360. Is the Protestant Work Ethic Real?

In the early 20th century, Max Weber argued that Protestantism created wealth. Finally, there are data to prove if he was right. All it took were some missionary experiments in the Philippines and a clever map-matching trick that goes back to 16th-century Germany.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:33Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:06Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:39Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Dean Carlin is an academic economist and also-

• 2:23Speaker 01

  I am president and founder of Innovations for Poverty Action.

• 2:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Which is what?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Which is a nonprofit organization which helps do research to figure out what works and what doesn't to fight poverty and social problems around the world.

• 2:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Carlin, who's at Northwestern, was teaching at Yale back in 2011 when he co-authored a book called More Than Good Intentions.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  And one of the reasons I wrote this book was to help philanthropists make better decisions.

• 2:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Carlin was headed to Hong Kong to give a talk about the book when something really great happened.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  I got an email from a guy, from a secretary to a guy who was the chief financial officer for Morgan Stanley in Asia Pacific.

• 3:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  That sounded like just the kind of philanthropist Carlin was hoping to meet.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  And he was hoping he was going to get a big grant from Morgan Stanley.

• 3:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that's the guy, an American named David Sutherland, who'd been working in Asia since the 1990s. He was in Washington before that, including a stint as a tax lawyer with the Treasury Department. So now-

• 3:23Speaker 02

  So I got a little flyer from the Foreign Correspondence Club that said this guy named Dean Carlin was coming to Hong Kong. So I said, I want to meet with this guy.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  And I was like, perfect. This is why I wrote the book. Sure, happy to have breakfast.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  So I met him for breakfast, and 10 minutes into the conversation, he realized he was just talking to somebody who wanted to talk about his own charity.

• 3:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  So no, Sutherland was not going to write Carlin a big check, but was it possible he could offer something even more valuable?

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Then he got out these reams of folders with tons and tons of spreadsheets and tables. And he said, you know, basically, my passion is this group called ICM in the Philippines, of which I'm chairman of the board, and here's all the things we're doing.

• 4:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  ICM stands for International Care Ministries. It's a Christian organization serving what it calls the ultra-poor.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  So the people that we work with, they are living lives in desperate poverty. They don't have enough food to eat. 32% of all the mothers have had one of their own children die, and 8% have had more than one of their children die.

• 4:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Sutherland and his wife have three kids of their own. His family first heard about ICM back in 1998.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  And it just really moved our hearts. So we started investing a little bit of money, and then just over time, it grew and grew and grew. We got more and more involved.

• 4:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  ICM today has an annual budget of around $10 million. And Sutherland, by the way, no longer works at Morgan Stanley. ICM in the past decade has served roughly 200,000 Filipinos. Its core program is called TRANSFORM. Its curriculum has three components: health and nutrition training, teaching livelihood or economic skills, and religious instruction.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  I mean, my view is that, for sure, there's a lot of fantastic secular charities in this world, but for me, I wanted to be involved in something that reaches the whole person, and for me, that is both physical poverty and spiritual poverty.

• 5:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  ICM works with a network of some 10,000 pastors.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  And these pastors are Protestant pastors. We teach a basic evangelical message that everyone has sinned, they need to put their faith in Christ, and that that is the key to freedom for them.

• 5:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Philippines, we should note, is overwhelmingly Catholic. It's only around 6% Protestant.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  You know, I often say the Protestants are like anarchy. Some guy wakes up in the morning and he decides he wants to be a pastor. He just wakes up and he puts a sign on his front door and says, "We are now the Church of Jesus Christ of Heaven and Earth," and there, he's a pastor. Actually, about a third of the pastors we work with are women. Their entire ecosystem is just the 100 families that they can see out front of their door. So they know which husband cheats on his wife, they know who sings good at karaoke, they know which little girl broke her leg. And so having that connectivity with the local people that we're trying to help is a core tenet that allows ICM to reach those very poor people.

• 6:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Sutherland had great faith in the reach of his pastor network.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  We can find the poorest people, we can reach them very, very efficiently.

• 6:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  So he knew that ICM was good at bringing poor people into the program.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  So the only thing that we need to know for sure is whether the program that we run is in fact effective.

• 6:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ah ha. Enter Dean Carlin. That was exactly the kind of research he tried to do with Innovations for Poverty Action. And he was well acquainted with the religious-based charity model. Roughly 60% of American nonprofits that work in international charity are religious.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  And when I talked with some of these groups, I would often hear claims made that they're not doing the preaching just because they're trying to spread their beliefs, but they actually believe that it's changing economic outcomes.

• 7:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Carlin was as interested in answering Sutherland's question as Sutherland was in having it answered.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  So we do see a lot of correlations out there. People where religion is a bigger part of their life tend to drink less, do fewer drugs, live longer, report higher levels of happiness, do less crime, things of this nature. So lots of correlations.

• 7:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Correlations, yes, but as we've been preaching on this show for years, correlation does not equal causality. People like to use umbrellas when it's raining. Do umbrellas cause rain? Science says no. What about religion? The economics literature has long noted that religiosity often coincides with attributes like diligence, thriftiness, and trust. But again, does religion cause any of this?

• 7:57Speaker 01

  And so that's the basic problem with why you can't go out into a cross-section of the world and just compare religious people to nonreligious people and say, "Ooh la la, look at these differences. Religion must have caused that to happen."

• 8:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Carlin had long dreamed of running a randomized controlled trial, or RCT, to tease out the effect of religion itself, where you'd have a control group and one or more treatment groups. Most religious charities, however, were not interested. David Sutherland could understand why.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Too many of the faith-based organizations weren't willing to set up a control group because they didn't want to set aside a group of people they weren't going to preach to.

• 8:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  But Sutherland himself didn't think like that.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  If an RCT showed that our current program was not effective, I want to know that as soon as possible so that we can pivot to a program that is even more effective.

• 8:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  And so it was that during that breakfast in Hong Kong, Dean Carlin realized that David Sutherland would be a willing partner in his longstanding desire to measure the economic effects of religious belief.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  I said, "Would you ever consider removing the religion from what you're doing so that we can understand how that influences the outcomes of your program?"

• 9:06Speaker 02

  So we kind of ticked through all the boxes and in 10 minutes I said, "Yeah, all of those things work for us. We're happy to do that."

• 9:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  After a few years of fundraising and logistical planning, they began running this RCT in the Philippines. Today on Freakonomics Radio, what'd they learn? Can religion itself improve your economic standing? And we explore perhaps the most famous argument ever about the relationship between religion and wealth.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  This was one of the most influential theses in the social sciences, but also one of the most controversial.

• 9:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's coming up, right after this.

• 10:01Speaker 04

  From Stitcher and Dubner Productions, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 10:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Dean Carlin is hardly the only American economist interested in how religion shapes our economic lives. There's the Association of Christian Economists, the Christian Finance Faculty Association, the Catholic Research Economists Discussion Organization, or Credo.

• 10:35Speaker 05

  We know that religion is one of the most important and powerful forces in society. And so we just want to know, what effect does that have on all sorts of things, including economic outcomes?

• 10:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's James Choi, a finance professor at Yale. He works with Carlin on innovations for poverty action.

• 10:52Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 10:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  The problem with doing economics of religion research is the lack of convincing evidence.

• 10:59Speaker 05

  You know, there's been a lot of suggestive evidence. What you really want to do for the purposes of social science to identify an effect is to randomly assign certain people to be a certain religion and other people to be a different religion, and then just follow them forward and see how do their economic outcomes differ? And that just doesn't happen in the real world.

• 11:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Choi did once try to get at this question in a lab experiment using research subjects with different religious backgrounds.

• 11:23Speaker 05

  So they came into the lab and they did a series of sentence scrambles where they had to rearrange words in order to form English sentences that made sense. And half the subjects got sentences that had religious content in them, the other half didn't. And so the theory was that those who got the religious sentences would have their religious identity made more salient to them and the religious effects would be stronger for them.

• 11:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Then Choi and his colleagues had the subjects play a game that measured how much they'd contribute to a public good.

• 11:53Speaker 05

  So this is a problem society has to solve. How do we get people to contribute to public goods?

• 11:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Public goods being things like the environment, or democracy, or safe streets?

• 12:04Speaker 05

  And what we did find was that when Protestants had their religious identity made salient to them, they contributed more to a laboratory public good, whereas Catholics contributed less to the laboratory public good. And they expected others in the group to contribute less. So it seemed like they were less trusting.

• 12:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Interesting, maybe. But Choi acknowledges the limits of this kind of research.

• 12:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, so laboratory tasks, no matter how cleverly designed they are, no matter how compelling they are, at the end of the day, that's not real life. And so the ultimate test really is, how do these interventions affect people's real lives outside the laboratory?

• 12:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  The fact that economics doesn't really have an answer about the effects of religion is pretty remarkable. When you consider that roughly eight out of 10 people on the planet identify themselves as religious. The three largest denominations are Christianity, around 31%, Islam, 23%, and Hinduism, 15%. Christianity is most concentrated in the Americas, Europe, and Sub-Saharan Africa. The Middle East and North Africa, meanwhile, are 93% Muslim, while the Asia-Pacific region is the most variegated. Just 7% Christian, with 24% Muslim, 25% Hindu, 12% Buddhist, 9% belonging to folk religions, and 21% unaffiliated.

• 13:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Jews, in case you're wondering, make up 0.2% of the global population. And what about James Choi?

• 13:35Speaker 05

  Yes, I do consider myself religious. I identify as an evangelical Protestant.

• 13:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Academia, as you likely know, is not exactly a hotbed of religious sentiment. Even so, Choi has never been shy about his own beliefs.

• 13:50Speaker 05

  If you think that what you believe matters for where you're going to go for the rest of eternity, then, you know, why wouldn't you want to share that with other people?

• 14:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  On his Yale faculty website, Choi has a page that reads, "Why I am a Christian, even though I don't believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy."

• 14:11Speaker 01

  And actually, that post is part of the reason why we ended up working together.

• 14:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Dean Carlin again. He was raised Jewish, now considers himself agnostic. Back when he was on the Yale faculty with James Choi, he'd seen that Easter Bunny page.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  And so one night at dinner, I brought it up.

• 14:27Speaker 05

  And so what we were talking about was, how might we identify the effect of religion?

• 14:32Speaker 01

  And so we started brainstorming about how to actually test this.

• 14:35Speaker 05

  And we had kind of this crazy idea that we would find some missionary organization that went out and evangelized to rural villages that were all isolated from each other, and we would try to convince this missionary organization to randomize which villages they went to and which villages they didn't go to. And so, of course, this is crazy talk, and so this idea went nowhere.

• 14:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  It went nowhere until a few years later, when Carlin had that breakfast in Hong Kong with David Sutherland.

• 15:02Speaker 05

  And then Dean excitedly contacted me and said, you know, I found just the organization that can do this. And this is International Care Ministries. And they are a very data-driven organization, and they care about whether their programs are actually helping people. And so they were willing to randomly assign which villages ended up getting different versions of the programs.

• 15:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, here is how ICM's transform program typically works. The participants, most of them women and self-identified as Catholic, and all of them excruciatingly poor, they'd meet once a week for roughly four months. The meetings were usually held in a church building, but again, even the ICM pastors have very little money. The building might have a dirt floor, a scrap roof, no electricity.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  So every meeting is 90 minutes long. 30 minutes of values, 30 minutes of health, 30 minutes of livelihood, VHL.

• 16:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  David Sutherland again.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  So we train the pastor to teach the values curriculum, the spiritual part of the curriculum, and they get 30 minutes each week. We teach them about the love of God, our respect for biblical principles, how Christ can help you to solve your day-to-day problems.

• 16:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Then there are the two nonreligious components of the program: health instruction.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  We will have our own person, an ICM employee, that we train as a health trainer.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  They're taught ideas about hygiene, nutrition, provided nutritional supplements for children.

• 16:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  And the livelihood portion.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  And we have our own livelihood person trained by ICM.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  The term livelihood in this context refers to kind of economic activity.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  We show them how to do organic gardening, which is very low cash, and then a few weeks later, you can have vegetables to feed your kids.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  There's lessons about small business enterprises, how to get that started. A small grant often goes with that. They also form a savings group, so there's a financial inclusion aspect to the program.

• 17:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that's the typical 90-minute weekly meeting. One-third economic livelihood, one-third health and nutrition, one-third religious instruction. David Sutherland and ICM suspected the program was helpful, long-term, but was it helpful because of the religious values? That is what Dean Carlin, James Choi, and a third economist, Garrett Brian, set out to learn. The first step in a randomized controlled trial is to randomize. They started by recruiting 160 pastors affiliated with ICM and having each pastor identify two Philippine villages where they'd never worked. And in each of those two villages.

• 17:44Speaker 05

  We had the pastors go out and pick out what they believed to be the 30 poorest families in each of these communities. And then we randomly assigned which community the pastor would be ministering to.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  So they would flip a coin about which village they actually went and worked in. And then we used the other one as the comparison. So we had four different treatment arms to the study. We had one treatment arm that received the full package.

• 18:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  The full package, meaning the standard transform curriculum. Equal parts, religious values, health and nutrition, and economic livelihood.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  For another quarter of the villages, just the pastor went, not the ICM employees.

• 18:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  So those participants got only the values or religious instruction.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  For another quarter of the villages, just the ICM employees went, and the pastor never showed up.

• 18:37Speaker 05

  And so in those villages, people were receiving just a secular curriculum and did not receive a Christian curriculum.

• 18:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  In these cases, the program was not held in a church, just to make sure the religious component was totally removed.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  And then a quarter of the villages, there's nothing. They're left as is.

• 18:56Speaker 05

  So that was the control group?

• 18:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  OK, so those were the four conditions from a set of villages that had been chosen randomly, with each condition including hundreds of households. It's pretty impressive for a real-world RCT. Six months later, the economists went back to measure the results. Now, how do you do that?

• 19:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we wanted the study to be about the effect of religiosity on economic outcomes.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  We ended up working with 6,000 households.

• 19:24Speaker 05

  So in order to identify the effect of religiosity, we were comparing those who got values, health, livelihoods, against those who got just health and livelihoods. And then we also compared those who got just values against those who got nothing.

• 19:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  This would allow them to isolate the economic and other effects of the religious instruction. But first, they'd need to know whether the religious instruction actually increased religiosity.

• 19:49Speaker 05

  Our study would kind of go nowhere if the religious curriculum didn't actually change the religiosity of the individuals attending these classes.

• 19:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  They surveyed people to see if the program made them more likely to read the Bible, pray, or attend religious services.

• 20:05Speaker 05

  And we found that it did.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  So we'd found big increases in religious behavior.

• 20:10Speaker 05

  So then we can go to the second stage, which is, given that the religious programs increased religiosity, what does the effect downstream on other economic outcomes seem to be?

• 20:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  They looked at everything from food security to life satisfaction to, of course, income. Because the whole purpose of this project, the whole purpose of the ICM charity, was to alleviate poverty. So what was the biggest downstream effect, as they call it, of just the religious instruction?

• 20:43Speaker 05

  What we found was that just being exposed to the religious curriculum increased income by 9% relative to the control group.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  And that's actually pretty noticeable. That's food. That's food on the table. And this is a household that has children going to bed hungry.

• 21:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that's pretty interesting. A 9% increase in household income that seems to be caused by religiosity. Okay, so that's the what, but what's the why? In this kind of research, the what is usually far easier to answer than the why. But why do we think religiosity might drive income? Dean Carlin, James Choi, and David Sutherland each have their own ideas, which, to my ear at least, seem to reflect their own perspectives on religion. First, we'll hear from Sutherland, the man behind this religious charity.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  Those people live such depressing, fatalistic lives that they don't take advantage of opportunities that are available to them. If we can inject hope into those people's lives, then life can change. And we think that that happens by the secular things that we do. But we also teach them that God loves them and God cares for them. And that aspect of reorienting your whole life around the love of your Creator, and therefore, the love of people around you, I think reorients their whole life. And it changes their approach to how they decide what they're going to do the next day.

• 22:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  And James Choi, the unabashedly religious economist.

• 22:24Speaker 05

  I think that it really probably has to do with the fact that they're told that they have worth in God's eyes, and their suffering has meaning. And therefore, they can continue on, and they can pick themselves up after they experience setbacks. And that's tremendously encouraging. And it allows them to engage in more productive economic behavior.

• 22:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  And finally, the agnostic, Dean Carlin.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  I am very interested in understanding more about issues on hope and aspiration, and kind of drive and ambition. And what is it that makes it so that some ultra poor households later are doing better and others are not? And some of that is bad luck, but some of that is about taking opportunities and seizing them and running with them.

• 23:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Carlin and Choi did turn up some data that addresses the why question, to understand why religiosity might lead to higher income.

• 23:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I think that there were two potential channels that stood out.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  One is that we see optimism increase.

• 23:26Speaker 05

  And second, we found that their grit increased.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Grit is a direct measure of kind of work ethic. You always finish tasks. And this is exactly what we're talking about when we talk about the Protestant work ethic.

• 23:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ah, the old Protestant work ethic. That idea has been around for a long time. What is it exactly? Where did it come from? And how strong is the evidence that it's real?

• 23:55Speaker 03

  So how can we attribute this difference in prosperity to religion rather than some other perhaps unmeasured factor?

• 24:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up after the break, we'll tell you about the ingenious research project that answers these questions about the Protestant work ethic. And if you want to hear some related episodes from our archive, check out episode number 176, Does Religion Make You Happy? And number 288, Are the Rich Really Less Generous Than the Poor? We'll be right back.

• 24:32Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 25:16Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 25:37Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 26:25Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 27:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  The randomized controlled trial of a missionary project in the Philippines found that very poor people earned more money as a result of receiving religious instruction. Why? The researchers suspect there were two primary drivers: optimism and grit. And this is exactly what we're talking about when we talk about the Protestant work ethic. The idea goes back to the early 20th century, when the pioneering social scientist Max Weber wrote a long essay called "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism."

• 27:44Speaker 03

  And this was one of the most influential theses in the social sciences, but also one of the most controversial ones.

• 27:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's George Spencook.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  And I'm an assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

• 27:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Spencook, like Weber, was born and raised in Germany.

• 28:02Speaker 03

  I would describe myself as agnostic, though I did grow up in a Catholic household. My parents go to church regularly.

• 28:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  As a grad student in the US, Spencook got interested in Weber's famous theory.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  Basically, he argued that the Protestant doctrine of self-determination would make people work harder. My question was whether Weber was right, whether there is a causal effect of Protestantism.

• 28:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  To answer this question, we need to go back to 16th century Germany. A young Catholic priest named Martin Luther had grown disgusted by many church practices, especially the sale of indulgences. That is, the forgiving of sins in exchange for large donations.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  And initially, he wanted to reform the church from within. But when he met resistance and was persecuted by church authorities, he decided to break off. And at the time, the printing press had just been invented. So he essentially launched what we called a large-scale media campaign.

• 29:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Luther also launched what came to be known as the Protestant Reformation. It would play out all across Europe for decades, with brutal wars between reformers and church loyalists, with millions of deaths. On the religious front, meanwhile...

• 29:21Speaker 03

  His teachings.

• 29:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Became what's now the Lutheran faith. Luther's teachings departed from Catholicism in several important ways, including a new conception of work.

• 29:34Speaker 06

  So the medieval church Catholicism said, if you really want to be religious and really please God, you need to go into the monastery.

• 29:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Tim Keller, a theologian and the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York.

• 29:47Speaker 06

  The Reformation changed that completely. Martin Luther comes along and says, look at all the places in the Bible where it says that God feeds every living thing. He says, well, how is God feeding every living thing? Is is food just appearing on their table? No. He says, obviously, God is feeding every living thing through human labor. So even the humblest farmer's daughter who is milking a cow is actually doing God's work. And therefore, he said, all work is a calling. All work is doing God's work.

• 30:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  And so it came to be that centuries later, Max Weber would argue that Protestantism helped fuel the rise of capitalism, in part by reframing secular work as a religious expression. Weber also argued that discipline played a strong role, that Protestantism tried to instill the discipline of the Catholic clergy into the Protestant laity. Keller again.

• 30:40Speaker 06

  Catholicism basically said the religious orders, the monks and the nuns, they they had to live a very disciplined life, but but the hoi polloi, the masses, can kind of be out there and doing what they want to do. Protestants came along and it put a lot of emphasis on all Christians have got to live virtuous, disciplined lives, all Christians. And that created a basis for thrift and self-control.

• 31:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's the theory, at least. There was also the influence of the French theologian John Calvin. Calvin was another reformer. I think of Calvin as Lutheran steroids.

• 31:15Speaker 06

  Where Calvin added his own wrinkle was the idea that your salvation is strictly by grace, without any contribution on your part.

• 31:22Speaker 05

  And so now, if salvation is by grace, then how do you know that you are actually saved?

• 31:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  James Choi again.

• 31:31Speaker 05

  And so it's in that sense that people are predestined to either be saved or not.

• 31:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Max Weber had a very particular belief about Calvinist doctrine. He believed that the doctrine of predestination.

• 31:45Speaker 06

  Meant that all Calvinists were radically insecure.

• 31:50Speaker 06

  And that they desperately wanted to prove to themselves that they were saved, but they didn't have any way of proving that. So how can I be sure I'm predestined? And he said, the anxiety of that lack of assurance was channeled into hard work.

• 32:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Max Weber's thesis, especially the insecure Calvinist angle, was not universally accepted. George Spencook again.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  There are all kinds of people saying this is BS. It wasn't just limited to Catholics.

• 32:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  And Keller.

• 32:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, I am a Calvinist. I'm a Presbyterian. And all of us, I mean, every Calvinist I know has always laughed at that.

• 32:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  But what about the broader thesis that Protestantism encouraged a work ethic that drove capitalism and leads to better economic outcomes? Some scholars have attacked Weber's thesis on empirical grounds. For instance, the very Catholic Northern Italy saw the inklings of capitalist enterprise well before the Protestant Reformation. And while it's true that even today Protestant countries tend to be more prosperous than Catholic ones, there is the old correlation does not mean causality problem.

• 32:58Speaker 03

  Yes, the Netherlands and Great Britain are more Protestant than, say, Spain or Italy. But they also speak different languages. They have different cultures apart from religion. And there are many other things that vary. So how can we attribute this difference in prosperity to religion rather than some other perhaps unmeasured factor?

• 33:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  That was exactly the question that George Spencook wanted to answer.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  Whether there is a causal effect of Protestantism.

• 33:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  But if you think about how hard it was for Dean Carlin and James Choi to learn whether religious instruction helped Filipino villagers earn more money, how was Spencook supposed to learn whether a 500-year-old religious transformation had an economic impact that could still be felt today? Well, it started with a simple idea. Remember, the Protestant Reformation triggered wars throughout Europe. Germany, at the time, was made up of more than 1,000 independent territories, each ruled by its own lord or prince.

• 33:58Speaker 03

  And what settled these wars was the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. And that peace treaty gave local rulers and lords the right to determine the religion of their territory and therefore the religion of all people who lived on that territory. And you have to realize that these were times of indentured servitude. So if my lord converted to Protestantism, that meant I also converted to Protestantism.

• 34:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  And if your lord stayed Catholic, so did you. But if a Catholic family lived in a territory where the local prince chose Protestantism, they could freely migrate to a Catholic area and vice versa. This created throughout Germany a checkerboard of Protestant and Catholic micropopulations. And George Spencook noticed something.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  What I noticed was that if you overlay a map from 1555 with a map from modern day Germany and compare to the geographic distribution of Protestants and Catholics, they almost match exactly. Meaning that whichever way a prince decided in the aftermath of the peace has a huge impact on how many Protestants live in the same area today.

• 35:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Spencook realized he could exploit this demographic accident of history.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  So I used that to determine the effect of Protestantism on modern day economic outcomes.

• 35:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Modern Germany is about one-third Protestant, one-third Catholic, and one-third nonreligious. The Protestant and Catholic populations beyond religion itself are quite similar. And Germany being Germany, there was a lot of data available for Spencook to drill down further.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  So we can do better than just looking at are Protestants richer than Catholics? We can ask, are they more educated than Catholics? Or do they work longer hours than Catholics? Do they want to work a longer hour than Catholics, et cetera?

• 36:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  With these data in hand, Spencook could now control for any differences beyond religious affiliation, which let him compare apples to apples, or really to compare observationally equivalent modern German Protestants and German Catholics to see who earns more money and perhaps why. So what did he find?

• 36:24Speaker 03

  I find three things. One, yes, Protestantism increases labor income in modern day Germany. Two, Protestants work longer hours than Catholics. And three, they don't earn higher wages. Meaning it's like, yes, Protestants are a little bit more prosperous, but because they work more.

• 36:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  In other words, the Protestant work ethic does seem to be real. So again, that's the what. As for the why?

• 36:55Speaker 03

  So this is where the data gets very thin. So what I do find in the data that when you ask people, how many hours a week would you want to work, conditional on your income adjusting accordingly, Protestants would want to work longer hours. But what drives these differences? Sort of if you dig a layer deeper, I don't know.

• 37:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Some have argued that institutional differences between Protestantism and Catholicism may trickle down to the individual level.

• 37:30Speaker 06

  The Catholic Church is very, very hierarchical and top down.

• 37:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  The theologian Tim Keller again.

• 37:35Speaker 06

  Protestantism is very entrepreneurial. You start your own denomination, you get things started.

• 37:40Speaker 05

  Horizontally organized religions like Protestantism are argued to be kind of more friendly towards the building of social capital.

• 37:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  The economist James Choi.

• 37:53Speaker 05

  Indeed, what you do find as you look across countries and even within regions is that Protestants are more trusting than Catholics are.

• 38:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Another idea comes from the fact that Protestantism has historically encouraged its adherents to regularly read scripture.

• 38:08Speaker 05

  There's an interesting theory that it was the literacy that was promoted by Protestantism that really led to this economic success.

• 38:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Indeed, one study that controlled for the literacy rate in Catholic and Protestant countries found no difference in their economic success. In any case, George Spencook's evidence for the Protestant work ethic, at least in the context of modern Germany, is pretty persuasive. We should say this is not necessarily an economic argument for conversion. Reverend Keller again.

• 38:39Speaker 06

  If a person is Catholic, living in America today, and becomes a Protestant, does that mean that person's going to make more money, work harder? I doubt it.

• 38:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  And several downsides of Protestantism have been measured. One recent study found that Protestants in 19th century Germany were substantially more likely than Catholics to die by suicide. George Spencook recently published a paper about another troubling association with Protestantism in Germany.

• 39:05Speaker 03

  The 10-second summary is that religion is the single most important determinant of Nazi vote shares at the end of the Weimar Republic. Protestants, at the time, were two to four times as likely as equivalent Catholics to vote for the Nazi party. Now, why was that? In the paper, we argue that that's due to the Catholic Church's influence over parishioners.

• 39:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's worth noting that what Spencook observed about incomes in Germany being driven by working more hours does not seem to account for the income gains that Dean Carlin and James Choi observed in the Philippines.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  We don't see an increase in the number of hours that people work, but we do see important changes in what they're doing.

• 39:57Speaker 05

  They seem to shift away from agricultural work towards other kinds of work, which may be more high-paying, and so that may be kind of just the accounting channel through which their income is increasing.

• 40:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  There are, of course, a lot of differences between the Germans that Spencook studied and the Filipinos that Choi and Carlin studied, especially the fact that the Filipinos were punishingly poor and perhaps had quicker gains to make by trying a different kind of work than what they'd been doing. It's also possible they were already working about as many hours as humanly possible. David Sutherland, the ex-Morgan Stanley CFO who runs the Philippines charity, thinks the religious instruction works for a very basic reason.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  I think reorients their whole life and it changes their approach to how they decide what they're going to do the next day.

• 40:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  As devout as Sutherland is personally, he's not sure the Protestant work ethic is really the key.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  Hey, I'm a true believer, right? So for sure, I would like to say that the Protestant relationship with God is a unique differentiator. Now, could someone with a Buddhist background or a Hindu background or a Muslim background that engaged with God the way they understood it, and if that really injected hope in their life, that clearly would have an important change for them. But whether it's the same as the Protestant, that's really hard for me to say. I don't know. I think that additional study would be needed to know whether that's true.

• 41:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  This is something that everyone we've spoken with today has in common. It may be useful to have learned a few things about the relationship between religion and income. There is much, much more that isn't yet known.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  At the end of the day, you know, we have not answered the question, what is the impact of religion? That's, no one study is ever going to do that.

• 41:46Speaker 05

  We don't have the data to answer that definitively. And so basically, we're left to speculate.

• 41:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  I wish I knew the answer.

• 41:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  So for the many of you listening today who are entering the season of a religious holiday, and for those who aren't, here's to questions asked, questions answered, and even those that remain unanswerable. It's nice to live in a world that's still got a little mystery, don't you think?

• 42:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up next time.

• 42:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's Freakonomics Radio Live, our unpredictable fact-finding mission, where we invite anyone and everyone to tell us something we don't know.

• 42:30Speaker 07

  So in choreography, we have different tools of analysis.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  So what does a hellant and an iPod have in common?

• 42:38Speaker 02

  Darwin kept pigeons for 12 years or more, and he was fascinated by them because you could breed them.

• 42:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Our co-host is Angela Duckworth, the Penn psychology professor and author of Grit.

• 42:52Speaker 08

  So why is this amazing fact so unknown? Like, what, the finches are just too, you know, like, they're sexier than pigeons?

• 43:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's coming up next time. And, big news, we've just scheduled some more tapings of Freakonomics Radio Live, including our first-ever trip to California. In San Francisco on May 16th, we'll team up with our friends at KQED for a show at the North Theatre. And in Los Angeles, on May 18th, we'll be at the Ace Hotel Theatre in partnership with our friends at KCRW. Again, that's May 16th in San Francisco, May 18th in Los Angeles. We'll also be back in New York for two shows in March at City Winery. Dates are March 8th and 9th. For tickets, go to Freakonomics.com/live. I do think they would make a swell holiday gift. Speaking of which, we just put some

• 43:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  other new Freakonomics Radio gifts on our site. Go to Freakonomics.com and click the Gifts tab.

• 43:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Greg Rosalsky, with help from Stephanie Tam and Zach Lipinski. Our staff also includes Alison Kreglo, Greg Rippon, Alvin Melathe, and Harry Huggins. We had help this week from Nellie Osborne. Our theme song is "Mr. Fortune" by The Hitchhikers. All the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The entire archive is available on the Stitcher app or at Freakonomics.com, where we also publish ... transcripts and show notes and much more. If you want the entire archive ad free, plus lots of bonus episodes, go to stitcherpremium.com/freakonomics.

• 44:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  We can also be found on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, or via email at [email protected]. Freakonomics Radio also plays on most of your better NPR stations. Check your local station for details. As always, thanks for listening.

• 45:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by EverPure. Is the value of AI not living up to the promise? The problem is probably your data, not your AI models. When it's scattered across different systems, getting your data AI-ready is a challenge. You keep your AI waiting and everything slows down. EverPure unifies your data so you can see it, understand it and control it all from one simple place and get it AI-ready fast. Unlock the true value of your AI at everpuredata.com.

• 45:43Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 46:13Speaker 09

  Hey, listeners, I'm Ash. And I'm Alena. And we are so excited to have joined the SiriusXM family.

• 46:22Speaker 10

  And you know what? If you want to keep hearing new episodes of Morbid ad free, subscribe to Sirius XM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit SiriusXM.com/podcastsplus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice. Let's go.

• 46:41Speaker 11

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