The profits of hell

Robert J. Barro and Rachel M. McCleary are going through hell trying to figure out exactly what makes economies grow.

The Harvard University professors -- he a noted economist and she a religion expert and government lecturer -- are leading the Religion, Political Economy and Society Project, which, among other things, looks at whether beliefs in salvation and damnation sway the world's economies. When pressed, they offer a couple of thoughts on what it all might have to do with the Yankees and Red Sox, too.

''I think religious beliefs have an economic impact working through things like influencing honesty, lack of corruption, maybe about work ethic and thrift," says Barro, 59.

In the Protestant work ethic born a couple of hundred years ago, it was widely believed that people were saved by the grace of God, hand-picked for heaven. Wealth was a sign you were taking the trip upstairs, and the threat of damnation may have caused people to work harder to show they were en route to the pearly gates. The 19th-century sociologist Max Weber wrote that the ethic explained why predominantly Protestant countries tended to do better than others economically.

''In some ways we're updating Weber, quantifying some of his ideas, putting a new face on them, but also looking at them in modern data, seeing if there's some elements of truth," Barro says.

McCleary set the framework for their studies by looking at how afterlife beliefs in Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam work as incentives for people to be productive, with particular focus on heaven and hell.

Unlike in Hinduism and Buddhism, ''where you have more opportunities to become saved because heaven and hell are sort of intermediary stages," in certain forms of Protestantism and Islam, heaven and hell are very clearly ends of the road, she says.

''You're so afraid of ending up in this permanent state of hell, particularly in Islam, where the Koran speaks of a physical burning in hell . . . that you act correctly in this life because you can't be forgiven," she says.

The couple then linked the theory to data from a half-dozen international surveys amassed in more than 60 countries.

The polls examined beliefs in heaven and hell, tabulated information about religious service attendance and whether the countries have state religions, and explored economic indicators like gross domestic product, life expectancy, and education. It also looked at political indicators like democracy and rule of law.

''The thing we focused on is on how religious beliefs affect individual characteristics, especially honesty, work ethic, those kinds of things," Barro says.

Barro and McCleary gauge the fervor of faith in countries by speaking in terms of ''religiosity," or how strongly people believe in their faith.

They found, like Weber, countries where people strongly believed in a final afterlife tended to have a higher level of productivity.

Several Asian countries that have seen a surge in Christianity and religiosity, opposed to a more morally forgiving Confucius-based doctrine, are seeing an economic upswing.

In South Korea, Barro says, the expansion of evangelical Christianity has been reflected in the country's economic success.

''You also see it in other places in some degree like Taiwan and Singapore," Barro says.

But while belief in hell motivated some people to act ethically and work hard, and while religious services helped foster those beliefs, the duo's research has found that spending too much time in church or temple didn't cut it -- economically speaking.

''You don't want to spend your whole day doing religious observance and services," Barro explained. ''You're obviously not going to have a lot of time to be productive."

''Among the rich countries, Ireland is probably the most religious, but then the US would be next," Barro says.

Barro and McCleary, who are married, have been studying the relationship between government and religion in the various countries, looking at how state religion affects economies.

''Communism turned out to be a big part of that story because either you look at it as communist countries have their own state religion -- something like scientific atheism," Barro says, ''or you can look it in that they basically don't want to have an official state religion in the conventional sense."

They also plan to examine religions that discourage things like credit markets and stock markets and look at whether a new Iraq would survive as a secular state.

''That would be a very surprising outcome from our study because, along with a lot of the other countries there, we would predict that religion would have an important official role," Barro says. ''We would expect some kind of Muslim state religion in Iraq."

The couple's work has been recognized in academic journals, newspapers, and magazines for their quantitative approach to expanding Weber's thesis.

''They are assembling a comparative data with a comprehensiveness and quality that we haven't had before," says Mark Chaves, a sociology professor at the University of Arizona. ''They're looking at more countries, and that will enable us to examine these questions in fresh ways. I think it will be hugely helpful."

Religion and cultural aspects of the economy were once a sociologists-only area of academia, he says.

''It might be fair to say that this is relatively new for economists to be looking at this connection."

The Harvard project, which began in early 2001, and other similar academic endeavors, have gained interest since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which created a wave of academic interdisciplinary interest in religion.

''There was that awareness that maybe there was a different way of looking at religion instead of looking at it in terms of looking at it as a very narrow, singular case study or just looking at violence," McCleary says.

McCleary, who says her upbringing as the daughter of a Methodist minister led her to study theology and philosophy, says the couple plans to spend the next five years collecting and analyzing data, eventually producing an academic book and possibly a general interest book on the findings.

Meanwhile, the project is a way of life for the coworkers-by-day, spouses-by-night.

It's one of a continuing dialogue that blurs the boundaries of home and office, one that follows them home from work to their dinner table in Weston.

Ed Glaeser, a Harvard colleague, says the synergy might come from their complementary backgrounds.

''I don't think there are natural boundaries between what is economics and what is his life," Glaeser says of Barro. ''He doesn't turn off his economic brain."

''Rachel, on the other hand, clearly comes from a very deep understanding of religion," he continued. ''Anywhere you push in terms of Rachel's knowledge of religion, she'll come up with something very impressive."

There are times when the endless discussion of the project's possibilities must pause.

''Sometimes we have to say to each other, 'OK, we've got to stop,' " McCleary says. ''If we don't, then it becomes our world."

But their studies do seem to apply to their outside interests. And when asked, Barro, a lifelong Yankees fan who grew up in the Bronx, mused about the religious aspects of another sample set: Red Sox Nation.

He blames the Red Sox loss in the 1986 World Series on ''divine intervention" and says the Curse of the Bambino ''is superstition, analogous to some measures of superstition that we discussed in one of our papers, and not true religion."

When asked whether, if Red Sox management believed in hell, they'd be more likely to be able to cough up the bucks for Alex Rodriguez, and whether one could conclude that the Yankees believe in hell, Barro responds: ''Instead of saying the Yankees believe in hell, you should say that the Yankees have made a deal with Satan, or perhaps have the devil playing for them."