Economic Crisis and Human Values

The theory of modernization and cultural change suggests that socio-economic conditions are correlated with the values prevalent in the population. In the process of socio-economic development, human values change from survival values to self-expression values that result in greater civil and political liberties and broaden people’s priority and entitlement to act according to their choices. In this paper, we examine the differences in young generation values under three economic conditions – before the last economic crisis, during the crisis and after the main dangers of the crisis were overcome. Here we would like to propose the hypothesis that not only the absolute position of a country on economic development scale is important for the value systems, but the relative change of the economic well-being.

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