The cultural surrender of the European middle class: part 2
Religion, work, attitudes, changes over time
Here is the first part:
R code is available here.
Religion
Coming Apart shows that in the US, against conventional wisdom, the rich are more religious than the poor, and more likely to attend religious services. In Europe, the opposite is true, and the conventional wisdom holds: the educated and rich are less religious.
Industriousness
In Coming Apart, there is a class divide in work, with the rich more likely to be employed and working longer hours. In Europe too, the educated are indeed much more likely to be in paid work, as are the rich (unsurprisingly).
Many people report exactly 40 hours of work per week. To dig into the data, I’ll follow Charles Murray, and look at 30-49 year old males in work who report less than 40, or more than 48, hours.
University-educated men are more likely to work short hours, and slightly less likely to work long hours.
Men in high-income households work longer hours, and the numbers are not too far from Murray’s US data. There, in 2008, about 40% of the top 20% richest working men worked long hours, and about 12% worked short hours.
So for work, the picture is quite similar to the American story, though I don’t have US data on education.