The Price of Everything

by Eduardo Porter

  In Israel, people who have donor cards are “paid” with priority treatment if they ever need a transplant. The Islamic Republic of Iran legalized payments for kidneys in 1988. Donors get a flat fee of about $1,200 and often negotiate extra compensation with the recipient. Iranian officials argue that the practice has reduced the average waiting time for a transplant to a few months.

  But buying a kidney is illegal in most of the world. Kidney donors live just as long and are just as healthy as those with two, according to recent research. But many people—including those at the World Health Organization—oppose renal commerce. In an address to transplant surgeons in Rome in 2000, Pope John Paul II argued that “to use the body as an ‘object’ is to violate the dignity of the human person.”

  Some critics fear that desperately poor people would sell a part of themselves to obtain money. They note that an illicit market in human flesh is emerging—with customers hailing from wealthy nations like Saudi Arabia and Taiwan, and sellers from poorer places, like China, Pakistan, and the Philippines. In the United States in 1983, Representative Al Gore of Tennessee, who would go on to become vice president, sponsored legislation to ban the practice, prohibiting donors from gaining anything of “valuable consideration” in exchange, including proper medical care. It became law in 1984.

  Proponents of kidney sales note pointedly that those outraged by the idea that the poor could sell bits of their bodies are not so squeamish when it comes to allowing the poor to enlist in the armed forces, where they vastly increase their odds of a violent death in exchange for a wage. But the culture allows for a professional army—perhaps because the individual soldier puts his life at risk for the tribe. Kidney sales, by contrast, are between individuals. So the culture banned them.

  DARWIN’S PRICE SYSTEM

  Some people say culture is all about sex. The boy with the nose stud and the purple hair jumping up and down onstage is simply advertising his genetic material, a bit like the peacock with his huge tail. It is an instrument of courtship. This kind of socially sanctioned behavior survived across evolutionary time because it was successful at encouraging reproduction.

  I would add that culture also allowed society to happen, helping humankind transcend its self-centered nature. Establishing borders of community, and setting the prices within it, culture helped pro-social attitudes emerge and evolve, improving groups’ ability to survive in competition over resources with others.

  Some intrinsic notion of fairness and reciprocity must have been essential to survival among the earliest groups of hunter-gatherers 3 million years ago, when there were few legal institutions to enforce contracts. These early humans might have simply killed each other to get at one another’s food. Instead, they hunted collectively and traded. Culture helped groups become more cohesive, and thus more effective killers of the people on the other side of the cultural fence. There was one price system inside the enclosure in which stigma carried a cost and there were rewards to selflessness. Reciprocity—trading favors at “just” prices—prevailed.

  These dynamics predate humanity. Chimpanzees groom each other and share food. Traveling through the forest, the able slow down to wait for the sick and injured. Wolves collaborate to bring down big prey. Capuchin monkeys have a keen sense of justice. Ordinarily, they are willing to work in exchange for little bits of cucumber. But just offer something nicer, like a grape, to the monkey in the next cage over and they will stop cooperating. The formerly desirable cucumber suddenly becomes unacceptable. The monkeys go on strike. It is costly for capuchin monkeys to reject the food, but by doing so they can ensure they’re not given a raw deal again.

  And modern humans exhibit different behaviors on each side of the cultural fence. Outside the group—the race, the faith, or the village—we may be the most ruthless bargain hunters. But inside the perimeter of our culture we can afford to be generous. Here we won’t always bargain ruthlessly to get the best possible deal at the lowest possible price.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Price of Faith

  WHAT WOULD YOU stake for a shot at eternity in heaven? Indecorous as it may sound, the proposition has excellent pedigree. It dates back at least to the seventeenth century, when the French mathematician, philosopher, and gambler Blaise Pascal jotted down a series of musings that came to be known as Pascal’s wager. An attempt to persuade people to believe in God, Pascal’s reasoning offered an interesting innovation over previous arguments for belief: it did not rely on proof of God’s existence. He proposed, rather, that it would make sense to believe even if it were impossible to determine whether God existed or not. The payoff of belief if He did was just too good to pass up. Were God not to exist, Pascal offered, one would lose little or nothing by believing in Him. Yet if He did happen to be, belief would lead to eternal bliss, while nonbelief would lead straight to hell. “Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is,” Pascal proposed. “If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.”

  In fact, belief does impose costs on believers, including dietary and sexual restrictions as well as many other sacrifices and prohibitions. Still, in Pascal’s view believing was the sensible choice. As long as there is a finite chance that God exists, even if only tiny, faith makes sense because heaven’s infinite rewards in the future would outweigh any finite costs today.

  Pascal was a fervent Catholic. But he also was a man of logic and reason. He despaired of the byzantine attempts that had been made over the centuries to prove God’s existence. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, argued that there had to be an ultimate unmovable mover of all things that move. René Descartes pushed the so-called ontological argument, which stated that because Descartes could conceive of God, God had to exist. “Reason can decide nothing here,” Pascal wrote. “We do not know if He is.”

  PASCAL’S GAMBLING ARGUMENT is not watertight. It omits that believing only to claim a future reward would likely be construed as corrupt. God might not be too pleased by such a pragmatic approach to faith. He could condemn mercenary believers to roast in hell anyway. The reasoning glosses over the fact that there are many religions, some of which have gods that punish believers in the other ones. The wager does not contemplate the risks of choosing the wrong faith. And Pascal’s logic would lose its power if the rewards of heaven were finite rather than everlasting. Perhaps most important, if you believe that God has no chance of existing whatsoever, the wager makes no sense at all.

  But despite holes in the argument, Pascal’s reasoning amounted to a big leap for religious thinking. His wager pitched religion not as humanity’s only possible response to an omnipotent deity whose existence should not be in doubt. He proposed it as a tool for civilization to cope with an uncertain world. What’s more, he argued that faith’s rewards were valuable. Pascal probably didn’t think of it in quite this way when he proposed his wager in the seventeenth century, but he was setting up religion as a service for which we should, naturally, be willing to pay a price.

  This is religion as catastrophic insurance: if it happens that God exists, faith would assure us a place in heaven rather than hell. The premiums are paid partly in money: charity, tithing, and the like. But the most onerous costs are the stringent rules believers must hew to, from fasting and prayer to avoiding sex out of wedlock. Such strictures constitute the main currency of belief. They are the price we pay for God’s grace.

  We’ve come a long way since the seventeenth century. But scholars seeking to understand how religion managed to survive as an institution across the ages have arrived at an analogous conclusion. Religion may be portrayed as the ultimate nonmarket institution, built upon unquestioned moral imperatives descended from the heavens. But it is in fact composed of a set of transactions in which believers assess the costs of the faith against its benefits.

  Perhaps the biggest difference between Pascal’s wager and current analysis of religion is that the seventeenth-century philosopher argued that the rew
ards for belief would occur in the afterlife. Contemporary scholars, by contrast, have concluded there is payback on this side of death. Be they economists seeking to understand why individuals invest in faith or biologists puzzling over how religion survived the pressures of evolution, most analysts have concluded that faith provides value for money. This is regardless of whether God exists or not.

  THE BENEFITS OF BELIEF

  The most tangible benefit religions provide to the faithful is a mixture of insurance and social services. In Israel, tight-knit groups of ultra-Orthodox Jews ensure that the sick receive visitors and the single are matched up with spousal candidates. Rabbis in the Bayit Vegan neighborhood of Jerusalem regularly put out flyers to request donations of time and money. The flyers also list offers of frozen meals for the sick, advice for childbearing mothers, playpens and wedding gowns, all provided for free by other members of the community. Orthodox communities can raise money quickly, providing interest-free loans of thousands of dollars to members in need. And trust is guaranteed: everything is insured by the word of the rabbi.

  These sorts of mutual assistance agreements are typical in many religions, including Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. Gallup polls in 145 countries have found that people who attend religious services donate more to charity and perform more voluntary service than those who do not. When crises drive people into the arms of God, they embrace Him for the insurance as well as the spiritual solace. When the Asian financial crisis struck Indonesia in 1997, the rupiah lost 85 percent of its value, the price of food nearly tripled, real wages plummeted by almost half, and the study of the Koran soared.

  Indonesian Muslims study the Koran in communal events called “Pengajian,” in which a teacher lectures and leads the recitation of the religious text. At these gatherings substantial social pressure is brought upon believers to make charitable contributions for the needy. After the crisis, participation in the Pengajian jumped to 71 percent of Indonesian villagers, from 61 percent before the crisis, according to one survey.

  Indonesian Muslims might have been in need of divine reassurance. But their faith was also driven by physical necessity. In the months after the crisis, the average village family had to cut their budget for everything but food by about two thirds—some $4.70 a month. Every dollar cut from the budget raised the odds that a family would participate in Pengajian by 2 percent. Those most hurt by the crisis—such as government workers on a fixed salary—were more likely to step up their Pengajian attendance than rice farmers, who benefited from soaring prices for rice and were thus less affected by the economic troubles. Indonesians who had access to credit from banks or microlending units did not change their religious participation much. They didn’t need the Pengajian for money. But the mosque-based insurance was effective. Three months after it peaked, those who increased their Pengajian participation were much less likely to need alms or credit than those who didn’t.

  Yet religion isn’t just a mutual insurance scheme. Faith offers more than help in time of need. It also promotes specific sets of behaviors, discouraging self-destructive choices because God and his community are watching. Religious people trust others more, trust the government and the legal system more, and are less willing to break the law. In one experiment, people who were made to read sets of words including evocative terms like “spirit” or “sacred” donated more than twice as much to a stranger as those who didn’t receive the cues.

  Sixty-nine percent of respondents to a recent American poll said more religion was the best tool to strengthen family values and improve moral behavior, 85 percent said it would help parents better educate their kids, 79 percent opined it would cut crime. Regardless of the plausibility of these beliefs, churchgoers in the United States smoke less, drink less, and are less likely to be overweight. They are more likely to be married and they report having more active social lives. They are also happier for it.

  The happiness gap between those who go to church every week and those who never go is about the same magnitude as that between the richest 20 percent of Americans and the poorest living among the bottom fifth. All this happiness tends to be good for people. Over a period of eight years, a group of sociologists and demographers tracked the mortality of thousands of people who participated in a national health survey in 1987. They found that going to church once a week added seven years to life expectancy at age twenty: twenty-year-olds who went to church were expected to live until age eighty-two. Those who didn’t were only expected to make it to seventy-five.

  One can even price the benefits: the extra happiness reported by more religious Americans over their less devout fellow citizens is similar to the happiness premium experienced by people who make more money. Americans pray on average 8.1 times a week. The happiness boost from praying one more time a week is equivalent to that of making roughly an extra $12,500 a year, in current dollars.

  JUST AS A car is more valuable in a sparsely populated suburb than to somebody in a dense city with a vast subway network, the proclivity of believers to comply with religious rules will depend on their options outside the faith. Women are consistently more religious than men. Since they typically earn less at work, religious investments require less sacrifice of them in terms of forgone income. From the 1950s onward, church attendance declined after states repealed so-called blue laws that forced retailers to close on Sundays. Churchgoers had more options to spend their time, so they went to church less often. Consumption of alcohol and illegal drugs rose sharply.

  People can pay for afterlife benefits with their time—in church, praying, etc.—or with their money. The rich, who have lots of money, yet little time, donate more; the poor, who have more time on their hands, go to church more often. This is not unlike shopping—the poor spend more time at it and typically find more bargains than the rich, who can’t bother to go bargain hunting.

  And taxes that change the relative value of time and money can alter the composition of religious investment. In the United States, when the government increased tax breaks for charitable contributions, people reacted by increasing their donations but going less often to church. Each 1 percent increase in religious charity was accompanied by an average decline of 0.92 percent in church attendance, as people who contributed more money felt less of an urge to spend their Sundays on a hard wooden pew.

  People select their very flavor of faith through cost-benefit calculations of the most mercenary kind. People with more opportunities in the secular world, those with higher wages and a higher cost of time, will choose less demanding faiths as they will have more to lose from strict moral codes. In the United States, France, and Britain, highly educated people go more often to church than those with less education. But they tend to disbelieve the more extreme religious propositions, such as the reality of miracles.

  In the United States, educated Christians choose relatively mild mainstream Protestant denominations, like Presbyterianism. Jews, the best-educated believers, are the least likely to buy the literal truth of the Bible. They go to the synagogue for the social rewards.

  By contrast, the most fervent and strict religions tend to be popular among the least educated, which have fewer options elsewhere and are thus most willing to invest the time, energy, and commitment. Evangelicals, Mormons, and Baptists, the Christian denominations with highest church attendance in the United States, are also those whose congregations are the least educated and are the most likely to believe in the devil and heaven.

  WHAT DOES IT COST?

  The individual process of acquiring a religion evidently depends on many factors. Believers are often unaware of the trade-offs of their faith. Parents tend to make the choice for their kids. Most people conform to the religious beliefs of the communities into which they were born. Religious benefits do not come for free, though. Insurance costs money. The benefits of religious organizations depend on their members’ contributions of time, money, and effort. Churches—which can exert substantial moral pressure on their donors—
are particularly good at extracting dues.

  But money isn’t the most important of religion’s levies. The most significant costs of faith are the sacrifices it imposes on believers and the constraints with which it shackles their lives. From Judaism to Hinduism, religion carries an additional price in the form of a set of rules on dress, diet, grooming, sexual conduct, and even entertainment and social interactions. These rules are not incidental. They are essential to the survival of the faith. Onerous moral strictures weed out the uncommitted and guarantee a minimum level of solidarity and trust within the group.

  Herein resides the core proposition of religion. The benefits of belonging depend on the zeal and intensity of every one of its believers, who donate time and money, buttress behavioral rules, provide moral support, and reinforce the mythical narratives that organize their world. The tougher the rules of admittance, the more committed members will be. This zeal is what gives value to membership in a religion for those who believe.

  Rules banning secular activities serve to make sure that the faithful commit time and effort to the faith, spending little time enjoying themselves outside the fold. But sacrifices and behavioral constraints also discourage free riders—the nonbelievers and soft-core sympathizers who are unwilling to commit themselves entirely and whose presence would dilute the benefits for all.

  This approach explains why radical religious groups are more proficient at terrorism than their secular peers—engaging in more extreme actions up to and including suicide. The sacrifices required to belong to the faith select those most likely to be good terrorists, naturally screening out the weaker members who would be most prone to defect and endanger the group. Suicide bombing is a service: it signals the intensity of the commitment to the faith and strengthens bonds inside the group. This is on top of any political agenda it may have.