entrepreneurship
Kimberly Winston 3-07-2014
Work ethic graphic created via wordle.net. Via RNS.
America’s vaunted Protestant work ethic is getting a makeover: Now it might be more of an atheist work ethic.
A new study has found an inverse relationship between the religiosity of a state’s population and its “productive entrepreneurship.” That’s professor-speak for “entrepreneurial investment responsible for real economic growth.”
In other words, the less religious a state’s population, the more likely it is to have a healthy economy.
The study, titled “Religion: Productive or Unproductive?” by economists Travis Wiseman of Mississippi State University and Andrew Young of West Virginia University, was published in the March edition of the Journal of Institutional Economics.
In the study, Wiseman and Young find that the “measure of total Christian adherents is robustly and positively correlated with states’ unproductive entrepreneurship scores” in a given state.