Shopping is the new religion and supermarkets look like churches. Perhaps not.
The assumption is that God and economic growth don’t mix, and never have done, for didn’t the Bible make it clear that we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but render unto God that which is God’s? But not everybody sees it like that.
A paper written by two Harvard economists, Robert Barro and Rachel McCleary, suggests that deeply held religious beliefs can enhance economic performance.
This is by no means a new theory, although in the past the tendency has been for writers to argue that certain faiths foster growth while others hold it back.
David Landes in the Wealth and Poverty of Nations says that the reactionary response of the Catholic church in Spain to the challenge of Protestantism led to slower development than in northern Europe. Not content with merely denouncing Martin Luther, the Catholic hierarchy came down hard on anybody caught reading, let alone publishing heretical texts, introduced the death penalty for reading foreign texts and prevented Spaniards from studying abroad.
”Such retreat was neither predestined nor required by the doctrine. But this path once taken, the Church, repository and guardian of truth, found it hard to admit error and change course. How hard? One hears nowadays that Rome has finally, almost, rehabilitated Galileo, after almost 400 years. That’s how hard.”
The argument deployed by Landes owes much to that of Max Weber, who in his seminal work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism argued that Protestantism promoted the rise of modern capitalism. Those who considered themselves predestined to heaven, the chosen ones, sought to display while on Earth exactly what it was about them that marked them out as special. So they promulgated certain virtues — thrift, honesty, hard work — and abhorred the vices of wasting time, frivolousness, deceit, sloth.
Weber’s argument was rejected by RH Tawney, who said in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism that it was the increased secularisation of Britain as a result of the diminished power of spiritual authority that pushed the country towards industrialisation and growth.
The conclusion of Barro and McCleary’s paper has more than a hint of Weber about it, although the study does not distinguish between one religion and another. ”Our central perspective is that religion affects economic outcomes by fostering religious beliefs that influence traits such as thrift, work ethic, honesty, and openness to strangers. For example, beliefs in heaven and hell might affect these traits by creating perceived rewards and punishments that relate to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ lifetime behaviour.”
Barro and McCleary’s hypothesis is that religion is good for growth because it helps to stimulate and sustain those aspects of human behaviour that make us more productive while frowning on those that make us less productive, such as sloth and ignorance. Religion, in other words, has no real direct influence on economic performance, but has a powerful indirect effect.
They also agree with those social scientists who say that the networks fostered by churches could be important in the formation of social capital, seen nowadays as one of the building blocks of economic development.
The authors also looked at how fervently people believed. Here the finding was that increases in some religious beliefs — notably in hell, heaven and an afterlife — tend to increase economic growth. ”There is also some indication that the stick represented by the fear of hell is more potent for growth than the carrot from the prospect of heaven.”
It’s certainly something to think about when you are being trampled to death in department store hell. — Â