TELL US WHAT WE DON'T KNOW (via John Ray)

People's Opium?: Religion and Economic Attitudes (Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, Luigi Zingales, September 2002, NBER Working Paper)

Since Max Weber, there has been an active debate on the impact of religion on people's economic attitudes. Much of the existing evidence, however, is based on cross-country studies in which this impact is confounded by differences in other institutional factors. We use the World Values Surveys to identify the relationship between intensity of religious beliefs and economic attitudes, controlling for country fixed effects. We study several economic attitudes toward cooperation, the government, working women, legal rules, thriftiness, and the market economy. We also distinguish across religious denominations, differentiating on whether a religion is dominant in a country. We find that on average, religious beliefs are associated with good' economic attitudes, where good' is defined as conducive to higher per capita income and growth. Yet religious people tend to be more racist and less favorable with respect to working women. These effects differ across religious denominations. Overall, we find that Christian religions are more positively associated with attitudes conducive to economic growth.

The paper's available in PDF or by e-mail. The real question though is whether the attitudes decline as religion does. Because if they do then that would buttress the idea that Europe faces a bleak future.

And, just as a way of illuminating the potential importance of such findings, consider the story below from the perspective of certain cultures being conducive to growtrh and others retarding it. Do we really want to be "understanding" if it will wreck our nations? Or might insisting on our culture be necessary to the continued health of our society?:
The Other and Ourselves: Is Multi-culturalism Inherently Relativist? (Charles Taylor, Project Syndicate)

Understanding "the other" will pose the 21st century's greatest social challenge. The days are over when "Westerners" could consider their experience and culture as the norm and other cultures merely as earlier stages in the West's development. Nowadays, most of the West senses the arrogant presumption at the heart of that old belief.

Sadly, this newfound modesty, so necessary for understanding other cultures and traditions, threatens to veer into relativism and a questioning of the very idea of truth in human affairs. For it may seem impossible to combine objectivity with the recognition of fundamental conceptual differences between cultures. So cultural openness poses the risk that we debase the currency of our values.

To grapple with this dilemma, we must understand culture's place in human life. Culture, self-understanding, and language mediate whatever we identify as fundamental to a common human nature. Across human history, always and everywhere, these basic faculties have demonstrated endless extraordinary innovation.

In accounting for such variety, some people anchor our understanding of human nature at a level below that of culture. Sociobiology, for example, seeks to discover human motivation in the ways that human beings evolved. Advocates of this view claim that cultural variation is but the surface play of appearances.

But we can never discover species-wide laws, because we can never operate outside of our historically and culturally specific understanding of what it is to be a human being. Our account of the decline of the Roman Empire is not and cannot be the same as that put forward in 18th century England, and it will differ from accounts offered in 22nd century Brazil or 25th century China.

Here the charge of relativism arises. But it is wrong to believe that accepting cultural differences requires abandoning allegiance to truth. The 17th century scientific revolution's great achievement was to develop a language for nature that purged the purpose- and value-terms bequeathed by Plato and Aristotle to earlier scientific languages, which were nourished by earlier civilizations.

But the universality of the language of natural science cannot be applied to the study of human beings, where a host of theories and approaches compete. One reason for this is that the language of human science draws on our ordinary understanding of what it is to be human, to live in society, to have moral convictions, aspire to happiness, and so on. No matter how much our everyday views may be questioned by a theory, we nonetheless draw on our understanding of basic features of human life that seem so obvious as to need no formulation. It is these tacit understandings that make it difficult to understand people of another time or place.

Ethnocentrism results from the unchallenged understandings that we unwittingly carry with us, and which we cannot dispel by adopting another attitude. If our tacit sense of the human condition can block our understanding of others, and if it is so fundamental to who we are that we cannot merely wish it away, are we utterly imprisoned in our own outlooks, unable to know others?

What if there are truths and the others are wrong?

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 5, 2003 6:26 PM