The Price of Everything

by Eduardo Porter

  STILL, THERE IS A gaping hole in the secularization trend in the industrial world: the United States. Americans remain hooked on God despite spectacular economic progress over the past hundred years. In 2001, 46 percent of Americans attended religious services at least once a week, three percentage points more than two decades earlier. And more than three quarters of Americans reported believing in life after death, 12 percent more than did so in 1947. Religious enthusiasm in the United States is closer to that in less developed countries. Fifty-nine percent of Americans said religion was very important in their lives, according to a poll by the Pew Global Attitudes Project in 2002. This was at least twice the share of other developed nations but comparable to rates in Turkey, Mexico, and Venezuela.

  The pattern has led a group of American economists and sociologists to posit that the secularization thesis is wrong. If faith declined in other rich countries, it was not due to less demand for religious services but to shoddy supply. Support for religion waned in Western Europe because the Catholic Church was a state-supported monopoly that grew lazy and allowed believers to drift away. Its services became too cheap to matter. By contrast, religion in the United States thrived because of a vibrant diversity that flowered when independence led to the strict separation of church and state. Dozens of churches sprang up to serve the disenchanted market of mainstream Christianity offering high prices and high cohesion. About one in eight American Protestants pray several times a week, compared to about one in thirty Catholics, according to surveys. Protestants are more likely than Catholics to believe in hell and they are more likely to belong to church-related social groups. Twenty-nine percent of Protestants say they try to proselytize strangers at least once a month. Only 11 percent of Catholics do that.

  This hypothesis—known as the supply-side or free-market theory of faith—posits that religion survived scientific progress and its alternative narrative of the world because as a club it still offers the real-life benefits to like-minded members willing to sacrifice for their beliefs.

  Sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark noted that in 1776 only 17 percent of Americans adhered to a church. But the rate doubled to 34 percent in 1850 and 56 percent in 1926, as scrappy new denominations vied for souls. The most strict and vehement sects, they suggest, like Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses, are growing fastest not only because they are aggressive about recruiting new members, but because they are much stricter than the Catholic and mainline Protestant churches from which they are taking market share.

  There is irony to how the religious pecking order changed in the United States. In the 1960s, the message from secular society to religion seemed to be “modernize.” The choice was between opening up to the secular world, adapting to the discoveries of science, or fading into irrelevance. Around the world, the Catholic Church tried just that and it didn’t work. The churches that did well were those that took the opposite path. The orders that thrived were the fundamentalists, who preached the literal interpretation of the Bible, and the Pentecostal denominations that engaged in exorcisms and other cathartic rituals—those who stepped back and recovered the traditional proposition of faith as a wall to enclose a community by demanding a very high price for membership.

  WILL GOD BOUNCE BACK?

  It’s a compelling thesis. A few years ago, I wrote an article about evangelical Protestants trying to expand among Hispanics in the United States, peeling believers from the Catholic Church. I accompanied a group of Southern Baptists on an evangelizing mission in a supermarket in a predominantly Latino neighborhood of Ontario, California. Their zeal and purpose was a sight to see. About a dozen people deployed across the supermarket parking lot, reassuring harried shoppers about the benefits of the Christian life. When the woman pushing her overstuffed cart to her car stopped to glance at the leaflet pressed into her hand, a flock of evangelizers descended upon her like a flock of geese. They never tired. In the course of a week’s reporting, I was invited to come to God a good half-dozen times. Contrasted against the tedious, soporific masses I experienced growing up in Mexico, the Baptists offered the energy of a rock concert. And they offered specific promises about how faith would improve people’s wayward lives.

  There are other potential explanations of the unique strength of Americans’ attachment to God, though. I suspect it has to do with the fact that, for a rich country, the United States has lots of poor people. Sociologists suggest that demand for religious services as insurance against potential hazards declines as countries climb the ladder of development.

  Development makes people more secure. It provides income, better health services, and education. It reduces the risk of political prosecution and ethnic strife. But it doesn’t do this across the board. There are large pockets of misery even in highly developed countries. In these impoverished corners religious belief will thrive, offering a shot at security and ultimate happiness. Here God can play His role as the ultimate form of insurance. In the United States—which suffers the most acute income inequality in the developed world—these pockets abound.

  Seen this way, it becomes obvious why religion is growing in some parts of the world even as secularization advances in others: in poor religious countries, people have more babies than in rich, secular states. Across the world, development has reduced fertility rates. Families in rich countries have chosen to have fewer children and invest more resources in each of them. The fervent poor, by contrast, have hung on to traditions that frown on contraception and mandate big families.

  The ultra-Orthodox in Israel earn less than half what non-Orthodox families do. In the mid-1990s, their fertility rate was 7.6 children per woman. By contrast, the fertility rate of other Jews in Israel is about 2.3. In the United States, the most religious states tend to be the most fertile and the poorest. New Hampshire is probably the least God-fearing state in the Union: 21.4 percent of its population report being atheist or having no religious belief. It is relatively rich, with a median income per capita of $74,625 in 2007. And it had only forty-two births per one thousand women in 2006. In Mississippi, by contrast, there were sixty-two births per thousand. Mississippi is poor: its median family income was $44,769. And only 5.8 percent of Mississippians report no religion.

  Despite the wave of secularization experienced over the past hundred years, I suspect the world might be about to become more religious, not less. Since the Industrial Revolution, growth has been humanity’s solution to virtually every problem. As technological progress enabled more efficient and intense use of resources, it ushered in a period of prosperity unlike anything the world had seen.

  That period, however, might be coming to a close. Global warming suggests we are running against rigid resource limits in our pursuit of economic prosperity. As we deplete them, economic growth will become more difficult to achieve. Two centuries after the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus claimed that “the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man,” the Malthusian trap appears like a plausible future.

  Were we to hit the limit of our resources, God would likely come back in demand. Halting economic growth wouldn’t just boost poverty. As people and societies were forced to compete fiercely for economic output, religion’s set of ethical norms would come in handy to help societies cohere. God would be called upon to provide a supernatural narrative, a balm that reconciled humanity to its un-improvable lot; or maybe to help in war and conquest as access to resources became a zero-sum game.

  To many in this dystopian future, faith would be worth the price, whatever sacrifices religion demanded in return.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Price of the Future

  FOR MORE THAN a century, economics has been known as the dismal science, peddling doom and despair, with little hope to offer. It owes this reputation to the work of the Scottish reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, who two hundred years ago delivered a crippling blow to his era’s burgeoning optimism about the prospects for human progress. In An Ess
ay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, published in 1798, the economist and demographer shook the self-confidence of the British Empire by arguing that the limited nature of the earth’s endowments would condemn humankind to poverty. Civilization would be kept in check by an inevitable scarcity of food.

  The process was straightforward: unable to control their reproductive urges, families would respond to any increase in their income by having more children. Feeding and clothing them would eat up their income gains, ensuring that they remained at the edge of subsistence forever. Human misery was the unavoidable outcome of a population that was growing geometrically—Malthus expected it to double every quarter century—yet was dependent on a food supply that grew much more slowly as new land was added to production and agricultural productivity increased at a snail’s pace.

  The price of food, of course, had to rise as demand expanded much faster than supply, until the “lower classes” couldn’t afford it any longer. Either people killed each other off in some other way, or enough would die of hunger to bring the head count back into line with what the earth could feed.

  “The vices of mankind are avid and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors of the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves,” Malthus wrote. “But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence and plague, advance in terrific array and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow, levels the population with the food of the world.”

  This kind of writing gave Malthus a gloomy reputation. The Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle characterized the controversy about population dynamics sparked by Malthus’s work as “dreary, stolid, dismal, without hope for this world or next.” But Malthus’s prognostications were entirely reasonable. His brand of catastrophe had visited other corners of the world. The classical Mayan civilization collapsed around the ninth century of the Christian era, tearing itself apart in myriad wars over exhausted natural resources in the lowlands of what is now Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, and south-eastern Mexico.

  The Rapa Nui of Easter Island, famed carvers of huge monolithic heads called Moai, also collapsed after it exhausted its physical limits. A population that reached a peak of ten thousand in the early fifteenth century had withered to about two thousand when Captain James Cook visited the island in 1774. The surviving civilization had no idea how the monumental stone heads had come to be there.

  The world in which Malthus lived seemed to have been stuck for years in a Malthusian quagmire. Over the prior two and a half centuries the world’s average income per head had inched ahead at a pace of about 0.1 percent per year. Between 1500 and 1750 the world’s population increased by only two thirds—to 720 million people. Humanity wasn’t thriving.

  Malthus’s England was more prosperous than most of the world at the time. Still, an English baby born in 1750 could expect to die by his or her mid- to late thirties. England’s population in 1750 remained roughly the same as in the year 1300, constrained by war, disease, and the food supply. It was virtually impossible to get ahead. Londoners in 1800 made about the same wages, in real terms, as their forefathers had four centuries before.

  Nonetheless, Malthus got the future wrong. He made his predictions just as England and the rest of Europe were embarking upon a sustained period of unprecedented economic growth that would spread around the globe and drastically improve humanity’s wellbeing over the following two centuries.

  THE REVOLUTION IN productivity in Lancashire’s cotton industry started as early as the 1730s, with a series of new inventions to spin yarn, such as John Kay’s “flying shuttle,” and continued through the 1770s with inventions such as Samuel Crompton’s “spinning mule.” The yarn revolution was followed by a weaving breakthrough. By the late 1700s Britain was starting to transform from a mostly rural nation into an industrial power, exporting textiles and metals. Then the spread of the steam engine in the nineteenth century led the Industrial Revolution to its apogee. Infant mortality declined sharply as living standards rose. But population growth was no match for the pace of material improvement. Between 1801 and 1901 the English population more than trebled, to around 30 million. Yet Londoners’ real wages more than doubled over the period.

  It is hard to overstate the importance of this economic transition. With the exception of newly settled colonies, never before had a country been able to achieve the double feat of a growing population and rising living standards. Yet England’s prosperity spread in the nineteenth century as the ships made with British steel brought Europe closer to the abundant natural resources and the sparsely populated land of the New World. From 1820 to the year 2000 economic activity sustained by the planet multiplied by almost sixty: the world’s population grew sixfold, to roughly 6 billion. Per capita income jumped by a factor of almost ten. Malthus’s thesis about the world’s grim future was buried under an avalanche of progress.

  Overcoming the Malthusian nightmare more than two hundred years ago put spring in civilization’s stride. The feat underscored the power of human ingenuity to overcome its environmental constraints. Yet despite our past success, the dismal reality predicted by Malthus over two hundred years ago seems once again to loom in the offing. Despite enormous advances in productivity, civilization appears to be reaching the physical limits of our natural environment, stretching the carrying capacity of the planet. This could portend a dire future. Just as China, India, and other developing countries seem poised for a surge of economic growth that would lift billions of people out of poverty, rising prices of oil, food, and other commodities suggest the earth’s resources may not support all this prosperity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our debate over what to do to forestall climate change—brought about by our voracious consumption of energy and our massive emissions of carbon.

  The United States produces about twenty metric tons of CO2 annually for each American. By contrast, China emits five tons per capita, India only one. As these nations industrialize they expect, reasonably, to consume more energy and emit more carbon. But if each of 1.33 billion Chinese and 1.17 billion Indians were to put the same amount of CO2 into the atmosphere as Americans do, they would burden the environment with the equivalent of seven extra American economies, more than doubling the world’s emissions of carbon into the air.

  Our new Malthusian moment confronts us with a difficult question. How much can the global economy grow without generating unacceptable climate-driven damage in the future? It becomes more difficult to answer when one flips the question on its head: how much economic growth should we be willing to forgo to avoid producing this damage to the world’s future ecosystems? Ultimately, the question boils down to this: what price are we willing to pay today to protect future generations?

  MISPRICING NATURE

  The economist Jeffrey Sachs characterizes climate change as “an accident of chemistry.” How could we have known that the carbon released into the atmosphere every time we step on the gas or fire up the furnace would linger there for years, capturing heat and slowly raising the planet’s temperature to the point that it would threaten nature’s precarious balance? But it is also a failure of the market system. Global warming, like the extinction of species, soil depletion, and all the other signs that the planet is having trouble sustaining the humanity that lives on it, underscores the global economy’s inability to put a proper price on the endowments of nature.

  In a market system prices are meant to allocate resources efficiently. When demand outpaces supply, prices can be expected to rise and smoothly readjust the balance—drawing more producers into the market and nudging some price-conscious consumers away. Yet this doesn’t happen when it comes to nature’s bounty. We often get that for “free,” no matter how much we consume. As is the case with other free things, the lack of a price signal to modulate our consumption will lead
us to consume too much, until we deplete the resource at hand.

  This pricing aberration explains landfills overflowing with garbage, rivers laced with mercury, melting polar ice, and depleted cod stocks in the Atlantic. From the point of view of a fisherman, cod are free—his only costs are those of getting to wherever the fish are, finding them, and catching them. That means he will catch as many as he can. So will every other fisherman in the vicinity. Overfishing—pulling them out faster than they can reproduce—is the inevitable consequence.

  We have done the same thing with most “free” resources of nature—from clean air to clean water. Water, mostly a public utility around the world, costs very little; its price doesn’t rise to reflect its growing scarcity and encourage us to consume it prudently. The cost of dealing with nitrogen runoff into streams is usually not incorporated into the price of our crops. Lacking prices to ration their use, free clean water and free clean air have met the fate of free things everywhere: they have started to run out. We are scrambling to deal with the fallout. Nowhere does this dynamic present a more menacing threat to humanity’s future than in the context of climate change.

  ENERGY IS PROBABLY the most egregiously mispriced good. The cost of gas at the pump incorporates the cost to find the oil, pay rent to the rulers of whatever country sits atop it, pull it out of the ground, refine it into gasoline, and move it to your local gas station. But in most countries no part of the price accounts for the effect that carbon dioxide released by burning oil has on the atmosphere.

  This is devilishly hard to measure, depending on many assumptions about the value of the damage caused by climate change to the natural environment. Yet a review of studies by the Environmental Protection Agency concluded that the “social cost” of CO2 emissions—a measure of the burden that releasing one metric ton of CO2 into the air will have on the environment over the next century—ranged between $40 and $68 today and would rise to somewhere between $105 and $179 in 2040 as the air became more saturated with the stuff. Given that burning a gallon of gas produces some twenty pounds of CO2, accounting for the environmental cost of driving would require a tax today of about sixty-two cents per gallon.