BOOK REVIEW : When ‘Culture’ Impedes Social Progress : WHO PROSPERS: How Cultural Values Shape Economic and Political Success, <i> by Lawrence E. Harrison</i> , Basic Books $22; 288 pages

One of the flash points of the Watts riots in 1965 was the friction between Jewish shopkeepers and the black community where they did business. A generation later, the focus of black anger in South Los Angeles had shifted to Korean grocers. And so we are prompted to ask a troubling and even dangerous question:

“Why do some . . . ethnic groups do better than others?”

That’s how Lawrence E. Harrison puts the question in “Who Prospers,” a provocative study of why various racial and ethnic minorities fare so differently in America. The answer, says Harrison, is to be found not in skin color but rather in culture: “I believe that cultures that nurture human creative capacity are better than those that don’t.”

Harrison admits that the very notion of culture is “fuzzy and elastic.” He defines it as “a coherent system of values, attitudes, and institutions that influences individual and social behavior in all dimensions of human experience.”

Harrison’s definition is spacious enough to permit him to attribute the varieties of human destiny to the influence, benign and malign, of a long list of imponderables. Thus he ponders the role of Confucianism in the 20th-Century economic “miracle” of Taiwan and Korea. He speculates on the linkage between “traditional patterns of male child rearing” and the tradition of authoritarianism in Spain. And he sizes up the role of natural resources, geography and climate as determinants of cultural progress.

“A temperate climate may be optimal,” he writes.

Harrison is a former official of the Agency for International Development, a well-intentioned New Frontier program that represented the brighter side of Pax Americana, and Harrison draws on his experience in Central America and the Caribbean to validate his theories on the role of culture in impeding or enhancing social and economic progress.

Indeed, some of the most intriguing material in “Who Prospers” is offered up in a series of short studies of five “national success stories”--Brazil, Spain, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. Harrison identifies what he regards as the cultural, historical and political factors that prompted these countries to move from authoritarianism toward democracy, from poverty toward affluence, from social stagnation toward social progress.

By contrast, Harrison bemoans the plight of black and Latino Americans, and he suggests that it is their unfortunate cultural deficiencies that explain their misery and poverty. Anticipating the horror with which his ideas will be received, he feels compelled to reassure us that he is not a racist.

“People confuse comparative cultural analysis with racism,” he insists, “which it most assuredly is not.”

Although he tries to adopt a decorous tone, Harrison allows a certain shrillness to creep into his otherwise careful argument. He worries out loud about what he calls “Afrocentrism” and the “resegregation” of America. He frets over immigrants from Mexico who “bring with them a regressive culture that is disconcertingly persistent.” He pauses to condemn the “anti-business bias in the media, academic and religious communities,” and he even manages to slip in a tedious swipe at lawyers.

Now and then, Harrison puts caution aside and tosses a hand grenade of political incorrectness at the reader. For example, he advocates a closed border with Mexico--”We should not be deterred by fatuous comparisons with the Berlin Wall”--and speculates that “modern remote-sensing technology should do the trick.”

The essential message of “Who Prospers” is that America, once the font of freedom and progress, finds itself in a moral drought precisely because “the mainstream ideas of the West” have dried up: “The United States as a nation has experienced economic and political decline,” he writes, “because of the erosion of traditional American values--work, frugality, education, excellence, community--that had contributed so much to our earlier success.”

The last chapter is an effort to rescue “Who Prospers” from utter gloom, a half-hearted call for “a cultural renaissance in the United States.” Harrison demands, among other things, presidential leadership, religious and educational reform and “above all,” an improvement in “child-rearing practices.” But Harrison expends notably more energy and imagination in describing America’s problems than he does in suggesting solutions.

Harrison cannot be faulted for asking the hard question: Who prospers in America, and why? But his answers are likely to generate more heat than light. And what really renders his book sterile is the fact that he poses the most important question only as an afterthought: If culture is the cause of social despair, exactly what are we supposed to do about it?