Religion, Values, and Behavioral Constraint [Iannaccone]
Laurence R. Iannaccone
Working Paper
George Mason University
Political and journalistic discourse these days is filled with talk about values, though most of it amounts to little more than hand-wringing and finger-pointing. Our nation is said to face a crisis of values. Increased rates of divorce, juvenile crime, and teen pregnancy are blamed on the deterioration in family values. Major social institutions – schools, churches, families, the entertainment industry, and government at all levels – find themselves under increasing pressure to do something about values. In such a climate, both rhetoric and reality impel social scientists to enter the fray.
Economists, however, find it difficult to talk about values. Part of this difficulty lies in their relatively precise approach to the study of human behavior; by economic standards, most values talk is hopelessly vague and politicized. But a deeper difficulty concerns the very foundations of economics, specifically the assumption of stable preferences. As Gary Becker (1976:5) observed some twenty years ago, it is the relentless and unflinching use of this assumption, together with the assumptions of maximizing behavior and market equilibrium, that “form[s] the heart of the economic approach” to human behavior.
File: Iannaccone - Values.pdf [66.40KB]
Published 01/01/1980
Filed under: *iannaccone, economics of religion, habits, religiosity, values