Does a recent scientific experiment involving 6,000 households mean that being religious will cause people to earn more money?
That’s what the latest episode of a popular economics radio show and podcast, Frekonomics, was trying to answer.
Host, Stephen J. Dubner, talked with three men who conducted a scientific experiment in the Philippines: James Choi, a finance professor at Yale; Dean Karlan, academic economist, president and founder of Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA); and David Sutherland, Chair of the Board of International Care Ministries (ICM).
Choi works with Karlan at IPA. They told Freakonomics that they wanted to study a Christian ministry to find out if religion causes real-world success in people’s lives or if it’s just a coincidence – a correlation, not a causality. But they had a hard time finding a Christian ministry to be a part of their experiment. Why? Because whichever ministry that agreed to the parameters would agree to not preach religion to a group of people (control group) – that’s how the scientists would be able to compare results, after all.
But ICM took a look at the parameters and quickly agreed because they were interested in learning if what they were doing was really working. If the experiment suggested otherwise, Sutherland told Dunbar that ICM would want to be aware of that and change their program to…
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