But hang on! Perhaps that\u2019s back to front. Perhaps, in fact, religion causes inequality. Plenty of people think that\u2019s the case, and there\u2019s some good scientific theories<\/a> which suggest it should do exactly that. There\u2019s also evidence<\/a> that belief in God and belief in government are alternative reactions to conditions of uncertainty. And David Stasavage<\/a> at NYU has shown that non-religious people are more likely to favour government welfare schemes.<\/p>\n So does religion help to explain national differences in income inequality? The unfortunate truth is that right now it\u2019s not possible to tell. There simply aren\u2019t enough good-quality historical data to decide whether changes in religiosity come first, before changes in inequality.<\/p>\n However, it\u2019s still possible to have a crack at putting the theory on a slightly more rigorous footing by using multivariate analysis. In other words, look at the correlation between religion and inequality while adjusting for the other factors that also cause inequality.<\/p>\n The only analysis of this type that I\u2019m aware of was published last year<\/a> in a student-run journal, the Journal of Politics and International Affairs. The author, Priyanka Palani, controlled for the numbers of elderly people in a nation, as well as education, GDP and whether the nation has an advanced economy (according to the IMF). The correlation with income inequality remained significant.<\/p>\n Well, that\u2019s interesting but I don\u2019t find it too convincing. The problem is that there are many other factors that affect income inequality that weren\u2019t included in the model. Here are a few that I am aware of:<\/p>\n I put all these factors into a model, correlating them with prayer frequency (which I previously found<\/a> to be strongly related to income inequality).<\/p>\n With 54 nations in the analysis, the only factor that correlated with inequality was religion! None of the others had any effect.<\/p>\n However, that\u2019s probably because poorer countries operate on different economic rules than rich ones do. So I re-ran the analysis just using the richest two-thirds of the nations (Mexico was the poorest one included).<\/p>\n This time three factors came out to have a significant effect: GDP, PR voting, and working-age population. The number of migrants just failed to reach statistical significance. All told, the factors explained nearly 80% of the variation in income inequality.<\/p>\n But guess what. Even after controlling for all these factors, religion still had a significant effect. And the effect was powerful: the four most powerful factors (religion being one of them) all had about the same effect.<\/p>\n I played around with the stats in a number of other ways, mixing things around. But the effect of religion was doggedly persistent.<\/p>\n I also looked at the correlates of government welfare spending. This is a tougher nut because the data aren\u2019t so good. I controlled for various national-level factors that are supposed to explain differences in welfare spending (GDP, number of school-age children, number of retirement-age people, proportional representation again and also ethnic fractionalisation).<\/p>\n The result? No effect of religion! I had better luck when looking at social wages, which is that part of government welfare spent on taking care of people out of work. Here there was a significant effect of religion.<\/p>\n Does that prove that religion actually causes income inequality? No, it doesn\u2019t. But it does help buttress the idea that there\u2019s a feedback loop at work here \u2013 that inequality leads to more religion, and more religion in turn leads to more inequality.<\/p>\n If that\u2019s true, then it raises an interesting possibility. You see, dynamic feedback loops can lead to a system with multiple stable states. In other words, a nation could settle at a position of high inequality and high religion, or low inequality and low religion. Both states would resist change, and it would take quite a hefty kick to move from one to the other.<\/p>\n Could this help explain the persistence of religion and inequality in some parts of the modern world? In the previous post I wrote about new research linking income inequality to religious attendance. The supposition is that the stresses and bad social conditions that are often found in nations with high inequality goad people into church. It also seems to make them generally more religious. But hang on! Perhaps that\u2019s back to front. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2091,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10],"tags":[33],"class_list":["post-341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-causes-of-religion-social","category-effects-of-religion-social","tag-inequality"],"yoast_head":"\n\n
__________________________________________________________________________![\"Creative](\"https:\/\/i.creativecommons.org\/l\/by-sa\/2.0\/uk\/88x31.png\")
<\/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":"