All world citizens have to learn to cope with climatic cold and heat using money. This holds true for people from individualistic cultures in Western Europe to collectivistic cultures in East Asia, from masculine cultures in Southern Africa to feminine cultures in Northern Europe, and from democratic cultures in North and South America to autocratic cultures in Central America. Climate-related values and practices are learned with the greatest of ease, without awareness of their age-long evolution and of survival as their ultimate objective. As a consequence, hidden cultural remnants of our climato-economic past are waiting to be discovered as companions of our climato-economic present. The joint effects of colder winters, hotter summers, and income per head on life satisfaction and work, reported in the preceding chapters, are cases in point.

It would be overly precise, if not downright naïve, to propose that the impact of a country's climato-economic firmament could be pinpointed at a single component of culture. Rather, a societal culture is a syndrome of values and practices passed on from generation to generation and gradually fine-tuned to its particular climato-economic niche with an accuracy that is often underestimated. In this vein, in the section “Picturing a Triangle of Cultures,” three broad tapestries of culture are first laid out: survival culture, self-expression culture, and easygoing culture. These cultural syndromes are next conceptually related to their alleged contexts of climatic demands and money resources.