Better Living through Software

Arriving home from work late last night, I browsed to The New York Times and was delighted to see this article analyzing the fact that evangelical Christians were relatively less impacted by the housing collapse.

The NYT piece discusses a recent IMF report published by an economist at the organization, which purports to show that evangelical Christians engaged in less speculative behavior during the bubble, and subsequently have experienced less financial loss.

The “delightful” part was the author’s use of eschatology to explain resilience to a bubble which was caused by massive, widespread, institutionalized epistemological error.

Of course, it’s not just evangelical Christians who are concerned with these two themes.  Christians, Jews, and Muslims share the ten commandments, and the first two commandments are simply commandments about epistemological error.  To a huge chunk of the world, epistemological sin is the greatest sin.

In addition, every Christian, Jew, or Muslim knows that the consequence of flawed epistemology is always a bitter dose of eschaton.  Any well-bred Christian, Jew, or Muslim will grow up being taught that history is a long series of local eschatons induced by poor epistemology, all leading up to an eventual and inevitable all-encompassing Eschaton.

Even if you aren’t a practicing member of one of these three “Abraham” faiths, you’re probably affected by this obsession more than you readily know.  If you live and work in the Western world or the Muslim world, you’re operating in a culture and society (with all of its values, norms, and social structures) that has spent the last 2,000 years obsessing about the interplay between epistemology and eschatology.  China is the only modern power than has never really possessed or institutionalized this obsession.

Having said that, I am not entirely convinced by the author’s reasoning.  The fact that evangelicals were less harmed is self-evident, but I don’t think you need to drag in Armageddon to explain that fact.  There are too many problems with that explanation.  In my opinion, it would be sufficient enough to say that “Conservatives were more conservative during the bubble”, by way of explanation.

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While it’s always delightful to use epistemology as an excuse to talk about Armageddon, it would be even more delightful to see people using a minor armageddon as an excuse to learn about epistemology.  The collapse of the global economy might make people eager to know “why did we never see this coming?”  People might be expected to be slightly more humble when making predictions, and slightly less eager to stereotype or argue based on rhetoric and wishful thinking.

Judging by the comments thread to the NYT piece, these lessons haven’t yet been learned.  Clearly, the first 100 or so commenters didn’t even bother to read the study – they simply used the article as an excuse to advocate for their own epistemological viewpoint (“fundies suck!” or “atheists suck!”).

Several argued that evangelicals are less likely to live in cities, and are less educated, and that this somehow explained the discrepancy.  They of course failed to mention (or indeed, even know) that the poorest and least educated in the furthest exurbs have been hit the hardest by the housing bubble collapse and have experienced the largest percentage fluctuations.

This is the same mental flaw that led Lance Knobel and others to suggest that the bubble collapse was a gift from us rich people to the poorer people, saying essentially that, “I don’t mind that my house lost $100,000 of value, because now it will be cheaper for poor people to buy houses in the future, and it’s the least I could do for mankind.”  It would be noble if it was true, but it is unfortunately false.

In any case, it would have been easy to avoid looking like a fool by simply reading the author’s study and understanding how he controlled for these extraneous factors.  I notice that the guy from NYT actually updated the post today with a response from the author which refutes these arguments.  Kudos to NYT for elevating the intelligence level of the discussion.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 5:03 pm and is filed under 1000 years of peace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.