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Comment by Meai | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

Jesuits are Catholics.

> 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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...

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.

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

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.

I do not think that you have ever encountered The Jesuits... They are as Catholic as can be.

In that times the primary goal of all catholic missions was to spread Catholicism, not to provide welfare to "pagans"

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.

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.

...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.

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.

Japan’s wealth has varied over time. Same for the other countries you listed. It seems that a good work ethic that includes working to educate yourself, and a stable environment for your good works to compound on themselves is the main driver. The US had these qualities in abundance and at a large scale for some time.

    Nearly all founding fathers were ... were also deeply religious

I'm no expert but I had the impression the founders weren't big on religion. One wouldn't admit to being an atheist back then, so being into Freemasonry or Deism was as close as you'd expect a public figure to get.

My understanding (and I am not a historian) is that many of the founding fathers were not Christians (e.g. they were deists, agnostic, or atheists); however, they did come from a Christian culture and espoused/endorsed Christian ethical principles. There also were founding fathers who were Christians (e.g. Sam Adams, Washington, and Patrick Henry).

My interpretation of this is that America was founded based on Christian ethics, culture, and philosophy; even if many of the founders were not practicing Christians. In my opinion, this does not necessarily imply that America is/should be a Christian nation in the right wing/culture war sense.

They assembled a country from components of a lot of cultures through history. They were as informed by the source of Christian ethics (older religions and philosophies with the same ideas) as by Christianity itself.

The founding fathers were very far from being "deeply religious." Once, when Benjamin Franklin proposed a moment of prayer - at a difficult point during negotiations over the shape the nation should take - the other founders just looked at him as though he were a fish. No prayer happened. And Mr. Franklin wasn't exactly pious, either.

Two big factors: the U.S. and Canada held enormous untapped gold and silver sources, and the U.S. (and Russia) appropriated all German intellectual property after WWII. Their allies didn't, but kept trading with the U.S. nonetheless.

While religiosity has been diverging significantly over the last decades, no such different existed in the times you mention, i. e. from first settlements to, say, WW2.

The degree to which the founding fathers were religious is debatable. It would appear to be singular achievement for men of actual, deep faith to resist the temptation to recreate the sort of intertwined state and church typical of the time.

A somewhat more believable narrative is that the founding fathers tended more to the religious ideas of enlightment, in a process parallel to what would later result in the french revolution.

That believe system is called "deism" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism#Deism_in_the_United_Stat...) and Wikipedia lists quite a few well-known names (with varying degrees of evidence).

It is unlikely that any of them believed in a "Wealthy god", for most of these men were quite smart, and had studied philosophy, while the idea of God being "wealthy" in a material sense is insanely stupid: Once you've created the universe, you really don't care about your ranking on the Forbes list.

There is, obviously, the Calvinist/Puritan tradition that emphasised work ethics (plus burning of witches). But it's important to remember that these were very small communities, and that about a hundred years passed between the pilgrims and US independence. By that time, these groups were but a minor fraction of the population. The vast majority of delegates to the Continental Congress were therefore (officially) Anglicans or "mainline" Protestants.

That's not to discount the Quaker/Calvinist/etc. influence, which certainly played a role. But it's unclear if the causality was quite as easy as one may think: after all, religious believes emphasising self-reliance may just be too good a fit for the needs of small groups of settlers arriving on a vast and wild continent. So it's just as believable that the importance of such doctrine was retrofitted to the needs of the time, possibly even afterwards.

In any case, drawing an equivalence from these early believes of redemption through work to today's version of retrofitting religion to match culture, namely the so-called "Prosperity Gospel" is a simplification bordering on insult. That's easily observed by comparing adherence of the former tradition (the Amish being the closest example you'll find) and the latter (the President comes to mind).

The missing pieces are obvious: humility was certainly among the values, but wealth wasn't. While hard work was/is emphasised, it was/is not intended to lead to earthly riches, but to atone for the original sin and, by God's grace, lead to rewards not in this life, but what comes next.

"The degree to which the founding fathers were religious is debatable. It would appear to be singular achievement for men of actual, deep faith to resist the temptation to recreate the sort of intertwined state and church typical of the time"

Considering that the sectarian violence of the English Civil War was still fresh in their minds, and that many of the States did have different official state churches (e.g. MA:Puritan, PA:Quaker, MD: Catholic), they all made a pragmatic compromise to prohibit the congress from establishing a federal religion or interfering with the state religions of any of the several states.

As an example, the original MA state constitution, written by Adams, makes the Congregationalist church the state religion, and guarantees state funding to construct a church in each town and pay a Congregationalist minister to preach there. That's why there is a quaint white wooden church in the center of each town in MA and ME (which was part of MA at the time).

Jefferson might have been a deist and his Democrats have always been more aligned with the spirit of the French enlightenment and revolution, but the Whigs/Federalists were most definitely not.

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.

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.

Most of the discussion here is driven by people who clearly did not read the entire article. Maddening.

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.

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.

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