Category: Religion
What’s this?
Really, I want to know. Chris Blattman doesn’t know either. Please tell me in the comments.
The countercyclical asset, a continuing series
A study last year may lend some credence to the legend. In “Praying for
Recession: The Business Cycle and Protestant Religiosity in the United
States,” David Beckworth, an assistant professor of economics at Texas
State University, looked at long-established trend lines showing the
growth of evangelical congregations and the decline of mainline
churches and found a more telling detail: During each recession cycle
between 1968 and 2004, the rate of growth in evangelical churches
jumped by 50 percent. By comparison, mainline Protestant churches
continued their decline during recessions, though a bit more slowly.
Here is the full story. Here is the paper. Here is earlier discussion from Mark Thoma’s. Here is David Beckworth’s blog.
Why so many churches in Las Vegas?
Robert, a loyal MR reader asks,
I lived there for four years and was always curious. I guess the more sin, the more churches???
For background, here is a 1997 look at the numbers. It seems the city has more churches than average in per capita terms. Among the cities claiming the highest number of churches per capita are Nashville, Grand Rapids, Mich., Waco, Texas, Wheaton, Ill., and Berkeley, Calif. (Berkeley?) Overall the South has more churches per capita than the rest of the country.
I would think that most of the churches in Las Vegas are for the residents, not the tourists, and thus the quantity of sin is not a major factor. Why should the residents be especially sinful? (Don’t forget that lots of sinful activities seem to be produced at constant returns to scale, so there’s not always free-riding upon the sin infrastructure for tourists plus parking is an issue.) In explaining the number of churches, I would expect three factors to play a role:
1. Perhaps migrants to Las Vegas are more likely to come from the South.
2. Most of the population growth is recent, so churches serve a valuable function of social networking.
3. Las Vegas has no dominant established religion so there is much religious competition and thus many different churches.
But surely Jacqueline (and others) can set us straight…
Robin Hanson on the belief in religion and government
A stunning hypothesis from the latest Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:
High
levels of support often observed for governmental and religious systems
can be explained, in part, as a means of coping with the threat posed
by chronically or situationally fluctuating levels of perceived
personal control. Three experiments demonstrated a causal relation
between lowered perceptions of personal control and … increased
beliefs in the existence of a controlling God and defense of the
overarching socio-political system. A 4th experiment showed … a
challenge to the usefulness of external systems of control led to
increased illusory perceptions of personal control. … A
cross-national data set demonstrated that lower levels of personal
control are associated with higher support for governmental control.It
seems we hope a stronger and more benevolent God or State will protect
us when feel less able to protect ourselves. I’d guess similar effects
hold for medicine and media – we believe in doc effectiveness more when
we fear out of control of our health, and we believe in media accuracy
more when we rely more on their info to protect us. Can we find data
on which beliefs tend to be more biased: confidence in authorities when
we feel out of control, or less confidence in authorities when we feel
more in control?
I would say "read the whole thing" except that is the whole thing. Here is evidence from California that voters are more likely to prefer conservative candidates (not exactly what the above study is testing) when economic times are good.
Spot the Contradiction
Daniel Gross’s review of Sachs’ Common Wealth was bizarre. Consider this:
Even congenital optimists have good reason to suspect that this time
the prophets of economic doom may be on point, with the advent of
seemingly unstoppable developments like….the explosive growth of China and India.
Huh? What kind of upside down logic makes high growth rates proof of economic doom? Proving this was no idle slip Gross goes on to say:
Things are different today, [Sachs] writes, because of four trends: human
pressure on the earth, a dangerous rise in population, extreme poverty
and a political climate characterized by “cynicism, defeatism and
outdated institutions.” These pressures will increase as the developing
world inexorably catches up to the developed world. (emphasis added)
Silly me, I thought rising life expectancy, increasing wealth, and lower world inequality, which is what it means to say that the developing world inexorably catches up to the developed world, was a good thing. And then there is this:
The combination of climate change and a rapidly growing population
clustering in coastal urban zones will set the stage for many Katrinas,
not to mention “a global epidemic of obesity, cardiovascular disease
and adult-onset diabetes.”
Ok, climate change will create problems but how clueless do you have to be not to understand that a large fraction of the world’s people would love to live long enough to die from obesity and other diseases of wealth?
Don’t misunderstand, I know that growth brings problems. My dispute with Gross is not that he thinks the glass is half-empty and I think it is half-full; my dispute is that Gross thinks the fuller the glass gets the more empty it becomes.
Addendum: Dan Gross writes to say that he was summarizing Sachs’ argument. Point noted.
Predictions about religion
In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the
faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy
debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence
of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just
cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going
to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.
That’s from David Brooks.
Questions for liberals (and some libertarians)
Robin Hanson, citing the work of Arthur Brooks, asks:
- Would you or I be happier if we let ourselves think more conservatively, such as by attending church more and believing we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps?
- Would society be happier if we encouraged more conservative thoughts?
Robin answers that he would rather "believe whatever is true even if that makes me unhappy." But there is always adjustment on some truthful margin that can be made. Robin could play up the relatively conservative thoughts he already believes in and do more of the church-like activities he already partakes in, even if he does not go to church per se. So these results probably should influence our behavior even though of course we should reject the deliberate pursuit of untruth.
Division of labor in the Babylonian Talmud
This reminds me of Leonard Read’s "I, Pencil," but of course it came much earlier:
Ben Zoma once saw a crowd on one of the
steps of the Temple Mount. He said, Blessed is He that discerneth
secrets, and blessed is He who has created all these to serve me. [For]
he used to say: What labours Adam had to carry out before he obtained
bread to eat! He ploughed, he sowed, he reaped, he bound [the sheaves],
he threshed and winnowed and selected the ears, he ground [them], and
sifted [the flour], he kneaded and baked, and then at last he ate;
whereas I get up, and find all these things done for me.And how many labours Adam had to carry out before he obtained a
garment to wear! He had to shear, wash [the wool], comb it, spin it,
and weave it, and then at last he obtained a garment to wear; whereas I
get up and find all these things done for me. All kinds of craftsmen
come early to the door of my house, and I rise in the morning and find
all these before me.
Credit goes to Stephen Dubner.
What I really think of the new popular economics books
I recently published an article in the Swiss arts magazine Du on the wave of popular economics books. Yes I am an economist but I am also interested in the implicit philosophies and theologies of these books. My piece is in German and not on-line but here are a few bits from it.
About Freakonomics I wrote:
The implicit theology of Freakonomics is that of original sin. The book is full of stories of liars: “people lie, data don’t” can be taken as the book’s motto…
Levitt and Dubner seek to puncture naïve optimism. It is the reader who needs reforming, and the proposal is to drive naivete out of our systems. We must recognize original sin (recall the bite into the apple on the book’s cover), give up on utopian dreams, and stick to what can be proven by science. That means an acceptance of ongoing human depravity, but Freakonomics goes further. It preemptively protects us against encountering that depravity and lying in our own lives. We have been warned, and we need no longer fear disappointment from our encounters with the real world.
It should come as no surprise that Dubner – the one who actually wrote the book – also penned an entire book about his personal theology. Dubner is ethnically Jewish but his parents had converted to Catholicism and raised him as a Catholic. Over the course of his life he rediscovered his Jewish heritage and religion and chronicled that process in his fascinating Choosing My Religion: A Memoir of a Family Beyond Belief. It is theology, Dubner’s main obsession, which gave him the background to write a popular economics book that touched so many Americans.
And how about Tim Harford?
Harford’s voice is always gentle, sometimes cynical, and usually whimsical and reassuring in his language. He points to the ironies of life. He is hardly one to deny that people lie, but such peccadilloes are a sideshow rather than the center of his moral universe. We still can make our way in the world and carve out a small piece of personal happiness and perhaps a small bit of virtue as well. Harford often reminds us that hedonism has its place in human affairs; his latest book opens with a discussion of the prospect of “a rational [you-know-what].”
In other words, Harford serves up British secularism rather than American original sin. Harford’s “Dear Economist” column…views human foibles as inevitable yet endearing; in Harford’s world no judgment is ever too harsh or too one-sided.
As an economist, Harford seems more interested in “invisible hand mechanisms” than are Dubner and Levitt. Freakonomics informs us that what appears to be ordinary is in fact full of corruption. Harford’s Undercover Economist is keener to show that the apparently corrupt can, at the macro level, lead to entirely acceptable and indeed sometimes humane results.
There is much more, here is one final bit:
Popular economics books reveal their true colors most clearly when they talk about sex. In Freakonomics sex is not holy but rather sex and reproduction lead to the birth of criminals…For Harford sex is a slightly naughty pleasure, and a pleasure to be mocked, but at least it is a real pleasure; this American reviewer again cannot help seeing the British tinge of his work.
The Economics of Religious Innovation
Here’s a story from the WSJ about a temple in Hyderabad, India that capitalized on the growing IT industry.
Hoping to capitalize on all the activity, technical colleges
sprouted up in the city’s outskirts near Mr. Gopala Krishna’s temple. Students
started trickling by on their way home from school; many complained about their
failed attempts to secure U.S. visas. That gave the priest an idea to sell the
students on the deity by giving him a new persona, "Visa God." Mr. Gopala
Krishna counseled the students in English, then told them to walk around the
temple 11 times to get their wish. "I used to say, ‘Go, this time you’ll get
it,’" he recalls.Soon, Mr. Gopala Krishna started seeing dozens — then hundreds
— of new visitors a day. In 2005, some local newspapers wrote about the Visa
God, just as new U.S. visa restrictions were taking a toll. Mr. Gopala Krishna
and his relatives also launched a Web site and a newsletter called Voice of
Temples, with features like a primer of sample prayers for help in visa
interviews.…Now devotees of the Visa God say they have to reach the temple by 6
a.m. to avoid the daytime rush.
Where do our beliefs come from?
We all like to think that our beliefs come from rational thinking, deep experience and good judgment. But suppose that you had to predict someone else’s beliefs, let’s say their beliefs about taxes, welfare, regulation….economic policy of all kind. Let’s put some money on it, the better your predictions the more money you make.
I will give you one piece of information to improve your predictions. Either I will tell you whether the person whose beliefs you must predict is an economist or a biologist or I will tell you whether the person whose beliefs you must predict is American or French. Which piece of information do you want?
What does this say about where beliefs come from?
Addendum: Suppose I asked you instead to predict the types of arguments that the person will use to justify their beliefs. Now which piece of information do you want? What is the role of education in determining beliefs?
Laissez-Faire Marriage
Should the state be involved in marriage? Writing in the NYTimes professor of history Stephanie Coontz notes:
The American colonies officially required marriages to be
registered, but until the mid-19th century, state supreme courts
routinely ruled that public cohabitation was sufficient evidence of a
valid marriage. By the later part of that century, however, the United
States began to nullify common-law marriages and exert more control
over who was allowed to marry.By the 1920s, 38 states
prohibited whites from marrying blacks, “mulattos,” Japanese, Chinese,
Indians, “Mongolians,” “Malays” or Filipinos. Twelve states would not
issue a marriage license if one partner was a drunk, an addict or a
“mental defect.” Eighteen states set barriers to remarriage after
divorce.
It’s no accident that the state began restricting and intervening in the marriage contract at the same time as it was restricting and intervening in economic contracts. It was of course the evil Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. who dissented in Lochner v. New York and who also upheld forced sterilization laws in Buck v. Bell (writing that "three generations of imbeciles in enough.") Economists don’t like to talk about social externalities but the connection between economic and social regulation is very clear in the progressives.
I think it’s time to restore
freedom of contract to marriage. Why should two men, for example, be denied the same rights to contract as are allowed to a man and a woman? Far from ending civilization the extension of the bourgeoisie concept of contract ever further is the epitome of civilization. Our modern concept of marriage, for example, is simply one instantiation of the idea of contract.
People will claim that this means a chaos of contracts for every form of marriage. This is wrong factually and also conceptually misguided. Factually, we already allow men and women to adjust the marriage contract as they see fit with pre-nuptials. Moreover, different states offer different marriage contracts with some offering more than one type. Partnerships of other kinds have access to all manner of contractual arrangements without insufferable problems.
More importantly, the chaos of contracts argument is fundamentally misguided. The purpose of contract law is to give individual’s greater control over their lives. To make contract law a restraint on how people may govern themselves is a perversion of the social contract. To restrict people from accessing the tools of civilization on the basis of their sexual preference is baseless discrimination.
It is time to restore
freedom of contract to marriage, Laissez-faire for all capitalist acts between consenting adults!
Thanks to Daniel Akst for the pointer.
Pascal’s wager and religious diversification across children
Justin Wolfers of the Wharton Business School spoke on Pascal’s Wager, saying that if one believes in religion then the greatest risk is choosing the wrong one. And how to hedge against such a risk? Mr. Wolfers advises the following: Have lots of children and bring each one up under a different faith. That way, if people don’t get into heaven themselves, at least they will have maximized the chances that one of their children will.
Here is the link. God may hold this sort of maximizing behavior against you, but surely not against your kids…
Markets in everything
I call this one: "Price-discriminating monopolists appeal to the weak-willed" edition. Let’s say you want to attract the religiously minded parts of the individual. What might your prices look like?
When Larry Pinczower switches on his cellphone, the seal of a rabbinate
council appears. Unable to send text messages, take photographs or
connect to the Internet, his phone is a religiously approved adaptation
to modernity by the ultra-Orthodox sector of Israeli life.More than 10,000 numbers for phone sex, dating services and the like
are blocked, and rabbinical overseers ensure that the lists are up to
date. Calls to other kosher phones are less than 2 cents a minute,
compared with 9.5 cents for normal phones. But on the Sabbath any call
costs $2.44 a minute, a steep religious penalty.
Or maybe there is no weakness of will, but rather the high prices signal the religious loyalty of the phone owner. Here is the full and fascinating article, and thanks to Zev for the pointer.
Why is it not $10 a minute for a call on the Sabbath? Might too high a price signal the person is excessively weak-willed?
The economics of polygamy, continued
(Some) economists, every now and then, look for reasons why polygamy cannot be efficient. How about this?:
Over the last six years, hundreds of teenage boys have been expelled
or felt compelled to leave the polygamous settlement that straddles
Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah.Disobedience is
usually the reason given for expulsion, but former sect members and
state legal officials say the exodus of males – the expulsion of girls
is rarer – also remedies a huge imbalance in the marriage market.
Members of the sect believe that to reach eternal salvation, men are
supposed to have at least three wives.
Here is the longer article, which has several interesting parts.