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Comment by cpursley | Hacker News Reader

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> I noticed years ago that majority Catholic and Orthodox countries are generally less prosperous than Protestant countries

Based on what? I can't think of a single pairing of Protestant and Catholic/Orthodox countries that genuinely had a similar enough history, geography, geopolitical situation to be able to compare them easily. Maybe the closest would be Belgium and Netherlands, but even then Belgium spent a few hundred years more under a faraway empire milking them, and as a frontier for lots of fighting with the French, and occupied by the Germans. And Belgium is also smaller in land and population, and had a very different colonial way of working. It also had resources (coal) that allowed it to industrialise quickly, while the Netherlands didn't so focused mostly on trade and trade posts.

And... Belgium has a slightly worse economy by most classic metrics (GDP, GDP per capita, etc.).

Maybe the only other even remotely comparable countries with different religions are the Baltics (Estonia was Lutheran when they were religious, Latvia is very mixed, Lithuania is mostly Catholic). Estonia and Lithuania have pretty similar GDP per capita, with Latvia a bit behind.

But seeing this through a religious lens is missing the forrest for the trees at best.

The book examines this in multiple different ways, not just at the national level, but even within countries (provinces that are more catholic vs more protestant, and even within Germany, how far the city was from Wittenberg), as well as comparing third world countries that encountered catholic missionaries vs protestant missionaries.

Trust by Francis Fukuyama explores this relation if you want more meat than comments on a board.

If only the protestant countries' secret services would stop arming rebels every time they democratically elect someone that wants to stop funneling riches to said protestant countries…

The book suggests two main reasons for this.

1. The reformation increased literacy/education in the populace to a greater extent in protestant areas, because you no longer needed clergy to talk to God, or understand the bible. Protestant countries have had better education for longer and it has a compounding effect.

2. The "Marriage and Family Program" (the "MFP")... protestant areas discouraged cousin marriage and levirate marriage much earlier than catholic countries, and it is still very common in the rest of the world. Consanguineous marriage is ludicrously prevalent in the middle east, it makes most of the rest of the world more tribal and you end up with compounding genetic defects. By making cousin marriage taboo, it encouraged children to move to a different town and made people less clannish.

I don't think that is a fruitful line of reasoning, given that the vast majority of the world is not Catholic/Orthodox/Protestant! You should consider digging deeper for underlying causes that go beyond localized religions.

Put another way - that would seem to be an effect, not a cause.

> Put another way - that would seem to be an effect, not a cause.

Protestantism does seem to become the preferred variant of Christianity in areas of bottom-up power systems, such as the UK (at least wrt Magna Carta), which does make perfect sense given the Vatican being the ultimate in top-down thinking.

Magna Carta (1200s) was issued 300 years before England defected from Catholicism (1500s), so I think we may be looking at the wrong thing as "the cause" here.

No, that's my point.

Generally speaking places that view things in a bottom up way became Protestant. The others stayed Catholic.

When you think of countries that are protestant, are you imagining Denmark, Sweden, Germany?

What about Central African Republic, Liberia, and Papua New Guinea?

I don't know if it's a joke I didn't, but it's the topic of Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

The cause is the Spanish Armada did not conquer England.

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