{"id":295,"date":"2010-03-28T22:50:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-28T22:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2010\/03\/are-atheist-nations-thriving.html"},"modified":"2014-11-03T21:36:33","modified_gmt":"2014-11-03T20:36:33","slug":"are-atheist-nations-thriving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2010\/03\/are-atheist-nations-thriving.html","title":{"rendered":"Are atheist nations thriving?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Regular readers of this blog will know that nations with a lot of atheists tend to come out on top<\/a> on a number of measures of \u2018societal success<\/a>\u2018 \u2013 wealth, education, life expectancy, and corruption<\/a>, for example. They also score higher<\/a> on a general measure called the Peace Index.<\/p>\n

So when I learned that Gallup had published a new international ranking<\/a>, the Global Well Being Index, I naturally wanted to see how national scores on this measure compare with atheism.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A core part of their measure is the number of people who report they are thriving, defined as follows:<\/p>\n

Gallup measures life satisfaction by asking respondents to rate their present and future lives on a \u201cladder\u201d scale with steps numbered from 0 to 10, where \u201c0\u201d indicates the worst possible life and \u201c10\u201d the best possible life. Individuals who rate their current lives a \u201c7\u201d or higher and their future an \u201c8\u201d or higher are considered thriving.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I compared the percentage of people in each nation who say that they are \u2018thriving\u2019 with the percentage who say that religion is \u201cNot at all important\u2019 to them (data from the 5th wave of the World Values Survey). So this isn\u2019t a comparison of individual piety with individual \u2018thriving\u2019 \u2013 it\u2019s a comparison of national averages.<\/p>\n

The top graph of the three shows how it pans out. Countries with more atheists also have more people who say that they are thriving. But the relationship is pretty weak (the R-squared of 0.17 means that about 17% of the variation in \u2018thriving\u2019 is explained statistically by the variation in atheism \u2013 although cause and effect could go either way, of course).<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not too surprising. Given that countries with more atheists also tend to be wealthier, I was expecting the relationship to be even stronger.<\/p>\n

The weak relationship is explained in part by the fact that there are two kinds of countries with lots of atheists. There are countries where atheism is organic, driven by high living standards. And there are countries where atheism has been imposed (the communist and ex-communist countries).<\/p>\n

The comparison between these two different kinds of atheist countries is revealing.<\/p>\n

Among countries that have never been communist, there is a much stronger relationship between the percent of atheists and the percent of people thriving. The outlier, Japan, has many atheists but is not thriving \u2013 no doubt due to the lacklustre economical performance in recent decades.<\/p>\n

Communist and ex-communist countries, however, without exception score very badly on the \u2018thriving\u2019 index. What\u2019s more there is no relationship \u2013 or perhaps even a slightly negative one \u2013 with the numbers of atheists. I suspect this is because the dead hand of communism is still dragging people down in these nations.<\/p>\n

There is an interesting symmetry between China and Japan. The first is undergoing wild economic growth, while the latter is in the doldrums. And yet they both have similar numbers of atheists, and neither are thriving!<\/p>\n

\n

\"Creative<\/a><\/span> This article by Tom Rees<\/b> was first published on Epiphenom<\/a>. It is licensed under Creative Commons<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Regular readers of this blog will know that nations with a lot of atheists tend to come out on top on a number of measures of \u2018societal success\u2018 \u2013 wealth, education, life expectancy, and corruption, for example. They also score higher on a general measure called the Peace Index. So when I learned that Gallup […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2091,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nAre atheist nations thriving?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Regular readers of this blog will know that nations with a lot of atheists tend to come out on top on a number of measures of 'societal success' - wealth,\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2010\/03\/are-atheist-nations-thriving.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Are atheist nations thriving?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Regular readers of this blog will know that nations with a lot of atheists tend to come out on top on a number of measures of 'societal success' - 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