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The Judaism in Transition exchange, part 1: What can economics teach us about our religious lives?

[additional-authors]
August 28, 2014

Carmel U. Chiswick is Research Professor of Economics at George Washington University. A founding member of the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Culture and a former officer of the Association for the Social-Scientific Study of Jewry, she has written extensively on the economics of religion and has been a consultant to organizations in the United States and Israel. Professor Chiswick holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and has worked as an Economist at USAID, the United Nations, and the World Bank.

The following exchange will focus on her book Judaism in Transition: How Economic Choices Shape Religious Tradition (Stanford, 2014).

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Dear Professor Chiswick,

Your book, which examines the role of economic choices in the religious life of American Jews, offers a lot of ideas and information to think about. While we will get more into specifics later in the exchange, I’d like to start with a very introductory question – What can treating Jewish religious services as consumer goods, and religious life in the context of economics teach us about American Judaism today? Are the changes in our attitude towards intermarriage, synagogue attendance, and even belief in God more a matter of money than we would like to think?

Best Regards,

Shmuel.

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Dear Shmuel,

Economics is not simply a matter of money, it is about how we use all of our scarce resources, not only money but also time and effort. (For example, we not only “budget” our time; we also say that we spend time, waste time, buy time, save time, or “can’t afford” the time to do something that we choose not to do.) Education and hard work can help us increase the money available to spend, but no matter how much we earn, our time is fixed at 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, etc. Time budgets are especially constraining for American Jews whose high levels of education and earnings permit many more activities than can fit into their schedules. Hence the irony that well-educated people with high incomes feel that they are “too busy” for the time-intensive religious rituals that their hard-working, low-income forbears considered routine. 

Religious observance has to compete with all other activities for a portion of our time, and traditional Judaism requires a very time-intensive religious observance. Economics doesn’t tell us anything about religious belief, any more than it can tell us how fond we are of ice cream or whether we enjoy the thrill rides in an amusement park. Yet costs enter into our decisions about how to spend time as well as money, and a person’s wage rate (or earnings) is a useful first approximation of the cost of that time. The Law of Demand says that the more expensive our time (i.e., the higher our earnings), the less we’ll want to spend on time-intensive activities and the greater our incentive to find time-saving ways to achieve the same goal. The high value of time typical of American Jews is an economic incentive to avoid the most time-consuming Jewish traditions and to find less time-intensive ways to satisfy their desire for religious expression. This economic incentive stimulated the development and growth of “new” synagogue movements, the largest of which are Reform Judaism and Conservative Judaism, and help explain their popularity among high-wage American Jews.

While economic incentives can affect behavior, their effect on beliefs is indirect at best. The nature of your belief in God is influenced by the family and community in which you live, but it is still fundamentally a personal matter, like your taste in clothes or food preferences. Yet religion is not only beliefs but also behaviors, and religion affects the attitudes we bring to other dimensions of our lives. Each person decides how much time to spend on ritual, on communal activities (including prayer services), or on holiday observances. Each person adopts a personal religious lifestyle that affects family relationships, business activities, and the attitudes he or she brings to most other non-religious spheres of activity. All of these decisions are susceptible to the influence of economic incentives.

Although we usually think of beliefs as influencing behavior, it is also possible for a change in behaviors to be accommodated by a change in beliefs. Considering how Jewish religious expression has varied from time to time and from place to place, we see changes in the relative importance given to synagogue vs. home observance of ritual, to family vs. community as the primary locus of religious life, and to the universal vs. parochial emphasis in religious Judaism. Even if these swings in theological fashion are independent of economic forces, their popular appeal – hence staying power – is surely influenced by how they affect the cost of religious behavior. Economic incentives are thus an important part of the socio-cultural context in which a religion is practiced and can tell us much about the direction in which a living religion will evolve.

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