Protestant work ethic
[5] Weber asserted that Protestant ethics and values, along with the Calvinist doctrines of asceticism and predestination, enabled the rise and spread of capitalism.
"[15] Another passage from the Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament provides an example: "A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man.
[21] Writer Frank Chodorov argued that the Protestant ethic was long considered indispensable for American political figures: There was a time, in these United States, when a candidate for public office could qualify with the electorate only by fixing his birthplace in or near the "log cabin".
He may have acquired a competence, or even a fortune, since then, but it was in the tradition that he must have been born of poor parents and made his way up the ladder by sheer ability, self-reliance, and perseverance in the face of hardship.
[23][24] Civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. said: We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice.
[citation needed] In a New York Times article, published on June 8, 2003, Niall Ferguson claimed, using data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), that "the experience of Western Europe in the past quarter-century offers an unexpected confirmation of the Protestant ethic", that the reason that people in modern Protestant Western European nations actually work fewer hours on average than in the Catholic ones or in the United States is due to a decline in active Protestantism.
[29] Pastor John Starke writes that the Protestant work ethic "multiplied myths about Protestantism, Calvinism, vocation, and capitalism.
[31] Due to the history of Protestantism in the United States, it may be difficult to separate the successes of the country from the ethic that may have significantly contributed to propelling it.
[36] Other factors that further developed the European market economy included the strengthening of property rights and lowering of transaction costs with the decline and monetization of feudalism, and the increase in real wages following the epidemics of bubonic plague.
[37] Social scientist Rodney Stark commented that "during their critical period of economic development, these northern centers of capitalism were Catholic, not Protestant", with the Reformation still far off in the future.
[38] As British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper stated, the concept that "large-scale industrial capitalism was ideologically impossible before the Reformation is exploded by the simple fact that it existed".
[40] Historian Laurence R. Iannaccone has written that "Ironically, the most noteworthy feature of the Protestant Ethic thesis is its absence of empirical support", citing the work of Swedish economic historian Kurt Samuelsson[41] that "economic progress was uncorrelated with religion, or was temporally incompatible with Weber's thesis, or actually reversed the pattern claimed by Weber.
[42] However, they also note that, between Luther (1500) and Prussia during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), the limited data available has meant that the period in question is regarded as a "black box" and that only "some cursory discussion and analysis" is possible.
However Dutch management economists Annemiek Schilpzand and Eelke de Jong argue that this value pattern is associated with the modernization phase of a region's economic development and thus, in principle, can be found for any religion or for non-religious persons.
[45] A 2009 study of 32 mainly developed countries found no difference in work ethic between Catholics and Protestants, after correcting for demographic and country effects; however, it found substantial support for a social ethic effect due to e.g. the Catholic attention to production within the family and to personal contacts: "Protestant values are shown to shape a type of individual who exerts greater effort in mutual social control, supports institutions more and more critically, is less bound to close circles of family and friends, and also holds more homogenous values.… (which ultimately works) in favour of anonymous markets, as they facilitate legal enforcement and impersonal exchange.
