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Wealth and church attendance: correlation or causation?
Also at the Acton Institute blog is a discussion of a recent MIT study that says that weekly church attendance raises your income 10 percent. I have to wonder whether they’ve fallen for the causation fallacy, i.e. that two data points don’t necessarily indicate causation rather than correlation. In other words, it may not mean that if someone wants to raise their income that going to church will help.
Instead, I think it shows that people who go to church on a regular basis are often people with those certain qualities that make them more economically productive. You have to be a certain type of person to both go to church on a regular basis and be more economically productive.
To use a familiar analogy, it would be like finding out that 90 percent of driveways in your neighborhood have expensive cars in them and deciding to park your car in your driveway expecting it to become a a luxury car.
Technorati Tags: economics, church, economics
The Acton blog posits that one of the reasons for this effect is that it increases social networking possibilities and builds up “social capital,” a concept that Sen. Rick Santorum explored in his book“It Takes a Family : Conservatism and the Common Good”. Of course they note that wealth building is a bad reason to decide to go to church. I would add that if your motivation for attending church is to do business networking and increase your wealth, you will be sadly disappointed.
Yet, it is an interesting idea that the more we become involved in our local webs of social capital the better off we are in all sorts of ways, not just economically.
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COMMENTS
I agree with you, Domenico. If you can tell what day it is (like when it’s Sunday), have a decent grasp on reality, and your moral life doesn’t look like it’s been macrame’ed by a drunk hippie, THEN the coast is clear for both gainful employment AND church-going. That’s why the two go together.
Posted by michigancatholic on 01/2/06 at 08:06 PM Perhaps the people, who are great BTW, at the Acton Institute aren’t hanging around in places where they can see what the average household is like these days.
I used to teach school. I don’t anymore. It’s scarier and scarier out there every year…... 
Didn’t Harvard show that prayer makes people more productive? Isn’t that why the saints tell us to pray an hour everyday except when we are busy…the pray two?
Except maybe already productive people pray.
I thought the study showed more oxyegen flows to the brain in prayer, therefore causing the productiveness….I think Professor Kreeft mentioned it one day in class.
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