strongest financial system. Germany ended up being the nation that let others borrow money and Germany also houses the offices of the European Central Bank in