> From: Alex Tabarrok [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Tom Grey wrote > > Further, I derive support for this from limited thought experiments: > > Society A: more Atheist, > > Society B: more Bible Believing. > > > > In which society do I expect more fraud? more cheating spouses & > > promiscuity? more theft? more murder? > > Well, even without empirical support, I believe B will be > better for me to > > live in, whether I, personally, am a weak Episcopalian/ > agnostic/ atheist/ > > or devout believer. > > The data do not seem to support the hypothesis England > and France, for > example, are much less bible believing than the U.S. but overall have > lower crime rates (and despite their reputation the French are > apparently not especially promiscious). The U.S. South is much more > bible believing than the North but crime rates are higher. Atheism > increases with education and income (even more clearly "bible > beleving" > falls with education and income) but crime falls with education and > income. > > The hypothesis is not well framed but if we were to say > simply that > societies with more bible believing should have lower crime rates etc. > than that is even more decisively refuted because most of the world is > not bible believing and the Asian societies, in particular, appear to > have lower crime rates etc. > > Alex
I haven't and won't quote from the Bible, nor claim it is true or not. I confusingly mixed my two hypotheses: a) A society with more Bible believing would be "better" to live in than that society with more atheism, a higher quality of life. b) One who believes in (a) will much more likely believe Biblical explanations of the material world (eg Creationism), and disbelieve any conflicting information/ scientific facts. The point I tried to make was mostly about the latter, (b) seems quite rational to me. Perhaps (b) seems to follow so certainly from (a) that it is trivial, but in Slovakia there are a lot more intellectuals and highly educated people who are believers. And the believers here I know do not believe in Creationism, yet do desire a more "Bible believing" society. So, for the (mostly US?) subset who do disbelieve conflicting info, my (trivial?) point was that this disbelief is rational given their belief in (a). More emotionally involving is the question about which society is "truly" better, where I agree with my intellectual believer friends on the superiority of a believing society. They have lived under atheism. I'm now checking out the Atheism site cited (thanks John), and certainly part of the confusing mix was indicating my own bias. Whether an "A" or "B-believing" society is better should be subject to some empirical data. Alex, I notice you don't mention Euro - communist societies. I suspect the atheist site will also disclaim any responsibility for communism, just as many Marxists try to do so, (not real Marxism! not real atheism!) but I don't think that is intellectually honest--they were 'officially' atheist. Their data must be included. (Similarly, Christians unfairly disclaim N. Ireland violence as not real Christian!) Another sub-topic could also be whether inter-civilization comparisons are valid, applying Huntington: "Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African civilization. The most important conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another." Catholic Slovakia claims Western Civ membership. So maybe Russian atheist data is NOT so valid. More confusion was caused by my not clearly differentiating between crime and "better society". In Slovakia, as in all ex-commie countries experiencing more freedom and more human rights, "crime" has gotten much worse. Yet dumping state atheism has allowed most people to improve their lives. It has also allowed old ex-commies to claim to be believers, like the current Slovak president Rudolf Schuster (former commie regional head, one step below Politburo). I understand that quality of life is more nebulous and less quantifiable than crime, unemployment, gdp per capita, or wealth distribution, so another future subtopic could well be measures of quality of life. And the purpose of good economists is to help improve the overall world quality of life; but knowledge, like legislation, has to be compartmentalized (even quantized, with words among the smallest quanta of knowledge, ignoring pictures ... linguistics are way off track) To conclude, it will be difficult dumping state subsidies to farmers, as long as the John Steinbeck "hard working poor farmer" is so dominant in the Western Civ cultural imagination. It might even be that this cultural fiction is believed more strongly among educated elite university professors and other intelligentsia. Is there any empirical evidence on farm aid subsidy support among professors? (Including and excluding economics.) I'd guess there's more than in the public at large. Perhaps the best hope is convincing the true poor (middle class) farmer that farm subsidies hurt him. Or, perhaps, to create a society with more people who just believe subsidies are bad. Also sorry if I've bored you-but it's been a fun exercise for me. Tom Grey
