Does a fear of hell lead to economic growth?

Timothy Perry links to a paper by two Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis economists suggesting that religious piety (operationalized as a fear of hell) could contribute to economic growth. The key section:

There might, therefore, be two parts to the link between religion and economic growth: a belief in hell tends to mean less corruption, and less corruption tends to mean a higher per capita income. The first part of the link is illustrated by the first chart below. It uses the 1990-1993 World Values Survey, which asked people in 35 countries whether they believed in hell, and the Corruption Perceptions Index produced by Transparency International, which surveyed many countries’ residents about corruption.9 The first chart plots the rankings of 35 countries’ percentages of people who believe in hell against the rankings of the countries’ perceived levels of corruption. As the chart shows, there is a tendency for countries in which a larger percentage of the population believes in hell to have lower levels of corruption. The second part of the link is illustrated by the second chart, which plots the GDP-per-capita rankings of the 35 countries against their corruption rankings.10 It shows a strong tendency for countries with relatively low levels of corruption to have relatively high levels of per capita GDP. Combining the stories from the two charts suggests that, all else constant, the more religious a country, the less corruption it will have, and the higher its per capita income will be. Of course, these charts are only suggestive. However, they are nonetheless consistent with Weber’s argument and the Barro and McCleary result that religious beliefs can influence economic outcomes.

The graphs would seem to be convincing — except for the fact that the authors omitted a discussion of any direct correlation between a fear of hell and per capita income in their data. There’s a good reason for that — when you crunch the numbers, it turns out there’s a correlation coefficient of -.21 between the two variables, which means there’s a
very
weak negative correlation between a fear of hell and income status. The authors’ hypotheses might be correct, because this kind of correlation is not a ceteris paribus test. But the aggregate effect would seem to be pretty weak. Another thing — for a paper concerned with economic growth, it’s odd that they’re using GDP per capita instead. Readers are invited to suggest alternative ways to test this hypothesis. UPDATE: Interesting — it looks like the authors have eliminated all the graphical evidence. And now there’s an editor’s note that explains:

It is the second revision that has been posted. In both the original version and the first revision, the article ended with a discussion of simple correlations between countries’ religiosity, levels of corruption and per capita incomes…. Thanks to the keen eyes of a number of readers, however, we have discovered that the charts used in both of these versions of the article contained errors. Consequently, the version below does not include discussions of the correlations between religiosity, corruption and per capita income. It is important to note that this has no bearing on the results in the literature that are discussed in the article.

Kevin Drum is less kind than the editor: “In other words: this was just simplistic crap and it wasn’t even computed correctly at that.” This has not stopped media coverage of the paper. Greg Saitz wrote it up in the Newark Star-Ledger, but bless his heart, he was smart enough to ask some atheists about it:

“I cannot imagine what the belief in mythological beings or things that don’t exist can do for business,” said Ellen Johnson, president of Cranford-based American Atheists. “What about the pornographic industry? That is probably very good for growth.”

Of course, Glenn Reynolds would reply that the consumption of pornography does not necessarily lead to antisocial behavior. [You started with piety and ended with porn — you are so going to hell!!–ed.]