Belief in hell boosts economic growth, Fed says

The St Louis Fed drew on work by outside economists who studied 35 countries, including the United States, European nations, Japan, India and Turkey and found that religion shed some useful light.

"In countries where where large percentages of the population believe in hell, there seems to be less corruption and a higher standard of living," the St. Louis Fed said in its July quarterly review.

For instance, 71 percent of the U.S. population believe in hell and the country boasts the world's highest per capita income, according to the 2003 United Nations Human Development Report and 1990-1993 World Values Survey.

Ireland, not far behind the United States in terms of income, likewise has a healthy fear of a nether world with 53 percent of the population acknowledging hell's existence.

The basic argument is that a belief in Hell is inversely corrolated with corruption, so the more people believe in Hell, the less corrupt a nation is overall. Since corruption drags an economy, the less corruption the more efficiently an economy operates. These ideas are not particularly new and were in fact advanced by, among others, Adam Smith himself.

An interesting thing to note is that economic success is not corrolated with religiosity itself, but whether that religion believes in Hell. What's even more interesting is that this happens despite an inverse corrolation between education level among individuals and religiosity and that church attendance and economic growth within a society are also inversely related. So it's not a matter of church attendance any societal benefits that come with that (increased community interaction, for instance), but squarely on Hell.

You can read the actual report here.