Filippo Gaddo, Managing Director at MAP and SPE member, held a discussion with Jared Rubin, Professor of Economics at Chapman University and co-author of “How the world became rich”, around the role and impact of religion and culture on economic growth and prosperity.
In the interview, Filippo and Jared explore how religion has affected growth and the debate around economic development over the past few centuries. Starting from the more widely known thesis of the Protestant Ethic developed by Max Weber, Jared takes the audience through a journey across history to discover the different ways religion can support or hinder economic activity. In the discussion we cover a number of potential transmission mechanisms, some stronger than others and some becoming active only at certain points in time: education, norms, institutions, trust, political legitimacy and marriage patterns (particularly the role of the ban on cousin’s marriage).
The imprint of culture and religion are strong and long lasting, Jared reminds us, and the implications can be both positive and negative. Jared points to three critical factors that are also part of the debate today around policies supporting growth and not just in the context of the research around religion and economics: the role of trust, political legitimacy and particularly education. Lessons from the past can be very useful for shaping the future too.
Jared Rubin is a Professor at Chapman University in California, USA and an economic historian interested in the political and religious economies of the Middle East and Western Europe. His research focuses on historical relationships between political and religious institutions and their role in economic development. He is the author of “How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth” with Mark Koyama and Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which was awarded the Douglass North Best Book Award for the best research in institutional and organizational economics published during the previous two years, awarded by the Society of Institutional and Organizational Economics. Rubin’s work has appeared in journals such as Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economics & Statistics, Economic Journal, Management Science and many others. He is the Co-Director of Chapman University’s Institute for the Study of Religion, Economics and Society (IRES) and the President of the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Culture (ASREC). He graduated with a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 2007 and a B.A. from the University of Virginia in 2002.
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