Social Science

Violence Is Bad For Business

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From my paper in Economic Affairs:

The…act of seeking out mutually beneficial exchanges with others expands what Michael Shermer (2015) calls the ‘moral sphere’. As this sphere diversifies, our attitudes regarding the vulnerable and disenfranchised tend to alter for the better. This moral expansion is likely why economic globalisation has been linked to fewer governmental violations of human rights, namely torture, extrajudicial killings, political imprisonment, and disappearances (De Soysa and Vadlammanati 2011). An analysis of 117 countries between 1981 and 2006 also found ‘positive effects of market-economic policy reforms on government respect for human rights’ (De Soysa and Vadlammanati 2013, p. 180) as defined above. While these studies seem to imply the market’s influence on human rights, there is also evidence that human rights boost market liberalisation. Utilising the CIRI Human Rights Data Project (which reports on extrajudicial killings, disappearances, torture, political imprisonment, freedom of speech and government censorship, freedom of religion, freedom of movement and migration, freedom of assembly and association, free and fair elections, workers’ rights, and women’s rights), a 2010 study finds that human rights abuses ‘actually reduce the pace of economic liberalization’ (Carden and Lawson 2010, p. 12). These studies seem to confirm that morals and markets create a positive feedback loop regarding human rights.

…[T]rade and business openness largely reduces the incentives of war and brutalisation. People become more valuable alive and able as potential partners, lenders, investors, and customers…After analysing data spanning from 1970 to 2005, De Soysa and Fjelde (2010) find that higher economic freedom lowers the risk of civil war, more so even than democracy and good governance. This remains true after variables such as income per capita, growth rates, total population, ethnic fractionalisation, and oil exportation are controlled for. Yet these results likely underestimate the total impact of economic freedom on civil war. ‘In reality’, write De Soysa and Fjelde (2010, p. 293), ‘the effect of economic freedom on peace is likely to be larger if we also take into account the indirect effect of economic freedom through its impact on income growth’. These findings correspond with a later study by De Soysa and Flaten (2012), which controls for the same variables and finds that higher levels of globalisation (particularly economic globalisation) reduce the risk of civil war as well as state violations of human rights. Other research finds that free-market conditions and economic liberalisation are associated with lower levels of various societal insecurities, including open armed conflict, violent crime, murder, societal militarisation and political instability (Stringham and Levendis 2010; De Soysa 2011, 2016; Bjornskov 2015). Various organisations from the World Economic Forum (2016) to the UN Global Compact (2014) are recognising the power commerce has to decrease conflict and establish peace (pg. 426-429).

A brand new study looks at the relationship between violence and business by examining Columbia’s reduction in violence between 1995 and 2010. 

The author explains,

To precisely measure the effects of violent crime on firm behaviour, I use the large reductions in violence caused by increased security expenditures of the Democratic Security programme under Uribe’s administration. According to the Uribe’splan published in 2003, the Democratic Security programme aimed at restoring police presence in all municipalities; dismantling terrorist organisations; reducing kidnappings, extortion, and homicides; preventing forced displacement; and fighting the illegal drug trade (Ministerio de Defensa 2003). Uribe’s government intended to achieve these goals by increasing spending on military infrastructure, personnel, and intelligence. High spending on security led to decreased violence in municipalities that voted for Uribe in the presidential elections of 2002 (when he was elected for the first time) as he was looking for re-election in 2006 (he was re-elected).

…I combine unique plant-level and rich consumer pricing data with homicide rates and electoral results in Colombia. Using these data, I compare the prices and market size of Colombian municipalities that showed higher and lower support for Alvaro Uribe in the presidential election of 2002. These correlations were subsequently reflected in larger or lower changes in homicide rates.

I find large effects due to changes in violent crime: 

– When violence decreases by 1%, firm aggregate production increases by approximately 0.4%. This is partly explained by higher production per firm but also explained by the entrance of new firms into the market.  

– Real income increases in areas with less violence. These changes are explained by higher nominal wages, which are larger in size than the documented increases in the general price levels. 

– Consequently, areas with lower violent crime have higher incomes. This condition may further reduce social unrest and violence.  

In conclusion, a “48% decline in homicide rates between 1995 and 2010 in Colombia increased aggregate production by 19.6%. My estimates, however, are a lower bound of the total social costs of violent crime, as they are do not include the costs of mortality or the long-run impacts of violent crime reductions. The benefits of reducing violence, consequently, are even higher. Investments in security improvements are thus an effective way to boost economic development.”

Violence, it seems, is antithetical to business. As I note in my paper, “findings that ‘merely’ demonstrate positive correlations [between markets and morality] should be interpreted in light of the feedback loops: even if moral behaviours are foundational and give rise to market systems (instead of vice versa), market systems in turn reinforce these virtues by imbuing them with value” (pg. 423).

Keys to Ending Global Poverty: Growth and Migration

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Harvard’s Lant Pritchett has an incredible new paper out that looks at the best course for eliminating global poverty:

So think of two ways to help the global poor. One is for rich people (in a global sense) to give a dollar and get roughly a dollar’s worth of benefits for the poor. The other people is for rich people to allow people who would like to work at the prevailing wage of their country to do so and not deploy active coercion to prevent this—which reflects the person’s contribution to product and hence is (or can be made to be) zero net cost to the host country. Of course, a dollar for a poor person could produce vastly more human well-being than had the richer person spent the money as the marginal utility was much, much higher for the poor person, but this redistribution effect is the same for both options. This means, at least in current conditions, the least you can do—just increasing the freedom of people who want to work and people who want those people to work to carry out that mutually beneficially transaction across national borders—is better than the best you can do of trying to directly help people in poverty but without allowing them to move to opportunity (pg. 1-2).

Pritchett looks at the Ultra Poor Graduation program, whose stated claim is “to graduate ultra poor households out of extreme poverty to a more stable state. This 24-month program provides beneficiaries with a holistic set of services including: livelihood trainings, productive asset transfers, consumption support, savings plans, and healthcare” (pg. 9). Pritchett finds that this program led to an average income gain of $344 dollars by the third year for targeted households. “The five country average NPV of costs per household of the 24 month program was $4,545” (pg. 9).

While Pritchett recognizes that redistribution can indeed benefit the poor, its impact is quite small. He concludes,

A large part of the explanation of differences in labor productivity across countries is differences in “A”—total factor productivity. Transmitting A from country to country has proven difficult. This implies that labor with the exact same intrinsic productivity will have much higher productivity (and hence justify a higher wage) in a high A than in a low A country. But, by and large, rich countries have passed extraordinarily strict regulations on the movement of unskilled labor. A relaxation of these restrictions could produce the largest single gains in global poverty of any available policy, program or project action. And since these gains to movers are (mostly) due to higher A which (at the margin) is a “public good” (it is non-rival and non-excludable) in the host country these gains are essentially free to the host country (or could be free to the host country under some technical design conditions).

Comparing the annual gains of the Ultra Poor Graduation program ($344 per household for a cost of $4,545) to those of a low-skill worker simply moving to and working in the United States ($17,115), Pritchett finds that the Ultra Poor Graduation program would have to invest $226,000 per person in order to match the gains of migration. Furthermore,

sustained rapid economic growth in developing countries—that is sustained by improvements in A—can also produce cumulatively enormous gains. And avoiding growth collapses/stagnation can prevent enormous losses. So, even though traditional measures of the country to country transfers of resources via “foreign aid” do not, in and of themselves, appear to be responsible for producing most of the observed differences in economic growth, investments that could bring that about more sustained growth (both more sustained accelerations and fewer sharp and extended decelerations) could also have astronomical returns. 

As Bryan Caplan sums it up, “Virtually all poverty reduction comes from economic growth and migration – not redistribution or philanthropy.”

What Does Economic Mobility in the U.S. Actually Look Like?

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Economist Russ Roberts gives us some insights:

Studies that use panel data — data that is generated from following the same people over time — consistently find that the largest gains over time accrue to the poorest workers and that the richest workers get very little of the gains. This is true in survey data. It is true in data gathered from tax returns.[ref]More panel data can be found in a 2007 Treasury Department report, a 1995 Dallas Fed report, and a 1992 Treasury Department report.[/ref] 

Here are some of the studies that find a very different picture of the impact of the American economy on the economic well-being of the poor, middle, and the rich.

This first study, from the Pew Charitable Trusts, conducted by Leonard Lopoo and Thomas DeLeire uses the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and compares the family incomes of children to the income of their parents. Parents income is taken from a series of years in the 1960s. Children’s income is taken from a series of years in the early 2000s. As shown in Figure 1, 84% earned more than their parents, corrected for inflation. But 93% of the children in the poorest households, the bottom 20% surpassed their parents. Only 70% of those raised in the top quintile exceeded their parent’s income.

Chetty et al find a similar pattern. In an otherwise gloomy assessment of American progress, they find that 70% of children born in 1980 into the bottom decile exceed their parents’ income in 2014. For those born in the top 10%, only 33% exceed their parents’ income.

The poor may find it easier to do better than their parents. But how much better off do they end up? Julia Isaacs’s study for the Pew Charitable Trusts finds that children raised in the poorest families made the largest gains as adults relative to children born into richer families.

In short, “the children from the poorest families added more to their income than children from the richest families. That reality isn’t consistent with the standard pessimistic story that only the richest Americans have benefited from economic growth over the last 30–40 years.” Another “study looks at people who were 35–40 in 1987 and then looks at how they were doing 20 years later, when they are 55–60. The median income of the people in the top 20% in 1987 ended up 5% lower twenty years later. The people in the middle 20% ended up with median income that was 27% higher. And if you started in the bottom 20%, your income doubled. If you were in the top 1% in 1987, 20 years later, median income was 29% lower.” A recent study found that when you follow quintiles, “[o]nly the people at the top gain much of anything between 1980 and 2014.” However, when you follow people, the same study finds that “the biggest gains go to the poorest people. The richest people in 1980 actually ended up poorer, on average, in 2014. Like the top 20%, the top 1% in 1980 were also poorer on average 34 years later in 2014. The gloomiest picture of the American economy is not accurate. The rich don’t get all the gains. The poor and middle class are not stagnating.”

Roberts concludes,

There’s a lot more to study and understand. But what the studies above show is that the economic growth of the last 30–40 years has been shared much more widely than is generally found in the cross-section studies that compare snapshots at two different times, following quintiles rather than people. No one of these studies is decisive. They each make different assumptions about income…which people to include, how to handle inflation. Together they suggest the glass isn’t as empty as we’ve been led to believe. It’s at least half-full.

Does Gender Equality Enlarge Gender Differences?

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Previous research has found that the greater the gender equality, the greater the differences between genders. A brand new article in Science heaps on more evidence. Testing 80,000 individuals in 76 countries on preferences such as risk-taking, patience, altruism, positive and negative reciprocity, and trust, the authors found,

Gender differences were found to be strongly positively associated with economic development as well as gender equality. These relationships held for each preference separately as well as for a summary index of differences in all preferences jointly. Quantitatively, this summary index exhibited correlations of 0.67 (P < 0.0001) with log GDP per capita and 0.56 (P < 0.0001) with a Gender Equality Index (a joint measure of four indices of gender equality), respectively. To isolate the separate impacts of economic development and gender equality, we conducted a conditional analysis, finding a quantitatively large and statistically significant association between gender differences and log GDP per capita conditional on the Gender Equality Index, and vice versa. These findings remained robust in several validation tests, such as accounting for potential culture-specific survey response behavior, aggregation bias, and nonlinear relationships.

How do men and women differ?

On the global level, all six preferences featured significant gender differences (fig. S1): Women tended to be more prosocial and less negatively reciprocal than men, with differences in standard deviations of 0.106 for altruism (P < 0.0001), 0.064 for trust (P < 0.0001), 0.055 for positive reciprocity (P < 0.0001), and 0.129 for negative reciprocity (P < 0.0001). Turning to nonsocial preferences, women were less risk-taking by 0.168 standard deviations (P < 0.0001) and less patient by 0.050 standard deviations (P < 0.0001) (26).

The researchers conclude,

The reported evidence indicates that higher levels of economic development and gender equality are associated with stronger gender differentiation in preferences. These findings may also relate to other personality traits, such as the Big Five (34, 35) or value priorities (36). Our findings do not rule out an influence of gender-specific roles that drive gender differences in preferences. They also do not preclude a role for biological or evolutionary determinants of gender differences (37). Our results highlight, however, that theories not attributing a significant role to the social environment are incomplete (38).

In this regard, our findings point toward the critical role of availability of and equal access to material and social resources for both women and men in facilitating the independent formation and expression of gender-specific preferences across countries. As suggested by the resource hypothesis, greater availability of material resources removes the human need of subsistence, and hence provides the scope for attending to gender-specific preferences. A more egalitarian distribution of material and social resources enables women and men to independently express gender-specific preferences.

DR Editor in Economic Affairs

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My article “Is Commerce Good for the Soul?: An Empirical Assessment” was published in the latest issue of Economic Affairs. The abstract reads,

Numerous empirical studies suggest that market exchange helps (a) create the conditions for liberal values to flourish, (b) refine our sense of fairness, (c) promote cooperation with those who are different from ourselves, (d) develop networks of mutual trust and trustworthiness, (e) generate tolerance and respect towards others, and (f) undermine hostility and conflict in favour of peace. This article reviews this empirical evidence and argues that markets make us better people, morally speaking.

You can read the full thing here. Check it out.

Political Identity Divides Us More Than Policy Preferences

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Politics is the worst:

Increased sorting could reflect identification with groups that better match our values. Perhaps Republicans and Democrats can’t compromise because their policy preferences are irreconcilable. However, this doesn’t explain why Americans personally dislike political opponents with such intense fervor. U.S. liberals and conservatives not only disagree on policy issues: they are also increasingly unwilling to live near each other, be friends, or get married to members of the other group. 

…Now, surprising new research suggests that what divides us may not just be the issues. In two national surveys, political psychologist Lilliana Mason of the University of Maryland measured American’s preferences on six issues such as abortion and gun control, how strongly they identified as liberals and conservatives, and how much they preferred social contact with members of their own ideological groups. Identifying as liberal or conservative only explained a small part of their issue positions. (This is consistent with findings that Americans overestimate the differences in policy preferences between Republicans and Democrats.) Next, Mason analyzed whether the substantial intolerance between liberals and conservatives was due to their political identities (how much they labelled themselves as “liberal” or “conservative”) or to their policy opinions. For example, who would be more opposed to marrying a conservative: a moderate liberal who is pro-choice, or a strong liberal who is pro-life? Across all six issues, identifying as liberal or conservative was a stronger predictor of affective polarization than issue positions. Conservatives appear particularly likely to feel cold towards liberals, even conservatives who hold very liberal issue positions.

…[W]e see that Americans are increasingly divided not just on the issues but also on their willingness to socialize across the political aisle. It is normal that society manifests new social cleavages as it heals old ones. However, when identities are fused with policies that have vast, long-term consequences (e.g., war, taxes, or the Paris Agreement), these divisions imperil our ability to select policies based on their expected outcomes. To paraphrase anthropologist John Tooby, forming coalitions around policy questions is disastrous because it pits our modest urge for truth-seeking against our voracious appetite to be good group members. If Americans slide into seeing all policy debates as battles between Us vs. Them, we stop selecting policies based on their actual content. Ironically, this would lead to choosing policies that don’t match our personal values, because the content and evidence would become less important than the source. In short, seeing politics as a battle may worsen things for everyone.

Once again, politics makes us into worse people.

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Negative Effects of the Corporate Income Tax

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I’ve looked at the evidence for adverse effects of the corporate income tax in a previous post. A brand new article in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics provides some more insights. The authors find,

A reduction in the corporate income tax rate leads to moderate job growth. If the corporate income tax were eliminated, the model predicts that the non-employed population would decrease from 34.1 percent to 31.7 percent, about a 7 percent fall in the relative nonemployment rate.

…[E]liminating the corporate income tax has a relatively small overall effect on TFP (an increase of only about 0.9 percent). The productivity loss due to capital misallocation caused by the corporate income taxation is estimated to be 2.6 percent.

…Average welfare is maximized with a 10 percent corporate income tax rate. With a lower corporate income tax rate, the widening of the corporate income tax base allows the government to maintain revenue neutrality without large increases in the personal income tax burden. An overwhelming majority of the population would be in favor of such a corporate income tax cut in this environment (pg. 302-303).

The Tax Foundation also has a new brief that looks at the benefits of cutting the corporate income tax rate:

  • One of the most significant provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is the permanently lower federal corporate income tax rate, which decreased from 35 percent to 21 percent.
  • Prior to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the United States’ high statutory corporate tax rate stood out among rates worldwide. Among countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the U.S. combined corporate income tax rate was the highest. Now, post-tax reform, the rate is close to average.
  • A corporate income tax rate closer to that of other nations will discourage profit shifting to lower-tax jurisdictions.
  • New investment will increase the size of the capital stock, and productivity, output, wages, and employment will grow. The Tax Foundation Taxes and Growth model estimates that the total effect of the new tax law will be a 1.7 percent larger economy, leading to 1.5 percent higher wages, a 4.8 percent larger capital stock, and 339,000 additional full-time equivalent jobs in the long run.
  • Economic evidence suggests that corporate income taxes are the most harmful type of tax and that workers bear a portion of the burden. Reducing the corporate income tax will benefit workers as new investments boost productivity and lead to wage growth.
  • If lawmakers raised the corporate income tax rate from 21 percent to 25 percent, we estimate the tax increase would shrink the long-run size of the economy by 0.87 percent, or $228 billion. This would reduce the capital stock by 2.11 percent, wages by 0.74 percent, and lead to 175,700 fewer full time equivalent jobs.

Scholarship or “Scholarship”?

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A group of academics performed another Sokalesque sting operation, but took it to eleven with multiple articles in multiple journals.

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The authors explain,

We spent that time writing academic papers and publishing them in respected peer-reviewed journals associated with fields of scholarship loosely known as “cultural studies” or “identity studies” (for example, gender studies) or “critical theory” because it is rooted in that postmodern brand of “theory” which arose in the late sixties. As a result of this work, we have come to call these fields “grievance studies” in shorthand because of their common goal of problematizing aspects of culture in minute detail in order to attempt diagnoses of power imbalances and oppression rooted in identity.

How did they come up with ideas for papers?:

Sometimes we just thought a nutty or inhumane idea up and ran with it. What if we write a paper saying we should train men like we do dogs—to prevent rape culture? Hence came the “Dog Park” paper. What if we write a paper claiming that when a guy privately masturbates while thinking about a woman (without her consent—in fact, without her ever finding out about it) that he’s committing sexual violence against her? That gave us the “Masturbation” paper. What if we argue that the reason superintelligent AI is potentially dangerous is because it is being programmed to be masculinist and imperialist using Mary Shelley’s Frankensteinand Lacanian psychoanalysis? That’s our “Feminist AI” paper. What if we argued that “a fat body is a legitimately built body” as a foundation for introducing a category for fat bodybuilding into the sport of professional bodybuilding? You can read how that went in Fat Studies.

At other times, we scoured the existing grievance studies literature to see where it was already going awry and then tried to magnify those problems. Feminist glaciology? Okay, we’ll copy it and write a feminist astronomy paper that argues feminist and queer astrology should be considered part of the science of astronomy, which we’ll brand as intrinsically sexist. Reviewers were very enthusiastic about that idea. Using a method like thematic analysis to spin favored interpretations of data? Fine, we wrote a paper about trans people in the workplace that does just that. Men use “male preserves” to enact dying “macho” masculinities discourses in a way society at large won’t accept? No problem. We published a paper best summarized as, “A gender scholar goes to Hooters to try to figure out why it exists.” “Defamiliarizing,” common experiences, pretending to be mystified by them and then looking for social constructions to explain them? Sure, our “Dildos” paper did that to answer the questions, “Why don’t straight men tend to masturbate via anal penetration, and what might happen if they did?” Hint: according to our paper in Sexuality and Culture, a leading sexualities journal, they will be less transphobic and more feminist as a result.

We used other methods too, like, “I wonder if that ‘progressive stack’ in the news could be written into a paper that says white males in college shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class (or have their emails answered by the instructor), and, for good measure, be asked to sit in the floor in chains so they can ‘experience reparations.’” That was our “Progressive Stack” paper. The answer seems to be yes, and feminist philosophy titan Hypatia has been surprisingly warm to it. Another tough one for us was, “I wonder if they’d publish a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.” The answer to that question also turns out to be “yes,” given that the feminist social work journal Affilia has just accepted it. As we progressed, we started to realize that just about anything can be made to work, so long as it falls within the moral orthodoxy and demonstrates understanding of the existing literature.

What were the results? 7 papers were accepted (including one recognition of excellence), 2 were revised and resubmitted, 1 was still under review, 4 were in limbo, and 6 were rejected. Here are a few highlights:

The put it crudely, the paper argued that men should have the “rape culture” trained out them in ways similar to dogs. Reviewers described it as an “incredibly innovative, rich in analysis, and extremely well-written and organized given the incredibly diverse literature sets and theoretical questions brought into conversation.” More telling, the editor wrote to them,

As you may know, GPC is in its 25th year of publication. And as part of honoring the occasion, GPC is going to publish 12 lead pieces over the 12 issues of 2018 (and some even into 2019). We would like to publish your piece, Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon, in the seventh issue. It draws attention to so many themes from the past scholarship informing feminist geographies and also shows how some of the work going on now can contribute to enlivening the discipline. In this sense we think it is a good piece for the celebrations. I would like to have your permission to do so.”

To sum up, the paper argues that social justice warriors shouldn’t be made fun of, but that they maintain the right to make fun of others. One reviewer wrote, “Given the emphasis on positionality, the argument clearly takes power structures into consideration and emphasizes the voice of marginalized groups, and in this sense can make a contribution to feminist philosophy especially around the topic of social justice pedagogy.” Another thought it was an “Excellent and very timely article!” 

Bottom-line: feminazi is apparently a thing. The reviewers found it “interesting,” stating that the “framing and treatment of both neoliberal and choice feminisms well grounded.” In their view, the paper had “potential to generate important dialogue for social workers and feminist scholars.”

If you will excuse the language, this is why others have referred to this brand of scholarship as scholarsh*t.

You can see what other academics are saying about the hoax here.

Lie To Me…Cause I Probably Can’t Tell

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Over at FiveThirtyEight, there is a nice rundown of the research on detecting liars. “[R]esearch suggests,” it reads,

our interpretations of testimony like Kavanaugh’s, or Christine Blasey Ford’s earlier on Thursday, will be shaped by what we already believe. The Kavanaugh confirmation fight and Ford’s allegation that he sexually assaulted her are taking place in a political context, tapping into partisan identities. But even without those particular biases, humans just aren’t very good at reading people. And that’s why testimony is “no substitute for a good, solid, thorough investigation and finding of the facts,” said Brian Fitch, a psychologist and retired Los Angeles County sheriff’s lieutenant.


In other words, we were never going to get a better idea of whether Kavanaugh was telling the truth by watching him speak. (He’s denied all the allegations against him.) That’s just not how the human brain works, said Judee Burgoon, director of human communication research at the University of Arizona. That’s because our ability to identify a lie is poor — no betterthan chance, in fact. “The best estimate, and that’s from a lot of studies all accumulated, is that we’re about 54 percent accurate,” she told me. “That’s about equivalent to flipping a coin.”


Both she and Fitch said that there’s no twitchy tell, no revealing behavior, that is indicative of lying or truth-telling. Partly, Fitch said, that’s because behavior is culturally mediated. When we all live in the same culture, people who want to lie know what behaviors might make them look more or less credible, as much as the people who are watching for those behaviors.

How about people who are supposed to detect lies, like judges, police officers, or custom agents? “Studies show they believe themselves to be betterthan chance at spotting liars. But the same studies show they aren’t, Alcock said. And that makes sense, he told me, because the feedback they get misleads them. Customs agents, for instance, correctly pull aside smugglers for searches just often enough to reinforce their sense of their own accuracy. But “they have no idea about the ones they didn’t search who got away,” Alcock said.” It also turns out that “it’s possible to interview someone in a way that creates inconsistencies and credibility issues that weren’t there originally. Because of this potential, there have been efforts to change the way law enforcement officers conduct interviews, particularly of people from vulnerable groups, including victims of traumatic violence.” What’s more, political “bias probably plays a big role in situations where we’re testing the trustworthiness of people under politically charged circumstances, and some studies have shown that it can have as strong an impact as the biases we carry related to race.” 

The article concludes,

Given what we know about how humans interpret the behavior of other humans — and how bad we are at doing that accurately — it should be no surprise that there appears to be a strong partisan split in how both politicians and regular people viewed Kavanaugh’s testimony. In fact, Burgoon said, this is why you generally want more layers of information in an investigation. You’re not going to learn the “truth” based on somebody’s body language. “I think that’s part of the desire for an FBI investigation, because the FBI would produce a more impartial rendering,” she said. Indeed, Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, a crucial swing vote, asked on Friday for the full Senate vote on Kavanaugh to be delayed a week so that the FBI could produce just such a rendering. Of course, as Burgoon added, not everyone is going to believe the FBI’s findings either.

If you generally identify on the political left and found Ford’s testimony “credible” or if you generally identify on the political right and found Kavanaugh’s testimony “compelling”, then there was likely nothing credible, compelling, or rational about how you came to that conclusion. [ref]This doesn’t mean you’re wrong. You may very well be right about Ford/Kavanaugh. It just means you’re irrationally biased.[/ref] It was more likely political hooliganism in action.

Does More Education Mean Less Religion?

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It depends. In a recent article in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, sociologist Philip Schwadel finds that the effects of education depend on religious context during adolescence:

Results show that higher education is particularly likely to lead to religious decline for mainline Protestants and those with religiously active parents, and to increases in religiosity for the religiously unaffiliated and those with parents who infrequently attend religious services. Unaffiliated emerging adults and those from homes with parents who rarely attend religious services are, on average, less religious than other emerging adults, but, unlike most other emerging adults, they are likely to increase in their religiosity if they go to college. These findings demonstrate how the religious context in adolescence conditions the influence of education, both positive and negative influences (pg. 870).

In short, “the widespread view that education “erodes” religion (Johnson 1997) does not apply equally to all emerging adults, and the religious context in adolescence is one dimension along which it varies” (pg. 882).

This expounds on Schwadel’s previous work. For example, his 2016 article in The Sociological Quarterly found that “graduating from college is associated with declines in prayer, religious certainty, and especially religious belief during emerging adulthood” (pg. 778). However, he also found that “the highly educated are relatively likely to attend religious services. These results suggest that church pews are now disproportionately filled with college-educated young adults, many of who question key religious beliefs. This comports with a long tradition of sociological research (e.g., Fukuyama 1961; Roof 1976) that emphasizes that college students, and the college-educated more generally, often compartmentalize religion to weekend services and holidays (for more recent examples, see Campbell 2005; Clydesdale 2007)” (pg. 779).

When he did a 2015 cross-national analysis, Schwadel found that while those with university degrees had lower levels of religiosity overall, “sex, marital status, and age have considerably larger effects on religiosity than does higher education” (pg. 414).[ref]In a 2018 study, Schwadel writes, “On average, men are more likely than women, non-married are more likely than married, and young adults are more likely than the elderly to have no religious affiliation, but the extent and even existence of these differences varies from nation to nation. This comports with Hayes (2000) analysis of variation in the factors predicting non-affiliation across 10 Western, Christian nations. Going beyond Hayes’ analysis, the results here suggest that demographic differences in the likelihood of non-affiliation are most pronounced in nations with low levels of religious regulation… [H]igh levels of religious regulation are associated with lower levels of non-affiliation, and fewer differences by age, gender, and marital status as the potential consequences of non-affiliation are more severe in many of those nations” (pg. 267).[/ref] Furthermore, “the average level of higher education in each nation is not associated with individual religiosity” (pg. 414). In fact, GDP per capita has a much stronger, negative effect on religiosity than average levels of higher education. Most telling, however,  is the fact that “the effect of university degree ranges from robustly negative to positive. The largest negative effects of university degree are in Israel (b = −.427) and Italy (b = −.409). University degree has a relatively strong, positive effect (b > .16) in Sweden, New Zealand, and South Korea. Overall, the effect of university degree is positive and significant (p < .05) in 9 nations, negative and significant in 18 nations, and has no significant effect in 12 nations” (pg. 411). 

What’s more,

the negative effect of higher education on religiosity is more robust in relatively religious nations. This is evident both from the negative correlation between the random slope for university degree and the adjusted mean of religiosity (i.e., intercept), and from the positive interaction between university degree and the mean with no religion in each nation. These findings appear to support the diffusion argument that the highly educated are innovators and early adopters (Rogers 2003) of new ways of being religious (or irreligious) but that secularity then diffuses to the less-educated segments of the population. As Elias (2000) suggests in regards to attributes associated with the upper classes (e.g., manners), secularity may be a form of status differentiation for the highly educated in relatively religious nations, but it cannot serve that function in relatively irreligious nations (pg. 415).

All of this complicates the narrative of “more education = less religion.” Even Pew’s research from last year–which is often thrown out as evidence of the religiosity-killing nature of education–doesn’t vindicate the common narrative. While college-educated Americans are more likely to, say, identify as “atheist/agnostic”, their religious affiliation and church attendance is about the same as those who never finished/attended college.

College graduates, non-grads report attending religious services at similar rates

For Christians with college degrees, their religious commitment is basically the same as Christians without them. In fact, the college-educated Christian is more likely to attend weekly religious services than their less-educated fellow devotees. 

College-educated Christians about as observant as Christians with less education

A 2007 study actually found that “it is the respondents who did not go to college who exhibit the highest rates of diminished religiosity. Those with the highest level of education – the respondents with at least a bachelor’s degree – are the least likely to curtail.their church attendance. They are followed by those with an associate’s degree, then by four-year college students, and then two-year college students. The most educated are also the least likely to report a decrease in religion’s importance, although those who attended college but did not finish also report low levels of decline in religious salience” (pg. 1677).[ref]The three dimensions of religiosity included (1) decline in religious service attendance, (2) decline in importance of religion, and (3) disaffiliated from religion.[/ref] The researchers also found that “cohabitors are the most likely individuals to report each type of religious decline,” while married persons “are the least likely to report each type of decline” (pg. 1677). Premarital sex and marijuana use was also associated with declines in religiosity. Schwadel’s 2011 study also found that education “has a positive effect on religious participation, emphasizing the importance of religion, and supporting the rights of religious authorities to influence people’s votes. Increases in education do not diminish devotional activities or belief in the afterlife, though highly educated Americans disproportionately lean towards belief in a higher power rather than definite belief in God” (pg. 178).

But does education at least lead to more liberal religious beliefs? A 2011 study found[ref]The measures of religious liberalization include (1) more unorthodox, (2) more naturalistic, (3) more uncertain, (4) more reserved when it comes to converting others, (5) more inclusive of other religious claims, (6) more individualistic, and (7) more independent of institutions.[/ref]

contrary to longstanding scholarly wisdom, attending college appears to have no liberalizing effect on most dimensions of religious belief. In fact, on some measures, college students appear to liberalize less than those who never attended college. College students are less likely to stop believing in a personal god and less likely to stop believing in the propriety of conversion attempts. On the other hand, they are more likely to develop doubts about their religious beliefs. In the main, however, the effect of college on students’ religious beliefs appears to be extremely weak. Although significant  minorities of emerging adults become more liberal in their religious beliefs, college itself does not appear to be the culprit. College students do not liberalize any more than those who do not go to college.

In fact, the case for the null (and perhaps protective) effects of college on traditional religious belief is even stronger than it appears from these results. In supplementary analyses (not shown), college attendance also failed to predict differences on six other variables measuring religious beliefs. College students are also no more likely than non-students to stop believing in a judgment day, stop believing in an afterlife, stop believing in angels, stop believing in demons (except in the final two models, where social networks appear to suppress a positive effect of college attendance), become more uncertain about the existence of God, or abandon the belief that active congregational participation is a necessary aspect of being religious. Thus, on 10 out of 13 possible beliefs, attending college shows no net liberalizing effect before accounting for social networks; on two others, college appears to support traditional beliefs; on only one outcome – increased religious doubt – does college appear to undermine traditional religious belief. In the debate over how college influences religious beliefs, this study overwhelmingly supports those who claim that its influence is largely negligible, and perhaps even somewhat protective of traditional religious belief (pg. 199-200).

Basically, when it comes to education and religion, it’s complicated.