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The study is still incomplete until you figure out whether the belief in God and specifically the bible are actually what helped retain the knowledge and work e

by Meai 8y ago

The study is still incomplete until you figure out whether the belief in God and specifically the bible are actually what helped retain the knowledge and work ethic over multiple generations and how it compares to atheist/muslim/[other religion] communities. Instead we get a bold claim that education itself is enough to help people when maybe the bible or religious belief in general was a primary ingredient in that help.

johnchristopher 8y ago
My protestant mother explained me once something that went like this: there is a protestant ethic that says God reward his believers with success in life so protestants would then work hard or try to be successful as a way to seek confirmation from the community that they are good standing believers. I don't know much about protestant ethic but that sounded plausible to me.
- raincom 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...
- NonEUCitizen 8y ago
  Jesuits are Catholics.
- goto11 8y ago
  Calvinists does have this views, but Lutherans does not. Since the Lutheran populations (Scandinavia and northern Germany) seem to historically have been as economically successful as the comparable Calvinist populations, I think this hypothesis cannot be true. In any case, both Jesuits and Franciscans are Catholic.
- geezerjay 8y ago
  > there is a protestant ethic that says God reward his believers with success in life so protestants would then work hard or try to be successful as a way to seek confirmation from the community that they are good standing believers. As the story goes, protestants changed their religion (or better yet created a new one) to fit their peculiar cultural trats, not the other way around.
- BirdieNZ 8y ago
  That's known as the prosperity gospel, and it is not the same thing as the Protestant work ethic. It is also a particularly modern problem/belief, and unlikely to be the cause of the economic differences between Catholics and Protestants. The Protestant work ethic is far more about the theology of the Reformers, and in particular the Calvinistic Reformers. Their doctrines included the idea of doing all that you do for the glory of God (including your vocation, and thus compelling excellence at work), treating your material possessions as ultimately belonging to God and not yourself, and thus not to be wasted in frivolities, denial of the self and self-pleasure, resulting in less waste on "fancy living", and much less of a focus on giving to the Church as a means of attaining grace. This resulted in private individuals accruing more wealth. It certainly isn't the only reason for European capitalism and wealth, but it appears to be a factor.
naim08 8y ago
I wonder if religion did play a role. One particular case that is interesting: USA. USA is pretty religious country(>2/3 believe in god and angels) relative to other western countries(where religion is in decline and below 1/2). Its often argued that the religious nature(protestants) of USA shaped the superpower and its economic dominance. Nearly all founding fathers were wealthy land owners who were also deeply religious. The god that they believed in was a wealthy god, who told his subjects it was okay to pursue wealth and fortune. So its not surprising that Televangelists ask for crazy donations and live like the wealthy.
- Normal_gaussian 8y ago
  Or, more simply, the USA has had huge amounts of natural resources available to it, and profited from the wars that wrecked the previous superpowers.
  - emn13 8y ago
    ...and easily defensible borders for when things did go pearshaped, and peaceful (and weak) neighbors to avoid the drain of constant defense, and had lots of internal cultures to draw from. And in any case throughout certainly the first half the 20th century the US was not uniquely religious; much of europe was too, and non-coincidentally shared the same faiths. The ascent of the US appears to have occurred at least somewhat before the loss of faith in europe. So... who knows? I mean, there are so many differences you're never going to be able to pick the various effects apart without careful - but subjective and error-prone - plain old reasoning. I don't see any particular reason to believe religion played a very notable role, but I don't think it's an absurd notion either: I just don't know, and haven't seen a very convincing argument either way.
  - mc32 8y ago
    Russia, Mexico, Brazil, etc., have or had more readily available natural resources. The US, unlike the Spanish viceroyalties relied more on agriculture and trade than the Portuguese and Spanish colonies who stuck gold in the Americas. Japan is natural resource poor yet it’s the worlds third leading economy. So thats not the main driver.
simen 8y ago
Are you for real? It's hardly a bold claim that education helps spread and retain knowledge. This is well known and supported by numerous studies. We know that parents' economic and educational status correlates well with children's economic and educational status. Also, this area was more or less completely converted to Christianity. If everyone's Christian, that can hardly account for the fact that economic and educational status correlates with distance to these missions. The article also mentions that this same relationship did not hold for the Fransiscan missions, who similarly promoted Catholicism and belief in the Bible, but didn't focus as much on education. This is unexpected if Christianity by itself was the primary cause. Also, I'm not an expert on the Guarani or Jesuit missions, but it seems that actually the natives were the ones who dictated how labor was to be organized: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/614138 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/614138 This says that they established a sort of proto-socialist system (my word, not theirs) of communal ownership and redistribution of food on mission lands by threatening to go on strike, essentially. Since the Jesuits were totally dependent on the Guarani as the primary labor force farming and feeding the missions, they couldn't impose the harsher labor regime they wanted. This doesn't sound like unenlightened Indians being taught the value of hard work by Jesus, it sounds like a well-organized group of people who knew the value of their own labor and took steps to ensure that they could benefit fairly from it. All in all, if you want to claim that the power of Christian belief alone can account for these findings, I think the burden of proof is squarely on your shoulders.
baddox 8y ago
I’m more curious about why the Jesuits chose to build their missions where they did. I highly doubt they placed them randomly, and strongly suspect that they placed them in places with good opportunities for building thriving communities.
- ziotom78 8y ago
  The authors considered this objection and rejected it. Apparently, the "best" places were already taken by Franciscans, which arrived in the New World maggiore the Jesuits.
pokemongoaway 8y ago
The really crazy thing is that the modernists/leftists/futurists/etc make bold claims that they can replace culture with an unnamed and undefined culture to good avail! They are never pushed to back this up with evidence - and in the few cases that they are, they cry "fascist, nazi" etc... Their evidence always amounts to finding flaws or issues in existing culture. Anyone with any knowledge of logic should be able to understand why finding issues in culture/religion/the-way-things-are is not evidence to any degree that a new (and especially undefined) culture is more problem-free. They just seem to want a government-sanctioned blessing to destroy and become our authorities.
- JohnStrangeII 8y ago
  It is evident to anyone who seriously studies Western civilization that our (mostly) shared values are an offspring of the French Revolution, similar, though earlier, slower and less violent democratic developments in England, humanism and enlightenment (Rousseau, etc.), utilitarianism to some extent - Mill addressed the Social Question and the utilitarian tradition later evolved to modern liberalism -, and medical, hygienic, and technological advances, last but not least factories and modern manufacturing and the invention of fertilizers. Some modern values are even the result of such mundane things as officers and politicians fearing death due to the power and sophistication of modern weapons, leading to international treaties to ban certain weapons and disarm countries, as well as new multilateral diplomatic treaties and conventions (U.N., Geneva Conventions, etc.). It is easy to see that there is no coherent set of "Christian values" that is not based on secular traditions, just look at the history of Christian torture (middle age), genocides, child abuse, Christian support for Feudalism, crusades, and so forth. The Christian values you endorse nowadays are an invention that didn't exist 150 years ago and resulted from the influence of other ideologies on Christianity, not the opposite.
  - pokemongoaway 8y ago
    This is a straw man. I did not argue that all of western civilization are based on a coherent set of Christian values. I don't know why you put "Christian values" in quotes either; I didn't mention "Christian values" in my post. Not only did you make a straw man to attack, but then you falsely claimed that I "endorsed" it! It is really impossible to have a reasonable discussion when this level of dishonest tactics are employed.
zczc 8y ago
The study compares effects of activity by Jesuits and by Franciscans. Both are Catholic orders so the difference is not related to the religion, but to the focus on education in Jesuits missions
- Meai 8y ago
  Maybe the jesuit order did very little or nothing to spread catholicism, as their mission was described to combat poverty and health issues. We can see this kind of faith divorced service in catholic missions and hospitals. They don't require anything in return, not even the time to sit through a sermon.
  - zczc 8y ago
    In that times the primary goal of all catholic missions was to spread Catholicism, not to provide welfare to "pagans"
  - sgt101 8y ago
    I do not think that you have ever encountered The Jesuits... They are as Catholic as can be.
pygy_ 8y ago
This is addressed in the article. The effect is uniquely found around former Jesuit missions, not Franciscan ones. > The Franciscans helped, too. The mendicant order had been in the area longer than the Jesuits. It wasn’t expelled. But the Franciscans focused on poverty and health, rather than education and vocation. Valencia found that, perhaps as a result, families’ economic and educational outcomes didn’t vary based on their distance to that order’s missions.
- iguy 8y ago
  This would be more convincing if it had a map of where the Franciscans set up shop. Does anyone know of one? The article has a map of where the Jesuit missions were located, and they are in quite a small area, basically in a line about 300km long. So the variable "distance to closest Jesuit" is probably just distance from this region. http://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjy024 http://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjy024
imgabe 8y ago
There should be a number of other missions that were led by orders who stressed a belief in God but not necessarily education the way that the Jesuits do. It would be simple enough to see if the same levels of achievement persisted around the non-Jesuit missions.
- rdl 8y ago
  Which they did, described in article. As I was reading it I kept coming up with “why not X instead” and a paragraph or two later they recognized that point and addressed it to my satisfaction.
  - macintux 8y ago
    Most of the discussion here is driven by people who clearly did not read the entire article. Maddening.

by Meai 8y ago

johnchristopher 8y ago

My protestant mother explained me once something that went like this: there is a protestant ethic that says God reward his believers with success in life so protestants would then work hard or try to be successful as a way to seek confirmation from the community that they are good standing believers. I don't know much about protestant ethic but that sounded plausible to me.

raincom 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...
NonEUCitizen 8y ago
Jesuits are Catholics.
goto11 8y ago
Calvinists does have this views, but Lutherans does not. Since the Lutheran populations (Scandinavia and northern Germany) seem to historically have been as economically successful as the comparable Calvinist populations, I think this hypothesis cannot be true. In any case, both Jesuits and Franciscans are Catholic.
geezerjay 8y ago
> there is a protestant ethic that says God reward his believers with success in life so protestants would then work hard or try to be successful as a way to seek confirmation from the community that they are good standing believers. As the story goes, protestants changed their religion (or better yet created a new one) to fit their peculiar cultural trats, not the other way around.
BirdieNZ 8y ago
That's known as the prosperity gospel, and it is not the same thing as the Protestant work ethic. It is also a particularly modern problem/belief, and unlikely to be the cause of the economic differences between Catholics and Protestants. The Protestant work ethic is far more about the theology of the Reformers, and in particular the Calvinistic Reformers. Their doctrines included the idea of doing all that you do for the glory of God (including your vocation, and thus compelling excellence at work), treating your material possessions as ultimately belonging to God and not yourself, and thus not to be wasted in frivolities, denial of the self and self-pleasure, resulting in less waste on "fancy living", and much less of a focus on giving to the Church as a means of attaining grace. This resulted in private individuals accruing more wealth. It certainly isn't the only reason for European capitalism and wealth, but it appears to be a factor.

naim08 8y ago

I wonder if religion did play a role. One particular case that is interesting: USA. USA is pretty religious country(>2/3 believe in god and angels) relative to other western countries(where religion is in decline and below 1/2). Its often argued that the religious nature(protestants) of USA shaped the superpower and its economic dominance. Nearly all founding fathers were wealthy land owners who were also deeply religious. The god that they believed in was a wealthy god, who told his subjects it was okay to pursue wealth and fortune. So its not surprising that Televangelists ask for crazy donations and live like the wealthy.

Normal_gaussian 8y ago
Or, more simply, the USA has had huge amounts of natural resources available to it, and profited from the wars that wrecked the previous superpowers.
- emn13 8y ago
  ...and easily defensible borders for when things did go pearshaped, and peaceful (and weak) neighbors to avoid the drain of constant defense, and had lots of internal cultures to draw from. And in any case throughout certainly the first half the 20th century the US was not uniquely religious; much of europe was too, and non-coincidentally shared the same faiths. The ascent of the US appears to have occurred at least somewhat before the loss of faith in europe. So... who knows? I mean, there are so many differences you're never going to be able to pick the various effects apart without careful - but subjective and error-prone - plain old reasoning. I don't see any particular reason to believe religion played a very notable role, but I don't think it's an absurd notion either: I just don't know, and haven't seen a very convincing argument either way.
- mc32 8y ago
  Russia, Mexico, Brazil, etc., have or had more readily available natural resources. The US, unlike the Spanish viceroyalties relied more on agriculture and trade than the Portuguese and Spanish colonies who stuck gold in the Americas. Japan is natural resource poor yet it’s the worlds third leading economy. So thats not the main driver.

simen 8y ago

Are you for real? It's hardly a bold claim that education helps spread and retain knowledge. This is well known and supported by numerous studies. We know that parents' economic and educational status correlates well with children's economic and educational status. Also, this area was more or less completely converted to Christianity. If everyone's Christian, that can hardly account for the fact that economic and educational status correlates with distance to these missions. The article also mentions that this same relationship did not hold for the Fransiscan missions, who similarly promoted Catholicism and belief in the Bible, but didn't focus as much on education. This is unexpected if Christianity by itself was the primary cause. Also, I'm not an expert on the Guarani or Jesuit missions, but it seems that actually the natives were the ones who dictated how labor was to be organized: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/614138 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/614138 This says that they established a sort of proto-socialist system (my word, not theirs) of communal ownership and redistribution of food on mission lands by threatening to go on strike, essentially. Since the Jesuits were totally dependent on the Guarani as the primary labor force farming and feeding the missions, they couldn't impose the harsher labor regime they wanted. This doesn't sound like unenlightened Indians being taught the value of hard work by Jesus, it sounds like a well-organized group of people who knew the value of their own labor and took steps to ensure that they could benefit fairly from it. All in all, if you want to claim that the power of Christian belief alone can account for these findings, I think the burden of proof is squarely on your shoulders.

baddox 8y ago

I’m more curious about why the Jesuits chose to build their missions where they did. I highly doubt they placed them randomly, and strongly suspect that they placed them in places with good opportunities for building thriving communities.

ziotom78 8y ago
The authors considered this objection and rejected it. Apparently, the "best" places were already taken by Franciscans, which arrived in the New World maggiore the Jesuits.

pokemongoaway 8y ago

The really crazy thing is that the modernists/leftists/futurists/etc make bold claims that they can replace culture with an unnamed and undefined culture to good avail! They are never pushed to back this up with evidence - and in the few cases that they are, they cry "fascist, nazi" etc... Their evidence always amounts to finding flaws or issues in existing culture. Anyone with any knowledge of logic should be able to understand why finding issues in culture/religion/the-way-things-are is not evidence to any degree that a new (and especially undefined) culture is more problem-free. They just seem to want a government-sanctioned blessing to destroy and become our authorities.

JohnStrangeII 8y ago
It is evident to anyone who seriously studies Western civilization that our (mostly) shared values are an offspring of the French Revolution, similar, though earlier, slower and less violent democratic developments in England, humanism and enlightenment (Rousseau, etc.), utilitarianism to some extent - Mill addressed the Social Question and the utilitarian tradition later evolved to modern liberalism -, and medical, hygienic, and technological advances, last but not least factories and modern manufacturing and the invention of fertilizers. Some modern values are even the result of such mundane things as officers and politicians fearing death due to the power and sophistication of modern weapons, leading to international treaties to ban certain weapons and disarm countries, as well as new multilateral diplomatic treaties and conventions (U.N., Geneva Conventions, etc.). It is easy to see that there is no coherent set of "Christian values" that is not based on secular traditions, just look at the history of Christian torture (middle age), genocides, child abuse, Christian support for Feudalism, crusades, and so forth. The Christian values you endorse nowadays are an invention that didn't exist 150 years ago and resulted from the influence of other ideologies on Christianity, not the opposite.
- pokemongoaway 8y ago
  This is a straw man. I did not argue that all of western civilization are based on a coherent set of Christian values. I don't know why you put "Christian values" in quotes either; I didn't mention "Christian values" in my post. Not only did you make a straw man to attack, but then you falsely claimed that I "endorsed" it! It is really impossible to have a reasonable discussion when this level of dishonest tactics are employed.

zczc 8y ago

The study compares effects of activity by Jesuits and by Franciscans. Both are Catholic orders so the difference is not related to the religion, but to the focus on education in Jesuits missions

Meai 8y ago
Maybe the jesuit order did very little or nothing to spread catholicism, as their mission was described to combat poverty and health issues. We can see this kind of faith divorced service in catholic missions and hospitals. They don't require anything in return, not even the time to sit through a sermon.
- zczc 8y ago
  In that times the primary goal of all catholic missions was to spread Catholicism, not to provide welfare to "pagans"
- sgt101 8y ago
  I do not think that you have ever encountered The Jesuits... They are as Catholic as can be.

pygy_ 8y ago

This is addressed in the article. The effect is uniquely found around former Jesuit missions, not Franciscan ones. > The Franciscans helped, too. The mendicant order had been in the area longer than the Jesuits. It wasn’t expelled. But the Franciscans focused on poverty and health, rather than education and vocation. Valencia found that, perhaps as a result, families’ economic and educational outcomes didn’t vary based on their distance to that order’s missions.

iguy 8y ago
This would be more convincing if it had a map of where the Franciscans set up shop. Does anyone know of one? The article has a map of where the Jesuit missions were located, and they are in quite a small area, basically in a line about 300km long. So the variable "distance to closest Jesuit" is probably just distance from this region. http://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjy024 http://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjy024

imgabe 8y ago

There should be a number of other missions that were led by orders who stressed a belief in God but not necessarily education the way that the Jesuits do. It would be simple enough to see if the same levels of achievement persisted around the non-Jesuit missions.

rdl 8y ago
Which they did, described in article. As I was reading it I kept coming up with “why not X instead” and a paragraph or two later they recognized that point and addressed it to my satisfaction.
- macintux 8y ago
  Most of the discussion here is driven by people who clearly did not read the entire article. Maddening.