Above It All
Church Membership and Economic Recovery: Evidence from the 2005 Hurricane Season
Iftekhar Hasan, Stefano Manfredonia & Felix Noth
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper investigates the critical role of church membership in the process of economic recovery after high-impact natural disasters. We document a significant adverse treatment effect of the 2005 hurricane season in the Southeastern United States on establishment-level productivity. However, we find that establishments in counties with higher rates of church membership saw a significantly stronger recovery in terms of productivity for 2005-2010. We also show that church membership is correlated with post-disaster entrepreneurship activities and population growth.
Do the Three Modern Social Conditions -- High Existential Security, Education, and Urbanicity -- Really Make People Less Religious? A Worldwide Analysis, 1989-2020
Louisa Roberts
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Some versions of secularization theory propose that existential security, education, and urbanicity exert directly measurable negative effects on religiosity cross-culturally. However, few studies have tested this using longitudinal data. Nor have researchers adequately examined how much the relationship between these modern social conditions (MSCs) and religiosity varies society-to-society. This study addresses these limitations in a series of new analyses, using 1989-2020 World/European Values Survey data from approximately 100 countries. Results suggest that the three MSCs do not exert independent, negative effects on religiosity in general, at least not in the short or medium term. Indeed, national-average increases in these MSCs were not found to predict decreased religiosity. And, interestingly and unexpectedly, the direction of individual-level relationships between each MSC and religiosity varied greatly between countries and world regions. These findings suggest scholars should probably look elsewhere to explain why average religiosity has decreased in some world locations over recent decades.
Independent Media, Propaganda, and Religiosity: Evidence from Poland
Irena Grosfeld et al.
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Exploring a drastic change in media landscape in Poland, we show that mainstream media can significantly affect religious participation. After nationalist populist party PiS came to power in 2015, news on state and private independent TV diverged due to propaganda on state TV, resulting in a switch of some of its audience to independent TV. Municipalities with access to independent TV continued to follow a long-term secularization trend, while municipalities with access only to state TV experienced a reversal of this trend. An online experiment sheds light on the mechanisms underlying the effect of exposure to independent news on religiosity.
Evolution vs. Creationism in the Classroom: The Lasting Effects of Science Education
Benjamin Arold
Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Anti-scientific attitudes can impose substantial costs on societies. Can schools be an important agent in mitigating the propagation of such attitudes? This paper investigates the effect of the content of science education on anti-scientific attitudes, knowledge, and choices. The analysis exploits staggered reforms that reduce or expand the coverage of evolution theory in US state science education standards. I compare adjacent student cohorts in models with state and cohort fixed effects. There are three main results. First, expanded evolution coverage increases students' knowledge about evolution. Second, the reforms translate into greater evolution belief in adulthood, but do not crowd out religiosity or affect political attitudes. Third, the reforms affect high-stakes life decisions, namely the probability of working in life sciences.
Physical constraints during Snowball Earth drive the evolution of multicellularity
William Crockett et al.
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, June 2024
Abstract:
Molecular and fossil evidence suggests that complex eukaryotic multicellularity evolved during the late Neoproterozoic era, coincident with Snowball Earth glaciations, where ice sheets covered most of the globe. During this period, environmental conditions -- such as seawater temperature and the availability of photosynthetically active light in the oceans -- likely changed dramatically. Such changes would have had significant effects on both resource availability and optimal phenotypes. Here, we construct and apply mechanistic models to explore (i) how environmental changes during Snowball Earth and biophysical constraints generated selective pressures, and (ii) how these pressures may have had differential effects on organisms with different forms of biological organization. By testing a series of alternative -- and commonly debated -- hypotheses, we demonstrate how multicellularity was likely acquired differently in eukaryotes and prokaryotes owing to selective differences on their size due to the biophysical and metabolic regimes they inhabit: decreasing temperatures and resource availability instigated by the onset of glaciations generated selective pressures towards smaller sizes in organisms in the diffusive regime and towards larger sizes in motile heterotrophs. These results suggest that changing environmental conditions during Snowball Earth glaciations gave multicellular eukaryotes an evolutionary advantage, paving the way for the complex multicellular lineages that followed.
Early Christian Growth: A Scale-Free Story?
Sean Everton
Naval Postgraduate School Working Paper, June 2024
Abstract:
Rodney Stark caused a stir among religious historians and biblical scholars when he showed that one could model the growth of the early Christian church with simple arithmetic. He demonstrated that if the church grew at approximately 40 percent per decade (3.4 percent per year), it would have grown from around 1,000 members in 40 CE to approximately 6.3 million members by 300 CE, which accords with some estimates. In light of Stark's analysis, early church historian Adam Schor has considered the strengths and weaknesses of using quantitative modeling to study early Christian growth. He speculates that perhaps the early church benefitted from being embedded in a scale-free network. Scale-free networks are driven by preferential attachment, resulting in networks where most actors have only a few ties while a handful (hubs) have numerous. Schor argues that hubs could have served as brokers for spreading Christian beliefs and practices. Moreover, scale-free networks are resilient to external shocks because removing random actors tends to have little effect on network structure since most have few ties. Schor believes this might help explain the early church's ability to weather various storms (e.g., plagues, persecution). This paper uses network simulation and multivariate regression to model the spread or diffusion of the early Christian church to explore whether it would have benefited from a scale-free network structure. Controlling for various types of network structure, exposure thresholds, and the number of ties of initial converts, the models show that the early church would have benefited from a scale-free network structure if (and only if) its earliest converts had numerous ties. Absent such ties, scale-free networks would have offered little to no advantage. The models' results have implications beyond the growth of the early Christian movement. Specifically, social movements (religious or secular) can reach "network" tipping points that, if breached, can hinder future growth.