Does easter contribute to economic growth? As any Christian will tell you, Jesus was crucified on Good Friday and the faithful celebrate his resurrection on Easter Sunday. Sure, the spike in church attendance on Easter Sunday results, in part, from the special pleasure people derive from marking Easter in church. But the supply-side product enhancements many churches offer in holy week – special choral and flower arrangements and the increased networking opportunities that come with a full house – also help to tilt the cost-benefit balance towards Easter Sunday attendance. As a result, religious observance falls below average in the weeks following Easter as the semi-regular worshippers who shifted their attendance to holy week drop away. If sunny weather increases the value of a walk in the park or other competing products on a Sunday, attendance falls even further. For economists, going to church is just another aspect of rational choice that is ripe for examination. Laurence Iannaccone of George Mason University, author of a comprehensive survey of the economics of religion, has his tongue nowhere near his cheek as he cites the premise that “individuals allocate their time and goods among religious and secular commodities so as to maximise lifetime and afterlife utility.” His musings on the delicate balance between the spiritual and the material represent just the tip of the iceberg. While by no means a mainstream branch of economics, proponents of the dismal science have examined the relationship between the individual and his religion, or lack of it, in exhaustive detail. No question has gone unasked – or unanswered. Why are people religious? What determines their choice of religion? Why do fanatical sects develop? And what is the effect of church attendance? Of course, economics does not help in determining whether religious belief is well founded but it can explain the links between society and prosperity on the one hand, and religion on the other. The results are often surprising. The question of whether religion improves economic performance was first examined by Adam Smith as far back as the 18th century. He saw religion as providing a constraint to enforce individual morality. Last century, the German sociologist Max Weber argued that the Protestant reformation fostered the work ethic and thereby ensured the triumph of western European and American capitalism in the 19th century. And in the past decade, it has become fashionable to blame Islamic teaching for the lack of modernity and economic progress in predominantly Muslim countries. It is all very well to sit around and argue the history, economists say, but econometric techniques and the data exist to reach a verdict on these competing theories. The thrust of the findings is that it is very hard to discern a link between religion and a country’s economic performance, once the starting position of an economy, education levels and other important factors have been taken into account. “Backwardness” among Muslim nations, in particular, is a myth. Marcus Noland, a senior fellow of the Institute for International Economics, found that if you looked at the proportion of a population that was Muslim, either across countries or within countries with large regionally concentrated Muslim populations, it was almost impossible to find a statistically significant negative effect of Islam on economic growth. “If anything, Islam promotes growth,” Mr Noland concluded. A country’s religion, therefore, is not an important determinant of its prosperity. Famous economists, however, have lighted on some factors that do seem to make a difference. Robert Barro and Rachel McCleary of Harvard University found, not surprisingly, that countries with high church attendance had high levels of belief in God and hell. But where two countries had similar levels of church attendance, economic performance was superior in the one where belief in hell was stronger. In the same vein, countries with high church attendance had a worse economic performance than less observant countries with similar levels of belief in God or hell. Belief matters more than belonging, they concluded. The threat of hell stops people cheating and increases trust, a valuable public good. But actually attending church wastes time that could be spent engaging in more profitable activities. Academics have not restricted themselves to studying the causal relationship between religion and economic performance. Many studies have set out to determine whether richer societies need less religion. The US is a big outlier. While religious observance tends to fall in most countries as prosperity increases, the US has seen no reduction in church attendance or the proportion of clergy in society. Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776) predicted that the vibrancy of the church in a society such as the US was inevitable. Competition among different churches would keep the clergy on their toes in a country without a single official religion. State-sponsored churches, the norm in many European countries, like any other monopolist, would get lazy, he argued. “The teachers of [religion] in the same manner as other teachers, may either depend altogether for their subsistence upon the voluntary contributions of their hearers; or they may derive it from some other fund to which the law of their country may entitle them. Their exertion, their zeal, and industry, are likely to be much greater in the former situation than in the latter.” But it is in their study of individual choice and its relation to religion that economists are surest of their ground. Church attendance, it turns out, is associated with good outcomes such as less criminality, higher incomes and lower divorce rates (so long as you marry someone from the same denomination). Nor does a self-selection effect account for the benefits derived from religious observance: in other words it does not seem to be simply that good people go to church. The theory of clubs neatly explains the emergence of weird sects. Extreme self-sacrifice, whether expressed through an onerous tithe or a drastic change in lifestyle, shows a credible pre-commitment to a club and helps to screen out potential freeloaders. Economics, therefore, dictates that before you unquestioningly attend or avoid church this Sunday, you should think about your motives. How will your actions maximise your utility – and, as you make that judgment, just how far into eternity should you be looking? Pa Che! ¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤ To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://listserv.icors.org/archives/gambia-l.html To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?S1=gambia-l To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to: [log in to unmask] ¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤