Posted: Nov 26, 2016 12:47 pm
tuco wrote:And I do not understand "luxury"The article you linked uses following description: being safe, secure, and successful societies, which is basically what I call welfare state because without redistribution of wealth its not generally easy to satisfy safe and secure conditions and without being successful there is nothing to redistribute.
Due to the success of the most well-developed welfare systems within the
democratic world (Einhorn and Logue 2003), the wealth in Scandinavia is shared to an
impressive degree throughout the nations’ populations; the gap between the rich and the
poor in Denmark and Sweden is smaller than in any other industrialized democracies.
I think I see what you mean.
What I was thinking was that at the individual level, more 'luxury' (in terms of existential security, which might include health, financial security and so on) could be (arguably is) correlated to lower religiosity, so that countries which had more of these individuals would be less religious, regardless of the way it was spread out internally, in the country.
But I suppose you are right, that a high degree of spread (as in a welfare state) will mean that there are more individuals crossing the comfort threshold, because even in an overall wealthy country, if the wealth is privately concentrated among a minority, this will inevitably limit the proportion of those gaining, as you call it, salvation.
Of course, comfort/luxury/existential security is arguably relative, in that even the poorest in many western countries are better off than the bulk of the populations in less developed countries, but I don't know how that might factor in.
On the subject of your phrase 'welfare state' I wonder if in some ways this replaces god as 'the one who looks after me'. But that is just a passing thought.