"We Pretend We Are Christians"
A Freakonomics reader in Texas fakes her religion for the sake of her kids.
A Freakonomics reader in Texas fakes her religion for the sake of her kids.
The economic downturn has obviously hurt newspapers a great deal, but it’s hard to say which areas of coverage have been depleted the most. I have talked to people in many realms – international reporting, business, sports, entertainment – who claim their domain has been particularly hard hit. (Here’s a map from Paper Cuts that shows 2009 newspaper layoffs.)
We’ve been doing a lot of media interviews for SuperFreakonomics, and once in a while you get asked a really interesting question.
But I don’t think this one will ever be topped. It comes from a journalist in India.
Contributions are down, and an unusually large number of religious-based schools have closed.
My initial thought was that those religious organizations that encourage tithing would have fewer problems; but a bit more reflection might suggest the opposite. If every member of a religious group always tithed, the income elasticity of demand for religion would be +1.
A Trinity College survey predicts a quarter of Americans will identify as nonreligious in 20 years (as opposed to the 15 percent who do so now). Dan Gilgoff, in his U.S. News column, predicts what that might to do American politics.
My wife and I were speculating on how long last Friday’s Rosh Hashanah service would last. We both figured on two hours, but my wife said, “Services always last longer than you expect.”
Deuteronomy 23:25-26 reflects the limits on altruism:
When thou comest into thy neighbor’s standing corn, then thou mayest pluck ears with thy hand; but thou shalt not move a sickle unto thy neighbor’s standing corn.
A new study by Angus Deaton uses an expansive dataset to analyze the determinants and benefits of religiosity around the world.
Camp Quest is like a regular summer camp — campers canoe and swim — except that one of the main activities is trying to prove unicorns do not exist in order to win a ?10 note signed by Richard Dawkins.
The Hebrew calendar is lunar, so that a leap-month has to be inserted every once in a while to keep the seasons and holidays at appropriate times. But when to insert the month, and what group should decide?
| Mormon church leaders have criticized HBO for planning to air a fictional version of a Mormon temple endowment ceremony on Big Love this Sunday, saying the ceremony risks being “misrepresented or presented without context or understanding.” But is it possible that more media exposure of Mormonism — like Salt Lake Tribune reporter Brooke Adams‘s The Plural Life blog — . . .
With the Super Bowl coming up in less than two weeks — and yes, thanks, my team made it — it’s worth considering what sort of end-zone demonstrations will be allowed and which will not. Here’s Mike Pereira, the N.F.L.’s outgoing head of officials, with an explanation from earlier this year: If you don’t feel like watching the video, here’s . . .
The L.A. Times reports on a group claiming that the recent reduction in gas prices was caused by prayer. “If the whole country keeps on praying, we can bring down prices even more — to even less than $2,” says Rocky Twyman, founder of Pray at the Pump. If prayer did cause the price to drop, did it do so . . .
Arthur Brooks — who has appeared on this blog a few times — has just published a new book, Gross National Happiness. He has agreed to blog here periodically on this subject and we are very pleased to have him. Last week I posted on the happiness difference between conservatives and liberals. Non-partisan survey data clearly show a large, persistent . . .
That was the question I found myself asking while reading through the Times sports section in recent days. I understand that we are sort of between seasons here. The Super Bowl is over, baseball has yet to begin, the N.B.A. is slogging through its long wintry slog, and the N.H.L. — well, I’m afraid I just don’t pay attention, as . . .
We’ve written in the past about the very thin line that separates an acceptable expression of racial or ethnic bias from an unacceptable one — for instance, the tumult over Andy Rooney writing that “today’s baseball stars are all guys named Rodriguez to me.” As we wrote in Freakonomics, evidence from the TV show Weakest Link suggested that bias against . . .
With the Democrats in control of Congress, and with the prediction markets suggesting a Democratic presidential victory, there has been a lot of talk about ending sexual orientation discrimination in the military by repealing the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (“DADT”) policy. There are always two ways of ending de jure discrimination: you can level up, or level down. In the . . .
The Jewish Daily Forward is reporting that more and more non-Jews are calling in the mohel, or ritual circumciser, to have their sons circumcised. The reasons for this include a desire for cleanliness (mohels operate outside of hospitals) and adding a bit of spiritual pizazz, even if the pizazz comes from outside a family’s own religious tradition. An excerpt: Nearly . . .
We have blogged repeatedly — mercilessly, some might say — about the serious shortage of human organs for transplantation, and what might be done about it. The basic problem is that relying on altruism doesn’t produce enough donated organs, but there is widespread repugnance at the idea of paying people for organs. There’s a fascinating article by Laura Meckler in . . .
Whenever I see a poker tournament on TV or wander through a casino, I am always struck by a particular absence: there seem to be very few Indian-Americans playing poker. Considering that there are so many Indians of poker age in this country who thrive in finance, computer science, engineering, and other fields that incorporate math, probability, risk, etc. — . . .
GodTube.com picks up steam (Earlier) “No Nukes” campaigns, updated for the new millennium (Earlier) Would hiring only legal nannies hurt New York’s economy? (Earlier) Philadelphia residents named “least attractive” people in the U.S.
Dubner and Levitt have written quite a bit about parenting, both in Freakonomics and on this blog. In particular, they’ve focused on what parents can do to help produce “successful” offspring. The key, they’ve found, is this: be well-educated and successful yourself, and your children are more likely to follow suit. But what about children from impoverished backgrounds? What steps . . .
More parents claiming religious exemptions for preschool vaccinations School choice at work in Ghana How will changes in accounting regulations affect U.S. auditors’ incentives?
August 29 is the day in 2000 when Pope John Paul II endorsed organ donation. No word on his endorsement of trading organs for shorter prison terms.
August 22 is the day in 2003 when Alabama chief justice Roy Moore was suspended from the bench for refusing to obey a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from his courthouse. No word on whether he’d read Dawkins.
Dubner discusses Jonathan Rosen’s “The Life of the Skies”
Yesterday I wrote a nondescript post on books that knock God. It got more than 100 comments in a day — about as many as we have ever gotten on any post where we weren’t giving something away. Now I know who buys these books: the same people who read this blog.
Via the Chicago Sun-Times: A University of Chicago and Yale-New Haven Hospital survey of 1,260 doctors found that those who considered themselves atheist or agnostic were just as likely to provide care for patients with little or no health insurance than those who were religious — a departure from studies finding that religious people are more charitable towards the poor. . . .
A little more than a year ago I blogged about how every third book had the word “bullshit” in its title. Happily, that trend faded. I could only find two books on Amazon released in the last year with “bullshit” in the title. Now, it seems that going after God is the hip thing to do. Daniel Dennett started the . . .
When I saw the first headlines, I thought it was some kind of a prank, but it’s not: the Vatican has issued a document concerning “the pastoral care of road users,” which includes a sober discussion of “the phenomenon of human mobility.” It also contains a section called “Drivers’ ‘Ten Commandments,’” which has been the focus of tons of news . . .