> Raised the question of how a religion that imposes costly requirements on its adherents can survive in a society like the U.S. where there is open entry to the religion industry. Why isn't such a religion always outcompeted by a new version that keeps everything else but dumps the costly restrictions
I think this begs the question of how religion outcompetes a-religion. Why isn't a system without any religious features more popular than one with religious features? After all, such a system would lack any religious restrictions.
One would need to conclude that religious have various features that are appealing. Once one concludes that, the question seems misplaced, and the solution, ad hoc. Once you know that there are various elements of religion that are appealing, but you haven't identified what they are, it's odd to assume that removing a particular element of religion would make the resultant product more appealing.
Similarly, assuming that restrictions persist because they limit interaction, seems to try too hard to describe them in a way meant to answer the question. After all, many personal restrictions don't preclude outgroup participation or encourage ingroup participation. E.g. religious Jews avoid wearing clothing with certain mixed fibers. That imposes a cost on purchases, but does little to encourage ingroup, rather than outgroup interactions. Why do these persist? And why did religions with such restrictions persist even when assimilation was hardly an option? E.g. in the ghettos of Europe, before emancipation, Jews couldn't assimilate anyway, so why didn't alternative versions of Judaism without any restrictions outcompete the stricter ones?
Lastly, this analysis doesn't seem to address the fact that religion with fewer restrictions did largely outcompete religion with restrictions, in the form of Orthodox Judaism becoming a minority relative to Reform Judaism.
It also doesn't account for the resurgence of Orthodox relative to its more liberal competitors. This can be seen in this survey: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-americans-in-2020/ which shows the oldest cohorts having the highest percentage of Reform Jews, and the percentage of Orthodox being highest among the youngest cohorts.
All in all, it doesn't seem like a very useful theory.
Another factor that may explain why religion is popular in the first place, and why restrictions persist, is that religions may offer the perception of authenticity. This may make it harder to sell people new versions of religion, the way you would sell them a new brand of toothpaste, while acknowledging that the new version is your own creation designed to appeal to them.
It would not, however explain why sometimes less restrictive versions do outcompete more restrictive versions, or why sometimes the opposite happens.
The resurgence of Orthodox Judaism might have a lot to do with birthrates. In Israel the OJ birthrate is about seven, while in New York I believe it's about six or so. This is compared to the secular and moderate Jews who follow the same trends as broader post-industrial populations, with birth rates plunging below replacement levels. I think the reason for this crash in brithrates is due to capitalism: populations shielded from capitalism, whatever their type, tend to have relatively high birth rates, while populations that are most integrated, like urban professionals, tend to suffer the most. Orthodox communities tend to be pretty sheltered from mainstream economic systems.
In response to your first postulation:
"I think this begs the question of how religion outcompetes a-religion. Why isn't a system without any religious features more popular than one with religious features? After all, such a system would lack any religious restrictions.
One would need to conclude that religious have various features that are appealing. Once one concludes that, the question seems misplaced, and the solution, ad hoc. Once you know that there are various elements of religion that are appealing,"
^In response to that, I don't think it necessarily follows that people stay with religion over a-religion primarily because they find positive benefit in it. I think a likelier alternative hypothesis is that people who grow up in religious communities end up investing much of their lives -friends, families, habits, tendencies, etc. - into it, so that there would be a high negative _cost_ for leaving the religion. And the reason that people end up in religions in the first place in the modern world, is, for the most part, simply due to inertia and birthrates.
I think that Orthodox Judaism, like other religions, bleeds more followers than it accumulates through reintroduction or conversions, so that holds up, though admittedly I do not have statistics for this on hand...
>I don't think it necessarily follows that people stay with religion over a-religion primarily because they find positive benefit in it. I think a likelier alternative hypothesis is that people who grow up in religious communities end up investing much of their lives -friends, families, habits, tendencies, etc. - into it, so that there would be a high negative _cost_ for leaving the religion
Fine. I'd consider "investment in all that" to be an "appeal" to religion, broadly. I didn't mean something that would necessarily be appealing a priori. A cost to a-religion, is equivalent to a benefit for religion, even if the cost only arises to someone born into the religion.
The point is the same, though. The question of why less restrictive religion doesn't outcompete more restrictive religion is misplaced if it doesn't consider why religion in general is appealing, and solutions that only focus on the staying power of the restrictions themselves, are thus weak.
Even if the "appeal" is just inertia, family, etc., it still largely precludes the question of why other strains don't outcompete it, as unlike normal market competition, those strains likely don't have those same features (inertia, family, etc.)
>The resurgence of Orthodox Judaism might have a lot to do with birthrates
I suspect this is far from the only factor. Per the Pew poll I linked:
>The share of all Jewish adults who describe themselves as Orthodox is also about the same in 2020 (9%) as it was in 2013 (10%). If the driving force was birthrates, it should have continued into the twenty first century.
It seems likelier that there were other forces at play in the twentieth century. Indeed, that same link reports that:
>The 2013 study indicated that the Orthodox retention rate had been much higher among people raised in Orthodox Judaism in recent decades than among those who came of age as Orthodox Jews in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.
That is, Orthodox retention went way up in the second half of the twentieth century.
>I think that Orthodox Judaism, like other religions, bleeds more followers than it accumulates through reintroduction or conversions, so that holds up, though admittedly I do not have statistics for this on hand
The question regarding market competition in religion isn't whether more restrictive strains gain more followers than they lose, it's whether they gain more net followers than their competitors. E.g. overall cheese consumption could drop, but a particular brand could still gain market share, and hence show its competitive advantage.
Per the aforementioned Pew poll, Orthodox Judaism had the highest the retention rate, followed closely by Reform, followed distantly by Conservative. That certainly doesn't paint a clear picture of more restrictive being less competitive in the market, although retention is only half of competition, the other half being acquisition. Among the subset who shift affiliations, the poll shows that they tend to shift towards less restrictive strains.
Whether or not similar forces caused each shift towards greater fundamentalism, the latter also highlights that religion, including more restrictive versions of it, can have popularity and outcompete more liberal strains, besides for just outbreeding them.
I have found an intriguing contradiction in the views of many social scientists. On one hand, some argue that children are predominantly influenced by their peers rather than their parents. On the other hand, they emphasize the importance of being raised by two parents.
There's also the preacher's-daughter or black-sheep reaction to strong family cultures, though, i.e. "Screw you, DAD, I'm running away to embrace the ways of the world!"
I do think personality plays at least some part: some people just have a constitutionally strong desire for dominance, and heredity means those people are also quite likely to have parents and children who are domineering/rigid themselves. When that puberty hits that type of family system, I'd expect family culture to become a bone of contention rather than a common bond. (Heritable strong personalities might also account for the phenomenon of families where successive generations flip back and forth across mutually antagonistic strong subcultures, like rigidly 50s-conformist parents raising hippie kids who then raise punk or alt-right grandkids.
I think most parents are pretty bad at raising kids, and fail to provide a cohesive culture a child can positively identify with. Kids don't simply rebel just to rebel. They do it for actual reasons, feelings of betrayal and that their parents don't treat them well. How can we blame a kid for rebelling when lying to your children is such an accepted social prevalence and that overworked parents don't have time or patience to spend with their children. Parents shuffle their children off to strangers at school who they then spend more time with than their parents. They often live in car centric hell holes where you can't go anywhere interesting without a car. There's many valid reasons for teens to realize their parents made life decisions based on what was convenient for them and not what was good for their children. This is so common that rebelling is common. Rebelling is simply a symptom of a very common disease that parents continue to give their children.
> That gets me to another book, Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish, a portrait of Ashkenazi-American culture in the first half of the Twentieth century in the form of a list of Yiddish words with detailed commentary. Features of that world included not only a different language but much more, dietary rules, patterns of behavior, things done at particular times for particular reasons.
And yet that world no longer exists for all intents and purposes.
It probably exists for some people, but many fewer.
The characteristics that blocked interaction with the surrounding world were not necessarily the characteristics that mattered, but their existence resulted in the transmission of other features of the culture as well. I expect my grandparents were happy with how my parents turned out even though they did not maintain a religiously Jewish household or speak Yiddish (except for my mother with her sister when she visited). They were successful, highly educated, in a stable marriage, produced children who themselves went to college. Pretty much the same culture in a different setting.
I remember my father commenting that his friend George Stigler was Jewish even though he wasn't. That was pointing at a bundle of personal characteristics that made him "us" instead of "them," although they didn't happen to include the ones Leo Rosten described in the book.
I can tell you that my extended family is much as you describe. My generation was raised by very bright but non-degreed parents. My parents' generation of our family included (up until I was 15, and I was 3rd oldest in a generation of 15) 5 farmers, one manufacturing foreman, one bookkeeper among the males, and one bookkeeper, one registered nurse, and 4 housewives who sometimes worked part-time at various labor occupations among the female. The nurse had a two-year degree, and my father had one semester of college just before WWII.
Across that family and into the next generations, we have had the habit/custom of treating children as much like adults as possible, while still allowing them to be kids. All are encouraged to read as much as possible, and when appropriate find part-time jobs. For instance, we play a lot of age appropriate games, but children aren't allowed to win just because they are children. They have to win while playing by the rules. Games of pure chance, or a bit ago "Hungry, Hungry Hippo" where they can win with their limited skills are used. Any child who gets angry at losing must sit out until they politely ask to rejoin.
Later we help them with the tactics and strategies of games with simple rules like parchesi. I started playing checkers with a great-uncle when I was five or so, I lost about 1000 straight games, then when I was 10 I finally beat him. I felt like it was an accomplishment. (He was a checkers champion at the state level in Indiana as a young man.)
We played a lot of Monopoly. No one "let" the kids win.
OTOH, we were encouraged to play all sorts of physical games, but not forced to. In general my generation has been successful both in financial terms and in loving family terms, and so has my children's generation.
I think I'm saying nurture of human children should be more guiding than forcing. You can't make good bricks without straw, but clay is useful for many ore things than making bricks. Nature tends to provide the essential clay, but nurture should supply the extra ingredients to make something humanly useful.
There are no chess champions in my generation nor the next. But there are more than a few genius-level individuals in their own areas.
An alternative for games between a child and an adult is an explicit handicap to make it more nearly even and so more interesting for both. I played pingpong with my father for years with a moving handicap. I started the game with N points. If I lost I started the next with N+1, if I won with N-1. Eventually I got N down to zero, even briefly negative.
>Why isn't such a religion always outcompeted by a new version that keeps everything else but dumps the costly restrictions: Judaism without koshrut rules, LDS with beer and coffee? His answer was that such restrictions serve the function of making it more difficult for adherents to interact with people outside of the religious community and thus give them an incentive to spend time and effort producing community public goods,
Some kashrut rules are *specifically intended* to make those interactions more difficult. For instance, according to medieval rabbis the reason for the Talmudic prohibition of *bishul akum* (certain cooked foods where no Jew was involved in the preparation) is to discourage intermarriage by preventing Jews from accepting invitations to dine with non-Jews.
I feel like internet access is a hugely underdiscussed element in this topic.
> Raised the question of how a religion that imposes costly requirements on its adherents can survive in a society like the U.S. where there is open entry to the religion industry. Why isn't such a religion always outcompeted by a new version that keeps everything else but dumps the costly restrictions
I think this begs the question of how religion outcompetes a-religion. Why isn't a system without any religious features more popular than one with religious features? After all, such a system would lack any religious restrictions.
One would need to conclude that religious have various features that are appealing. Once one concludes that, the question seems misplaced, and the solution, ad hoc. Once you know that there are various elements of religion that are appealing, but you haven't identified what they are, it's odd to assume that removing a particular element of religion would make the resultant product more appealing.
Similarly, assuming that restrictions persist because they limit interaction, seems to try too hard to describe them in a way meant to answer the question. After all, many personal restrictions don't preclude outgroup participation or encourage ingroup participation. E.g. religious Jews avoid wearing clothing with certain mixed fibers. That imposes a cost on purchases, but does little to encourage ingroup, rather than outgroup interactions. Why do these persist? And why did religions with such restrictions persist even when assimilation was hardly an option? E.g. in the ghettos of Europe, before emancipation, Jews couldn't assimilate anyway, so why didn't alternative versions of Judaism without any restrictions outcompete the stricter ones?
Lastly, this analysis doesn't seem to address the fact that religion with fewer restrictions did largely outcompete religion with restrictions, in the form of Orthodox Judaism becoming a minority relative to Reform Judaism.
It also doesn't account for the resurgence of Orthodox relative to its more liberal competitors. This can be seen in this survey: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-americans-in-2020/ which shows the oldest cohorts having the highest percentage of Reform Jews, and the percentage of Orthodox being highest among the youngest cohorts.
All in all, it doesn't seem like a very useful theory.
Another factor that may explain why religion is popular in the first place, and why restrictions persist, is that religions may offer the perception of authenticity. This may make it harder to sell people new versions of religion, the way you would sell them a new brand of toothpaste, while acknowledging that the new version is your own creation designed to appeal to them.
It would not, however explain why sometimes less restrictive versions do outcompete more restrictive versions, or why sometimes the opposite happens.
Clearly, the reality is quite a bit more complex.
The resurgence of Orthodox Judaism might have a lot to do with birthrates. In Israel the OJ birthrate is about seven, while in New York I believe it's about six or so. This is compared to the secular and moderate Jews who follow the same trends as broader post-industrial populations, with birth rates plunging below replacement levels. I think the reason for this crash in brithrates is due to capitalism: populations shielded from capitalism, whatever their type, tend to have relatively high birth rates, while populations that are most integrated, like urban professionals, tend to suffer the most. Orthodox communities tend to be pretty sheltered from mainstream economic systems.
In response to your first postulation:
"I think this begs the question of how religion outcompetes a-religion. Why isn't a system without any religious features more popular than one with religious features? After all, such a system would lack any religious restrictions.
One would need to conclude that religious have various features that are appealing. Once one concludes that, the question seems misplaced, and the solution, ad hoc. Once you know that there are various elements of religion that are appealing,"
^In response to that, I don't think it necessarily follows that people stay with religion over a-religion primarily because they find positive benefit in it. I think a likelier alternative hypothesis is that people who grow up in religious communities end up investing much of their lives -friends, families, habits, tendencies, etc. - into it, so that there would be a high negative _cost_ for leaving the religion. And the reason that people end up in religions in the first place in the modern world, is, for the most part, simply due to inertia and birthrates.
I think that Orthodox Judaism, like other religions, bleeds more followers than it accumulates through reintroduction or conversions, so that holds up, though admittedly I do not have statistics for this on hand...
>I don't think it necessarily follows that people stay with religion over a-religion primarily because they find positive benefit in it. I think a likelier alternative hypothesis is that people who grow up in religious communities end up investing much of their lives -friends, families, habits, tendencies, etc. - into it, so that there would be a high negative _cost_ for leaving the religion
Fine. I'd consider "investment in all that" to be an "appeal" to religion, broadly. I didn't mean something that would necessarily be appealing a priori. A cost to a-religion, is equivalent to a benefit for religion, even if the cost only arises to someone born into the religion.
The point is the same, though. The question of why less restrictive religion doesn't outcompete more restrictive religion is misplaced if it doesn't consider why religion in general is appealing, and solutions that only focus on the staying power of the restrictions themselves, are thus weak.
Even if the "appeal" is just inertia, family, etc., it still largely precludes the question of why other strains don't outcompete it, as unlike normal market competition, those strains likely don't have those same features (inertia, family, etc.)
>The resurgence of Orthodox Judaism might have a lot to do with birthrates
I suspect this is far from the only factor. Per the Pew poll I linked:
>The share of all Jewish adults who describe themselves as Orthodox is also about the same in 2020 (9%) as it was in 2013 (10%). If the driving force was birthrates, it should have continued into the twenty first century.
It seems likelier that there were other forces at play in the twentieth century. Indeed, that same link reports that:
>The 2013 study indicated that the Orthodox retention rate had been much higher among people raised in Orthodox Judaism in recent decades than among those who came of age as Orthodox Jews in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.
That is, Orthodox retention went way up in the second half of the twentieth century.
>I think that Orthodox Judaism, like other religions, bleeds more followers than it accumulates through reintroduction or conversions, so that holds up, though admittedly I do not have statistics for this on hand
The question regarding market competition in religion isn't whether more restrictive strains gain more followers than they lose, it's whether they gain more net followers than their competitors. E.g. overall cheese consumption could drop, but a particular brand could still gain market share, and hence show its competitive advantage.
Per the aforementioned Pew poll, Orthodox Judaism had the highest the retention rate, followed closely by Reform, followed distantly by Conservative. That certainly doesn't paint a clear picture of more restrictive being less competitive in the market, although retention is only half of competition, the other half being acquisition. Among the subset who shift affiliations, the poll shows that they tend to shift towards less restrictive strains.
Perhaps coincidentally, the resurgence of Orthodox Judaism seemed to coincide with the rise of more radical strains of Islam, illustrated by the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Revolution in Iran (see https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islamic-world/Islamist-movements-from-the-1960s).
Whether or not similar forces caused each shift towards greater fundamentalism, the latter also highlights that religion, including more restrictive versions of it, can have popularity and outcompete more liberal strains, besides for just outbreeding them.
I have found an intriguing contradiction in the views of many social scientists. On one hand, some argue that children are predominantly influenced by their peers rather than their parents. On the other hand, they emphasize the importance of being raised by two parents.
There's also the preacher's-daughter or black-sheep reaction to strong family cultures, though, i.e. "Screw you, DAD, I'm running away to embrace the ways of the world!"
I do think personality plays at least some part: some people just have a constitutionally strong desire for dominance, and heredity means those people are also quite likely to have parents and children who are domineering/rigid themselves. When that puberty hits that type of family system, I'd expect family culture to become a bone of contention rather than a common bond. (Heritable strong personalities might also account for the phenomenon of families where successive generations flip back and forth across mutually antagonistic strong subcultures, like rigidly 50s-conformist parents raising hippie kids who then raise punk or alt-right grandkids.
I think most parents are pretty bad at raising kids, and fail to provide a cohesive culture a child can positively identify with. Kids don't simply rebel just to rebel. They do it for actual reasons, feelings of betrayal and that their parents don't treat them well. How can we blame a kid for rebelling when lying to your children is such an accepted social prevalence and that overworked parents don't have time or patience to spend with their children. Parents shuffle their children off to strangers at school who they then spend more time with than their parents. They often live in car centric hell holes where you can't go anywhere interesting without a car. There's many valid reasons for teens to realize their parents made life decisions based on what was convenient for them and not what was good for their children. This is so common that rebelling is common. Rebelling is simply a symptom of a very common disease that parents continue to give their children.
> That gets me to another book, Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish, a portrait of Ashkenazi-American culture in the first half of the Twentieth century in the form of a list of Yiddish words with detailed commentary. Features of that world included not only a different language but much more, dietary rules, patterns of behavior, things done at particular times for particular reasons.
And yet that world no longer exists for all intents and purposes.
It probably exists for some people, but many fewer.
The characteristics that blocked interaction with the surrounding world were not necessarily the characteristics that mattered, but their existence resulted in the transmission of other features of the culture as well. I expect my grandparents were happy with how my parents turned out even though they did not maintain a religiously Jewish household or speak Yiddish (except for my mother with her sister when she visited). They were successful, highly educated, in a stable marriage, produced children who themselves went to college. Pretty much the same culture in a different setting.
I remember my father commenting that his friend George Stigler was Jewish even though he wasn't. That was pointing at a bundle of personal characteristics that made him "us" instead of "them," although they didn't happen to include the ones Leo Rosten described in the book.
I can tell you that my extended family is much as you describe. My generation was raised by very bright but non-degreed parents. My parents' generation of our family included (up until I was 15, and I was 3rd oldest in a generation of 15) 5 farmers, one manufacturing foreman, one bookkeeper among the males, and one bookkeeper, one registered nurse, and 4 housewives who sometimes worked part-time at various labor occupations among the female. The nurse had a two-year degree, and my father had one semester of college just before WWII.
Across that family and into the next generations, we have had the habit/custom of treating children as much like adults as possible, while still allowing them to be kids. All are encouraged to read as much as possible, and when appropriate find part-time jobs. For instance, we play a lot of age appropriate games, but children aren't allowed to win just because they are children. They have to win while playing by the rules. Games of pure chance, or a bit ago "Hungry, Hungry Hippo" where they can win with their limited skills are used. Any child who gets angry at losing must sit out until they politely ask to rejoin.
Later we help them with the tactics and strategies of games with simple rules like parchesi. I started playing checkers with a great-uncle when I was five or so, I lost about 1000 straight games, then when I was 10 I finally beat him. I felt like it was an accomplishment. (He was a checkers champion at the state level in Indiana as a young man.)
We played a lot of Monopoly. No one "let" the kids win.
OTOH, we were encouraged to play all sorts of physical games, but not forced to. In general my generation has been successful both in financial terms and in loving family terms, and so has my children's generation.
I think I'm saying nurture of human children should be more guiding than forcing. You can't make good bricks without straw, but clay is useful for many ore things than making bricks. Nature tends to provide the essential clay, but nurture should supply the extra ingredients to make something humanly useful.
There are no chess champions in my generation nor the next. But there are more than a few genius-level individuals in their own areas.
An alternative for games between a child and an adult is an explicit handicap to make it more nearly even and so more interesting for both. I played pingpong with my father for years with a moving handicap. I started the game with N points. If I lost I started the next with N+1, if I won with N-1. Eventually I got N down to zero, even briefly negative.
I have an old blog post on the subject:
https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2011/07/playing-with-kids-asymmetrical-games.html
>Why isn't such a religion always outcompeted by a new version that keeps everything else but dumps the costly restrictions: Judaism without koshrut rules, LDS with beer and coffee? His answer was that such restrictions serve the function of making it more difficult for adherents to interact with people outside of the religious community and thus give them an incentive to spend time and effort producing community public goods,
Some kashrut rules are *specifically intended* to make those interactions more difficult. For instance, according to medieval rabbis the reason for the Talmudic prohibition of *bishul akum* (certain cooked foods where no Jew was involved in the preparation) is to discourage intermarriage by preventing Jews from accepting invitations to dine with non-Jews.
Interesting.
Indeed. In fact the Talmud itself already states that the reason for some dietary restrictions is to discourage intermarriage.