Religion: God and money: a good mix
Is regular churchgoing good for your wallet?
You might think so. After all, the father of modern sociology, Max Weber, saw that there was a pretty powerful connection between being a good Protestant and being a good capitalist. But people have been arguing about that "Protestant ethic" thesis for a long time now. And many folks have questioned whether it's just Protestantism that leads to worldly prosperity.
For all the curiosity about it, though, there's been surprisingly little rigorous study of the question—far less than what has been devoted to the effect of religiosity on things like health, crime, and substance abuse.
Now to the rescue comes Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist, with a bristlingly dense little study for the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research, entitled "Religious Market Structure, Religious Participation, and Outcomes: Is Religion Good for You?" [abstract]
Gruber admits that it's very hard to separate the effect of religion from other factors affecting income. But he comes up with what he feels is a fairly unassailable set of correlations. First, he finds that religious participation is highest in those places where there is a high density of people sharing the same religious preferences; and second, that for those who are part of it, this "higher market density" leads to all sorts of good things according to key economic indicators such as income, levels of education, dependence on welfare, and marriage and divorce statistics.
Gruber throws in an interesting caveat, though. The positive effects of living around a lot of people who share your religion are offset if most of those people belong to the same ethnic group. In other words, Italian Catholics go to church more often and do better economically if they live in an area where there are not just Italians but other ethnic groups—Poles or Irish, say—that share the Catholic faith.
What that suggests about the ties bind us—and the ones that boost us—is provocative indeed.
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