Substack

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Most educated religious group in the US?

Hindus again, followed by Jews!

More importantly, David Leonhardt finds a very strong relationship between education levels and incomes across all religious groups and within each of them. He analyzed the data in different ways and comes to the same conclusion - "more affluent people tend to produce more educated children, and more educated people tend to earn much more than less educated people".

The chart below shows the percentage of people with a four-year college degree and the percentage of people with family income of at least $75,000 a year, using data from Pew. Note the near tight upward correlation between education levels and household incomes.



Interestingly, as David points out, the Protestants, who form the largest religious group in the US, are poorer than average and poorer than Catholics, thereby calling to question Max Weber's famous theory that Protestant nations are generally richer than Catholic nations.

I had blogged earlier about the fact that Hindus formed the richest religious group in the US.

Update 1 (25/1/2014)
From a Times oped,
Indian-Americans earn almost double the national figure (roughly $90,000 per year in median household income versus $50,000). Iranian-, Lebanese- and Chinese-Americans are also top-earners. In the last 30 years, Mormons have become leaders of corporate America, holding top positions in many of America’s most recognizable companies... Although Jews make up only about 2 percent of the United States’ adult population, they account for a third of the current Supreme Court; over two-thirds of Tony Award-winning lyricists and composers; and about a third of American Nobel laureates.
The remarkable rise of Asian immigrants is captured by this anecdote,
Take New York City’s selective public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, which are major Ivy League feeders. For the 2013 school year, Stuyvesant High School offered admission, based solely on a standardized entrance exam, to nine black students, 24 Hispanics, 177 whites and 620 Asians. Among the Asians of Chinese origin, many are the children of restaurant workers and other working-class immigrants. 

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