We're still struggling with the fallout from Pope Urban II starting the Crusades in 1095.
Long-run effects of religious persecution: evidence from the Spanish Inquisition
31–40 of 79 posts
Re: Long-run effects of religious persecution: evidence from the Spanish Inquisition
#32The causality might go the opposite way. Maybe areas with poorer economies were more prone to persecuting minorities. So it’s not the persecution that led to the poor economy, but the poor economy that led to the persecution. Or maybe a third factor drove both of these things.
Well maybe, but the abstract says they controlled for this.
Re: Long-run effects of religious persecution: evidence from the Spanish Inquisition
#33The causality might go the opposite way. Maybe areas with poorer economies were more prone to persecuting minorities. So it’s not the persecution that led to the poor economy, but the poor economy that led to the persecution. Or maybe a third factor drove both of these things.
While they can't prove there wasn't an unrelated third factor, the abstract does say they attempted to control for religiosity and wealth.
Re: Long-run effects of religious persecution: evidence from the Spanish Inquisition
#34What does this have to do with religion? Secular ideologies killed about a two hundred million people in last century alone and nearly destroyed all of civilization. Secular Totalitarians were putting people in gas chambers and gulags by the 10s of millions 'In The Name Of Whatever' (and of course, about 1/2 of those secular ideologies were specifically anti-religious). If you look at a map of Europe, you can see the…
I think the finding of this study is suggesting religious persecution is bad for for a community, not religion itself. It would likely see all the persecution you mention as harmful, just not part of this study.
Re: Long-run effects of religious persecution: evidence from the Spanish Inquisition
#35As with many other maps of Spain (or Italy for that matter) it would be interesting to see also "correlation with kms away from the center of Europe".
(The white bit doesn't really count because afaik is empty anyway)
Re: Long-run effects of religious persecution: evidence from the Spanish Inquisition
#36Ungated version: https://repec.cepr.org/repec/cpr/ceprdp/DP16030.pdf
Re: Long-run effects of religious persecution: evidence from the Spanish Inquisition
#37The causality might go the opposite way. Maybe areas with poorer economies were more prone to persecuting minorities. So it’s not the persecution that led to the poor economy, but the poor economy that led to the persecution. Or maybe a third factor drove both of these things.
The Spanish Inquisition was centrally ordered and to an extent managed, not spontaneous local events. Unless they specifically targeted poorer areas, which isn't impossible but is unlikely ( if they killed or expelled infidels, guess who got to keep the gold/money/property?), causality seems more probable to be in the way Spanish Inquisition -> poverty.
Typically papers like this find some instrument. The fact they don't have one might explain why they went for PNAS and not an economics journal, which are usually more rigorous (or more anal?) That said, their results on trust fit their mechanism pretty well.
The big possible confounder might be that the inquisition correlates with Muslim ("morisco") or Jewish presence. There's a big literature arguing that ethnic heterogeneity weakens trust, and that might persist over time even when the ethnic heterogeneity has vanished. But: "adding a control for pre-expulsion morisco population has little impact on the results."
Re: Long-run effects of religious persecution: evidence from the Spanish Inquisition
#38I can't read the article, but the Spanish Inquisition is generally misunderstood in the historical context and innumerable myths have been spun about the affair through later Protestant leaflets and the like (outrageous claims of the genocide of millions, for example, compared to the actual 3,000-5,000 executed over the course of close to four centuries; compare this to the 150,000 secular witch burnings during the s…
> the very notion of forced conversion is understood as not only evil by Catholics
Funny you say that, given how one of the cornerstones of Catholicism is forced conversion of children.
Re: Long-run effects of religious persecution: evidence from the Spanish Inquisition
#39Legacy papers are very popular these days in econ, history, and political science. I don't have the time to dive deep into this one, but spatial identification of long-term causal effects is prone to errors. Specifically, the error terms in regression specifications capture unexplained variance that can be very persistent over long periods of time. These errors can also be spatially correlated across treated observations: https://voxeu.org/article/standard-errors-persistence
Re: Long-run effects of religious persecution: evidence from the Spanish Inquisition
#40[deleted]