Progress Daily

Richard Sosis analyzed two hundred 19th-century US communes: 88 religious and 112 secular. He found that communes whose ideology was secular were up to four times as likely as religious ones to dissolve in any given year.

In a follow-up study, Sosis focused on 83 of these communes (30 religious, 53 secular) to see if the amount of time they survived correlated with the strictures and expectations they imposed on the behaviour of their members.

He found that the more constraints a religious commune placed on its members, the longer it lasted (one is still going, after 149 years). But the same did not hold true of secular communes, where the oldest was 40.

Ara Norenzayan has conducted experiments using what is known as the “dictator game,” a test used to gauge altruistic behaviour. Participants receive a sum of money — $10,in this case — and are asked if they would like to share it with another player.

Norenzayan and Azim Shariff primed half of their volunteers to think about religion by getting them to unscramble sentences containing religious words such as God, spirit, divine, sacred and prophet. Those thus primed left an average of $4.22, while the unprimed left $1.84.

An experiment by Jesse Bering subjected a bunch of undergraduates to a quiz. His volunteers were told that the best performer among them would receive a $50 prize. They were also told that the computer program that presented the questions had a bug in it, which sometimes caused the answer to appear on the screen before the question. The volunteers were therefore instructed to hit the space bar immediately if the word “Answer” appeared on the screen. That would remove the answer and ensure the test results were fair.

The volunteers were then divided into three groups. Two began by reading a note dedicating the test to a recently deceased graduate student. One did not see the note. Of the two groups shown the note, one was told by the experimenter that the student’s ghost had sometimes been seen in the room. The other group was not given this suggestion.

The so-called glitch occurred five times for each student. Bering measured the amount of time it took to press the space bar on each occasion. He discarded the first result as likely to be unreliable and then averaged the other four. Those who had been told the ghost story pressed the space bar in an average of 4.3 seconds. That compared with 6.3 seconds for those who had only read the note about the student’s death and 7.2 for those who had not heard any of the story concerning the dead student.

“Where angels no longer fear to tread,” The Economist

The single best gauge of economic performance is not growth in GDP, but GDP per person, which is a rough guide to average living standards.

Over the past five years, America’s average annual real GDP growth of 2.9% was much faster than Japan’s 2.1%.

However, America’s population is rising much faster, by 1% a year (thanks to immigration and a higher birth rate); the number of Japanese citizens has been shrinking since 2005. Once you take account of this, Japan’s GDP per head increased at an annual rate of 2.1% in the five years to 2007, slightly faster than America’s 1.9% and much better than Germany’s 1.4%.

Likewise, Spain has been one of the euro area’s star performers in terms of GDP growth, but over the past three years output per person has grown more slowly than in Germany, which, like Japan, has a shrinking population.

One of the supposedly booming BRIC countries, Brazil, has seen its GDP per head increase by only 2.3% per year since 2003, barely any faster than Japan’s. Russia, by contrast, enjoyed annual average growth in GDP per head of 7.4% because the population is falling faster than in any other large country (by 0.5% a year). Indians love to boast that their economy’s growth rate has almost caught up with China’s, but its population is also expanding much faster. Over the past five years, the 10% average increase in China’s income per head dwarfed India’s 6.8% gain.

During the past five years, world GDP has grown by an average of 4.5% a year, its fastest for more than three decades, though not as fast as during the golden age of the 1960s when annual growth exceeded 5%. But the world’s population is now growing at half of its pace in the 1960s, and so world income per head has increased by more over the past five years than during any other period on record.

Zero GDP growth in Japan, where the population is declining, would still leave the average citizen better off. But in America, the average person would be worse off. On this basis, America has been in recession since the fourth quarter of last year when its GDP rose by an annualised 0.6%, implying that real income per head fell by 0.4%.

“Grossly Distorted Picture,” The Economist

Economists have repeatedly found that the better the rule of law, the richer the nation. (The chart below, by Daniel Kaufmann, shows the results of three studies). Every rich country with the arguable exceptions of Italy and Greece scores well on rule-of-law measures; most poor countries do not.

Some new research finds only a weak link between the rule of law and recent economic growth. The connection with wealth is well established but that is different: it has been forged over decades, even centuries.

As usual, correlation does not imply causation. Perhaps growth helps the rule of law, not vice versa. Perhaps countries can afford the luxury of the rule of law only after they have grown rich.

“Order in the Jungle,” The Economist