ABSTRACT
The newspapers and magazines in the United States are full of discussions about "family values" and the collapse of public morality. People in small towns across America perceive that there is increasing family violence, teenage pregnancy, drunk driving, and handguns in the high schools. Many economists have no trouble accepting the general proposition that culture shapes human values, since economists do not pretend to explain where values come from. Max Weber grew up in Berlin, the son of a prominent politician, during a time when the German economy was growing explosively and the country was becoming a world power. Weber's formulation of moral economics is the basis of early economic anthropology and remains a powerful theme in the work of prominent twentieth-century anthropologists like Marshall Sahlins and Clifford Geertz. Cultural economics have definitely been the thread that connects economic anthropology most clearly with the mainstream of modern sociocultural anthropology.
