Again what are the significant variables? Only one significant variable? Does this researcher identity any other variables? One study one conclusion not good science. That goes against all the research projects I have seen teaching a statistical method called six-sigma. Working with hundreds of teams on improvement projects in every case I can remember there were multiple significant variables some of course more significant than others.

I think the economic model a nation employs and how long that model has been used would be a significant variable. A deregulated capitalist system may show great prosperity for many years and then take a society into sharp economic and moral decline. This may be happening now with 30 years into our Reagan economics.  Which I must say I predicted but as always few listened.

One only has to look at history to see this deregulation theory in action that led to the great depression. This time we knew how to put a band-aid on this coming great depression by borrowing and printing money. Heck let the grandkids pay for it. Live now baby it is the America way. And interesting enough this economic theory is supported by most fundamentalist’s religious folks.

Their devil himself or herself could not have designed a more corrupt self destructive economic system than capitalism. The list is long of the immorally (from imperialism to wars for profits to mega profits off the sick and needy) that we are facing and the religious worship at the altar of capitalism which is Darwinism survival of the fittest defined. With their economic ideologies they are the champions of social and economic Darwinism.

In fact in America the capitalist paradigm has become so powerful that capitalism and patriotism are considered one and the same.

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Researcher,

Agreed that the science was not so good and that unbridled capitalism is bad. As with most aspects of life, though, it’s not black and white. Capitalism works extremely well with appropriate regulation to prevent its least desirable outcomes.

The more we see the world in black and white, the less accurate is our picture.

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Unbridled religion is clearly destructive when it tends towards extremism. This is most visible when religious beliefs are allowed to become actual law—that throws cold water on the hot coals of human desire.

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I know I don’t want to go to the most religious countries in the world as a tourist or worker. They all suck for the common people. Maybe it would be great to be super rich and live in one of those countries if you wanted to break the law all the time and own slaves and such. A theocracy would allow you to act in any immoral way you wanted because they tend to be corrupt. Religion is the opiate of the masses and can hold back an entire society from reaching it’s potential.

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