The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [139]
177-178 Darwin’s Price System: The experiments about monkeys’ sense of fairness are described in Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal, “Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay,” Nature, Vol. 425, September 18, 2003, pp. 297-299.
179-181 The Price of Faith: Pascal’s wager is described in Blaise Pascal, Pensées, translated by W. F. Trotter, 1910, Section IV: On the Means of Belief, paragraph 233 (at oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/pascal/pensees-contents.html, accessed 07/18/2010).
182-185 The Benefits of Belief: The discussion of mutual assistance patterns in religious groups draws from Eli Berman, “Sect, Subsidy and Sacrifice: An Economist’s View of Ultra-Orthodox Jews,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 65, No. 3, 2003, pp. 905-953; David Landau, Piety and Power: The World of Jewish Fundamentalism (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. 263; Buster Smith and Rodney Stark, “Religious Attendance Relates to Generosity Worldwide,” Gallup Report, September 4, 2009 (www.gallup.com/poll/122807/religious-attendance-relates-generosity-worldwide.aspx. , accessed 07/18/2010); Daniel Chen, “Club Goods and Group Identity: Evidence from Islamic Resurgence During the Indonesian Financial Crisis,” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 118, No. 2, 2010, pp. 300-354. The discussion about the impact of religious faith on trust, moral behavior, happiness, and mortality draws from Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales, “People’s Opium? Religion and Economic Attitudes,” Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 50, No. 1, pp. 225-282, 2003; Azim Shariff and Ayan Norenzayan, “God Is Watching You,” Psychological Science, Vol. 18, No. 9, 2007, pp. 803-809; Steve Farkas, Jean Johnson, and Tony Foleno, “For Goodness Sake: Why So Many Want Religion to Play a Greater Role in American Life,” Public Agenda, 2001; Robert Hummer, Richard Rogers, Charles Nam, and Christopher Ellison, “Religious Involvement and U.S. Adult Mortality,” Demography, Vol. 36, No. 2, May 1999, pp. 273-285; Jonathan Gruber, “Religious Market Structure, Religious Participation, and Outcomes: Is Religion Good for You?” NBER Working Paper, May 2005; and Timothy Brown, “A Monetary Valuation of Individual Religious Behavior: The Case of Prayer,” University of California Berkeley Working Paper, September 2009. The relation between religious attitudes and people’s opportunities in the secular world is discussed in Jonathan Gruber and Daniel Hungerman, “The Church vs. the Mall: What Happens When Religion Faces Increased Secular Competition?” NBER Working Paper, July 2006; Jonathan Gruber, “Pay or Pray? The Impact of Charitable Subsidies on Religious Attendance,” NBER Working Paper, March 2004; and Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote, “Education and Religion,” NBER Working Paper, 2001.
185-188 What Does It Cost?: Maimonides’ comment on circumcision is found in Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, translated from the original Arabic text by M. Friedlander, 2nd edition (Charleston, S.C.: Forgottenbooks. com, 2008), pp. 646-647. The description of the mystic religion of Pythagoras is in Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 51. The survival rates of religious versus secular communes in the nineteenth century are found in Richard Sosis and Eric Bressler, “Cooperation and Commune Longevity: A Test of the Costly Signaling Theory of Religion,” Cross-Cultural Research, Vol. 37, No. 2, May 2003, pp. 211-239.
189-192 When