Since I had the spreadsheet setup, I figured it would be fun to compare the perceived corruption levels of the various religions.

So across 176 countries and regions I compared the Transparency International Corruption perception index (0-100 with 100 being bad) to the CIA factbook religious breakdown of these countries.

Here's the results least to most corrupt:

It doesn't show animal rights activism, extreme environmentalism, evolutionism, liberalism, man-caused global warmingism, or atheism. I would have expected those to top the list. : ) (forgot big governmentism)

Good point Tim.
Unaffiliated includes your Atheist and Agnostics.

Folk religion includes Voodoo, santeria, many local African religions, and religions based on superstition, such as the "throw the virgin in the volcano" religions. By this definition the ELF/ALF tree huggers seen to fit the Folk Religion category.

You forgot the religion of Liberalism.

i thought every body thought Jew's were corrupt and money hungry. My sister says the Jews have big noses because air is free. (she thinks we have Jewish blood)

Eyeball, I haven't forgot about them, I just haven't found a good empirical way to measure them yet.

I'm looking for a good measure of Communist, Socialist, Capitalist within my sample set, but every counties has different party names designed to hide who and what they really are.

As an example, "Liberals" in our country fail to meet the traditional definition of Liberal. They are really Socialist/Communist.

Oh, ok.

Understand that everybody who claims to be a Christian is not necessarily Christian. Jesus said there will be many on that day (Judgment Day) who say they did such and such and He'll say to them, "Depart from me, you who practice iniquity. I never knew you." This is paraphrased, of course. If needed I can quote chapter and verse but you can look it up just as easily as I can.

The most corrupt religion? Has to be the Democratic party!

Not sure what you've done here?

You've looked the TIC perception index for each country, and then looked up the predominant religion of that country and then assumed the TIC Perception Index score relates to that religion?

The most corrupt is me-ism. Always has been always will be.

This is very true.

First thought when I seen Folk Religion and the numbers: Hatfields and McCoys.

Goes to show what I know.

Bob

It's a little more complicate then that. What I did is called Regression analysis

What's the meaning of corruption for the purposes of your chart? If it means the religion people will attempt to practice resulting with the most hypocrisy or straying from it's postulates, Christianity would have to win. Not because it's the worst, to the contrary, but because it calls people to be something they can't be by nature. They are called to be something more than they often can or want to be. To bridge that divide God affords men salvation, because no one or nothing else can.

Ricky, I used a more worldly, less theological measure of corruption.

Here my source: Transparency International 2012 Corruption perception index.

I actually used the inverse of the index to make it easier to interpret.

It's been that way all through history. A whole bunch of Catholics who ran the Inquisition, for example, got a real shock when they died. They called themselves Christians but were anything but.

Where's Humanism? Many adherents of Humanism refer to it as a religion. Sounds like it could be rather corrupt.

Humanism actually spans most of the religions. Martin Luther is largely regarded as a Humanist, along Thomas Paine. TS Elliott is considered a Polemic Humanist, where Carl Sagan is was classified a Skeptic Humanist. The Early Islamic Philosophers were also classified as Humanist, but that went out the window with Al Gasazi (sp?) in the 11th century.

The primary defining trait of a humanist is they are guided by reason, and not superstition. As a consequence the secular humanist are largely in the top category, at the opposite end of the spectrum from Voodoo and other Folk religions.

There is much that is wrong with your little study -- primarily garbage in/garbage out.

Martin Luther was no Humanist, though Humanists like to claim him because he stood up to the authorities of the day.

Steve.

If ya think Martin Luther was a humanist, you could not have made a bigger

historical/theological/doctrinal mistake.

It may not be perfect, but with an R Square of .92 it's statistically significant.

The whole thing is hilarious. You must be bored --- or troubled.

Nice personal attack. Would you like to try and speak to the data?

Liars,...damn liars,...statisticians,...

Yea, he was. He was a Christian Renaissance Humanist (which is much different from a Modern Secular Progressive Humanist), but he was still a humanist.

http://www.wlsessays.net/files/GerlachLuther.pdf

B. S. No ad hominem, just fact.

To the OP,

Hope you didn't spend a lot of time on this.

Because it means absolutely nothing.

Diss is what is known as the "equivocation two step". Still hilarious that a theologian who viewed man as hopelessly lost and sinful could be considered a humanist by any meaningful stretch of the word. Bwahahahahha!

All of your statistics & theories and even the very powers of hell can't change the truth that Jesus is Lord. You can't win.

Mt 16:16 Simon Peter answered, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God."
17 Jesus replied, "You are blessed, Simon son of John, because my Father in heaven has revealed this to you. You did not learn this from any human being.
18 Now I say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and all the powers of hell will not conquer it.

Regardless, for purposes of the data he was a Christian. I was just demonstrating that Humanist was not necessarily it's own category.

Exactly. The only way a humanist can claim Martin Luther as intellectual kin is to ignore the heart of his message.

But then, I suppose someone can say that since God created man in his image, God is a humanist. So let's do the equivocation multi-step and call everyone a humanist.

Steve.

OK, so it appears this is some organization that nearly no one has heard of, at least on this site, who are giving their perception of corruption found in the the governments of countries. Am I correct, so far?

I noticed that the countries they scored the highest are Scandinavian countries that just happen to be lying to their citizens and the world about the muslime destruction of said countries rapidly occuring with no significant resistance by those governments. If that is not ubber corruption, malfeasance, and PC stupidity, I don't know what is. That effectively makes this organization as bat chit crazy as the elected morons in Scandinavia allowing their countries to be destroyed.

You should have spent your time reloading, like I'm going to continue doing now.

Bristoe is concise, as usual.

Ok, in all seriousness, I appreciate the statistical analysis. You must have some tough skin though! I'm sure you anticipated just a wee bit of debate and comment. Nic work.

Bob

Okanagan, there was nothing "calibrated" about the data.
I used the widest data set possible, ran it once, and posted the results.

I wasn't surprised that Islam ranked below Christianity, but I was surprised how abysmally the Folk Religions performed. I expected the unaffiliated to compete well, but didn't expect it to do as well as it did.

I'm empathetic that you don't like the results, but they were not manipulated in any way.

I thought it was interesting.

It was based on the "perceptions" of a group who see themselves as qualified to judge things like corruption. Usually such groups have definite agendas, typically political, and often progressive socialist. Most likely the calibration was largely already done.

Ricky, this same group did not measure the religion.
CPI was by TI
Religious break down was by the CIA.
TI's data actually lines up very well with data from expensive, pay for subscriptions services.

This

That's another issue.

The cultural makeup, economics, governance, and histories of most of the religious groups, except christians, are very similar. How does that make combining them valid or indicative of something?

It's data but what, if anything meaningful, does it indicate?

Your report is interesting and you did some work. Good.

However all of the regression analysis you might undertake, and all of the statistical signicance you might calculate, will not render your outcomes at all meaningful when the relationship between the premise and the data set is flawed.

Some said "garbage in, garbage out".

Any measure of the imperfect must be computed by comparison with the perfect.

What is your baseline for these claimed measures of imperfection?

Can you tell us what the perfect is?

Do you know what the perfect is?

How?

Ricky, as usual you are asking good questions.
In another thread someone posted how the success of the United States was the result of the Christian religion. So I decided to test the hypothesis that our success was a direct result of the Christian Religion and the Grace of the Christian God. Normally I would control for additional factors, geography, oil, etc, but if everything is the result of God and/or faith, there is nothing else to control for. Of course, you've seen those results in the other thread. In reality the per capita GDP for Islam is probably overstated due to their oil wealth, which is something for which I normally control, but decided not to since the Muslim believe it's their gift from Allah.

Since I had everything set up, I decided to run a side test. For sometime, it's been my personal belief that a religion exhibited it's power in the manner it caused it followers to behave. So could I test which Religions caused it followers to exhibit the best behavior? Again since we were focusing on the religious aspect and I was just doing this for fun, I ran it with the single variable.

What the results show is correlation, it does not show causation. In order to prove causation I would need to run a strong 2 stage least squares, I'm neither that board nor deranged.

Consequently it's an open question if the presence of non-religious individuals reduces corruption, or if the reduced corruption that leads to individuals stating they are unaffiliated.

As for what does it mean? It will mean something different to each person who reads it. As a highly critical thinker, perhaps it will mean something very profound to you.

Gibberish, all is gibberish, unless you can establish (a) what the perfect is and (b) how you did (a).

Ken, perfection would weighing the heart of every man. I claim neither that right, nor ability. I am just an Analyst making due with the data at hand, which takes each at his/her word regard his/her faith. Although I hope to contribute something meaningful, I make no claim that either it, nor I am perfect.

In a letter to Howells, Twain wrote that a day-long experience had shown him a great truth � that a man can not have a hole in the seat of his pants and keep his finger out of it.

A serious modern corollary, I suppose, would be that a very contemplative man can pluck a turd from his butt and by tasting it, smelling it, mashing it into a myriad of interesting shapes, etc, determine whether it was originally cabbage or steak.

My friend, God clearly demonstrated over thousands of years the corruption of man, by providing him with a simple religion consisting of 10 rules of betterment from which success would follow, and none could stay the course. So a couple millennium ago, He gave man an out that man could not provide for himself. It did not appreciably change man, only save his fickle soul.

The corruption continues, and always will while time ticks by.

History affords us opportunity on occasion for great things to happen when the circumstances of men synergize with enlightenment of the divine. Such a thing and time happened in the forming of this country. But from all appearances, that was then and this is now. Man is still man, and still corrupt, though Hope can abound. There is nothing new under the sun.

A seriously contemplative man would already know what he ate.

One could poll well by having very few standards pertaining to the myriad of views that constitutes "corruption".

Carlos Danger wouldn't even poll in Des Moines, but a decent percentage of New Yorkers still find him mayoral material.

After obama won a second term, I wouldn't rule out Carlos polling anywhere in the country. Maybe even well.

Cute!

But surely a serious analyst would want to determine which food produced which turd � or whether that datum could be established.

Of course, your oh! so clever retort would be right on the money if the guy had eaten nothing but cabbage or nothing but steak.

"Analyze" or synthesize?

Maybe you and I understand these two terms differently. I find that the Oxford defines �em exactly as I understand �em �

analyze (v) � �To take to pieces; to separate, distinguish, or ascertain the elements of anything complex, as a material collection, chemical compound, light, sound, a miscellaneous list, account or statement, a sentence, phrase, word, conception, feeling, action, process, etc.� (I�d also include, for practical application, �to sort and to appraise the contributive parts that the whole comprises, that makes the whole what it is and determines its character.�)

synthesize (v) � �To make a synthesis of; to put together or combine into a complex whole; to make up by combination of parts or elements. � (Opposed to analyse.)" (I�d also add �to elucidate, part by part, the elements that establish the character of the whole.�)

So I wonder �

� How does one analyze anything that he can not access, identify, postulate, examine, or define?

� How does one synthesize or appraise or explain anything that no one can analyze?

Numbers tend to not mean much too me, finding that personal experience means more.

That said, a so called 'Christian' is the last person I'd ever turn my back on.

One dark night on a fox hunt 'way out "in the middle of nowhere" over half a century ago, I heard a rural red-neck raconteur use a colorful expression that still evokes a smile � some times even a chuckle � "quicker'n seven gods could skin a minute."

No one, of course, made any allusion to any pseudo-scientific method of quantifying the concept. We all understood that the fellow meant simply "quicker'n quick" and let him make the point in his colorful way.

No one appealed to some mythical authority with a capitalized title (The Multidisciplinary Foundation for Intergalactic Investigation of the Operational Rapidities of Deities, maybe?) to imply unassailable, unquestionable solidity for overt ostentation or obvious propaganda.

Christians have to be very careful whom we let come up behind us, too.

Ken, the technical name for the operation I performed is Regression Analysis. I provided a link with details explaining it above.

Since this is an initial operation on collected data, it is still analysis. Synthesis is typically multi-source, so if we were to put together several regressions, along with analysis from other sources to form a single cogent picture of events then it would be synthesis.

All Religions are Corrupt and a Racket . They are just a front to make money off of peoples stupidity, believe what you like but don't pay a Church or Preacher for it.

Ken is saying the statistical analysis is a red herring, which it is. If you start with a faulty premise and use valid logic, you do not get a sound conclusion. GIGO!

Yes, it's obvious that you and I definitely understand the terms analysis and synthesis quite differently.

practically speaking, we're into the reality that the secular humanists are holding the system together, as we speak.

a ton of Christians, etc. want to follow the old Egyptian theology as advanced by pharaoh, and company, and later the Greeks, as they studied in Alexandria Egypt, before the fall.

the True Jews never spoke of an Afterlife, in so far as I know.

we've got competing ideologies on our hands, as we weigh the differences and balances.

if I was an ego, would I want to die at the end of my biologic life span, or would I want a change at living forever?

can the tall, blue-eyed, long-haired Jesus give me Life forever simply for my willingness to bow down to him and his theories so I could live forever? the Pharoah, Man God on Earth, as explained by the Greeks and their Philistine allies attempted to leave the Hebrews in the dust. did they?

That is something I learned recently in the logic lectures I have been listening to lately. Being the genius I am it will take me listening to each about thirty times before I learn much.

Ken doesn't agree with the results, so of course he's going to say that. In the process he set up a nice Nirvana Fallacy.

Ken's just a dumb sh�t who simply doesn't grasp anything so abstruse.

I would like to know when the Christians, Hebrews, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindu'es and others choose to band together and bring a Spiritual Existence into discussion down here on the Earth.

should the RoundTable be built of Oak, Maple, Ash, or Hickory?

Antelope Sniper, this is just sloppy thinking; no matter how you dress up your processes with mathematical rigour.

In what way?

For dumb ol' sh�t me, trying to compare imperfects to an unknowable perfect is still impossible to imagine.

So also is the matter of determining the perfect by manipulating a bunch of imperfects.

But of course, as I readily admit, I'm just a dumb ol' sh�t.




(I'll hafta see about workin' that line into a limerick!)

And where did I claim to be measuring "The Perfect", or measuring with perfection?

It is interesting when a person who says that he is only analyzing data and reporting results can make the leap to know who likes and does not like the results and what those folks will do in response. Seems to me that such vivid insight must go well beyond statistical manipulation. And. Dr. Howell did not "set up a nice Nirvana Fallacy" He did not pose an option or a solution contrasted with or opposed to your premise - did not at all pose anything unrealisitic in comparison with your position - for you provide no actual against which to pose such an alleged fallacy. Dr. Howell merely asked you to define your differential hypotheses. Therefore, most likely you are forever banned from Nirvana.

Looks like you can apply all of your known measures - regress, deviate, and Chi Square the stuff to weariness and then work to prove some degrees of significance - until you run out of manipulations - but your leap with that spurious data will not work here.

CCCC if you've ever read any of Ken's post on Theology, you know where he stands. It's not much of a leap to say these results do not comport with his world view.

As for his Fallacy, please reread Kens posts. He specifically mentioned perfect and perfection as part of his disagreement.

As for manipulations, again, read my previous post.
I ran it once, the results were significant, and I posted them. There were no "manipulations to run out of", because there was no manipulating.

Faulty premise: faulty conclusion. Sorry agenda to boot.

Now you're down to the heart of the matter.

I have read many of Dr. Howell's posts and I may - or may not- know where he stands Theologically or how your results might comport with his "world view", whatever you mean by that. In fact, you can't know what I know - you may extrapolate to your own personal high degree of confidence about what I know, but you cannot state it with certainty. Not if you are a halfway decent statistician. So, you are working with something other than scientific/numerical calculation in making that first statement. It does not blend with the "tone" your OP - not "scientific" at all - not even pseudo-scientific.

And, for a person to simply use the terms "pefect" and "perfection" in posing a question/contention or requesting a definition of hypothetical bases is NOT to set up a Nirvana Fallacy. To do such requires understanding of the supposedly realisitic proposal and an action in proposing an alternative or opposing utopian position of an unrealisitc nature. Dr. Howell did not define and propose such an alternative. He merely asked you to define your premises. Where, in your mind, was the Nirvanic hypothesis stated?

Study of Stat was useful but not highly enjoyable. Too many statisticians hangin' around trying to "establish" something of which they were unsure - or that they wished to be true.

In my admittedly limited understanding of mundane matters (not to mention erudite matters!), the very term corrupt directly and unswervingly denotes departure from an ideal (or to use an alternative term, a perfect example). Theology aside! Not involved in any way! (Except maybe in your rejection of it.) Just a simple matter of words, meanings, and implications. Surely you can handle such simple matters without resorting to glib rejoinder.

I'd love to know how to do whatever it was that you did.

I'd hope, then, that I'd know how I knew to do that.

Then I'd hope that I understood it well enough that I could explain it in easily understandable terms without putting anyone down.

I guess the "outer space" of esoteric thinking is just not a reachable milieu for us mere mortals.

Where, pray tell, did I ever say or otherwise indicate that I don't agree with the results of whatever it is that you did? My MO requires that I understand your results before I can agree or disagree with 'em, and since I flat-out don't understand even the basis of 'em, I'm completely unable either to agree or to disagree with 'em. In fact, I didn't even pay any attention to 'em.

If I remember right, I asked (a) what uncorrupted model you used as a base line for comparing varieties of corruption and (b) how you attained or established such a model.

Since you have made no effort to address either question, I'm still wondering.




"Nirvana fallacy?" Asking for a real rather than an imagined standard for comparison?




As to my theology, you have not the slightest glimmer of a greasy guess what my theological position is or what it rests on. I seriously doubt that you have read either my book In Step with the Master or my book Upon This Rock, much less studied either one, and I can think of no reason to assume that you would either understand them or regard them with any degree of decency or honor.

Sonofabitch. Is that what happened to all of them? Damn.

It is an absolute pleasure to know that the results of the above matters not. Nada...

Well, since Jews are mostly concentrated in Israel, and Hindus in India, one has to ask if distribution had an effect. After all, I haven't heard anyone expound upon the corruption-free properties of India, just the opposite in fact.

The results for India alone would seem to throw the whole premise of this analysis into questions.

Also, one wonders where the CIA got their data, fer example individuals in some cultures are far more likely to call themselves a trendy Western term like "unaffiliated" than are others.

If we judge by ACTIONS, there's a whole lot of "unaffiliated" folks in all countries I'd guess, this probably NOT accounted-for in that data.

All the above without before even beginning to question the uniformity of the polling methodology or lack thereof between different countries.

How about running another one, this time between that same corruption index and per-capita income? (with the understanding that the Gulf oil states are likely to be outliers whacking the correlation quite a bit).

Birdwatcher

Birdwatcher, you are asking some good questions.
Each country was a single, observation. It's the variance in the religious compositions that was compared across countries.

CIA data is easy to use, and free. I agree there would be alot of more interesting measures. "Do you pray to a personal God. How often do you pray to your God?" A measure of actual attendance of religious services would be very useful. We have approximations of this data for a few countries, but not for enough countries that I would expect a significant result.

It's interesting that you should ask about Corruption and Per capita income. That was the basis for my original study, attempting to determine the effects of corrupton on income. I was also concerned about the effects of oil, not only in the ME, but also in places like the North Sea. As a result all GDP figures were expressed in purchasing parity adjusted US dollars, and I subtraced out all oil profits.

After controlling for life expectancy, market capital, education spending, tax rates, and bureaucracy, it turned out that each point of corruption directly reduced the per capita GDP by $110.00. It also resulted in other indirect reduction, such as a loss of GDP due to a reduced capital base.

In another thread, I did run a comparion between religious composition and per capita GDP. I left in the oil, since each religion can claim their natural resouces are a gift from God, but despite this, Muslims still performed very poorly weiging in at almost half the level of Christians. Here are the results:



As for the high performance of the non-affiliated, you brought up a very salient point. What do you call a non-affiliated person in a fundamentalist Muslim country? DEAD.
This brings up the obvious quesiton. Is the high correlation between the non-affiliated and high income a result of selection bia, sampling error (not admitting it in places they don't want to get their heads cut off), or some real effect on incomes.

The resulst for NA's, Jews, Christians, and Muslims were all highly significant. The rest, not so much.

Sayin a dog turd is not a candy bar is hardly a Nirvana fallacy.

Ken, if you are interested in the methodology used, here's the link to the orginization that did the work.

Their methodologies are avaliable in their full report avaliable here:

TI 2012 CPI

Ken, as I'm sure you are aware, the very nature of data collection and analysis is dealing with imperfects.

If I ever received a "perfect" result, the only thing I would be confident in, is that I did something wrong.

Religions aren't the problem; people are.

The redemption found in Christ answers our depravity in a final and definitive way. All other religions make suggestions for how we can manage that depravity. Irreligious people hypocritically point to hypocrisy within religious groups failing to recognize that central truth; people kill, dehumanize, and enslave each other for any number of convenient reasons. Religion just happens to be the one irreligious people like to point out the most.

When people commit these acts of inhumanity with Christianity as an excuse they are acting in direct contradiction to their Lord as revealed in Christ. When other religious people do so (irreligious too) they are acting in accordance with their religion, for all others are merely man-made ways of self-service.

Ken, concerning glib rejoinders, I'm not the one who resorted to turds on fingers.

Ken, here's the straight forward explination of what I did:

Simple explination of Econometrics

As for how to do it, it usually takes at least 2 semesters for work, one is statistics, then a semester of econometrics. As a mere mortal myself, I make no claim to being up to the task of teaching econometrics. It is one of the most difficult, and least fun subjects to teach. I hope the slides provide you a helpful familiarization of the subject.

Or perhaps an increase of $110 in per capita GDP directly reduced the corruption index by one point.

It was my great good fortune to get to spend three years in the sticks in Ghana. In the West it is EASY to be an honest man; those who eschew corruption can still feed their children and for the most part make a comfortable (literally) living.

Also, I would guess those countries with high per-capita GDP's also tend to have functioning legal systems where folks live mostly under the rule of law, with effective systems for apprehending and punishing those who break the law.

In Ghana the pressures to be corrupt were enormous, and the extra revenues collected or not collected this way could literally be a matter of life or death for one's relatives that they had to raise and/or support. In places like the US, not so much.

Birdwatcher

Understood, but that still doesn't control for the effect of Judaism for example, probably more than any other religion (with the possible exception of "non-affiliated") limited a) to one heavily-subsidized Western nation where they comprise about 75% of the population and b) to the West in general, for reasons of history.

Indeed, since "non-affiliated" presumably also is mostly limited to Western nations, one has to question why the Jews by comparison perform so poorly, UNLESS there are small percentages of Jews in less developed nations where de-facto "non-affiliateds" were not likely to be recorded.

With respect to these de-facto (but very real) "non-affiliateds" not appearing in the data, in Africa I lived around Christians, Moslems and Animists. In every set there was a large set of slackers, who might self-identify as something other than "non-affiliated" but who led pretty much agnostic life styles.

Birdwatcher

"Religion" and "corrupt" are such subjective terms.

BW, every economics paper you will ever read usually contains a complaint about a wish for more, and better data. As for the direction of Corruption and GDP, Dr. Daron Acemoglu of MIT done some great work on the subject showing Causation between were the African Slave trade destroyed institution in the area resulting in increased future corruption and reduced GDP. So the research demonstrates that it's the increased corruption that decreases the GDP. If you are interested in the subject I recommend his book "Why Nations Fail". It's written for the Lay public and much easier to read then his scholarly papers, although as scholarly papers go, his are among the easier to read.

Ya, especially when they are making outlandish claims like how their data illustrates that Agnostics and Jews are inherently less corrupt than other religions

BTW you did breezily skip EXACTLY how you normalized or controlled for whatever all the other variables that conceivably might come into play.




Interesting, I was in the Ashanti Region, the Ashantis being decidedly in the export business when it came to human trafficking, so much so that me and a buddy hiked 70 miles across the remote Afram Plains and met few people, the area STILL suffering the effects of having been depopulated by Ashanti slavers.

The point being that ASHANTI institutions weren't destroyed by the African Slave Trade, in a very real sense they are still very much in play, in a sort of coexistence with the overlay of British-derived laws and customs.

And yet there was corruption.

Dr. Acemoglu's hypothesis as presented by yourself does sound decidedly trite, the sort of thing that pointy headed academics might come up with, especially as compared to say, the effects of the division of natural nations by arbitrary borders drawn by colonial powers and then liberation, leaving the former colonial army as the most powerful political entity in the new country.

But I can tell you this; anyone who doesn't realize that poverty is a powerful incentive for corruption really has no clue.

Not saying that Dr. Acemoglu is necessarily a pointy-headed academic hisself.

Thanks for the references.

Birdwatcher

BW, if the God, or the Gods control everything, there is nothing else to control for, so that's the way I ran the original. Many of the things we would normally control for, such as education, savings, could be a function of religion (do Jews really save more, and do Asians/Buddist really place a higher emphasis on education?) so many of my precollected control didn't necessarily apply. One I did add was LIFE EXPECTANCY. LE captures alot of variation, and is also correlated with corruption, so it would control for alot of the issues mentioned by Ricky D. This caused the significance to increase, and Christianity to pop up just under Judiam for both income and lack of corruption.

Actually your experiences in the Ashanti region comport very well with Dr. Acemoglu's theories. Slavery is a corrupt practice, and it leads to corrupt institutions. When the core institutions of a society have become corrupt, it infect every level of life, creating a vicious cycle. In contrast, strong, inclusive, pluralistic institutions can create a virtuious cycle, with the reinforcement leading in a positive direction.

Acemoglu also discusses how different disease enviroments effected the type of institutions created by European settlers. In high malaria enviroments where it was difficult for them to live, the institution were designed to extract as much as possible for the natives as quickly as possible. These destructive institutions were largely still in place when the Colonial powers left. The only difference is they were taken over by the locals.

He provides some interesting history on North America, and why, in his opinion we turned out so prosperous. I think you would find it interesting read. My short explination may have sounded trite, but, it's difficult to do a 500 page book justice in 5 lines.

AS.

you are to be commended to scratch the surface of a subject that runs so deep and wide. it's engrained, and there's no denying that fact.

to tell one of the followers that Lord Ganesha is not worthy, would likely cause his followers to uprise, even in a uproar.

so, we all know that Religion is inculcated down into our very core. to even dare raise a discussion point shows an honest attempt to scratch the surface, and then see where it all leads.

a commendation belongs to you. but, now what are you gong to do next, pray tell?

with 7 billion humans down here on the Earth, what to do next does seem like Job One.