Cultures not governed by religion are more wealthy and have better education

Cultures that are not governed by religious beliefs and tolerant of minority groups tend to have higher levels of wealth, education and democracy, a study has found.

Positive changes in culture relating to acceptance and tolerance generally come before improvements in these three measures of affluence, not the other way round.

Computer scientists in the UK and the US studied survey data of half a million people across 109 countries since 1990. The data showed that secularism and openness towards minorities – 'secular-rationality' and 'cosmopolitanism', respectively – can predict GDP, enrolment in secondary education and even the introduction of democracy.

While cosmopolitanism is the acceptance of marginal groups, ‘secular-rationality’ is defined as having a healthy dose of secularism – the ability to exclude oneself from religion.

For a nation to become affluent, it needs first and foremost to separate itself from religion and be tolerant of minorities and of individual rights, the study suggests. ‘ We used careful statistical methods to learn cultural values from survey data, and compared them to historical statistics,’ said Dr Daniel Lawson, statistician from the University of Bristol’s School of Mathematics.

‘ With access to massive digitised datasets, history is becoming a science. Our data- driven analysis supports the notion that a “good” society – valuing diversity, tolerance and openness – may also be a “productive” society, which is a reason to be hopeful about the future.’

The last 300 years have brought about increases in affluence relating to health, economic development, democracy and education.

The researchers, from the University of Bristol and the University of Tennessee, wanted to investigate the origins of this surge in affluence – was religious tolerance a result of affluence, or the other way round?

‘A pertinent question is whether these distinctive cultural values emerged in response to the rising prosperity in Western societies, or, conversely, whether cultural change preceded those developments,’ they write in Royal Society Open Science.

Using data gathered by the World and European Values Survey, the team found that both secular-rationality’ and cosmopolitanism have to be in place for socioeconomic development to emerge.

Promotion of a country’s development must take pre- existing cultural values into account, and promoting democracy will only succeed if combined with the promotion of tolerance of minority groups.

The first place to see dramatic increases in wealth, health, education and democracy tended to be western countries.

Regions with the highest secular-rationality and cosmopolitanism are in Western Europe, Australasia and the Americas.

As an example, the team says that American college students are substantially different psychologically from other more traditional societies in their values of fairness, economic decision-making, individualism, independence and ‘moral reasoning’.

Cultural values are ‘the software of society’ and can be innovated in one place before spreading to another region that speak the same language, they hypothesize. Places with the greatest increases in wealth, education and democracy tended to have pre- existing secular and tolerant cultures, at least in the 21st century.