Religious Freedom and the Gross Domestic Product

A propensity toward free association has been with me ever since my childhood. I think of one thing and right away think of another. Psychoanalysis is a therapeutic practice in which free association by the patient is an important diagnostic tool (though Freud himself is supposed to have said that â??sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.â?) When it comes to science the aforementioned propensity leads to a method of connecting the dots, sometimes with surprising results. To cite a famous example from classical sociology, who before Max Weber would have associated modern capitalism with the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination? Of course, if someone found a statistical correlation between hayfever and Methodism, chances are that this is a meaningless coincidence. It is not enough to note an association; one must have some theory within which the association makes sense. Weber had one. I am no Max Weber. But in what follows I will look at the way some dots seem to be connected, in the event religious freedom and economic development, and ask how this connection can be explained.