Category: Religion

The historical roots of yoga

by  Tyler Cowen in

The reality is that postural yoga, as we know it in the 21st century, is neither eternal nor synonymous with the Vedas or Yoga Sutras. On the contrary, modern yoga was born in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. It is a child of the Hindu Renaissance and Indian nationalism, in which Western ideas about science, evolution, eugenics, health and physical fitness played as crucial a role as the ‘mother tradition’. In the massive, multi-level hybridisation that took place during this period, the spiritual aspects of yoga and tantra were rationalised, largely along the theosophical ideas of ‘spiritual science,’ introduced to India by the US-origin, India-based Theosophical Society, and internalised by Swami Vivekananda, who led the yoga renaissance.

In turn, the physical aspects of yoga were hybridised with drills, gymnastics and body-building techniques borrowed from Sweden, Denmark, England, the United States and other Western countries. These innovations were creatively grafted on the Yoga Sutras–which has been correctly described by Agehananda Bharati, the Austria-born Hindu monk-mystic, as ‘the yoga canon for people who have accepted Brahmin theology’–to create an impression of 5,000 years worth of continuity where none really exists. The HAF’s current insistence is thus part of a false advertising campaign about yoga’s ancient Brahminical lineage.

The full story is here, and hat tip goes to The Browser.

The Lucas critique and twin adoption studies

by  Tyler Cowen in

It is odd to cite a twin adoption study, and its results, as a response to a methodological critique of…a twin adoption study.  Nonetheless, the paper Alex cites, and the associated graph, show very readily the problems in interpreting such studies.

If you check out the graph, for a variable such as "religious importance" it shows family transmissibility of about thirty percent, with varying estimates of transmissibility for other religious variables.  That is the result from a data set involving a) parents who try hard to transmit religion with some idea of what to do, b) parents who don't try very hard, and c) parents who try hard and have no idea of what is an effective technique, as they might be advised by a well-informed social scientist. 

Here's the key point.  The original "control" question we were debating was about a) alone, yet in response Alex is putting forth a measure of the marginal efficacy for a-c, namely including the families who aren't trying to transmit.  Obviously the marginal product of the informed, trying families should be higher than the average marginal product for the group as a whole.  At the very least we can take thirty percent as the lower bound here, not the best estimate of the effect we are trying to measure.

The Korean-American Protestant study finds transmissibility of religious fervor, through family influence, of two-thirds.  That paper does not control for genetics, and of course because of genetic similarity family influence will run especially easily and this figure is an overestimate of the net family effect.  You can think of two-thirds as the upper bound here.  If we had commensurable studies (not the case), we would have lower and upper bounds for trying-to-transmit families.

One way to think about the Korean study is to recognize that out of 100 Protestant children, parental inculcation "worked" for 66 of them.  The correct marginal product question is: without that inculcation, how many of those 66 kids would have found their way to a comparably observant religion?  Of course we don't know, but that's the right question to focus upon.

Twin studies encourage you to think in terms of a different question about marginal products: if you had those Protestant families adopt 100 kids, and try to inculcate the same religion, would 66 of them have ended up observant?  Very likely not.  Of course the two thought experiments are quite different, and they give you different measures of marginal product, most of all because there are non-linear interactions between parenting, peers, and genes.  Since most children are not adopted, it is the first thought experiment which gives the more accurate measure of marginal product of parental inculcation of religion. 

What about the religious variables which don't seem very transmissible at all?  Alex cites "born agains," drawing on the same paper.  But this interpretation again mirrors a major drawback of many interpretations of twin adoption studies, namely that they don't reconcile the cross-sectional and the time series comparisons.  Alex is walking a simple pitfall here, as does the paper he cites.

What does this mean in practice?  Born agains (or arguably, their revival) are a relatively recent phenomenon in the United States, dating from the 1970s.  (There is a similar revival in biblical literalism, although perhaps less extreme.)  The study takes adults from the mid-1990s.  That means you will have lots of "born again" descendents who had strongly below average prospects of having had "born again" parents.  The correlation will appear very weak, but this doesn't show the variable is not transmissible going forward.  We simply don't know, at least not from this data set.  

To put this final point another way, the father of Abraham was not a Muslim, and so back then the correlation was zero, but this does not show the family cannot transmit Islam in later periods of time.

I'd like to stress again that when it comes to Bryan's book, I agree with most of his points.  But on religion in particular I don't think Alex is making sound claims.

Genetic Factors and the Religious Life

by  Alex Tabarrok in

It's getting late but for the record you can find a good study of genetics and religion in Do Genetic Factors Influence Religious Life? Findings from a Behavior Genetic Analysis of Twin Siblings. PSYDIR offers a good summary:

Bradshaw_2009_genetics_religion

It's a fairly standard twin study. They took a sample of around 600 identical and non-identical twins from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS), and looked at a number of religious characteristics.

Basically, their analysis allows them to tease out the variations that are shared by identical twins but not by non-identical ones (genetic factors), by non-identical twins (family factors or shared environment), and that differed even among non-identical twins. This last factor was put down to the effects of external environment (i.e. things that happen in you life that aren't shared by your twin).

I've put the results in the graph. First off, look at childhood religiosity. The biggest factor is your family, and not your genetics. It's not until adulthood that the effects of genetics really start to shine through. No surprises there!

The 'salience', or importance of religion in your life is about one-quarter defined by genetics, as is your spirituality. The most important factor here, however, is the external environment. You get similar results for religious attendance.

When you get to more personal beliefs, the patterns start to shift. There are three factors that are about 40% driven by genetics, with your family upbringing having hardly any effect. These factors are: how often you turn to religion for guidance, whether or not you take the bible literally, and whether people should stick to one faith, or experiment with others (exclusivist beliefs).

It is true that there are tricky statistical issues with twin research and it is certainly possible that results like these will be overturned in the future. If that happens, however, it will be because of better twin/adoption and direct genetic studies. The type of evidence that Tyler cites is simply not capable of answering the fundamental questions that are being asked by this type of research. It is also true that these results are conditional on an environment, that is a time and place. (But that is the relevant measure for parenting today.)

I would also note that if you think the statistics get the numbers wrong you also have to deal with the fact that the patterns make sense. Parents have the biggest influence on childhood religiosity, non-shared environment has the biggest influence on attendance, genetics has the biggest influence on being "born-again." (Even the word suggests nature.) Bryan's book reviews a number of studies like this which are broadly similar.

What can parents influence?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I had been meaning to pen a longer response to Bryan Caplan (he is the one with "a theory of everything" in this area, not I, his theory just happens to have few variables), but I'll focus on two of his claims, as they are indicative of the larger disagreement:

Parents strongly affect what you say your religion is, but have little long-run effect on your intrinsic religiosity or observance.  I don't discuss language, but it's pretty clear how a twin or adoption study would play out: You can make your kid semi-fluent in another language with a lot of effort.

Both claims are false, at least at many commonly available margins.

Take Jews.  If a group of children are born to Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, or liberal parents, their later religious observance will be predicted by both peers and parental upbringing.  (Perhaps genes are a factor too.)  An Orthodox Jewish boy, with Orthodox parents, growing up in an otherwise non-Orthodox Jewish community of peers, is more likely to stay Orthodox than a Reform Jew from the same community is likely to become Orthodox.  And that of course correlates with levels of observance.  I have no formal study to cite, but can I just stamp my feet and scream this is true?  Because it is.  You can imagine numerous variants on this tale, even if it isn't true for all religious denominations.

Bryan has a tendency to concede environmental factors by noting something like "Of course parents can lock a kid in the closet and affect him that way."  He is less likely to admit that a lot of less extreme influences can matter too and that those influences are missed by twin adoption studies, for whatever reason.

Or take language.  Yana speaks Russian.  She learned Russian from Natasha (her mother, and it wasn't hard for her to speak Russian at home), and note that Yana left Moscow before she was two years old.  This is again a common pattern.  The parents matter, even though in most American families you won't see enough cross-sectional variation (most people speak English at home) to always pick this up.  Travel around India for more examples of this phenomenon.

Presumably the twin studies have in their data sets Jews and possibly some Russian immigrants as well.  And yet the twin studies, with their ultimately macro orientation, miss micro mechanisms such as these.  Parents can matter more than the studies suggest.

By treating those studies as an epistemic trump card, Bryan is led to make claims which are indefensible on the face of it.  I stick by my earlier points.  The evidence Bryan is citing for twin adoption studies is simply…the studies themselves.  Where is consilience when you need it?  

What do twin adoption studies show?

by  Tyler Cowen in

"A case in point is provided by the recent study of regular tobacco use among SATSA's twins (24). Heritability was estimated as 60% for men, only 20% for women. Separate analyses were then performed for three distinct age cohorts. For men, the heritability estimates were nearly identical for each cohort. But for women, heritability increased from zero for those born between 1910 and 1924, to 21% for those in the 1925-39 birth cohort, to 64% for the 1940-58 cohort. The authors suggested that the most plausible explanation for this finding was that "a reduction in the social restrictions on smoking in women in Sweden as the 20th century progressed permitted genetic factors increasing the risk for regular tobacco use to express themselves." If purportedly genetic factors can be so readily suppressed by social restrictions, one must ask the question, "For what conceivable purpose is the phenotypic variance being allocated?" This question is not addressed seriously by MISTRA or SATSA. The numbers, and the associated modeling, appear to be ends in themselves."

A theory of liberal churches

by  Tyler Cowen in

From Michael Makowsky:

There is a counterintuitive gap in the club theory of religion. While it elegantly accounts for the success of strict sectarian religious groups in recruiting members and maintaining commitment, it is less satisfactory when attempting to account for groups requiring neither extreme nor zero sacrifice. Moderate groups are always a suboptimal choice for rational, utility maximizing agents within the original representative agent model. The corner solutions of zero and absolute sacrifice, however, are rarely observed empirically compared to the moderate intermediate. In this paper, we extend the original model to operate within an agent-based computational context, with a distribution of heterogeneous agents occupying coordinates in a two dimensional lattice, making repeated decisions over time. Our model offers the possibility of successful moderate groups, including outcomes wherein the population is dominated by moderate groups. The viability of moderate groups is dependent on extending the model to accommodate agent heterogeneity, not just within the population of agents drawn from, but heterogeneity within groups. Moderate sacrifice rates mitigate member free riding and serve as a weak screening device that permits a range of agent types into the group. Within-group heterogeneity allows agents to benefit from the differing comparative advantages of their fellow members.

Also via Kevin Lewis, here is an interesting Dan Ariely paper on who benefits from religion.  And here is a rational choice model of papal infallibility.

The Nordic triangle?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Via Conor Friedersdorf, and Bagehot, here is a discussion of Henrik Berggren and Lars TrägÃ¥rdh:

Conor writes:

Here's an interesting frame for the difference between America, Germany, and Sweden: every society has a different relationship to "the triangle formed by reverence for the Family, the State and the Individual." 

Bagehot writes:

Americans favour a Family-Individual axis… suspecting the state as a threat to liberty. Germans revere an axis connecting the family and the state, with a smaller role for individual autonomy. In the Nordic countries… the state and the individual form the dominant alliance.

Here is Reihan on this topic.  Here is my earlier and very directly related post on Sweden and the Swede as individualist.  Does anyone have a link to the Pippi Longstocking paper itself?

Here is Bagehot again:

(Before you scoff, you should perhaps know that the French–a conservative and statist lot–have a very complicated relationship with Pippi Longstocking as a children's book. For many years, the only French translation available was a bowdlerised version, that played down Pippi's wilder, anti-authoritarian side. There is a moral in there somewhere.)

The culture that is Sweden

by  Tyler Cowen in

In recent decades, successive waves of immigrants have been coming to Sweden, and many avail themselves of the laws and take Swedish-sounding names to hasten their integration.

Mr. Ekengren recalled a case a few years ago in which an immigrant family requested permission to be called Mohammedsson.

“Permission was granted,” he said.

The article is interesting throughout.

The problem

by  Tyler Cowen in

Via Bob Cottrell:

"This is the place," he says. "The economy is booming and there's a real vibe. My son and I went to Ukraine recently and everyone was saying to us: 'Can we have the Belarus president in charge here for a year?'"

It's not difficult to see why. Unlike Ukraine and Russia, Belarus's economy is not dominated by billionaire oligarchs. There is no underclass: according to UN figures, Belarus has one of the lowest levels of social inequality in the world. Lukashenko wins elections not through fear, but because he has delivered social protection and rising standards of living. Growth now stands at 7 per cent.

The danger, some feel, is that a move towards a more market-oriented economy will destroy these achievements, and leave Belarusians sharing the same bitter-sweet jokes as their fellow eastern Europeans.

The full article is here.  But look here for per capita income:

Belarus: $1248.60 per person (update: correction here)

If you want proof that F.A. Hayek is a brilliant and important thinker, there it is.  On the brighter side, not everyone lives in Belarus.  

Very good sentences

by  Tyler Cowen in

His brothers sell vegetables from a cart and wish they could be rat catchers too.

Here is more, from Mumbai, and this too:

The competition for rat catcher jobs in Mumbai is stiff. Only men aged 18 to 30 need apply. They must be able to lift a 50 kilogram (110 pound) sack and run a few kilometers (miles). They must demonstrate their ability to catch and kill a rat in the dark within ten minutes.

Each rat catcher must kill 30 rats a night, six nights a week. If he doesn't make the quota, he doesn't get paid.

Arun Bamne of the city's insecticide department, which oversees the rat-catching, says people badly need jobs. The last time the city recruited, he said, over 4,000 people – some with university degrees – applied for 33 rat catcher positions.

And this:

There is young Wasim, dragging a rat as big as his forearm from a trap and smacking it to death. His mom giggles as she watches the video.

Such is the parents' pride, they could be watching their son playing the heroic lead in a school play.

"Now he's putting his hand in the burrow," the father said, beaming. "I'm never worried about disease. I have faith in God."

For the pointer I thank George McQuistion.

Women and alcohol

by  Tyler Cowen in

Is there a better blog post title?  Here is the abstract of a new paper, "Women or Wine, Monogamy and Alcohol":

Intriguingly, across the world the main social groups which practice polygyny do not consume alcohol. We investigate whether there is a correlation between alcohol consumption and polygynous/monogamous arrangements, both over time and across cultures. Historically, we find a correlation between the shift from polygyny to monogamy and the growth of alcohol consumption. Cross-culturally we also find that monogamous societies consume more alcohol than polygynous societies in the preindustrial world. We provide a series of possible explanations to explain the positive correlation between monogamy and alcohol consumption over time and across societies.

That's by Mara Squicciarini and Jo Swinnen.