360. Is the Protestant Work Ethic Real?

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Documentary, Society & Culture

4.6 • 32K Ratings

🗓️ 6 December 2018

⏱️ 41 minutes

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Summary

In the early 20th century, Max Weber argued that Protestantism created wealth. Finally, there are data to prove if he was right. All it took were some missionary experiments in the Philippines and a clever map-matching trick that goes back to 16th-century Germany.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Dean Karlin is an academic economist and also.
0:08.3	I am president and founder of Innovations for Poverty Action.
0:12.5	Which is what?
0:13.5	Which is a nonprofit organization which helps do research to figure out what works and
0:18.5	what doesn't to fight poverty and social problems around the world.
0:22.2	Karlin, who's at Northwestern, was teaching at Yale back in 2011 when he co-authored a book
0:27.8	called More than Good Intentions.
0:30.3	And one of the reasons I wrote this book was to help philanthropists make better decisions.
0:35.0	Karlin was headed to Hong Kong to give a talk about the book when something really great
0:39.2	happened.
0:40.2	I got an email from a secretary to a guy who was the chief financial officer for Morgan Stanley
0:46.0	in Asia Pacific.
0:48.0	That sounded like just the kind of philanthropist Karlin was hoping to meet.
0:51.7	And he was hoping he was going to get a big grant for Morgan Stanley.
0:55.3	And that's the guy, an American named David Sutherland, who had been working in Asia since
1:00.4	the 1990s.
1:01.4	He was in Washington before that, including a stint as a tax lawyer with the Treasury Department.
1:07.1	So now, so I got a little flyer from the Foreign Correspondess Club that said this guy named
1:11.9	Dean Karlin was coming to Hong Kong.
1:13.9	So I said I want to meet with this guy.
1:16.0	And I was like, perfect, this is why I wrote the book.
1:18.0	Sure, happy to have breakfast.
	...

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