We already have some limited evidence that conventionally religious people are happier
But see Will Wilkinson on this too (arguing that this only really holds in the US, and speculating that it’s really about “a good individual fit with prevailing cultural values” rather than religion per se).
That’s a good counter-argument, but the linked post doesn’t actually measure religion-happiness correlation within those other countries (which is the relevant factor), and it’s very plausible that European monopolistic religions are far less effective than American freely competing religions for creating happiness.
The Snoep paper Will linked to measured the correlation for the US, Denmark and the Netherlands (and found no significant correlation in the latter two).
The monopolist religion point is of course a good one. It would be interesting to see what the correlation looked like in relatively secular, yet non-monopolistic countries. (Not really sure what countries would qualify though.)
I’m going to completely ignore “statistical significance”, as scientific papers are well known to have no idea how to do statistics properly with multiple hypotheses, and can be assumed to be doing it wrong until proven otherwise.
If null hypothesis were false, the chance of all almost signs pointing in the same direction would be very low. As far as I can tell what the paper finds out is that religion is less effective in Denmark and Netherlands than in US, but it increases happiness, and it’s extremely unlikely to be a false positive result due to chance.
But see Will Wilkinson on this too (arguing that this only really holds in the US, and speculating that it’s really about “a good individual fit with prevailing cultural values” rather than religion per se).
That’s a good counter-argument, but the linked post doesn’t actually measure religion-happiness correlation within those other countries (which is the relevant factor), and it’s very plausible that European monopolistic religions are far less effective than American freely competing religions for creating happiness.
The Snoep paper Will linked to measured the correlation for the US, Denmark and the Netherlands (and found no significant correlation in the latter two).
The monopolist religion point is of course a good one. It would be interesting to see what the correlation looked like in relatively secular, yet non-monopolistic countries. (Not really sure what countries would qualify though.)
I’m going to completely ignore “statistical significance”, as scientific papers are well known to have no idea how to do statistics properly with multiple hypotheses, and can be assumed to be doing it wrong until proven otherwise.
If null hypothesis were false, the chance of all almost signs pointing in the same direction would be very low. As far as I can tell what the paper finds out is that religion is less effective in Denmark and Netherlands than in US, but it increases happiness, and it’s extremely unlikely to be a false positive result due to chance.