Timothy Noah reveals at MSNBC the shocking news that Dave Brat has been actively engaged with the intellectual heritage of Max Weber:

Dave Brat: Christianity is the key to prosperity

06/11/14 10:46 PM

By Timothy Noah

Washington insiders aren’t the only ones asking “Who is David Brat?” after his unexpected primary victory Tuesday night over House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. His fellow economists are also unsure what to make of the college professor. …

A sampling of Brat’s work reveals a preoccupation with translating Max Weber’s theory of the Protestant work ethic into quantitative economics. In his 1905 book “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” Weber traced the evolution of capitalism back to the Protestant Reformation, and particularly to the Calvinism that thrived in Northern Europe. More than a century ago, Weber concluded that the religious content had drained away from the Protestant ethic. Brat appears to reject that conclusion, arguing that Protestant faith continues to animate economic growth. …

“I have no idea what to make of all that,” Jared Bernstein of Washington’s Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said in an e-mail. …

“I am happy to believe that institutions matter a lot,” Georgetown economist Harry Holzer e-mailed me, “and that religion might matter too. But his statistical models are very simple-minded … In these small-sample regressions, how do we know that religion or the other variables are really ‘exogenous’ and not just correlated with other characteristics of countries that are doing well? If Christianity is so crucial, what explains the explosion of growth in China, India and other Asian countries (did they experience an explosion of Christianity that I missed)?”

“He seems like a guy working very hard to impose his belief system on the data,” Holzer elaborated in a phone interview. “A good journal is not going to publish the kind of statistical work he did because it’s so low in quality.”