Great read. As the world becomes more secular, we need better frameworks to make religious worldviews more "legible" to audiences & social scientists who cannot mentally accept or empathize with a non-materialist world view.
I appreciate how you take religious people at their word in interviews, rather than interpreting their beliefs as something else entirely.
Framing piety as utility captures a real trade-off many religious individuals make! I'm curious about the relative weight of earnings vs. piety—does higher household income reduce religiosity? I'm not sure it does? But I could be wrong especially in communities with strong social incentives to maintain religious signaling.
Azzi and Ehrenberg have an old 1975 JPE paper that builds a model of lifetime utility that includes the afterlife. The paradise premium fits very well into their framework!
Azzi, C., & Ehrenberg, R. (1975). Household allocation of time and church attendance. Journal of political Economy, 83(1), 27-56.
Great and a very informative article but the research on effects of Ramadan on pregnancy outcomes and Ramadan fasting and happiness are hard to divorce from selection effects. I feel like it should be explicitly acknowledged especially since it touches upon a politically and spiritually sensitive topic. We live in times where social research has an outsized effect on discourse contrasted to its validity or predictive power.
There's also the complication that the competition that counts is not material consumption, but effective reproduction; it's inherently zero-sum, so "raising all boats" isn't selected for.
One way to look at it is that the West somehow got into a state where status competition was over material things, and particularly the sort of material things that allow one culture to achieve predominance over others -- technologies of war, wealth of the sort that attracts immigrants, etc. After a few centuries of that, the West was able to conquer a sizable fraction of the world.
How does your observation "South Asia differed - trusted networks of cooperation were consolidated through endogamous marriage (within extended kin) and male honour depended on female seclusion." fit with the "WEIRD hypothesis" that modernity was triggered by the Church deliberately destroying the clan system in western Europe? I've never seen a clear analysis of east Asia in that light, other than that the Japanese government had a campaign against cousin marriage in the early 1900s.
Great read. As the world becomes more secular, we need better frameworks to make religious worldviews more "legible" to audiences & social scientists who cannot mentally accept or empathize with a non-materialist world view.
I appreciate how you take religious people at their word in interviews, rather than interpreting their beliefs as something else entirely.
Framing piety as utility captures a real trade-off many religious individuals make! I'm curious about the relative weight of earnings vs. piety—does higher household income reduce religiosity? I'm not sure it does? But I could be wrong especially in communities with strong social incentives to maintain religious signaling.
Azzi and Ehrenberg have an old 1975 JPE paper that builds a model of lifetime utility that includes the afterlife. The paradise premium fits very well into their framework!
Azzi, C., & Ehrenberg, R. (1975). Household allocation of time and church attendance. Journal of political Economy, 83(1), 27-56.
Great stuff. Causality can go the other way, however. Lack of economic (earthly) prospects can lead to focus on otherworldly goals.
A bit like no athiests in foxholes?
Great and a very informative article but the research on effects of Ramadan on pregnancy outcomes and Ramadan fasting and happiness are hard to divorce from selection effects. I feel like it should be explicitly acknowledged especially since it touches upon a politically and spiritually sensitive topic. We live in times where social research has an outsized effect on discourse contrasted to its validity or predictive power.
There's also the complication that the competition that counts is not material consumption, but effective reproduction; it's inherently zero-sum, so "raising all boats" isn't selected for.
One way to look at it is that the West somehow got into a state where status competition was over material things, and particularly the sort of material things that allow one culture to achieve predominance over others -- technologies of war, wealth of the sort that attracts immigrants, etc. After a few centuries of that, the West was able to conquer a sizable fraction of the world.
How does your observation "South Asia differed - trusted networks of cooperation were consolidated through endogamous marriage (within extended kin) and male honour depended on female seclusion." fit with the "WEIRD hypothesis" that modernity was triggered by the Church deliberately destroying the clan system in western Europe? I've never seen a clear analysis of east Asia in that light, other than that the Japanese government had a campaign against cousin marriage in the early 1900s.