So welcome back. This is the 5th lecture in module 3, what explains the factors behind economic development or the creation of economic wealth across countries, across time. This next topic can be somewhat controversial. What we're going to talk about next is the importance of religion and culture to the development of wealth across countries. Surprisingly to some, and perhaps not so surprisingly to others, this is actually been a commonly suggested reason for why some countries are wealthier than others. The evidence is probably mixed, and we will see. Why that's the case as we look further at the evidence. Let's look at a map of the world which shows for example, let's see, religions across nations, and we see that there is quite a bit of diversity across the world. There is a high concentration in some parts of the world in Christianity. Some parts heavily dominated by Catholic Christianity. There are other parts of the world that are heavily Muslim. Other parts that are heavily Buddhist. There's Hindu. Majority in other parts of the world and there are other regions where religions are, are less important. And there's no clear majority or there's not a major affiliation. What, what we want to talk about is more than just religion, we really want to talk about culture. But we'll do that in a whole separate module in a different lecture. We'll focus on one aspect of culture right now, which is religion. We know that the two are heavily intertwined. For example, some religions in the world put a heavy emphasis on family. Many religions. And therefore some societies in the world have a very family centered culture we might argue. All of these things are up to debate and I'm sure that some would disagree and others would agree, but generally speaking that seems to be at least partially true. So what some people have tried to hypothesize or suggest is that there's a relationship in some countries between the religion or religious culture and economic wealth. And I'm going to give you one example that might, you may have heard of that might be familiar to some of you in some of the English-speaking parts of the world. And it might be less familiar to others of you that are less familiar with English speaking parts of the world. Many years ago sociologists from Germany, named Max Weber came to the United States trying to answer the same question. Why is the United States growing so rapidly in terms of it's economy. What explains this great wealthy creation in a relatively short period of time? How did this new country just explode on the scene and become so rich? And his observation was actually quite interesting. His observation was captured in a book, and he termed it the Protestant work ethic. Now think about that for a minute and what that means. He said that there was some aspect of the religious culture of the, the colonizers who came to the Americas from Europe to the northern part of the Americas in the 1500s and later. What he described was a period of immigration based in religious faith, religious freedom that was largely Protestant. And which had a very particular form or belief of Protestantism. His finding was that many of the individuals who immigrated to the United States of America, or what became the United States of America in the 15, 16, and 1700s believed that hard work was part of their religion. They believed that their supreme being wanted them to work hard and that they could see their likelihood of returning to their supreme being or pleasing their supreme being through their own personal development of wealth. In other words, if you were more well off, that was a sign that your supreme being was more pleased with you, that you were doing a better job of living your religion, so was, there was a work ethic or an element of hard work that developed over time and became part of the larger culture. Now, many would argue that it went beyond the religion and in some ways has become almost a secular religion that we know as The American Dream in the United States, which is that, if you work hard, anybody can become wealthy. Does that seem to have or does that ring a bell with any of you? Is, do you buy that? Well, it might be a factor in the explanation of the economic wealth in the United States of America. If you may accept that and that's fine. What's the problem with that though? Is every country in the world Protestant? No, as you can see on this map there are lots of versions of Christianity across the world and there are lots of other religions. For example, you may see Japan on the map. Is Japan a Christian nation? It is not. Is, is Japan one of the wealthiest nations in the world? Yes. Refer back to our GDP per capita tab. And you'll see that Japan is one of the wealthiest nations in the world. It can't be the case that one particular type of religion or even culture is conducive or the most conducive or the best at producing economic wealth. It can't simply be the case that everybody should adopt one religion in order to become wealthy. And so that's this explanation that we've provided, the fifth one, in trying to answer this question. Why are some countries wealthier than others? We'll see you next time.
