So sad when genius becomes lazy. Many have written on Nialls Ferguson abandonment of academic rigor and his new dedication to broad generalizations and bold hypotheses on a huge number of targets. His views on empire try to refute Paul Kennedy's "imperial overstretch", but he should worry about mental overstretch. His Op-Ed in today's LA Times is a prime example comes to this conclusion:

You see, the most remarkable thing about the transatlantic divergence in working
patterns is that it has coincided almost exactly with a comparable divergence in
religiosity, both in terms of observance and belief. There is surely something more than coincidental about the simultaneous rise of unbelief in Europe and the decline of Weber's work ethic.

Ferguson, playing off Weber, even goes as far as to label it "The Atheist Sloth Ethic and the Spirit of Collectivism." His main evidence is anecdotal, comparing the summer work environment in New York and London. He pairs this with survey data on religiosity, vacation time and unemployment.

A first and obvious problem is his use of Weber, who focused on Protestantism as it had emerged out of Catholicism. Ferguson expands the thesis to include all religions including Catholicism. Not being an expert on Weber, it seems to me that a thesis that compares one religion to another is not particularly useful when comparing religion to lack thereof.

Another glaring problem is that Ferguson uses religious survey data from the all of the United States, but uses New York as his example. It might be more helpful if Ferguson were actually using data that compared New York and London.

Ferguson's hypothesis would seem to have a problem explaining the widespread poverty in South Asia, the Middle East and Latin America where religion is firmly entrenched. Even if Ferguson's hypothesis is limited to the first world it could be tested by matching the United States against itself. That is, a rise or decline in religiousity would match a rise or decline in unemployment or productivity. Unfortunately for the wild speculation does not hold. The CUNY survey demonstrates that religious identification decreased in the United States from 1990-2001, a time of markedly low unemployment and increased productivity.

Ferguson, an immicon, ends his piece with the quip "If I weren't on holiday, I'd write a book about it." Fortunately for him, someone did. In today's Internation Herald Tribube two sociologists introduced their findings:

There is, of course, an element of truth in these stereotypes, but as descriptions of two supposedly different cultures, they are far too simplistic. The lesson to be learned from comparing work cultures is not that Europeans should become more like Americans, nor that Americans inhabit a different, more materialistic culture. It is that Europeans have gained politically and socially what many Americans say they want individually but have been unable to achieve politically. Americans, too, would like to have employment security, more flexibility, more leisure, fewer worries about health care and pensions, but the United States still has a long way to go.

I would be loath to say that Americans and Europeans share the same attitude towards work, but I seriously doubt religion has much to do with it.