Malcolm Gladwell has a chunk of one of his books devoted to this. The theory he uses is that growing rice in paddies is painstaking and meticulous work, where attention to detail and constant refinement are necessary for a good crop, whereas wheat or soybeans don’t need this level of work.
This would predict the same attention to quality and continuous improvement in all rice paddy reliant cultures. China disproves this hypothesis. Even very, very expensive apartments in Shanghai often have terrible quality finish. It looks great when new but even a couple of years later things start to fall apart in most places. And it isn’t confined to accommodation. It’s amazingly difficult to get people to actually follow a maintenance schedule for equipment, even extremely expensive manufacturing equipment. When most of the workforce is at best two generations removed from peasants and most aren’t even one an attitude of “Fuck it, it’ll do.” is pervasive.
Gladwell has made something of a career out of exactly this sort of tenuous, facile nonsense.