Marc F. Bellemare Posts

From the very serious MIT Technology Review:

Back in 1990, about 8 percent of the U.S. population had no religious preference. By 2010, this percentage had more than doubled to 18 percent. That’s a difference of about 25 million people, all of whom have somehow lost their religion.

That raises an obvious question: how come? Why are Americans losing their faith?

Today, we get a possible answer thanks to the work of Allen Downey, a computer scientist at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, who has analyzed the data in detail. He says that the demise is the result of several factors but the most controversial of these is the rise of the Internet. He concludes that the increase in Internet use in the last two decades has caused a significant drop in religious affiliation.

The emphasis is mine. You can read the whole article — titillatingly titled “How the Internet Is Taking Away America’s Religion” — here. Oh, and here’s some “evidence” for you:

I was in Ithaca last week to give a talk at Cornell’s Institute for African Development (and, incidentally, work with coauthors on a few projects). The title of my talk was “The Food Security Impacts of Participation in Agricultural Value Chains.”

If you have an interest in the topic of agricultural value chains and contract farming, you can find my slides here. Comments are most welcome, given that the results therein are very preliminary.

The abstract of a great new article by Jean-François Maystadt and Olivier Ecker in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics titled “Extreme Weather and Civil War: Does Drought Fuel Conflict in Somalia through Livestock Prices?”:

A growing body of evidence shows a causal relationship between extreme weather events and civil conflict incidence at the global level. We find that this causality is also valid for droughts and local violent conflicts in a within-country setting over a short time frame in the case of Somalia. We estimate that a one standard deviation increase in drought intensity and length raises the likelihood of conflict by 62%. We also find that drought affects conflict through livestock price changes, establishing livestock markets as the primary channel of transmission in Somalia.

The emphasis is mine. And in case anyone wondered, I was not a reviewer for this paper (and generally, I try not blog about the papers I get to review…)