How religious folks can improve their well-being

[rug]

Mark Silk is Professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and director of the college's Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life.ark Silk | May 23, 2013

It’s an established fact that religion makes people happy. Or that happiness makes people religious. Or anyway, that religion and happiness go hand in hand.

Ask a bunch of people, “Did you experience a lot of happiness yesterday?” and those who say that religion in an important part of their daily life are more likely to answer in the affirmative than those who say it isn’t. That goes for non-Americans as well as Americans, in the aggregate as well as one by one. That is to say, there’s more reported happiness in more religious states like Mississippi than in less religious ones like Vermont. And in more religious poor countries like Rwanda than in less religious rich ones ones like Denmark. (O those melancholy Danes!)

You will not be surprised by such findings if you believe, with Marx, that religion is the opium of the people. But it does unsettle mainstream economists like Angus Deaton of Princeton and Arthur A. Stone of Stony Brook, albeit they wish to redirect measurement of human well-being “away from GDP in an era when growth rates are diminishing across much of the rich world.” As they put it in the latest issue of the American Economic Review, “These results cast serious doubt on using (the hedonic version of) happiness to provide an overall assessment of human well-being.”

What’s a poor economist to do? Well, there’s a less hedonic way of measuring subjective well-being (SWB) that isn’t at such odds with material realities. Ask people to rank their lives on a scale of one to 11 (worst possible to best possible), and lo and behold, GDP and other conventional measures of social well-being (e.g. health) make for higher life rankings. In other words, the happier inhabitants of Mississippi and Rwanda rate their lives worse than the less happy denizens of Vermont and Denmark do.

http://marksilk.religionnews.com/2013/05/23/how-religious-folks-can-improve/

Here's the report, registration required.

http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.103.3.591

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. established FACT? By whom?

When? Where? and I suspect How? is another decent question to add.

Most of the Tea Baggers are conservative christians. They seem anything but happy to me.

This is absolutely bogus. I suspect that there is something else at work. Having spent too much time in Mississippi, I learned that "Bless your soul" actually stood for "Go Fuck Yourself." This self-reported happiness is probably little more than the the answerer trying to please the questioner.

Of course, I would seriously doubt anything published by someone teaching religion at Trinity College. Do not forget the study about the adverse impact on third party prayer on heart patients being released from hospital. The strongly religious had worse outcomes, increased levels of infection and post-op complications, and were more depressed about their situation, especially when they learned that certain people (who they did not know) would be praying for them.

I can only imagine how Trinity College asked the questions. "Hi, I teach religion and faith at Trinity. Are you religious? Do you consider yourself to be a happy person? Happier than them evil atheists?"

[rug]

2. Apparently by the American Economic Review.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

4. two authors who work for Gallup?

that absolutely fabulous polling company, which did such stellar work last year? I am not going to pay money for the full text, I just find their conclusion irrational and unbelievable, especially from my (admittedly anecdotal) experiences. I do recall another AEA study about medical malpractice which was totally non-sensical. And wrong. Just because they had Marty Feldstein as their president does not mean that they are always right.

[rug]

6. Lol, that must be it.

[LostOne4Ever]

3. And with that

It’s an established fact that religion makes people happy. Or that happiness makes people religious. Or anyway, that religion and happiness go hand in hand.

Ask a bunch of people, “Did you experience a lot of happiness yesterday?” and those who say that religion in an important part of their daily life are more likely to answer in the affirmative than those who say it isn’t. That goes for non-Americans as well as Americans, in the aggregate as well as one by one. That is to say, there’s more reported happiness in more religious states like Mississippi than in less religious ones like Vermont. And in more religious poor countries like Rwanda than in less religious rich ones ones like Denmark. (O those melancholy Danes!)

And with that....I stopped listening.

[rug]

5. That's ok.